Death Cube K

The essay by Vidler puts the work of Morphosis into the context of Kafka's interpretation of the place of man in modern times. It seems that the work of Morphosis is an "other," something that emerges rather than being ready-made for the site. The ready-made by Marcel Duchamp is a strange contraction that reminds me of the dystopia presented by the Death Cube K. It is two materials that have been slammed together which give new meaning to the result. It is no longer a bike wheel and a stool, but a bool or a whike. 

Ready-made - Marcel Duchamp

In a sense, the built form is an exercise in perspective; from above buildings seem to cut away and chart geographies of unknown forces. On the ground a different perspective is revealed, one where "racing close to the contours, the models seem to meld with the earth's crust itself, heaving and breaking, splitting and opening up with seismic precision, as if mapping the fault lines of a once hot, now cooling culture." The work of Morphosis points back to that of Duchamp, there is a strange juxtaposition of land and building that makes their structures transcend the mundane.

Cooper Union - Morphosis

One of the tenets of the essay was a return to the principles of modernism, with a slight nod to the past. The statement "modernity's absorption of modernism, working with the language of the latter to construe a critique of the former," sets the tone for Morphosis' work as that in the vein of modernism. There is an assertion that the work of Morphosis critiques the culture that we live in, actively calling for the public to be able to understand our spaces in current context.

Plan Voisin - Le Corbusier

Material also plays a role in the realm of our modernist modernism. The process of building seems to have "exploded from the mechanical to the digital, and thus taking over the public realm by virtue of its conquest of matter as a whole, merging at once with the temporal moves of the population and the spatial shifts of the earth."

Perot Museum - Morphosis

"Morphosis [...]seems to celebrate the underground as simply another dimension of gravity-free space, moving at will around ground zero without recognizing the transition, without the sense of constriction given by the canonical modes of modernism and postmodernism." This in-objectivity of the ground plane presents a carte-blanche approach to architecture, one that allows the architect to describe what he wishes upon any site.