Week 10 - Outcome

Well, its definitely been an interesting module. I have read some text and enjoyed them, I've been shocked, I've felt bored, I've been confused, I've been excited and I've relaxed and watched a film. I think with the texts covered have probably given most emotions and with some have struggled to put down on paper what exactly I was thinking or feeling. It was a new experience and although testing and sometimes a struggle I enjoyed it, I guess. 

The text have given me an insight into the past views in architecture for instance in 'The Fountainhead' and also introduced me to the title of 'Starchitects' the modern architect of today like Hadid. I sometimes struggle to understand the deeper meanings in text but reading these has helped me to understand some of my problems and also helped me to understand how to read not what is on the paper but what is beneath it. 

We are the new bread of architects that will be facing the political and economic world today and in the future will this future need the likes of Roark or Keating? Will there be cold hard cash or the kind of floating around never seen cash of Badiou? Its useful to read these text because it gives us examples of the past to help as modern architects today. 

How much will we be governed and directed by the media? We live in a Big Brother world where everything is watched, directed, staged almost like the film described by Badiou. Who will be the hero of our own reality show when everything starts to come crashing down? Will the new architects be able to work with the new society to built a world supported by pillars which won't come crashing down? 

There was a lot of information to digest and some which I struggled to understand what it had to do with me as an architecture student but on every text I was able to form an opinion so I think if that was the aim then I was successful. My favourite piece if I had to choose would probably be 'The Fountain' because it was in a media I could understand easier. Would I enjoy the book as much? Probably not! The text which got the most reaction was 'The Howl'. Does this mean it was a bad text, that I shouldn't of read it? No! Although I struggled to see the connection with architecture at times it did get the strongest reaction from me so perhaps that makes it one of the most important text? What we want to read and what we should read are not necessarily always the same......

Week 9 - Ayn Rand 'The Fountainhead'

After struggling through all the text watching a film was a refreshing change. It was a lot easier for me to follow and I surprisingly enjoyed the film. Being so used to current film styles it was a reminder of the iconic black and white film era. Where everything was dramatic and exaggerated. Dominique was spirited and entertaining with her expressions and Roark with his stubborn commitment to his vision. 

The idea of being expelled or cast aside for being different or original is almost unheard of today in architecture so it was an interesting idea that this were the case in society of the past. Roark was a strong character, possibly a bit stupid, who would rather work as a labourer than build what he didn't want to build. His lack of interest in what his clients what was quite possibly a bit to far. Yes be original but surely be sensible about it. Whats the point  in building something that nobody wants? An architect should be free to design and build but surely a client and society should be free to ave buildings that they want?

The smear campaign was all rather petty and childish but I can imagine this being a common event of the past. Don't we now have 'Starchitects' such as Hadid. Maybe not to such an extreme as what was shown in 'The Fountainhead' but if a newspaper or magazine started feeding negative comments to society about Hadid would she loose some of her star quality? Is she only a star because the media tells us she is a star? Even Roarks good friend, Wynand and love, Dominique got involved in his smear campaign but he still sticks to his vision. Toohey is an annoying, know it all who skates around the outside of everything wanting to take centre stage but never quite getting there.

Dominique says like Roark she doesn't care for other peoples opinions and she is quick to throw herself into relationships and marriage. She is almost sold from one person to another and she still remains detached. Everything is kind of done behind somebody else back. Dominique and Roark meet in secret, the housing project is altered whilst Roark is away, Roark rather than discuss opening the change in plans simply blows the building up! Would you prefer to see a piece of your work altered pleasing society but not be pleasing to you or would you simply blow it up? It was quite a strong statement and Roarks sums it u “I don’t care what they think of architecture – or anything else!”. 

Would an architect who thought like that today be praised for their individuality and commitment to themselves or would they, like Roark, end up in ruin? Isn't Roarks ideal that a building should be built to its environment, that the material, purpose, sculpture should fit within in the environment how architects think today?

It all ends in a happily ever after ending but after the drama of the film and Roark's and Dominiques characters where Dominique was a bit too childish really in her behaviour and Roark like a stubborn child I felt the ending could of held a bit more punch than a happily ever after. I could relate to Roark though and although I think we need a lot of Keatings int he world we also need the Roarks to keep things interesting....

Week 8 - Evelyn Waugh 'Decline and Fall'

Decline and Fall was so wonderfully absurd and at the same time accurate in it's description of British society and education around 1930. It explores the societal conventions of the time surrounding education, marriage, values and even murder. 

The tale follows the good natured Paul Pennyfeather through his hilarious adventures where he moves through life unable to control his own path but is in the hands of his superiors. This lack of control gets him caught up in the shenanigans of the Bollinger club and then he finds himself in prison as a result. This is where he begins his decline and eventual fall into the depths. This is the start of his journey where he will meet a series of incredible characters and the most unbelievable situations along the way but somehow through it all he manages to retain his innocence. 

Margot Beste-Chetwynde is the society beauty who lights up Decline and Fall, but don’t be fooled she's not all that she seems to be. The money from her shady businesses gives her the money to buy King's Thursday and begin its transformation and rebuilding from its untouched, out of date state. Unfortunately Professor Otto Friedrich Silenus the German Architect transforms the beautiful county home into an art deco glass and concrete block, much to the anxiety and dismay of the Society for the protection of Ancient buildings. The local people wanted to leave the building in the past, in the age of servants and labour hard work. Socially the world was developing but the servants and inhabitants no longer wanted to live and work in dirty, hard conditions. They wanted lifts and running water, gas and electric. It might have been a historic building to the surrounding community but to its workers and people who lived in it this historic ideal wasn't appreciated.

This definitely felt to me like an example of society and the social space wanting to hold back the physical and economic development of a building even though nobody wanted to use or love it for what it was. Yet once it became a modern loved building it was rejected by society for being improved. So do you listen to society and keep it as a social space to be admired from a far or improve it for i to be loved by some....

Week 7 - Allen Ginsberg 'Howl'

Ok, so I can't say Howl was an interesting read but it certainly got my attention. The outcry of anger towards the abusive and destructive society. It is graphic, scary, explicit and I guess honest for the world it describes. I'm not surprised that the publisher was arrested following its publication the obscene content was not what I was expecting and held me in shocked silence. 

Ginsberg introduces cultures that many would never experience and his ability to share cultures was carried on throughout his life in his other works and organising of events such as “Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In,”. I do struggle to see how somebody who can write such violent (rubbish) text can also be an advocate for 'flower power' though.. This does not come across as the writing of someone who uses smiles and love to mend problems.

I didn't like or approve of the content of his text at all but I can appreciate his writing style. Once I got over the content I found it easy to read through and digest. Reading poetry was a big change on the other texts though and perhaps this is where it challenged me the most. The language provided a very clear and strong mental imagine of this social space and also introduced glimpses of the physical space. 

I think his idea of Moloch isn't from the traditional sense of god but the idea of the physical space or structure as the god of people controlling their actions and lifes. Is it the buildings or is it society that he is talking about I'm not sure. Is it Moloch as society he is talking about who has designed the prisons and factories and caused the blood and the pain. Moloch is everything and yet seems man made. Social spaces and society can be man made or elected so is this control he is explaining from mans control of self? Is it the cross over to a different culture that shocks.. The introduction into an otherwise unknown, underworld culture of dirt and promiscuity?

Ginsberg mixes the 'street's' with skyscrapers and factories with the madhouse. He describes people at their worst yet he walks with the angels. He talks of soul searching and soul destroying... Perhaps reading it from context, from my experiences in todays society I am taking a different feel for the poem but I guess the basics of how communism, need, judgement or denial can run our lifes is evident whichever decade you are from.....

Week 6 - Marshall Berman 'All that is solid melt into Air'

The more I read of 'All that is solid melt into air' by Marshall Berman the more I think that this is more a diary, it is deeply personal to the author growing up and watching the world change around him. Berman took in everything around him and in his book Berman distinguishes between three key ideas:

Modernisation - being the constant changes that go off around us every day.

Modernity - the way in which such changes are experienced and lived through.

Modernism - the reflection and representation of these changes.

Berman wants to make modernists of his readers; he wants them to feel at home in the world for which they live in. For this very reason, he argues that it's crucial to understand contemporary modernism as the product of two earlier modern periods, represented by Goethe and Marx and many others.

He uses Marx, Dostoyevsky, Baudilare,Goethe, Bely etc. to try and show how the quality of being able to appreciate and respond to modernity itself has developed largely out of literature, and how we can see that sensibility at work in our own age with issues of geography and city planning. Not only does he offer examinations of those thinkers and their works, he places them in a different context with an intense, deep look of their work in order to develop and back up his own assertions of modern life.

Faust is the idea of going together cultural self-development and the real social movement towards economic movement to help bring about mans modern development. For a transformation to take place changes need to happen in both areas to make changes to the moral, social and physical world. Further in he goes even further to say that to create anything new he must let everything go. That for modern man to move forward everything already needs to be destroyed. I think this is a bit drastic, I mean to me as humans we build on what we already have and learn from our mistakes. If we destroyed everything we already have and rebuilt then there would be no record of mistakes and so man would repeat them again and again. Thats not developing thats going in a circle....

Week 5 - Colin Rowe 'The mathematics of the Ideal Villa' & 'La Tourette'

In the 1947 text 'the Mathematics of The Ideal Villa' Rowe compares Palladio's and Le Corbusier's work particularly Villa Foscari and the Stein Villa at Garches. The essay offers little introduction to the text before jumping in with room dimensions, scales and layouts. This makes it a bit disorientating when first reading the essay and I had to do a fair but of other research just to understand what he was trying to explain. To look at these buildings they do not have much in common but Rowe argues that mathematically they are similar. He highlights areas like the Piano Noble on the first floor giving access through the terrace to the garden, the portico, steps and the general proportions of the building. He also talks about the Garches upper balcony and compares it to the prominent portico of the Villa Foscari.

Although he does touch on some differences its almost like he feels there is a supernatural power before th similarities rather than just being coincidence (or possibly imaginery). This supernatural power could be simply mathematics. Le Corbusier's Golden ratio of A : B = B : (A+B) and Palladios 3 : 4 to 2 : 3 both being mathematic ratio will show similarities. However it kind of feels he is grasping at straws and trying to explain a connection which may or may not be there. Maybe I just couldn't visualise what he was trying to say and so I was missing something but although I can see how buildings based around mathematic designs could be similar to me it kind of ends there.

When talking about La Tourette ( Le Corbusier and Iannis Xenakis) in the 1961 test 'Dominican Monastery of La Tourette', Rowe is, for me a slightly better read. I could visualise what he was trying to describe. La Tourette is a closed community for its users and Rowe breaks this down quite clearly. He also does quite a good job of describing the cold bleak approach and aesthetics of the building. Rowe seems to spend a lot of time describing what La Tourette looks like and how it feels compared to in 'The Mathematics of an Ideal Villa' where he seems to be trying to explain why they look like they do rather than what they look like. 

When talking about La Tourette, Rowe sets the stage, describes the scene and even introduces the characters. Its a much easier read than when he was writing about Palladio and Le Corbusier but it still feels a bit bitty. It still feels like he is writing perhaps so passionately that he is forgetting to write down the joints in his thoughts to help the reader make sense of what is in his head. However is it better to learn about a piece of architecture from somebody else experience or opinion of it or by analysing the facts and looking at the physical space? 

Week 4 - Henri Lefebvre 'The Production of Space'

In ‘After Life’ Lefebvre tries to make sense of the complexity of the capitalist contemporary city and attempts to define a “unitary theory of space”. In Chapter 2 he focuses on social space and his idea is that there are multitudes of spaces which all overlap on each other. He has the idea that absolute space is nowhere and has no place because it holds all places and has a symbolic existence. 

My understanding is that social space is the analysis of everyday life and the urban reality. It is the beginning of space where basic needs are met and political space grows. Then the political space, religious space become bonded in an absolute space which holds them together. His idea tha everyday life has been capitalized and as a result so has the location of everyday life. i.e. the ‘social space’. 

Then when he goes on to talk about social space which is a social product which takes mental space and physical space to bring them together as a social space. This social space holds the actions of people, the thoughts, people grow in this space, they suffer and eventually they die. Lefebvre seems to think that his idea of social space has no boundaries. 

Does Lefebvre sees space as a form of power? I think so. He talks about the social space being a social product so then the space produced is a production where new space is created which then becomes where powers and control lays. He also talks about the split between professionals when dealing within the space of a city particularly mentions Venice. Where the macro and micro levels within the space of the city have allowed it to improve, change and grow.

He talks about nature that it does not produce because it does not labour. It doesn't know what its doing, it just does!. People do produce though because they do labour and they do know what they are doing. Its on these social spaces the natures doesn't produce and people do produce which give us the production of daily life. 

I particularly like his idea of horizontal space meaning submission, I took that to be residential types of housing where we are just going about our daily life. Vertical space being about power which holds try for the skyscrapers when business is conducted and the decisions to affect a national are made and subterranean space meaning death. A graveyard is underground… Underground is dark, its cold and all live is held out. 

I think I like some of his ideas and themes but as he jumps around I’m not sure I followed him completely. He seems to constantly be creating spaces out of space so it was difficult to keep track of all these spaces. Interesting read but it should come with a warning that your brain might end up disorientated and lost in another space to one you started in!