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5th International Festival for Architecture in Video
THE FUTURE AND THE CITY
international architectural conference > November 30 - December 3, 2000

exhibitions > November 30 - December 17, 2000




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Takehiko Nagakura
Talin's tower (1919)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
USA 1999, 3'12"

Immediately after the Russian revolution, Vladimir Talin, a soviet artist, proposed a monument for the Third International, a steal structure planned to be higher than Tour Eiffel. Although it has never been built, Tallin wanted to put it into San Pietroburgo, the classical Russian capital. Advanced computer graphics allow to visualise this never constructed tower in the urban context.
The tower is well known in architecture, but only through Talin's mysterious descriptions, his abstract drawings and his "un-materialised" sculpture models. Studying Talin's sculptural techniques, the équipe who has produced this video added constructural details to the original drawings and realised a proto-modern mega-structural model. At the end, synthetic images have been super-imposed on the original video. The final production emphasises an enormous contrast of proportions and of materials between the city and the tower, being an element of big strength getting its energy from stage designing, from rigid Russian climate and from vibrating Russian language. 

Takehiko Nagakura is an architect from Tokyo. At MIT, he teaches courses related to computer-aided design, and his research focuses on the representation and computation of architectural space and formal design knowledge. He has founded and led the Architecture, Representation and Computation group (ARC) since 1996. His recently finished building, Gushikawa Orchid Center in Okinawa, Japan has been awarded the SD Review Award (1998) and Nikkei Kyushyu District New Office Award (1999). He leads the project Unbuilt Monuments, in which his team is developing computer graphics visualization of significant but unrealized early modern architecture such as the Danteum (Terragni and Lingeri, 1938) and the Monuments for the Third International (Tatlin, 1919). Its recent video productions have been exhibited in Tokyo, Osaka, Orlando, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Charlottesville, Paris, Milan and Florence in film festivals and computer graphics conferences such as SIGGRAPH Animation Theaters of 1998 and 1999. For the film production of Le Corbusier's Palace of Soviets (collaboration with Shinsuke Baba), his team was awarded with the Third Prize of Prix Pixel-INA Science Division at 19th Edition of Imagina in Monaco. Inspired by the perspective apparatus Albrecht Durer documented in 1525, he invented DIGITARAMA, a computer based space-form projection machine, developed for the Virtual Architecture Show at Tokyo University Digital Museum in June 1997. Nagakura's PhD dissertation (1996) at Harvard University proposed a computable paradigm for representing architectural shapes and transformations. Before coming to MIT in 1993, Nagakura worked for Fumihiko Maki in Tokyo, and was an instructor at Harvard University, Graduate School of Design. He earned Bachelor of Engineering in Architecture from Tokyo University in 1985, Master of Architecture from Harvard University in 1987, Master of Engineering in Architecture from Tokyo University in 1988, and completed his PhD at Harvard in 1996. In 1985 he received the prestigious Ishizaka Memorial Foundation scholarship from the Japanese Federation of Economic Institutions. He is the recipient of the Japan Information Culture Society Grand Prize in 1999.
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