Category: Research

Heritage Lightup

Honestly, my first impressions of the light up was …… it’s so red. It almost makes the whiteness of the buildings unnoticeable, maybe that’s that the reason why they chose predominantly white buildings for the project. Most of the buildings were just lit up with red lights and white light maybe for a patriotic reason since this event was to commemorate national day. I actually walk through most of the venues since they were only a short distance away from one another. The exhibitions were pretty similar but the audience was really greeted with an obnoxious shade of red that was for some part uncomfortable to see. In fact, most memorable thing on this trip for me was walking past the volunteers’ tent at the National Museum and getting jump scared at their shout when they won at a game of mahjong or whatever they were playing.  It might have been a good idea though to bring a picnic mat to the National Gallery to sit there and just watch the screen with the scrolling paintings. Overall it seems to be a patriotic message.

It would have been good if there were different meanings of history and cultural aspects to the works that stir up nostalgia for the audience though.

Reading Reflection

Relational architecture seems to be a re-contextualizing of certain architecture to give a different narrative from the original and breaking down on the materialization and environment of the buildings to give a different level of meaning to them. By adding different hyperlinks to the areas of a certain architecture Rafael Lozano-Hemmer deconstructs the given meaning of the architecture giving it new meaning and connections. The interesting thing is that people tend to react differently to changes perhaps due to culture differences no matter how similar you try to do it. On the other hand this might be the doing of certain groups of individuals who are enjoying the piece of work. people tend to follow what they see other people doing, so perhaps some of the people in Lisbon started trying to not overlap their shadows with others therefore starting to make people think they weren’t supposed to overlap there shadow or something. The British on the other hand is famous for their drinking culture and sarcasm thus it doesn’t seem to be too far from their culture to have that reaction to the works. It’s good though that the works often revitalizes the neighborhoods that were once quiet. There are things we could do with architecture to reconnect and reintroduce people to each other.