/// GEORGE LUCAS - O GRANDE ARQUITECTO

Unlike the residential architecture of Robert Venturi, which invokes bygone palaces, Star Wars was not a retreat to the imagery of past. Lucas was not reacting against the dominant program of faux-industrial imagery, which Venturi righteously criticized. Venturi’s passive ambit of comforting the old with a palatial appliqué had nothing to do with the modernist compulsion to make it new. Lucas, like Smithson, Morris, and Jacobs, dug deep into the dominant ethic of rationalizing the inconsistencies and contradictions of modern senescence. Star Wars built on the radicalism and procedural logic of minimalism and made a bold visual assertion, proposing a future “drawn not from how it ought to be, but from how it is.” In defiance of conventional wisdom, Lucas revealed a place that was modern, but not new, a future long occupied, unfinished, worldly. Modernity is the presumption that the natural environment for man has yet to be built. Lucas was the first to imagine that future built environment as already old. John Powers . Star Wars A New Heap (PT) Vale a pena ler este ensaio de John Powers. Uma descarnagem metódica da relação entre a ficção científica - principalmente na incontornável obra que é a saga Star Wars - e o movimento moderno e minimal da arquitectura da segunda metade do século. Ou de como as paredes brancas, as formas rectilíneas, o despojamento e o ambiente tipo sala-de-operações-esterilizada-à-espera-do-paciente nasceram com a Death Star e a apurada estética das forças do Império. /// GEORGE LUCAS - THE GREAT ARCHITECT (ENG) It’s worth reading this essay by John Powers. A methodic investigation of the relation between Sci-Fi – mainly in the masterpiece Star Wars saga – and the modern and minimalist architecture movement of the second half of this century. Power writes about how white walls, straight forms, the bareness and the ambience like sterilized-operation-room-waiting-for-the-patient began with the Death Star and the refined esthetic of the Empire’s forces. LRO