ARQ Docs Joan Ockman
(April 2023)
Joan Ockman; Francisco Díaz, Stephannie Fell (eds.)
Paperback; exposed binding with dust jacket
12 x 17 cm | 171 pp.
Spanish + English
ISBN: 978-956-6204-04-6
In these two essays, historian and scholar Joan Ockman unravels the relationships between late modernism of the 1960s and its cultural expressions. In “Architecture in a Mode of Distraction,” the author revisits the connections between architecture and cinema through Jacques Tati’s 1967 film, Playtime. Providing a detailed examination of various aspects of the work, Ockman utilizes Playtime as a resource to understand the theory of distraction proposed by Walter Benjamin decades earlier. In the second essay, “An Orchid in the Land of Technology,” Ockman revisits the SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen designed by Arne Jacobsen and proposes it as the swan song of late-modernist architecture. Through a detailed description of its spaces and an analysis of the concept of “total design” embodied in the project, the stories of the SAS Royal Hotel and Playtime intertwine when Ockman suggests that Jacobsen’s work could have been an influence on the perplexing modern spaces portrayed in Tati’s film.
Extracts:
“Today, however, in a world in which distraction and attention continue their rivalry with intensifying ferocity, Playtime remains an indispensable vehicle for probing their dynamics. Through the extended analogy that Jacques Tati elaborates between architecture and cinema, the film brilliantly probes the impact of the post-urban city on the human psyche.” [from Side A: “Architecture in a Mode of Distraction”]
“...the artfully choreographed photographs of the SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen [...] are evidence that Arne Jacobsen’s building for the Scandinavian Airline System was an exquisite exemplar of late-modern architecture in its day. I am going to make the case that it was also its swan song. [...] At SAS, transparency and total design reached a late- modernist culmination. Nor do the previous descriptions adequately capture the hotel’s finely calibrated and modulated interrelationships of materialism and immateriality, rationalism and surreality, naturalism and artificiality. Liminal would be a better word.” [from Side B: “An Orchid in the Land of Technology”]
Side A: “Architecture in a Mode of Distraction: on Jacques Tati’s Playtime”
Side B: “An Orchid in the Land of Technology”