Guggenheim as pure staircase
example ·
retold in 3 talks
An architect friend told Žižek that the Guggenheim Museum is the realization of Benjamin's insight about the Paris Opera, the building is essentially one big staircase, and paintings are mere secondary decoration for a place to walk and talk.
As told 2
“The proper way to perceive Guggenheim is to reduce paintings there just to a secondary decoration. It's a place where you go up to slowly walk down and talk.”
“We have such a building, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, where basically it's one big staircase. You go up so that you go later down.”
What it carries
one story, many jobs: the ideas this anecdote is deployed to argue, one tally mark per use (an idea page shows the same relation from the other end, as its shelf of stories)
Its cast and sources
populated by
Daniel Libeskind2Marcion of Sinope1Mehmed Paša Sokolović Bridge1Theodore Sturgeon1Bryan Ward-Perkins1Charles Freeman1Dietrich of Bern1Jacques Cousteau1
alongside works
Every retelling 2
An architect friend told Žižek that the Guggenheim Museum is the realization of Benjamin's insight about the Paris Opera, the building is essentially one big staircase, and paintings are mere secondary decoration for a place to walk and talk., illustrating architecture as ideology,secondary spaces as true focus
The Guggenheim is essentially a giant circular staircase you ascend to descend; Žižek jokes this is like skiing, going up a mountain only to come down, and asks why not stay at the bottom and read a book., illustrating means becomes end,architectural paradox,less is more inversion