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.