dauphin island II

source: highlike
Work: Dauphin Island is located on a sand bar. The Gulf of Mexico lies to the south of the island, and the Mississippi Sound and the bay of Mobile lie to the north. The island currently has a fixed population of 1200 inhabitants and is connected to Mobile by the hyperboloid Gordon Persons bridge – in an almost dreamed-of suspension.Even though it has several bird reserves, the main one is the Audubon Bird Sanctuary;it is the primary meeting place for the birds that emigrate to the north from South America and, as a consequence, many species can be found before they continue their journeys. Mapped out by the Spanish explorers in 1513, the first French settlers called the island Massacre for the “mountain of human skeletons” they found. The island’s importance as a refuge and defence port was acknowledged, and soon “Isle Dauphine”, as it was subsequently called by a great-great-grandson of Louis XIV and heir of Dauphin, became a bridge for the colonisation of the New World. Spanish and English created fortresses that protected the entrances to the bay, but it was the Americans who captured Mobile along with Dauphin Island in 1813 and turned it into a permanent fortification. My interest in Dauphin Island comes from the study of aquatic architecture and pile dwellings originating in the Neolithic period. Before becoming interested in this location I planned to visit the Kampong Ayer district of Bandar Seri Begawan, the capital of Brunei. But the fact is that the architecture of Dauphin Island contains both a kind of humility, of servitude and of submission to a medium that make it typologically ambiguous. On the one hand the oscillations of the water and the relations with an unconsolidated or exposed environment mark the position and height of its buildings, and on the other hand the superfluity or the redundancy of many of its constructions make them magnetic, almost totemic, in an enclave contrarily envisaged for fishing and leisure. There is a certain phantasmagoria in the non-holiday periods that make this enclave a hypnotic region, not only for the implicit solitude but also because the joining, the consolidation of the dwellings and their subsequent rejuvenation (the summit of elegant subtleties, vertexes and crests) are exposed to a near-certain capitulation. They are constructive structures for resignation. From the island’s original name of Massacre, to so many named fatalities: Katrina, Ivan….up to the current oil-spill catastrophe and the over 1.9 million gallons of chemical dispersants poured in to date to dissolve the crude oil that began spreading on 20th April, in what is seen as the worst spill in history, this island has a natural complicity with adversity. How can this island settle or face this conjunction of disaster and its subordination to the subsoil with the property policy of its meagre surface? The inhabitants of Dauphin Island have a motto:rise up in the face of adversity, but, doesn’t this proclamation contain a neurotic obstinacy in what is a supra-heroic, but useless existence? Their denial of docility generates a permanent constructive worship, an establishment of the bricoleur as the counter figure to the concept of dedition; of conversion into a deditian territory. At the moment its inhabitants distance themselves from objective temporary logic, the architectural practice is developed from a permanent chaining of the hours but in a time that is at once measurable. The now old woman who owns a house with dilapidated pillars and a large part of the boarding of the walls detached or raised up proudly stated that the house had been erected by her grandfather, without doubt convinced by the concept of belonging, but now postulated in the budget of non-continuance. Actually, in itself the house was an unruly but ruinous symbol of the confrontation with the forces of nature. In this form of inhabiting disaster there is a paradox, on the one hand the way the community establishes itself, in a continuous constructive activity, fixes the group in a society of the present and, on the other hand, that fragmentary state permanently reconciles it to a vision of the deconstructed whole around a historical continuity. Which means they live in real time and yet in delayed time. Katrina caused the loss of 250 houses on a surface area of 16 square kilometres, andIvan 170 only in the more open, western area of the island. Now, since an accident that occurred on 20th April on the Deepwater Horizon oil platform caused the spillage of 800,000 litres of crude oil a day, approximately 172 kilometres of barriers have been deployed along the whole of the Gulf coast.The fact is that these barriers are prominent enough to drive away the American middle class who seek exile and relaxation on the island. The reality is, as the locals assert, that without visitors this town is dying.
Photographer: Dionisio González
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source: wallpaper
Dionisio González’s work is visually captivating, hovering between the real and the imaginary. The Spanish photographer’s latest solo exhibition, Le Corbusier: The Last Project, is an exploration of a built environment inspired by the iconic architect’s work and has just opened at the Ivorypress Space gallery in Madrid as part of the Off PhotoEspana Festival.
For this series, González created a set of images of fantasy landscapes based on twenty designs by the Swiss master. Known for his digital imagery that explores space and sculptural, architectural environments, it is no surprise that González’s new pieces are so convincing and painstakingly detailed that call for a double take.
The photographer’s work reflects on themes of utopia, restoration and ruin and at the same time allows the visitor to discover some lesser-known Le Corbusier works, which were designed but never built, such as the Governor’s Palace in Chandigarh, India, Villa Paul Prado in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and the Museum of Unlimited Growth, in Algeria. “This exhibition intends to show a work of restitution of omitted vestiges”, he explains.
González, who teaches at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Sevilla, has received numerous awards for his work and has exhibited in various high profile institutions, from the Museu de Arte in Sao Paulo, to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid. This show, on display until the 13 July, also includes pieces from the artist’s previous series, Dauphin Island.
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source: a-desk
In accord with his own precepts, philosophy and the trends that were in vogue at the time, Le Corbusier praised the virtues and the benefits that machines could bring not only to society bit also as a tool for architecture. The camera (or the macchina as the Italians would say) and the computer seem to be the main tools in the work of artist Dionisio González (Gijon, 1965), showing from today until 13 July at ivorypress. His series of manipulated photographs (Favelas, Halong, Dauphin Islands, Busan, Venice*) are especially well-known in the world of architecture for their critical focus on the contemporary city and today’s urban planning, incapable of resolving problems beyond the immediacy of expropriation, demolition or short-term patching-up. His photomontages are personal proposals for the contemporary city that present alternative ways of making a city, taking advantage of what is already there and also with actions similar to Kenneth Frampton’s “critical regionalism”. Although one can’t deny that his research into certain latent urban situations is interesting, nor that the artistic and technical quality (the light and colour in his images are meticulously impeccable), his determination to go almost too far (further than an actual architect would go) in his definition of architectural and urban proposals makes them seem slightly naive, superficial and contradictory with respect to the virtues that he seems to want to expound in principle, clouding the final message of the work. The informality and unpredictability of spontaneous urban settlements seem to become domesticated and programmed, the endeavour being to stylise the material precariousness through capricious formal solutions and supposedly “glamorous” materials which seem to demand an aesthetic of “good taste” (in the most conventional sense of the word) and a process of friendly gentrification, but gentrification nonetheless. Equally his hyperrealist style, a mix of commercial property and video-game simulator, currently the dominant trend in the aesthetics of the most competitive world of architecture (tenders, selling projects to clients, presentations) suffers from a lack of irony that one misses. That said it is a pleasure to see the latest project by Dionisio González. “Le Corbusier. The Last Project” is a spectacular photographic reconstruction of twenty “unborn” projects by Le Corbusier and it is therefore one shows off his artistic capacity for representation and interpretation, closer to Piranesi’s Romanticism and further from any more risky architectural pretensions. The “staging” (which could be seen at the last ARCO* fair) recovers the essence of the most spectacular installations such as Elegía* (2008) and Transfigured Schöenberg* and, even though Le Corbusier was “probably the 20th century architect to have been written about most” [2]. and his documentary collection is definitely the biggest in the history of architecture, his work can never be exhibited too much and presented to more amateur audiences who don’t have the time or the inclination to research the works of this famous architect and relate better to systems of 3D representation than to classic technical plans, collages and drawings.
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source: leblogdeshige
Cette série du photographe espagnol Dionisio González sur Dauphin Island (une station balnéaire dans l’État de l’Alabama) date de 2011, elle a été présentée dans la cadre de l’exposition « Le Corbusier: The Last Project » centrée sur l’œuvre inachevée de l’architecte suisse.
The show also includes various works from the series Dauphin Island, recently created by the artist and inspired by the island of the same name, in the state of Alabama (USA). ‘My interest in Dauphin Island comes from the study of aquatic architecture and palafittes that originated in the Neolithic Era’, explains González. An island in the Gulf of Mexico that has suffered numerous natural catastrophes and for which the artist has imagined ‘innovative projects that give shape to new habitable structures in the vacuums in the perception of spaces that had previously been devastated’.
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source: noticiasarqcommx
El fotógrafo ha seleccionado edificios que nunca llegaron a levantarse, como el Palacio del Gobernador en Chandigarh (India), la Villa Paul Prado en Buenos Aires (Argentina) o el Museo del Crecimiento Ilimitado (Argelia), para restituirlos y, a la vez, para destruirlos.
Dionisio González hace explotar los proyectos frustrados del maestro de la arquitectura moderna siguiendo la idea del filósofo Heidegger de que “todo proyecto no construido es una ruina”. La no ejecución se convierte, aquí, “en una destrucción silenciosa y silenciada, en una explosión que, en este caso, implosiona”. Le Corbusier: The Last Project es el título de la primera exposición que realiza el fotógrafo Dionisio González en Ivorypress Space (Madrid), que abrirá sus puertas el próximo 30 de mayo como parte del Festival Off PHotoEspaña.
Actualmente 9.50/10