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| MBr September 2012 |
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| Isabel Marant SS 2012 |
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| Upper Lawn Pavilion, Alison and Peter Smithson |
I've always been thrilled by this concept of rough poetry and deep complexity hidden under apparently straightforward and careless looks. My obsession towards this "carefully careless" effect extends to many different areas of knowledge and even to the random frames of my daily life.
I truly believe beauty can be found all over; from the most spectacular landscapes to the (a priori) most unpleasant places. And somehow this constant need for feeding my greedy eyes is intrinsically rooted in my personality. I believe, though, it is exactly this openness for being fed with beauty that constantly brings magic and excitement to my days.
Often the most interesting images arrise from ordinary contexts. Likewise, in fashion, easy garments can be combined into wealthy looks. The use and transformation of sporty and careless looks - so present in our collective image inventory - is brilliantly conceived and recreated by the french stylist Isabel Marant. She takes masculine pieces, wasted fabrics, scissor-cut pieces and mixes them fearlessly with the most sophisticated and feminine pieces and accessories, reaching final looks that couldn't find competitors in sexiness. It took me a while to figure the richness of her work and it is something I have been perceiving after following her collections every year.
Once regarded and interpreted in a correspondently complex and subtle fashion, the work of the architects Alison and Peter Smithson bears witness to the concept of built roughness that gradually reveals that complexity and intensity (even smoothness) from which this autonomous architecture draws its power.
Smithsons' work is often underestimated. Their activities cover a wide spectrum, strongly supported by their own approach rather than by formal preconditions. There are several complex architectural subjects that have been explored by them through the use of essays, diagrams or projects.
References to Misean buildings are recurrent in the Smithsons' works, mainly in the form of allusions to the subtle differences between his work and theirs. Whereas Mies' endeavors were towards perfection and precision, the Smithsons' look for similarity and relationship that results in these "almost exact places". Their work is oriented through the criteria of perception, a criteria that can only be perceived through the analysis of their built works. In "the Economist", for instance, "the slight differences in the openings of the three buildings heighten the ensemble effect". The Economist building complex was intended to be an anonymous part of the existing city, yet an impulsioner of its development and reinterpretation.
MBr _ 20121107
