1992. You're sitting in a pitch-dark lecture hall. A tall, soft-spoken Czech emigré is caught in the light of the projection beam. Falling across his face and the screen is a stunning photograph of a delicate, exquisitely colored jellyfish. He whispers, "Maybe all buildings will look like this one day." And although this speaker has realized very few of his architectural visions, you believe him.
1996. The tall man - Jan Kaplicky - and his partner Amanda Levete have taken their visions from the lecture hall and the drawing board to the building site. With their award-winning Glass House in Islington, North London, and other projects such as a UK-based millennial Earth Center and the royal family's cricket grounds in the works, Kaplicky and Levete - as the groundbreaking architectural practice Future Systems - are making good on their promises.
Their book, For Inspiration Only, succeeds in capturing on paper the mind-bombing that is Future Systems. The small, Day-Glo volume is a collection of the visual references that Kaplicky, Levete, and erstwhile collaborator David Nixon have collected over the last 30 years, each accompanied by the thought-provoking sound bites of the practice.
The eclectic images - yachts, spacecraft, egg yolks, snail shells next to aircraft body-structures, slum kids of India sheltering in surplus sewer pipes - are used by the architects as jumping-off points for their designs. The powerful juxtapositions displayed in the book describe simply a number of very complex ideas: the relationship of the organic to the technological, the value of design at all levels of detail, the establishment of real need and real opportunity for projects, and other tenets of the Tao of Future Systems.
Anyone involved in the design and making of things should carry this slim volume like a Maoist would carry the "little red book." Inspiring indeed.
For Inspiration Only, by Future Systems: US$24. Academy Editions: (800) 462 6420, +1 (301) 459 3366.
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