Information, on a Whim

Architizer News

Information, on a Whim

July 1, 2011

Totem De/Dos by Brut Deluxe Arquitectura is the first of three sign posts to be installed in industrial parks around Madrid. The architects sought to establish an iconic model—a signpost at the urban scale—that would immediately register place and direction for confused visitors to the decentralized industrial park.

The Totem’s metal frame is cladded with milky-colored 40 mm thick cellular polycarbonate plates, under which LEDs relay graphic information and directions. The prototype is all cantilever, with two wings jutting out in opposite directions. It cuts a striking profile that instantly recalls the aesthetics of the Constructivist projects and the irony of the OMA-school. We think it particularly owes more than a little bit to the following projects:

1) El Lissitzky, Wolkenbügel (1923-25).

El Lissitzky’s Wolkenbügel (“Cloud Iron”) comprised of identical horizontal skyscrapers featuring a precarious cantilever has become famous for its structural daring and futurist aesthetic. Lissitzky’s towers have enjoyed a long afterlife, with many project from the twentieth century, including most of those on this list, riffing off Lissitzky’s design.

2) Erik Gunner Asplund, Advertising Mast (1930).

The Advertising Mast was a minimalist architecture, reduced to structure and only a metal frame at that. Asplund’s Mast supported a small observation platform and flashy advertisements fastened to its side–a novel way of presenting information.

3) Steven Holl, Retaining Bars, Phoenix (1989).

Steven Holl’s Retaining Bars was a bridge-like assembly, whose form was generated from Holl’s self-avowed interest in the Z-dimension. This project represents the germ of an idea that would fully blossom nearly twenty year later with Holl’s Linked Hybrid in Beijing.

4) OMA, CCTV (2002).

OMA design for the headquarters of the Central Chinese Television is a mutated, willfully subverted play on Lissitzky’s canonical design. Perhaps this is the Wolkenbügel’s successor, you can’t go anywhere along China’s eastern coast without seeing depictions of its corseted body.

5) Filip Dujardin, Fictions.

The work of artist and photographer Filip Dujardin has been floating around design blogs for quite some time. Fictions is a series of projects of realistic collages depicting brutalist buildings flipped on their sides and packed into each other, forming entirely new, impossible structures.