New Architectures — Allegra Hangen

INFORMATION

New Architectures

2023

Archival inkjet print on cotton paper

The ongoing series New Architectures by multidisciplinary artist Allegra Hangen utilizes erasure as a tool and a methodology to question strict and antiquated modes of thinking about progress, Modernity, functional spaces, and the “everyday man” as discussed by Le Corbusier in his canonical book, “Towards a New Architecture.”

Hangen digitally erases words and whole phrases of Le Corbusier’s to form her own poetry--at times minimal and naturalistic, at others, critical and objective. Her poetry sometimes focuses on the natural world, depending on the words included by the original author. But often she focuses on the built world, specifically the postwar Modernist buildings that gave form to the radical ways that (predominantly male) architects began to think about frugality, harmony, machinery, efficiency, technology, modularity, and individualism, in relation to mankind and our necessities.

Today, our ever-connected world allows for an empathy and a knowing that one style of home cannot fit all. This makes much of Le Corbusier’s thesis crumble and fall into fragmented idealistic pretensions. Hangen sifts through the rubble to form a new structure from these old words, something deeper, softer, more poetic; a New Architecture.

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