One Last Blog

You are asked to complete one final blog summing up your experience of these texts. It is your chance to overview your own performance, then to print out and submit your collected blogs as hard copy to the Faculty Office for Friday 10th January, or Monday 13th January if you are part-time.

Some theoretic texts can be very daunting indeed. For instance sitting down to read Fredric Jameson this morning was not particularly pleasant for me. Indeed I would say it was a huge disappointment. But I carry on. After all I carried on with Lefebvre, and he gets better (or at least easier) every time.
The aim of this course is to introduce you to something that is often daunting, and simplifications have to be made. I hope at the very least we have established an understanding as to why you do not necessarily understand what you are doing in the contemporary world of architecture (!) And sometimes, that you have to laugh, not cry, and position yourself in the time of man, not just time of life.

It does not matter how many sessions you attended or not, your blogs will demonstrate your effort of interpretation in the hard dark lonely land of the night, and this will always be partial, flawed, or perhaps, thrillingly brilliant. Let's see.

Helpful hint: For those who think their blogs are too long, top and tail them with sharp introductory and take home statements!

Change to K207

I can't believe it but it is utterly predictable that somebody else is in K307 this afternoon. However the room below on the 2nd floor, K207 is free. I suggest we use that. Sorry for the late notice.

Please Download Spengler's Charts

Please download and print Spengler's three charts from 'Decline of the West' before you come to Friday's final session. They are rather hard to project successfully.
Download them from Aman's post on the LSBU Architecture Noticeboard on Facebook.

Week 10

Thanks to Aman from Studio 8 who has posted the charts we are going to look at this week on the LSBU Architecture Noticeboard Facebook site. I will project them in the session for our further consideration.

As an overview, all the texts we've looked at so far can be read, for want of a better word, as somehow redemptive. They cannot all be considered 'left wing' (Hickey and Waugh would be excluded there) but they represent and reflect on issues of modernism and progress. The last two pieces we look at in this course are starkly, in their own ways, opposite. 

In discussing the machine age, we became aware that the machines were fine and it was the people who would need to change, and Darwin, Marx and Freud were there to support such an idea, while Goethe warned us of some difficulty ahead. Post 1989, as capitalism became the almost universal stratagem for living, the polarity reverses, after all, your desires are there to be satisfied, at least and preferably momentarily, to feed the capitalists profit; why would you want to change that? And there was 'no such thing' as society as Margaret Thatcher famously observed.

In The Fountainhead Ayn Rand presupposes an almost primal will dismissing social issues altogether. Oswald Spengler, arguably the first post-modern philosopher, presents a fatalistic circle game. The painting above by Poussin, Dance to the Music of Time, represents a similar neoclassical idea, that we all go round in circles, sometimes laughing, sometimes crying, and it comes as no surprise that as post modernism thinking entered architectural circles, so did neo-classicism as a style.

However you could say Mies van de Rohe was neo-classical, and he certainly had a copy of Spengler on his shelves, and had no pretence in any redemptive quality to architecture; you got, so to speak, whatever the epoch gave you. Mies would happily have worked for the Nazi's, and there's the rub. Meanwhile, because Mies van de Rohe's architecture is undoubtedly exquisite, while others following the social torch were left to languish in the tragedy of their endeavours (Berthold Lubetin became a pig farmer, L-C swam out to sea) a case can certainly be made for the post-modern attitude. It's just that, well, it can lead you to feel just a little empty, just a little depressed, when there seems so much to do.

The consequences of Spengler's thought were undoubtedly catastrophic in other ways. In terms of a task for this week, we shall look over the charts, but it would be a good idea for you to familiarize yourself with Spengler a bit more, by whatever web based means, before we do so. With this in mind,  always worry lest your dreams come true, and be careful what you wish for, and here endeth our ten sessions of critical thinking for another year.

Week 9

I'm pleased to say that this week you do not have to read a text, but simply turn up and watch The Fountainhead film in the session. I wouldn't read the book, it is unbearable, yet has been mightily popular and influential. You might read my critique of the character of Howard Roark and Ayn Rand in general for 'Reputations' in this month's Architectural Review (December 2013) conveniently now on the newstands (well, at least on subscribers desks).

Week 8

This week I want you to read Evelyn Waugh's short and humourous novel Decline and Fall. Alongside this I want you to read the section on the barrage (construction of a dam) from Le Corbusier's City of Tomorrow, partly this is to augment your understanding of the Faustian imperative (see below).

It is in Waugh's character of Prof Silinus, who we should take seriously as an effective parody, that we can see some home truths in the character of the organizer architect. Waugh was no stranger to architectural criticism, and wrote a relatively gushing review of L-C's 'City of Tomorrow' whilst clearly in two minds. It is of course the mark of a first class intellect to be able to juggle two opposite ideas in your head at the same time and still function.

For those now running short of time, Professor Otto Silinus enters Waugh's story in Part Two, in the chapter titled 'King's Thursday' (pg 115 in my edition). L-C's discussion of the dam happens around page 140 in my edition of the 'City of Tomorrow'.

P.S. You will find my own interpretation of the significance of Waugh's Prof Silinus recently posted on my blog: Architecture and Other Habits (pauldaviesarchitecture.blogspot.com)

The Faustian Imperative and the Tragedy of Development

Re-reading Berman this week, I was struck by just how 'counterculture' he was, perhaps, for me, just a little too comfortable in both his situation and his opinions, appearing all the more the bohemian American Marxist, a creature so curious as to deserve it's own ethnography.
So I beg the question, what happens if we do not embrace the Faustian imperative, that of the great project, that of 'utopia' if you like? Whilst of course realising at the same time that in order to make an omelet, you are certainly going to have to break some eggs?
On the other hand that corresponding 'tragedy' of development is that fact that in his preoccupation and commitment to the project, Faust ends up blind to 'care'. Sometimes, it is clear, you just can't win.