Lai Chetwund
Delirious!
Pavilion, Serpentine
7pm, 1st September 2006
A live performance based on the revered Rem Koolhaas book 'Delirious', originally published in (and is a thesis about) New York in 1978. Influential as a cultural, architectural, and social history of New York, through it Koolhaas celebrated and analysed the city as a metaphor for human behavior coining the notion of "the culture of congestion". Koolhaas interprets the dynamic between architecture and culture through the prism of New York's history, looking at key moments (the imposition of the Manhattan grid, the creation of Coney Island, the development of the skyscraper and so on). Above all though 'Delirious New York' thrives on intriguing and entertaining facts, and it is the wittiness of the publication that drew Lali Chetwynd to it, and which inspired her skyscraper's cocktail party, a lively social interaction of buildings and culture made in her engagingly hand-crafted style. A homage which specifically recalls the 1931 Beuxs-Arts Ball in which at least two dozen architects came dressed as the buildings they had designed. The ball was apparently covered live by a radio station, but only fragmentary descriptions and a couple of photographs remain of what must have been a spectacular party that promised "modernistic, futuristic, cubistic, altruistic, mystic, architistic and feministic" according to an advert in the New York Times before the ball. See how Chetwynd re-imagines it here.
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Credits
Editorial direction: Christabel Stewart
Image capture: Carrie Farncombe
Editorial Assistance: Jenny Campbell-Colquhoun
Thanks: Lali Chetwynd, Herald Street Gallery
Selected links
http://www.heraldst.com/artists/chetwynd.html
http://www.serpentinegallery.org/2006/07/serpentine_gallery_pavilion_20_1.html
