Monday, September 24, 2012

.Superheroes: Model Citizens, Bad Architects?.



Where is the kitchen?

The boom of American mass media in the post-war period yielded a popular culture which was to influence the practice of architecture for generations to come. Television, film, radio, and print media were all synthesized with various aspects of “high” culture to produce an aesthetic that would prove both undeniably decadent yet satisfying, witty but non-alienating. This gooey confection of comic strip graphics, day-glo color palettes, pseudo-scientific imagery, and text bubbles–all hallmarks of pop culture–were soon to make their way in the trippy work of conceptual architectural practices (Archigram) and critics (Reyner Banham). But was this a symbiotic exchange?
io9 clearly doesn’t think so, and they’ve listed some of the architectural failures of some of our favorite superhero bases. Among the architectural shortcomings are the failure to include kitchens in the Justice League satellite, Batman’s toxic spewing artificial mountain/batplane hangar, the literalism of the Teen Titans HQ (whose form curiously anticipates the work of OMA and Steven Holl), and the extravagance of the Fantastic Four’s base at the Baxter Building.

From: io9.com

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