Jagged black balconies (they might look gray in the snapshots below, but they are in fact black): inner city housing designed by architects Bentele & Co., 1974. Address: Hornsgatan 148, Stockholm, Sweden. Floor plans from the public archives of the Stockholm planning department.
(Cont.)
Here it is, the video clip which started this whole series of architectural pop videos,“James Bond Theme (Moby’s re-version)” from 1997:
This particular video of American recording artist Moby, directed by Jonas Åkerlund, was shot entirely on location in the modernist heart of the Swedish capital Stockholm. Read more about its high-architecture-goes-pop-culture significance here. It was as feedback to that particular article of mine (about Moby’s and Jonas Åkerlund's video) that Lars Gezelius recently sent me the hip-hop video clip which became the subject of the first post in this video mini-series. Thanks again, Lars.
(Cont.)
Video clip of Europe performing their “Prisoners in Paradise” (1991) inside the Institut du monde arabe in Paris (Jean Nouvel, Architecture-Studio, 1988).
Thank you again, Lars Gezelius, for sending another (perhaps not “great,” but certainly “of interest”) architectural pop video tip.
(Cont.)
And the beat goes on in the “modernism is pop” series, as a certain Bollywood hunk flunks his bunk (I have no idea what that means) in front of Gehry, Calatrava, and Moneo.
As I have already explained, I never much cared for Rafael Moneo’s museum of modern art in Stockholm. But I rather like those plain tilted glass boxes of his Kursaal cultural center in San Sebastián (see video clip above, and pics below).
There used to be such a great divide between “what architects like” and ordinary people’s tastes. But if a wacky, tacky movie spectacle such as Sivaji (starring the rather rotund Rajanikanth) gladly and exuberantly makes use of the stark and clean architecture of the Kursaal as backdrop for the zaniest pop music video imaginable, it must be obvious to each and everyone that the gap between elite and pop is closing fast: because apparently it’s not just in the West (as we have already seen in the case of the Alkaholiks video mentioned in an earlier posting) that pop culture is getting to be perfectly in sync with the tastes and preferences of the architectural elites: believe it or not, in 2007 (when Sivaji is made), architectural modernism goes Bollywood!
Thank you, Claes Sörstedt, for sending me this delicious YouTube tip.
Thank you, Lars Gezelius, for this TouTube tip: the “Flute Song” video of Los Angeles rappers Alkaholiks (2006) is filmed against the backdrop of several contemporary architectural landmarks in Malmö, Sweden, such as the new Turning Torso housing tower (Santiago Calatrava 2005), and the recent Öresund Bridge, which connects Malmö/Sweden and Copenhagen/Denmark since 2000. (But also the not quite recent, but all the more classical, high-modernism of Malmö’s Hyllie Water Tower of 1973 gets to be in the video.)
I just now (april 2008) received this trippy hip-hop clip tip as one reader’s feedback to an earlier article of mine—about American recording artist Moby’s 1997 video for his “James Bond Theme (Moby’s re-version)” which—just like the Alkaholiks clip—happens to be a pop culture video shot against a backdrop of significant (Swedish) modernist architecture; shot entirely on location in and around Sergels torg, the modernist downtown district of Sweden’s capital city. read it here.
But if the ten year old example of Moby in downtown Stockholm was all about a kind of nostalgia for the past; all about—more than 20 years after the fact—rendering the 1970s and 1960s modernist post-war architecture picturesque (after decades of neglect and public disdain), this recent hip-hop example from Malmö is an example of today’s very different mindset: of how popular culture actually seems to be totally in sync with today’s neo-modernist architecture.
Modernism used to be elitist, out of sync with the tastes of contemporary society (it took more than 20 years for Sergels torg to be “discovered” by Moby and video director Jonas Åkerlund). Today it seems architectural modernism (be it modernist classics such as the Hyllie Water Tower, or quite contemporary examples such as the Calatrava Turning Torso) is no longer elitist; today modernism is pop.
