During the modern movement the column loses all its protagonism. The ornaments are eliminated from the columns and they lose their name after the Corbusero term "piloti". Only its functionality and effectiveness is relevant.
Carmelo Rodríguez from ENORME Studio, the designer, creates two lamps for Bizarre Columns that try to recover the distinguished classic past of the Doric and Ionic columns and transform it into furniture objects. Constructed in fluorescent methacrylate, they use conventional luminaires such as a fluorescent tube and a glass globe.
Description of project by ENORME Studio
During the Modern Movement, columns are stripped of any prominence in relation to their distinguished past. Any significant ornamental reference is eliminated from the column and it is reduced to a question of functional syntaxis. The column, which even loses its name after the Corbuserian term "piloti", becomes relevant only in terms of its structural and structuring capacity, a role imposed by modernity through the open plan. This formal and semantic reduction is questioned by Robert Venturi in "Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture" in 1966 and by Charles Jencks in "The Language of Postmodern Architecture" in 1977. For the latter, architecture must recover its semantic capacity as a language through the power of the metaphor. So, the column becomes the fundamental term bound to communicate those new messages that surpass, but at the same time include, the exhausted modernity. The hybridization and aesthetic complexity, the recovery and reinterpretation of history, the taste for the extravagant or the bizarre, the inclusion of the unspecialized public, the interest for the context or for the generation of new cultural references are some of those new messages for which the column becomes the fundamental means of communication based on a series of architectural strategies.
"The Free Style order, like the first Doric and Ionic order, or like most compound orders, are motivated by meaning. Newness is provoked by that willingness for meaning." (Jencks, 1982, p.110)
The columns are back in town.
Doricahhh and Jonicahhh are two lamps that try to recover the distinguished classical past of the Doric and Ionic columns and transform it into furniture objects. Constructed in fluorescent methacrylate, they use conventional luminaires such as a fluorescent tube and a glass globe to dignify them through an exercise of Free Style Classicism.
Doricahhh and Jonicahhh are two prototypes associated with the BIZARRE COLUMNS research.
