From the immateriality of ideas, and idées fixes, to the immateriality of light.

Architecture and culture: Batman by Tim Burton and Production designer Anton Furst, and 20 years later by Christopher Nolan and cinematographer Wally Pfister; Koolhaas, Graves, Stern, to Jean Nouvel; capitalism. The Joker: Jack Nicholson's camp killer clown to Heath Ledger's psychotic deity. All that is solid melts into air and all that is not becomes material. Burton/Furst's Gotham was Gothic Art Deco: overdetermined historicist kitsch—a city by Michael Graves as bad joke—and Nolan's (in The Dark Knight) is modernist post Jacques Tati and Dan Graham and Alphaville/Tokyrama, Hong Kong by Godard, John Woo and Ringo Lam; but also Edward Yang's Taipei. Objects and structures framing windows and mirrors are now less important than the light that passes through or reflects off them.

Yi Yi



expanded, continuing