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.