Quotes like this are sure to generate some discussion here: "We’re attempting to sell the public buildings and neighborhoods they don’t particularly want, in a language they don’t understand. In the meantime, we’ve ceded the rest of the built environment to hacks, with sprawl and dreck rolling out all around us."
Miles Jaffe
Dec 16, 14 1:12 pm
Nice piece, but doesn't touch on education or economics and marketing.
curtkram
Dec 16, 14 1:30 pm
i question this quote:
IN architecture, everyone’s a critic.
sure, everyone has an opinion. but some of us actually work for a living. i don't consider myself an architectural critic. i'm just someone who has an opinion like everyone else, and i'm trying to do the job i was hired to do. i try to listen to the myriad of concerns that come up, from a broad range of interests and disciplines, and i try to keep everyone happy. but in the end, sometimes compromise has to be made. not everyone gets what they want.
if i were to paint my house, should i ask my neighbors what color to paint it? what if my neighbors disagree on what color to paint my house? which neighbor do i select as having an opinion better than the other neighbors? do we all have to paint our house the same color, so that one neighbor who i've decided is better than the rest and gets to state what the public desires can be happy? maybe we should all be sending our designs to thayer so he can approve or reject how closely we fit within his aesthetic judgment of historicism?
why can't i just paint my house?
so some lady doesn't like corrugated metal panel on a house. i wouldn't either. but if my neighbor clad their house in metal, i wouldn't stop them. i'd just hope they keep it maintained and clean up their lawn every now and then.
x-jla
Dec 16, 14 1:36 pm
Doesn't even begin to address the real cause for this disconnection between architects and the general public. 99% of the population has zero ability to affect the built environment. Their wants and desires are not translating into "demand" because housing is a need not a want, and the choices are extremely limited and geographically, economically, and socially pre-determined. Your choices for housing are almost as limited as you political choices...and votes, via ballet or wallet, are also as meaningless. coke or pepsi.
bugsmetoo
Dec 16, 14 2:08 pm
Architects have no real power yet they get the blame. Ask which city official allowed that parking lot to be built right dab in the center in exchange for kickbacks. Ask who laid out the city so that there is no way anyone not in the 1% can actually enjoy it. Or which tax-free deal paved over once public space. Sprawl? It's about economics and affordability and building capital that's actually obtainable for new middle-class families without much generational wealth to buy that $1.5 million closet loft in the middle of a city.
Most of it is political. And cultural. And social. Really, it's time to stop thinking architecture is this savior of sorts for all the wrongs. For someone writing a book and the other a journalist, you'd think they would stop with these narrow-minded declarations.
How Modern Art Became Trapped by its Urge to Shock
"Originality therefore became the test that distinguishes true from fake art. It is hard to say in general terms what originality consists in, but we have examples enough: Titian, Beethoven, Goethe, Baudelaire. But those examples teach us that originality is hard: it cannot be snatched from the air, even if there are those natural prodigies like Rimbaud and Mozart who seem to do just that. Originality requires learning, hard work, the mastery of a medium and - most of all - the refined sensibility and openness to experience that have suffering and solitude as their normal cost."
"To gain the status of an original artist is therefore not easy. But in a society where art is revered as the highest cultural achievement, the rewards are enormous. Hence there is a motive to fake it. Artists and critics get together in order to take themselves in, the artists posing as the originators of astonishing breakthroughs, the critics posing as the penetrating judges of the true avant-garde."
...
"Modernism was the attempt to rescue the sincere, the truthful, the arduously achieved, from the plague of fake emotion. No one can doubt that the early modernists succeeded in this enterprise, endowing us with works of art that keep the human spirit alive in the new circumstances of modernity, and which establish continuity with the great traditions of our culture. But modernism gave way to routines of fakery: the arduous task of maintaining the tradition proved less attractive than the cheap ways of rejecting it. Instead of Picasso's lifelong study, to present the modern woman's face in a modern idiom, you could just do what Duchamp did, and paint a moustache on the Mona Lisa."
"The interesting fact, however, is that the habit of faking it has arisen from the fear of fakes. Modernist art was a reaction against fake emotion, and the comforting clichés of popular culture. The intention was to sweep away the pseudo-art that cushions us with sentimental lies and to put reality, the reality of modern life, with which real art alone can come to terms, in the place of it. Hence for a long time now it has been assumed that there can be no authentic creation in the sphere of high art which is not in some way a 'challenge' to the complacencies of our public culture. Art must give offence, stepping out of the future fully armed against the bourgeois taste for the conforming and the comfortable, which are simply other names for kitsch and cliché. But the result of this is that offence becomes a cliché."
Interesting opinion piece in yesterday's New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/16/opinion/how-to-rebuild-architecture.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=c-column-top-span-region®ion=c-column-top-span-region&WT.nav=c-column-top-span-region&_r=0
Quotes like this are sure to generate some discussion here: "We’re attempting to sell the public buildings and neighborhoods they don’t particularly want, in a language they don’t understand. In the meantime, we’ve ceded the rest of the built environment to hacks, with sprawl and dreck rolling out all around us."
Nice piece, but doesn't touch on education or economics and marketing.
i question this quote:
IN architecture, everyone’s a critic.
sure, everyone has an opinion. but some of us actually work for a living. i don't consider myself an architectural critic. i'm just someone who has an opinion like everyone else, and i'm trying to do the job i was hired to do. i try to listen to the myriad of concerns that come up, from a broad range of interests and disciplines, and i try to keep everyone happy. but in the end, sometimes compromise has to be made. not everyone gets what they want.
if i were to paint my house, should i ask my neighbors what color to paint it? what if my neighbors disagree on what color to paint my house? which neighbor do i select as having an opinion better than the other neighbors? do we all have to paint our house the same color, so that one neighbor who i've decided is better than the rest and gets to state what the public desires can be happy? maybe we should all be sending our designs to thayer so he can approve or reject how closely we fit within his aesthetic judgment of historicism?
why can't i just paint my house?
so some lady doesn't like corrugated metal panel on a house. i wouldn't either. but if my neighbor clad their house in metal, i wouldn't stop them. i'd just hope they keep it maintained and clean up their lawn every now and then.
Doesn't even begin to address the real cause for this disconnection between architects and the general public. 99% of the population has zero ability to affect the built environment. Their wants and desires are not translating into "demand" because housing is a need not a want, and the choices are extremely limited and geographically, economically, and socially pre-determined. Your choices for housing are almost as limited as you political choices...and votes, via ballet or wallet, are also as meaningless. coke or pepsi.
Architects have no real power yet they get the blame. Ask which city official allowed that parking lot to be built right dab in the center in exchange for kickbacks. Ask who laid out the city so that there is no way anyone not in the 1% can actually enjoy it. Or which tax-free deal paved over once public space. Sprawl? It's about economics and affordability and building capital that's actually obtainable for new middle-class families without much generational wealth to buy that $1.5 million closet loft in the middle of a city.
Most of it is political. And cultural. And social. Really, it's time to stop thinking architecture is this savior of sorts for all the wrongs. For someone writing a book and the other a journalist, you'd think they would stop with these narrow-minded declarations.
Strongly related: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30343083
How Modern Art Became Trapped by its Urge to Shock
"Originality therefore became the test that distinguishes true from fake art. It is hard to say in general terms what originality consists in, but we have examples enough: Titian, Beethoven, Goethe, Baudelaire. But those examples teach us that originality is hard: it cannot be snatched from the air, even if there are those natural prodigies like Rimbaud and Mozart who seem to do just that. Originality requires learning, hard work, the mastery of a medium and - most of all - the refined sensibility and openness to experience that have suffering and solitude as their normal cost."
"To gain the status of an original artist is therefore not easy. But in a society where art is revered as the highest cultural achievement, the rewards are enormous. Hence there is a motive to fake it. Artists and critics get together in order to take themselves in, the artists posing as the originators of astonishing breakthroughs, the critics posing as the penetrating judges of the true avant-garde."
...
"Modernism was the attempt to rescue the sincere, the truthful, the arduously achieved, from the plague of fake emotion. No one can doubt that the early modernists succeeded in this enterprise, endowing us with works of art that keep the human spirit alive in the new circumstances of modernity, and which establish continuity with the great traditions of our culture. But modernism gave way to routines of fakery: the arduous task of maintaining the tradition proved less attractive than the cheap ways of rejecting it. Instead of Picasso's lifelong study, to present the modern woman's face in a modern idiom, you could just do what Duchamp did, and paint a moustache on the Mona Lisa."
"The interesting fact, however, is that the habit of faking it has arisen from the fear of fakes. Modernist art was a reaction against fake emotion, and the comforting clichés of popular culture. The intention was to sweep away the pseudo-art that cushions us with sentimental lies and to put reality, the reality of modern life, with which real art alone can come to terms, in the place of it. Hence for a long time now it has been assumed that there can be no authentic creation in the sphere of high art which is not in some way a 'challenge' to the complacencies of our public culture. Art must give offence, stepping out of the future fully armed against the bourgeois taste for the conforming and the comfortable, which are simply other names for kitsch and cliché. But the result of this is that offence becomes a cliché."