Dutch Air Guitar Championships

A webpage focussing on contributions made by reknowed French Artist Yves Klein.� Ook mooi zijn de fotos van de enige tijd geleden in Nederland georganiseerde Architects of Air, waarbij kunst c.q. luchtgebouwen schiterend worden uitgelicht.

`Air Architecture, at the MAK Center/Schindler House in Los Angeles, is the first exhibit in the U.S. of architectural projects by Yves Klein from 1958 through 1961. Curated by Los Angeles-based architect and teacher François Perrin, the architectural renderings, blueprints, texts and films in the show amount to a pitch for an architecture of the future in which barriers between nature and architecture are dissipated to produce an immaterial Eden where roofs and walls are made of air and fire. In one perspectival view, recumbent naked figures shelter under a roof of jets of air alongside a fountain of plumes of fire. Klein’s intention is no less than to finally realize modern architecture’s long-standing ambition to become infinite space. In a paradox taking nothing away from the delightfulness of Klein’s vision, Air Architecture is in most respects, although not solid, far from immaterial. This point is demonstrated most clearly by a cross-section which shows the Air Architecture landscape literally as the tip of an iceberg: a thin crust on top of a deep subterranean realm of engineering including transportation, mechanical equipment and computer controls revealed on the surface through a glass floor. The resulting architecture is paradoxically concrete—an immateriality arrived at through intensely material practices and typically maximal means. Earlier, Klein had produced a series of artworks called Void Rooms, in which empty rooms were painted completely white or blue in order to dissolve any subjective perception of enclosure and to fuse pictorial and the architectural surfaces.(6) His fire and water fountains, like the fountains at the terminal points of Roman aqueducts, hint that behind this frivolous display lies a vast investment of natural resources, mechanical energy, and human ingenuity enlisted in the transformation of elemental phenomena.`