Last night Wolf Prix of the Austrian architecture firm Coop Himmelb(l)au gave a lecture at Sci-Arc entitled "Learning from Le Corbusier." He began by comparing Le Corbusier favorably to Mies van der Rohe, who he claimed was merely a designer, while the former was a 'sculptor' – therefore an architect. He showed some of Le Corbusier's poetic solutions to technical problems and spoke of the aim of architecture as overcoming gravity. He also evoked another sculptor – Brancusi – whom he claimed worked according to an "open system." Concentrating on the very recently completed headquarters for BMW in Munich, he showed a series of impressive images, the highlight being a four minute stop-motion animation detailing the four year construction process. The ambition on display did not stop with the gravity quote... he also explained how he convinced the board of directors of BMW to approve his design: namely, by claiming he could build something comparable to Acropolis. A national icon for Germany...
The strangest part of the evening was the fact that he took no questions...
I would have like to hear more about his thoughts on the relationship between sculpture and architecture given his seeming preoccupation with the formal language of sculpture. Also, Given that he described the BMW building as a new kind of public space, how does the project implicate and provoke our notions of what is public?
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