Dispute Plan to Prevent Future Luxury Constitution by Benjamin H. Bratton

Shortly after his arrival, several locals fell ill with cholera. “I will be back in Athens before you know I was gone.” His diary notebooks from this period, now in the archives of the Getty Institute in Los Angeles, suggest that this trip through the Cyclades Islands was to last for no more than a few days. For Johnson, this particular pilgrimage to Naxos’s caves, to a primal architecture of sorts, was an important but unplanned addition to his itinerary. Naxos is the island where, as mythology has it, Zeus himself was raised in a cave. Johnson’s extensive travels during this period were greatly influenced by his Harvard studies of the pre-Socratics, particularly Zeno and Parmenides. This visit and its predicament would change his life. Philip Johnson visited the Greek island of Naxos in 1927 and was caught up in a local vampire panic spurred by a cholera outbreak. Principal-in-Charge: Hernan Diaz Alonso/ Xefirotarch Design Team: Ivan Bernal, Nick Kinney, Nicholas Poulos, Brandon Vickers, Michael Young. Xefirotarch project proposed for the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Pavilion, 2010. “What began for as a pursuit of cinematic botanical monsters, became, in ways he himself does not necessarily control, profiles of allegorical cannibalism … and probably even actual weapon systems.” San Francisco’s political culture being what it is, my remarks were positioned as ethical warnings or as criticisms, though I meant them as neither. The quote that ended up in the paper the following week had me suggesting that Xefirotarch was some combination of Victor von Frankenstein, Alfred Hitchcock, and Raytheon.

I patiently repeated that Hernan was not really in the architecture business in any normative sense, that his work was pursuing something else, and that, no, I was not really surprised by what had happened.

Hernan Diaz-Alonso was home in Argentina when the San Francisco Chronicle ran coverage of all this, and as I have co-taught several classes with Hernan at SCI-Arc (Southern California Institute of Architecture), the suspicious journalists seeking quotes eventually buzzed my phone instead of his. The linear gash in his abdomen healed, but he remained adamant that the work lunged at him and not the other way around. One boy was hospitalized for nearly a week because of his injuries. Each claimed to have been “bitten” by its forms, but more likely, the children had fallen upon one of its dangerous, fang-like angles, and left punctured by the sharp contours. The reasons for this go beyond the now well-known series of incidents at the group’s 2006 SF MoMA show, during which, over consecutive days, several children were left bleeding and traumatized by their encounters with the installation.

Dispute Plan to Prevent Future Luxury Constitution by Benjamin H. Bratton