The video begins with a few seconds of Laurie Anderson’s “Let X = X.” Michael Rotondi encourages the audience to see the student work on display throughout the school for the NAAB and WASC accreditation teams visit. Eric Owen Moss introduces Wolf Prix as a pyromaniac, not an architect. Wolf Prix presents his sets for a Salzburg Festival production of Jean Cocteau and Igor Stravinsky’s “Oedipus Rex.” A video of the production plays throughout most of Prix’s lecture. Prix describes starting out in architecture in the 1960s, dreaming of a city that reacts to the citizens’s motions and emotions. And forms without material, unstable as clouds or flames. He developed a method of basing everything on sketches which were deliberately not architectural, and “excluded constraints.” Prix illustrates his sketch-based methodology in the rooftop office in Vienna, the Groninger Museum, competitions designs for Helsinki and Tours, a studio for Anselm Kiefer in France, the “Expressionist Utopia” exhibition at LACMA, and a Graz production of Bruno Taut’s opera “Der Weltbaumeister.” Prix continues the discussion of his sketching-based methodology by returning to the Groninger Museum. He explains the design’s evolution from sketch to model, and to construction.
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Wolf Prix: The dissipation of building in the anticipation of architecture (February 15, 1995)
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