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.

Week 7

The text this week is chapter one of this book concerning Goethe's story of Faust. Obviously this is an interpretation by Berman, but it is a useful one, bringing an explanation to an overall story we have delved in to so far only in parts. Please read the consecutive sections if you can, sections Berman decides to lable the dreamer, the lover and the developer.

Goethe's story of Faust took him most of his life to write, and ranks as one of the greatest stories ever told, seeming to predict the consequences of the industrial revolution from it's root in the C18th and still relevant to us to day. Goethe is not unlike Shakespeare in significance, and this epic story has been  adopted in many variants. To architecture students, it gives an emotive handle on the processes of urban development aside from those you might get from historical texts.

Berman died recently, so there are obituaries you may wish to read. In persona he certainly looked like Allen Ginsberg, and was certainly, in his love of New York, an academic who was no stranger to the counterculture New York is so famous for. Personally it is his love hate relationship with the processes of development which I find captivating, after all they brought him the metropolis he loved.

The university library assures us that core reading lists are now available on-line, so you should be able to download this text without difficulty.

This Weeks Room

Appropriately enough given our subject this week, we continue our nomadic progress to K307 for the 15th Nov session.

Week 6

This week we explore the significance of another kind of language entirely, so download and read this poem from 1956 to begin. As much as we have enjoyed (!) an inquisition of language in Lefebvre, and felt it lolling around in various forms in Rowe, Eagleton, Meades and so forth, it is worth remembering that some radicals distrusted language in itself! After reading this poem please familiarise yourself with the work of William Burroughs in The Job, make sure you have a passing acquaintance with Jack Karouac's novel On The Road, and have at least heard of Marshall McLuhan.

On Rowe on La Tourette

It is without doubt the sheer loquaciousness of Rowe's essay on La Tourette that is so off-putting. Despite the sophistications contained within, it is hard to get behind that yes it is/no it isn't parade of proposition and denial (denial of course if you are not sufficiently au fait ) that makes up what appears the equivalent of a fireside chat. We might wonder what kind of world Rowe inhabited and compare it with some of the other writers worlds we have encountered. Is Meades at his most insufferable just the same, is Hickey a low-brow Texan version, is Eagleton just the same kind of beast with a chip on his shoulder? I certainly imagine Rowe tucked up in a club chair with a large brandy, and I love the description of him turning up to an event looking not unlike an unmade bed!
However if there is a prize for interpreting this piece it would go to those who discern, with effort, it's primary satisfactions, for of course La Tourette is itself a stark, apparently plain beast, and it is pleasant, even necessary, for the architect to read it otherwise. Meanwhile in the session I pointed out some things I think Rowe passed over which he shouldn't have. Just to note them here:
1. Corbusier clearly provides a viewing balcony on the south side of the courtyard inviting us to insect and appreciate his array of forms in light.
2. Rowe, with his penchant for abstraction, does not concern himself with any literal visual puns that L-C employs; the kidneys, the light canons, the light machine guns, the ear to god, which he employs in the tradition of the very origins of architecture and that provide complex meaning beyond the visual.
3. Rowe avoids discussion of oddities that may relate directly to Greek mythology (the struts supporting Achilles ships replicated in the slanting pilotis for instance).
4. Experiential effect is very heavily codified, the building is not a 'fridge' (bloody cold) an echo chamber (bloody noisy) the roof of the church does not 'lift off' as the sun comes down, all aspects of our experience of this complex that are undeniable.
These four points, and I suspect there are more, are made not so much to undermine Rowe, but to make us aware of his proclivities, and hence put us in a better place to trace his influence in the abstract architecture the US enjoyed subsequently with 'the whites' (New York Five) who dried out the experiential factors even more!
There is a blog post on AAOH with my own essay on La Tourette for those who wish to venture further.

Room Change

There will be a room change tomorrow for our 3pm session due to an open day this weekend. We will be in BR 361

Today's Session on Lefebvre CANCELLED

I'm sorry but due to a sudden illness I've had to cancel today's lectures. Please keep an eye on this blog for updates but expect us to continue and catch -up next Friday.

Week 5

Lefebvre attempts a critique of Venice, now let's stay geographically close by, but intellectually miles away, by looking at two essays by Colin Rowe collected in the above volume. The first is the title essay, the second his attempt to decode Le Corbusier's monastery La Tourette, a building Rowe considered an almost primal architectural experience, and far from the advertorial fluff of today. The consequences of Rowe's thinking would be profound in marking the act of criticism as no longer being exactly the same as the act of building, predisposing us to interpretation that would eventually border on the arcane. He started it.

I have the original text for 'La Tourette' first published in the AR in 1960, in K713. The first essay, 'Mathematics of the Ideal Villa', dating from 1947, was reprinted in the AR August 2010. I suggest you use your various means to share the material so that we do not have people saying they couldn't get hold of either text.

Bad Weather Cancellation

Given the BBC News this evening, I am minded to cancel tomorrow's Critical Thinking session given that so many part-time students have to come in on the train. I will attempt to get in myself, but the 9am slot is cancelled. Students who do manage to get in may wish to try and come and have a chat in K713 about their work if they feel like it.

New Room

Please note the room booked for this week is K307. Please also note that when there is an open day or some such event the following Saturday, we need to keep eyes open for a further change.

Week 4

Chapter 2 of the Production of Space by Henri Lefebvre, with attention turned specifically to the various ways we might interpret the word 'space' beyond 'nice space' and further the consideration of a possible difference between a 'work' and a 'product'.
This is not an easy read, but every year I somehow feel better for reading it, and it will take us to the heart of the dilemmas that occupied the minds of Eagleton's eager Marxists back in the sixties and seventies.

Postscript: In the end last week we sketched out some basics to Marxist economics, especially the distinction Marx draws between use and exchange value and the continuing imperative, in Capitalism, to reduce cost. This was done with very broad strokes and one might question several elements (but probably not the core) of the argument. Certainly this argument should appeal to architects, since it partially explains issues of building quality and patronage close to their hearts. But this further questioning is what Lefebvre tries to do, in further pursuing distinctions between work, labour and production, often quite happy to tangle them up as difficult questions. When it comes to Venice, he seems to imply that the difference between use and exchange value apparent at the time in the city's economy was rather usefully put in the service of beauty.
'Marxism as a relatively interesting way to read Wuthering Heights' (or for that matter any particular building) was not our imperative when we looked at Eagleton, but it is his main issue. With Lefebvre we have something that could help us, at least, criticize Grand Designs or Gardeners World more effectively.

Postscript 2: Why should we bother with all this? Well I just heard a spokesman for a major utility company on the radio. Everybody is worrying about the rising cost of energy. He used the word 'cost' to refer to his 'costs', our 'costs', everything. He should of course, if he wanted to make sense of his economic argument, be talking about 'costs' and 'prices', since they are different things, and he might have included 'investment' too. Using these terms would help us understand what is going on. Seeing as I've just had to make an international phone-call to enquire as to a domestic invoice already twice removed from it's commissioning publication in a multi national dalliance, I would have been pleased if I had understood what my call operator was saying, but I didn't. Hence, not knowing is now endemic, perhaps propagated, and we could say, in the post modern world, that maybe this sucks.

Here's a download link:

Here's a downloadable text:

http://selforganizedseminar.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/lefebvre_production_space.pdf

Week 3

The picture at the top here is by Shumon Basar. The image on the left was taken in Zurich, the one on the right in Dubai. Juxtaposed they relate pretty well to my own consideration of the two texts by Hickey and Davis you were given last week, especially if you relate them to the piece on my blog 'A Contribution to a Maoist Critique of Striptease' @ pauldaviesarchitecture.blogspot.com

The book above is your text for Session 3. I do not expect you to read all of it but at least the first 100 pages. Eagleton is a smart writer who you may think is far too smart if you are encountering him for the first time. His humour may be an acquired taste but once you begin to get it you can be assured you have joined the ranks of those who are thinking rather than those who just spout opinions. What's the difference? Well Eagleton would enjoy this since he is passionate about many things Irish, but if I said I thought the Irish in general really piss me off with their overarching lapses in to literary pretension, that would be an opinion. An idea might stand for quite the opposite, that it is illogical to preach any kind of discrimination at all on the basis of nationality, creed, colour and so on. These two things are not incompatible; understanding this will get you past your opinions and into ideas.

Postscript: What is somewhat annoying in Eagleton is that the kernel of the thing he hankers for is still elusive to us. Bar an appreciation of a more pleasant time for more of the worlds population that is. The 'Theory' he is talking about is a many headed beast, and on the one hand you might remember that the most important quest is that for TRUTH rather than LIES, that in line with that search may come virtue, but along side it an almost unfortunate realization that 'Marxism' whilst certainly a search for rational, materialist, truth, can almost be as curious a thing to think about as 'sexual attraction'; you know it's there but there seem to be many ways of defining it and even ruining it in the process. Meanwhile the level of our enquiry in to truth appears somewhat paradoxically and uncomfortably circumstantial, leaving us with the idea that presently, we might all be being lead down the garden path.

Booklist

FYI: These are the further books I'm looking to use this year:

Terry Eagleton: After Theory
Colin Rowe: Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays
Henri Lefebvre: The Production of Space
Marshall Berman: All That's Solid Melts in to Air
William Burroughs: The Job
Evelyn Waugh: Decline and Fall
John Dos Passos: USA

There will be other texts we use, but they are mostly downloadable, and there is one film; The Fountainhead.

Week 2

The texts this week are Dave Hickey's 'At Home in the Neon' from the compilation 'Air Guitar' and Mike Davis 'Fear Sand and Money in Dubai' collected in Evil Paradises. I'm not sure Hickey's essay is easily down-loadable (so get on the case straight away) but Davis' critique is easily available via the web.

Dave Hickey is a very talented writer, and Mike Davis is an excellent, truth seeking, academic. In my time I have been more swayed by Hickey, since the language is so cool; he writes of little pleasures, of his own experience, small triumphs like they could be revolutions, while Mike Davis is clearly an angry Marxist. Both are great texts to continue our adventure.

Remember you are not expected to read the whole books, just the chapters outlined above.

Welcome

Welcome to this years Critical Readings. Without too much preamble, let's start from our traditional  base line, now or nowish, to proceed backwards through the prevailing thought of the twentieth century. The two texts for this week are Alain Badiou's This Crisis is the Spectacle: Where Is the Real? (2010 easily downloadable for free) and Jonathan Meades essay on Zaha, The First Great Female Architect, originally penned for the unfortunately named magazine 'Intelligent Life' in 2008 and also downloadable. 

Badiou, along with Slavoj Zizek, occupies the space of what you might call a celebrity theorist- whose books clutter the shelves of art gallery bookshops. Although their work can be off putting at first, it can be made more accessible (in Zizek's case especially) by a visit to YouTube.

Meades is also somewhat a celebrity as writer and broadcaster, and the collection above has found it's way on to many of the more literary minded architects shelves. 

We shall attempt to dissect what they are saying and how they are saying it in next weeks sessions (7th for PT and 11th Oct for FT).

In the meantime you are asked to join up and follow this guiding blogsite, which will usually be updated each Sunday. You should also set up your own blogsite (I suggest with blogspot.com) where you will make weekly commentary on your readings. For this course you compile your submission as you go along, or as we go backwards, with each blog, so please do not think you can write an essay at the end. That is not the point. Make time to both do the reading and write your blog each week as a habit.

You will find previous commentaries on many of the texts from previous students who have done this course on the web. Of course you will find them useless other than to inspire a little confidence. Be aware I am looking for your progress and your thoughts as we go along. I am not interested in somebody else's except in class when we have the opportunity to debate opinions together. On the business of blogging you might look up my own blog pauldaviesarchtecture.blogspot.com to see what form blogs might take.