I found both "Privacy & Publicity" and "Domesticity at War" very pleasant reads - she writes well in addition to having (to me, at least) original insights about her subjects. P & P is maybe the more complete of these two - because DaW stretches out to this day and unravels a bit at the end - but I would call both books recommended reading for anyone interested in anything.
About a year back there was an interview / dialogue with Colomina in Artforum - elaborating on the present state of war and the idea of shelter (kinda a continuation of DaW) - also recommended.
Currently reading Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media, and got up to p. 84 yesterday morning while waiting for the repair of an automatic car window. There is an unfortunate manuscript error on page 68:
lines 1-4
Benjamin cites a sentece of Theodor Reik... Remembrance is essentially conservative; memory is destructive."
lines 14-15
In these terms, Reik's distinction between conservative memory and destructive remembrance...
As they stand (at least in the 1994 hardback edition), these lines contradict each other, and thus completely confuse the issue. Now checking the source, lines 1-4 correctly recall Reik's distinction.
Staying on page 68, I (personally) use/translate Erfahrung as 'a knowledge of', and Erlebnis as 'an actual experience of', in the sense that Erfahrung is more or less a reenactment of Erlebnis.
how many architects/architecture students do you think actually get a complete reading or teaching of Philosophy before jumping into the more contemporary stuff that is bandied these days?
i dont know if you actually get more experience by reading more esoteric philosophers no matter if it is plato or zizek.
knowledge perhaps... but I guess I'm wondering about using philosophical theory to inform your architectural theories without actually understanding the whole context of the discipline?
Hi there, shockingly bourgeois... Again a new name, or is this an old new one?
Anyway, you found a typing mistake in the book. fascinating. Reading the thing in context leaves no room for misjudgement or other than initial confusion. This error in the manuscript only registers for a period longer than a thought IF one is hungry for something to be a smart-ass about.
---
The question of using philosophy/literary theory/whatever as means of producing/excusing architecture was discussed a bit in this thread: http://www.archinect.com/forum/threads.php?id=73063_0_42_0_C155
and the question was finally not answered - here, it concerned the value of "theory" in architecture production in general and particularly the "evolo" competition, where the winner pretentiously proclaimed that the arbitrarily produced, visually arresting layer-dildo of a skyscraper was about "interiorities" (amongst other things) - which had angered a fellow contestant, who thought, rightly, that this was bullshit and had nothing to do with this obviously purely aesthetic excersise in form-making.
---
I would distance the books of Colomina from the usuall senseless self-serving statements (like Greg Lynn's ideas on calculus, anything by NOX, etc.) often labelled as theory, because she works as an analyser of "evidence" and archives - writing very revealingly and insightfully about architecture(s) in their cultural environments and the context of architecture itself.
Apr 4, 08 3:52 pm ·
·
Helsinki, is it really necessary to infer that I'm somehow trying to be a smart ass? I was just relating what I read yesterday, and correcting a mistake that was found. I am not hungry to find fault with Privacy and Publicity. I like it a lot so far. Find it thought provoking even.
I'm not sure I completely agree with Reik's distinction, however. Nor do I completely agree with Benjamin's/Colomina's distinction of Erfahrung and Erlebnis. On this I have elaborated above. Why not comment on that?
The whole notion of a 'grounding' in traditional philosophy is questionable, in my view. It introduces an historical prejudice. The idea that a student should only introduced to Deleuze after they have read Liebniz, Spinoza, Nietzche, Heraclitus is faulty.
That isn't to devalue the importance of becoming well-informed.
In the last three Months:
KHALED HOSSEINI - The Kite Runner
MARY SHELLEY - Frankenstein
ERNEST HEMINGWAY - A Farewell to Arms
UPTON SINCLAIR - The Jungle
Trying to read:
GASTON BACHELARD - Poetics of Space
JARED DIAMOND - Guns, Germs & Steel
high school level books, I know.
some comments:
Overall, I learned a great deal from juxtaposing the writing styles of these authors. Besides the stories themselves, I noticed the craft each author placed in their work, as for example how they create pace and rhythm to stretch out or speed-up a scene.
Its also interesting when the themes start to overlap between the books - themes like, father-son relationships, agony and despair, depravity, hopelessness, death...and more!
Regarding Diamond:
While the maps and associated captions he employed are most cogent in driving home the point, the fiction slash non-fiction, Pulitzer prize winning GG&S reads like the Pheonix Ariz. heat. Its pretty dry.
bourgeois, sorry about that - just seemed pointless to talk about a mistake in a book, instead of the book itself. No intent to be insulting - smart-ass first thing that came to mind.
I think we can all see that you have both been smart-asses at some point in this thread, and find little fault or personal annoyance in these instances.
In regards to the two possible narratives of philosophical inquiry: historiochronological and rhizoscatterific: Unless you are brought up in a library/prison, the chances of you reading all the Plato you need before picking up Heidegger or Zizek are pretty small. If you find a text you like, it will provide you with references to other texts. You can pick up these leads if you like, some will lead you back in time, others will lead you to contemporaries.
How many of you saw the first episode of Full House before all other episodes?
I'm not advocating one strategy over another, but am simply trying to insist that this be totally subjective, and that you don't let other people lead you astray. Bibliographies and class reading lists will do you good though.
Which books do you people feel are "canonical" as far as contemporary architecture is concerned? I mean somewhat contemporary books.
Apr 5, 08 8:53 am ·
·
Helsinki, no doubt smart-ass is the first thing that came to your mind, but you also analyzed the situation, even checked-out the error in the text. In the end you set out to belittle my contribution. That's what you really did.
Page 68 of Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media is loaded, and the dyslexical error therein provides a spark capable of igniting an explosion. More truth may in fact lie with the notion that the attributes of memory and remembrance are indeed interchangably fluid rather than strickly apposed. Le Corbusier's 'doctoring' of photography (as discussed in the chapter after page 68) seems to even be a perfect example of the interchangable fluidity of memory and remembrance.
--Balloon and Prick: Modern Reading as Virtual Architecture, (forthcuming).
currently on my 'book table':
Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media
The Limits of Interpretation
The Changing Light at Sandover
Labyrinths
The Architecture of Humanism: A Study in the History of Taste
The Fifties
The Rise of Scientific Philosophy
Promises, Promises: Essays on Psychoanalysis and Literature
Difference & Repetition
Man and Time
The Anaesthetics of Architecture
The Diaries of Paul Klee
Illuminations
Reflections
Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry: An Introduction
"The Boudoir in The Expanded Field"
The Production of Space
Art in America, April 2008
Artforum, April 2008
51N4E space producers
Shrinking Cities
Festival Architecture
Future City: Experiment and Utopia in Architecture
Yves Brunier, Landscape Architect
...perhaps a sign of being neither student nor architect; sondern etwas anderes.
Apr 5, 08 10:32 am ·
·
I should have written opposed instead of apposed, but I think I know why I made the mistake.
It seems like once every fifteen or twenty years, a book is published that fundamentally changes our perspective on architecture, the way "Vers une architecture" did.
The last book that seemed to fundamentally change our way of looking at things was "S.M,L,XL." This is a book that the whole profession, from academics to older practitioners, is aware of and has read, or at least skimmed.
I don't think there's been a book with such broad influence since. What do you think?
Apr 5, 08 12:35 pm ·
·
It may be well worth noting that the publication of S,M,L,XL closely coincides with the dawn of the easily-browsable/easily-publishable hypersized internet. Ends and beginnings are both extreme situations.
Yes, and does this mean the death of the architect as creator of "master narratives"? SMLXL is, if nothing else, a kind of "browsable" book that simulates or predates the internet in its breadth.
What you seem to be implying, SMIB, is that the possibility for creating a fixed, massive, all-encapsulating text such as SMLXL (or Vers une architecture or Complexity and Contradiction et al.) isn't possible anymore.
Apr 5, 08 4:05 pm ·
·
farwest1, SMLXL is indeed a kind of "browsable" book that predates the internet in its breadth, and, for me at least, has stimulated publishing via the internet.
As far as I'm concerned, the internet makes "creating a fixed/fluid, massive, all-encapsulating text" even more possible.
Bourgeois - concerning the earlier "dispute" - you are correct.
and concerning SMLXL - I think it's most visible contribution lies in the massive mushrooming of mega-books (in page-count, at least) and the bigbook as a must-have commodity. But despite the active production of monumental books, no publication since has had the same power of ideas (in number and force) or agility of presentation. SMLXL stands alone in my opinion. And is still the book of the moment.
well... SMLXL IS still hot. as are "Learning from Las Vegas" and "Complexity and Contradiction in Arch." it's not the newness that matters. it's the hotness.
It may be well worth noting that the publication of S,M,L,XL closely coincides with the dawn of the easily-browsable/easily-publishable hypersized internet. Ends and beginnings are both extreme situations
i just didn't feel like browsing though SMXXL actually. Plus, in all my time on archinect, with such an esteemed and educated lot, i have not come across one contextual or otherwise citation from the book on the part of an archinector that pointed to its significance in contributing to a canonic change or augmentation of anyone's perspective. The only thing that has been cited over and over again is the style rather than the content ... oh people say the content is really good...but somehow they never say whats, in the content, is good. perhaps this is, as all-mighty-archmed would say...MY PROBLEM. i did like delirious new york on the other hand. and i can say why.
as to the style...no i don't see it as a sort of blah blah hyper text in parallel with blah blah evolution of the internet. a hyper text is a text that takes you to another text/image, this doesn't. furthermore, this contributes to more trees dying than a webpage. its a book, point à la ligne. essentially, its an encyclopedia of ideas structured in a chosen order, right? Encyclopedias are only seminal in the breadth of info and their relevance to the reader (their reflection of 'reality' is another matter...after all it could be a fictional encyclopedia) and they're not a new invention. but i still don't see anyone refer to more than junkspace and hugeness. could that not have been presented in two pages?
oh, the first paragraph is quoted from Shock Me's posting above.
aside, i'm reading a neil gaiman collection of stories. i like his combo of lyrical whimsy and darkness. ted hughes poems as well, i still find his universe so so so skewed, its always surprises me.
i'm trying to read murakami's wind-up bird chronicle, but its not clicking! so i'm finishing off v.woolf's the waves...its one of the most beautiful AND boring books i've read. but the part where the kids are running after each other is unsurpassable...it can almost be sung!
but this is odd! i really did enjoy his Kafka on the Shore novel, it was a fun read and had much pathos. norwegian wood was good as well; anyone read the wind-up bird chronicle and tell me whether its really worth persevering with and why? i wanted to like it...
Apr 9, 08 11:22 am ·
·
to clarify, when I wrote...
It may be well worth noting that the publication of S,M,L,XL closely coincides with the dawn of the easily-browsable/easily-publishable hypersized internet. Ends and beginnings are both extreme situations
...it was in response to farwest1's
I don't think there's been a book [since SMLXL] with such broad influence since. What do you think?
...meaning that, since SMLXL, it's from the internet that broad influence now eminates.
i think neufert and co exerted more influence b4 and after SMLXL on the arch. community :p .. i also think SMLXL was (or is) emblematic of koohasia...since its got so much of it crammed in...and that sells. but if you were to soak the book in water and then boil it..condense...how much really influential ideas peculair only to that book remain . now u can't do this to all other books...since most are structured in a narrative...and u can't really condense a narrative ... but with a quasi-encyclpedia, why not?
perhaps, you mean...for your good self (consensus has not been mesured) that SMLXL iconic standing is in the fact that it signals the death of architectural theory books (theory?) because perhaps it caricatures it. the revelling in colours, the cocktail of fonts, the excessive graphicity (?)...so aside from a few ideas (which could be summarizes on an A4 in nice point 10 helvetica or gils sans font ...SMLXL is a famous epitaph...thus also making it a sort of tourist site....
You know, there are really only two different fonts used throught S,M,L,XL. The size of fonts vary though; some are small, some are medium, some are large, and some are extra large.
First, DaleCooper, I've understood everything noctilucent has said (as, apparently, has Shock Me.) So you might consider who is the moron here.....
The influence of SMLXL, aside from its megalomaniac size and graphics, can be summed up for me in the following Koolhaas paragraph from "What Ever Happened to Urbanism?":
"If there is to be a "new urbanism" it will not be based on the twin fantasies of order and omnipotence; it will be the staging of uncertainty; it will no longer be concerned with the arrangement of more or less permanent objects but with the irrigation of territories with potential; it will no longer aim for stable configurations but for the creation of enabling fields that accommodate processes that refuse to be crystallized into definitive form; it will no longer be about meticulous definition, the imposition of limits, but about expanding notions, denying boundaries, not about separating and identifying entities, but about discovering unnameable hybrids; it will no longer be obsessed with the city but with the manipulation of infrastructure for endless intensifications and diversifications, shortcuts and redistributions – the reinvention of psychological space. Since the urban is now pervasive, urbanism will never again be about the new only about the "more" and the "modified." It will not be about the civilized, but about underdevelopment."
Incidentally, noctilucent, I had the same reaction as you to "The Wind-up Bird Chronicle." It has a lot of cache with the hipster crowd, but I was kind of bored by it.
I was much more into Murakami's "Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World." It seemed to me he took many more structural risks with the narrative, and it was filled with interesting ideas and images.
Apr 9, 08 12:40 pm ·
·
You know, for me (like for most architects), architecture has always been a sort of tourist site.
Condensing "a huge book" would in most cases be easy - the tomes of MVRDV etc. are mostly just badly edited collections of graphs and a superabundance of images that don't communicate as effectively anymore when they are massed in such a high pile. So yes - most big books could be condensed in a few pages (sometimes not even that).
On the other hand - what makes SMLXL special IS the form as well as the content - it is very different than the other big books produced since (also ones by Koolhaas/Harvard - most notably maybe the Prada-book, making fun of the excess of big books - admittedly, in a very dull way), inspired by it's popularity as a profitable object - not so much as a complex architectural work. SMLXL presents each idea and built project in a way/style most fitting to it - as a diary of the design/building process; as a walk-through-photographic sequence; as a cartoon-parody; etc. This creates the visual volume and density of the work and makes SMLXL an important BOOK like almost no other, in how it presents ideas as well as the ideas/projects themselves.
As a general note - why should the essence of a book about architecture be ever condensed into text, or a manifesto? There's no point in the excercise.
As a tip to noctilucent - maybe you should read the book you are criticizing? It's not a "quasi-encyclpedia" just because there is a running thread of word explanations - even the method of arranging projects by size does not make it a disconnected group of separate points - there is actually a running narrative in there, and I found the whole an inspiring work.
maybe i will Helsinki (however, who or what are you to tell me that I 'should', tip or otherwise?). also note i didnt criticize the content of the book, i asked :"...how much(sic) really influential ideas peculair only to that book remain " ... i never said that there weren't any...if i did criticize anything, it was the lack of a substantial reaction from reading that book that i've encountered in many, except for cheerleader reverence ...and thats not necessarily peculair to that book itself. in other words, i wanted someone to tell me why they really thought the book was good....and what sort of book would be a good thought as well....and not supply insipid reverence.
when it did seem like i was demeaning (and not criticizing, ur being too mildmannered) the book, i was assuming, admittedly farcically, someone else's viewpoint (the paragraph that begins with "perhaps, you mean...for your good self" ). So my stance towards the book's content or otherwise, might not ..necessarily :) ...as simplistic as your reading of it (it=my stance not the book). in effect, i have zero stance, didn't read it.
if that is how you see narrative, then an encyclopedia equally has a narrative, a topical one (it could address the world at wide, oceanography, orthinology..) and the narrative in construed from necessary self-referential structure of the overall system. well, u'd say thats not a narrative...well, narrative, development over time...cause and effect...even if postmodernly scrambled...etc
thank you for the tip, i appreciate your altruism...ye good christian.
farwest 1 , i appreciate the more specific focus. its an interesting one as well. cheerio.
i started The Brief History of the Dead yesternight, few pages into it. best line so far (paraphrased, i aint got it with me) when asked how she died, she only replied that she had started to snow.nayyyyyssssss
Apr 10, 08 6:49 am ·
·
Re: S,M,L,XL
"It's not so much a presence. It's more a lack of absence."
I will have finished Inspiration's Quick Turn To Envy tomorrow dawn. Apparently more people write this book than read it.
At the moment, G.Vidal's "Narratives of Empire" (Burr, Lincoln read so far) seems a fun & entertaining read - anyone have an opinion on the quality of the rest of the books in the series?
Now 1/10 into de Duve's Kant After Duchamp. The passages I read last night reminded me of some passages within Tafuri's Theories and History of Architecture. I guess I like lists interspersed throughout prose. Likewise, just reading the index of Lefebvre's The Production of Space fascinates me.
Had hoped to gleam more from "Museum" within Privacy and Publicity, thus now planning to reread "The Portable Museum" within Demo's The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp.
Now preparing for my M.Arch 1 and generally wallowing in free time I've taken advantage of the local library towards this updated reading list:
Le Corbusier (a life)- not the best bio ever, but amusing. (bios I liked: Boswell's London Journal.. and .. The Life of Samuel Johnson, and.. Oscar Wilde by Richard Ellman)
Gravity's Rainbow- TP, like 'working' on the buffet of Babel, delicious, frustrating, delicious
Tracing Eisenman- Too bad the copy from the library has some pages missing. Sarah Whiting's essay is quite good, Greg Lynn seems a little too casual... like he's got it all figured out...
Being and Event- AB, having enjoyed some of his shorter works taking the big plunge.
Metastases of Enjoyment- Zizek
Some back issues of Lacanian Ink
Rigadoon- Celine
Informal- CB, a smaller version of the chunk/superbook. Having read deLanda et al., I wish there were more pictures.
In Search of Wagner- Adorno, The debate surrounding the life and work of Wagner is fittingly epic.
READING LIST
I found both "Privacy & Publicity" and "Domesticity at War" very pleasant reads - she writes well in addition to having (to me, at least) original insights about her subjects. P & P is maybe the more complete of these two - because DaW stretches out to this day and unravels a bit at the end - but I would call both books recommended reading for anyone interested in anything.
About a year back there was an interview / dialogue with Colomina in Artforum - elaborating on the present state of war and the idea of shelter (kinda a continuation of DaW) - also recommended.
Privacy and Publicity is a really good book.
Currently reading Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media, and got up to p. 84 yesterday morning while waiting for the repair of an automatic car window. There is an unfortunate manuscript error on page 68:
lines 1-4
Benjamin cites a sentece of Theodor Reik... Remembrance is essentially conservative; memory is destructive."
lines 14-15
In these terms, Reik's distinction between conservative memory and destructive remembrance...
As they stand (at least in the 1994 hardback edition), these lines contradict each other, and thus completely confuse the issue. Now checking the source, lines 1-4 correctly recall Reik's distinction.
Staying on page 68, I (personally) use/translate Erfahrung as 'a knowledge of', and Erlebnis as 'an actual experience of', in the sense that Erfahrung is more or less a reenactment of Erlebnis.
how many architects/architecture students do you think actually get a complete reading or teaching of Philosophy before jumping into the more contemporary stuff that is bandied these days?
*bandied about
johnnystew, are you basically asking how many have the Erfahrung without the Erlebnis?
i dont know if you actually get more experience by reading more esoteric philosophers no matter if it is plato or zizek.
knowledge perhaps... but I guess I'm wondering about using philosophical theory to inform your architectural theories without actually understanding the whole context of the discipline?
I can't answer for others, but lately my architectural theories involve a conjunction of Erlebnis und Erfahrung.
Hi there, shockingly bourgeois... Again a new name, or is this an old new one?
Anyway, you found a typing mistake in the book. fascinating. Reading the thing in context leaves no room for misjudgement or other than initial confusion. This error in the manuscript only registers for a period longer than a thought IF one is hungry for something to be a smart-ass about.
---
The question of using philosophy/literary theory/whatever as means of producing/excusing architecture was discussed a bit in this thread:
http://www.archinect.com/forum/threads.php?id=73063_0_42_0_C155
and the question was finally not answered - here, it concerned the value of "theory" in architecture production in general and particularly the "evolo" competition, where the winner pretentiously proclaimed that the arbitrarily produced, visually arresting layer-dildo of a skyscraper was about "interiorities" (amongst other things) - which had angered a fellow contestant, who thought, rightly, that this was bullshit and had nothing to do with this obviously purely aesthetic excersise in form-making.
---
I would distance the books of Colomina from the usuall senseless self-serving statements (like Greg Lynn's ideas on calculus, anything by NOX, etc.) often labelled as theory, because she works as an analyser of "evidence" and archives - writing very revealingly and insightfully about architecture(s) in their cultural environments and the context of architecture itself.
Helsinki, is it really necessary to infer that I'm somehow trying to be a smart ass? I was just relating what I read yesterday, and correcting a mistake that was found. I am not hungry to find fault with Privacy and Publicity. I like it a lot so far. Find it thought provoking even.
I'm not sure I completely agree with Reik's distinction, however. Nor do I completely agree with Benjamin's/Colomina's distinction of Erfahrung and Erlebnis. On this I have elaborated above. Why not comment on that?
The whole notion of a 'grounding' in traditional philosophy is questionable, in my view. It introduces an historical prejudice. The idea that a student should only introduced to Deleuze after they have read Liebniz, Spinoza, Nietzche, Heraclitus is faulty.
That isn't to devalue the importance of becoming well-informed.
-10
In the last three Months:
KHALED HOSSEINI - The Kite Runner
MARY SHELLEY - Frankenstein
ERNEST HEMINGWAY - A Farewell to Arms
UPTON SINCLAIR - The Jungle
Trying to read:
GASTON BACHELARD - Poetics of Space
JARED DIAMOND - Guns, Germs & Steel
high school level books, I know.
some comments:
Overall, I learned a great deal from juxtaposing the writing styles of these authors. Besides the stories themselves, I noticed the craft each author placed in their work, as for example how they create pace and rhythm to stretch out or speed-up a scene.
Its also interesting when the themes start to overlap between the books - themes like, father-son relationships, agony and despair, depravity, hopelessness, death...and more!
Regarding Diamond:
While the maps and associated captions he employed are most cogent in driving home the point, the fiction slash non-fiction, Pulitzer prize winning GG&S reads like the Pheonix Ariz. heat. Its pretty dry.
bourgeois, sorry about that - just seemed pointless to talk about a mistake in a book, instead of the book itself. No intent to be insulting - smart-ass first thing that came to mind.
I think we can all see that you have both been smart-asses at some point in this thread, and find little fault or personal annoyance in these instances.
In regards to the two possible narratives of philosophical inquiry: historiochronological and rhizoscatterific: Unless you are brought up in a library/prison, the chances of you reading all the Plato you need before picking up Heidegger or Zizek are pretty small. If you find a text you like, it will provide you with references to other texts. You can pick up these leads if you like, some will lead you back in time, others will lead you to contemporaries.
How many of you saw the first episode of Full House before all other episodes?
I'm not advocating one strategy over another, but am simply trying to insist that this be totally subjective, and that you don't let other people lead you astray. Bibliographies and class reading lists will do you good though.
Which books do you people feel are "canonical" as far as contemporary architecture is concerned? I mean somewhat contemporary books.
Helsinki, no doubt smart-ass is the first thing that came to your mind, but you also analyzed the situation, even checked-out the error in the text. In the end you set out to belittle my contribution. That's what you really did.
Page 68 of Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media is loaded, and the dyslexical error therein provides a spark capable of igniting an explosion. More truth may in fact lie with the notion that the attributes of memory and remembrance are indeed interchangably fluid rather than strickly apposed. Le Corbusier's 'doctoring' of photography (as discussed in the chapter after page 68) seems to even be a perfect example of the interchangable fluidity of memory and remembrance.
--Balloon and Prick: Modern Reading as Virtual Architecture, (forthcuming).
currently on my 'book table':
Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media
The Limits of Interpretation
The Changing Light at Sandover
Labyrinths
The Architecture of Humanism: A Study in the History of Taste
The Fifties
The Rise of Scientific Philosophy
Promises, Promises: Essays on Psychoanalysis and Literature
Difference & Repetition
Man and Time
The Anaesthetics of Architecture
The Diaries of Paul Klee
Illuminations
Reflections
Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry: An Introduction
"The Boudoir in The Expanded Field"
The Production of Space
Art in America, April 2008
Artforum, April 2008
51N4E space producers
Shrinking Cities
Festival Architecture
Future City: Experiment and Utopia in Architecture
Yves Brunier, Landscape Architect
...perhaps a sign of being neither student nor architect; sondern etwas anderes.
I should have written opposed instead of apposed, but I think I know why I made the mistake.
It seems like once every fifteen or twenty years, a book is published that fundamentally changes our perspective on architecture, the way "Vers une architecture" did.
The last book that seemed to fundamentally change our way of looking at things was "S.M,L,XL." This is a book that the whole profession, from academics to older practitioners, is aware of and has read, or at least skimmed.
I don't think there's been a book with such broad influence since. What do you think?
It may be well worth noting that the publication of S,M,L,XL closely coincides with the dawn of the easily-browsable/easily-publishable hypersized internet. Ends and beginnings are both extreme situations.
Yes, and does this mean the death of the architect as creator of "master narratives"? SMLXL is, if nothing else, a kind of "browsable" book that simulates or predates the internet in its breadth.
What you seem to be implying, SMIB, is that the possibility for creating a fixed, massive, all-encapsulating text such as SMLXL (or Vers une architecture or Complexity and Contradiction et al.) isn't possible anymore.
farwest1, SMLXL is indeed a kind of "browsable" book that predates the internet in its breadth, and, for me at least, has stimulated publishing via the internet.
As far as I'm concerned, the internet makes "creating a fixed/fluid, massive, all-encapsulating text" even more possible.
Bourgeois - concerning the earlier "dispute" - you are correct.
and concerning SMLXL - I think it's most visible contribution lies in the massive mushrooming of mega-books (in page-count, at least) and the bigbook as a must-have commodity. But despite the active production of monumental books, no publication since has had the same power of ideas (in number and force) or agility of presentation. SMLXL stands alone in my opinion. And is still the book of the moment.
SMLXL is like so hot right now.
What is next.
well... SMLXL IS still hot. as are "Learning from Las Vegas" and "Complexity and Contradiction in Arch." it's not the newness that matters. it's the hotness.
Hot
Ruskin's Seven Lamps are HOT.
what is the what - dave eggers
he's good. has anyone read his essay on becoming a successful artist in new york?
It may be well worth noting that the publication of S,M,L,XL closely coincides with the dawn of the easily-browsable/easily-publishable hypersized internet. Ends and beginnings are both extreme situations
i just didn't feel like browsing though SMXXL actually. Plus, in all my time on archinect, with such an esteemed and educated lot, i have not come across one contextual or otherwise citation from the book on the part of an archinector that pointed to its significance in contributing to a canonic change or augmentation of anyone's perspective. The only thing that has been cited over and over again is the style rather than the content ... oh people say the content is really good...but somehow they never say whats, in the content, is good. perhaps this is, as all-mighty-archmed would say...MY PROBLEM. i did like delirious new york on the other hand. and i can say why.
as to the style...no i don't see it as a sort of blah blah hyper text in parallel with blah blah evolution of the internet. a hyper text is a text that takes you to another text/image, this doesn't. furthermore, this contributes to more trees dying than a webpage. its a book, point à la ligne. essentially, its an encyclopedia of ideas structured in a chosen order, right? Encyclopedias are only seminal in the breadth of info and their relevance to the reader (their reflection of 'reality' is another matter...after all it could be a fictional encyclopedia) and they're not a new invention. but i still don't see anyone refer to more than junkspace and hugeness. could that not have been presented in two pages?
that doesn't make a word of sense, moron.
oh, the first paragraph is quoted from Shock Me's posting above.
aside, i'm reading a neil gaiman collection of stories. i like his combo of lyrical whimsy and darkness. ted hughes poems as well, i still find his universe so so so skewed, its always surprises me.
i'm trying to read murakami's wind-up bird chronicle, but its not clicking! so i'm finishing off v.woolf's the waves...its one of the most beautiful AND boring books i've read. but the part where the kids are running after each other is unsurpassable...it can almost be sung!
but this is odd! i really did enjoy his Kafka on the Shore novel, it was a fun read and had much pathos. norwegian wood was good as well; anyone read the wind-up bird chronicle and tell me whether its really worth persevering with and why? i wanted to like it...
to clarify, when I wrote...
It may be well worth noting that the publication of S,M,L,XL closely coincides with the dawn of the easily-browsable/easily-publishable hypersized internet. Ends and beginnings are both extreme situations
...it was in response to farwest1's
I don't think there's been a book [since SMLXL] with such broad influence since. What do you think?
...meaning that, since SMLXL, it's from the internet that broad influence now eminates.
i think neufert and co exerted more influence b4 and after SMLXL on the arch. community :p .. i also think SMLXL was (or is) emblematic of koohasia...since its got so much of it crammed in...and that sells. but if you were to soak the book in water and then boil it..condense...how much really influential ideas peculair only to that book remain . now u can't do this to all other books...since most are structured in a narrative...and u can't really condense a narrative ... but with a quasi-encyclpedia, why not?
perhaps, you mean...for your good self (consensus has not been mesured) that SMLXL iconic standing is in the fact that it signals the death of architectural theory books (theory?) because perhaps it caricatures it. the revelling in colours, the cocktail of fonts, the excessive graphicity (?)...so aside from a few ideas (which could be summarizes on an A4 in nice point 10 helvetica or gils sans font ...SMLXL is a famous epitaph...thus also making it a sort of tourist site....
no, you are wrong.
You know, there are really only two different fonts used throught S,M,L,XL. The size of fonts vary though; some are small, some are medium, some are large, and some are extra large.
First, DaleCooper, I've understood everything noctilucent has said (as, apparently, has Shock Me.) So you might consider who is the moron here.....
The influence of SMLXL, aside from its megalomaniac size and graphics, can be summed up for me in the following Koolhaas paragraph from "What Ever Happened to Urbanism?":
"If there is to be a "new urbanism" it will not be based on the twin fantasies of order and omnipotence; it will be the staging of uncertainty; it will no longer be concerned with the arrangement of more or less permanent objects but with the irrigation of territories with potential; it will no longer aim for stable configurations but for the creation of enabling fields that accommodate processes that refuse to be crystallized into definitive form; it will no longer be about meticulous definition, the imposition of limits, but about expanding notions, denying boundaries, not about separating and identifying entities, but about discovering unnameable hybrids; it will no longer be obsessed with the city but with the manipulation of infrastructure for endless intensifications and diversifications, shortcuts and redistributions – the reinvention of psychological space. Since the urban is now pervasive, urbanism will never again be about the new only about the "more" and the "modified." It will not be about the civilized, but about underdevelopment."
Incidentally, noctilucent, I had the same reaction as you to "The Wind-up Bird Chronicle." It has a lot of cache with the hipster crowd, but I was kind of bored by it.
I was much more into Murakami's "Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World." It seemed to me he took many more structural risks with the narrative, and it was filled with interesting ideas and images.
You know, for me (like for most architects), architecture has always been a sort of tourist site.
Condensing "a huge book" would in most cases be easy - the tomes of MVRDV etc. are mostly just badly edited collections of graphs and a superabundance of images that don't communicate as effectively anymore when they are massed in such a high pile. So yes - most big books could be condensed in a few pages (sometimes not even that).
On the other hand - what makes SMLXL special IS the form as well as the content - it is very different than the other big books produced since (also ones by Koolhaas/Harvard - most notably maybe the Prada-book, making fun of the excess of big books - admittedly, in a very dull way), inspired by it's popularity as a profitable object - not so much as a complex architectural work. SMLXL presents each idea and built project in a way/style most fitting to it - as a diary of the design/building process; as a walk-through-photographic sequence; as a cartoon-parody; etc. This creates the visual volume and density of the work and makes SMLXL an important BOOK like almost no other, in how it presents ideas as well as the ideas/projects themselves.
As a general note - why should the essence of a book about architecture be ever condensed into text, or a manifesto? There's no point in the excercise.
As a tip to noctilucent - maybe you should read the book you are criticizing? It's not a "quasi-encyclpedia" just because there is a running thread of word explanations - even the method of arranging projects by size does not make it a disconnected group of separate points - there is actually a running narrative in there, and I found the whole an inspiring work.
maybe i will Helsinki (however, who or what are you to tell me that I 'should', tip or otherwise?). also note i didnt criticize the content of the book, i asked :"...how much(sic) really influential ideas peculair only to that book remain " ... i never said that there weren't any...if i did criticize anything, it was the lack of a substantial reaction from reading that book that i've encountered in many, except for cheerleader reverence ...and thats not necessarily peculair to that book itself. in other words, i wanted someone to tell me why they really thought the book was good....and what sort of book would be a good thought as well....and not supply insipid reverence.
when it did seem like i was demeaning (and not criticizing, ur being too mildmannered) the book, i was assuming, admittedly farcically, someone else's viewpoint (the paragraph that begins with "perhaps, you mean...for your good self" ). So my stance towards the book's content or otherwise, might not ..necessarily :) ...as simplistic as your reading of it (it=my stance not the book). in effect, i have zero stance, didn't read it.
if that is how you see narrative, then an encyclopedia equally has a narrative, a topical one (it could address the world at wide, oceanography, orthinology..) and the narrative in construed from necessary self-referential structure of the overall system. well, u'd say thats not a narrative...well, narrative, development over time...cause and effect...even if postmodernly scrambled...etc
thank you for the tip, i appreciate your altruism...ye good christian.
farwest 1 , i appreciate the more specific focus. its an interesting one as well. cheerio.
i started The Brief History of the Dead yesternight, few pages into it. best line so far (paraphrased, i aint got it with me) when asked how she died, she only replied that she had started to snow.nayyyyyssssss
Re: S,M,L,XL
"It's not so much a presence. It's more a lack of absence."
I will have finished Inspiration's Quick Turn To Envy tomorrow dawn. Apparently more people write this book than read it.
noc: - blah blah blah. just read the book.
---
At the moment, G.Vidal's "Narratives of Empire" (Burr, Lincoln read so far) seems a fun & entertaining read - anyone have an opinion on the quality of the rest of the books in the series?
...and drink plenty of fluids.
Now 1/10 into de Duve's Kant After Duchamp. The passages I read last night reminded me of some passages within Tafuri's Theories and History of Architecture. I guess I like lists interspersed throughout prose. Likewise, just reading the index of Lefebvre's The Production of Space fascinates me.
Had hoped to gleam more from "Museum" within Privacy and Publicity, thus now planning to reread "The Portable Museum" within Demo's The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp.
"Ah, bear in mind this garden was enchanted!"
Now preparing for my M.Arch 1 and generally wallowing in free time I've taken advantage of the local library towards this updated reading list:
Le Corbusier (a life)- not the best bio ever, but amusing. (bios I liked: Boswell's London Journal.. and .. The Life of Samuel Johnson, and.. Oscar Wilde by Richard Ellman)
Gravity's Rainbow- TP, like 'working' on the buffet of Babel, delicious, frustrating, delicious
Tracing Eisenman- Too bad the copy from the library has some pages missing. Sarah Whiting's essay is quite good, Greg Lynn seems a little too casual... like he's got it all figured out...
Being and Event- AB, having enjoyed some of his shorter works taking the big plunge.
Metastases of Enjoyment- Zizek
Some back issues of Lacanian Ink
Rigadoon- Celine
Informal- CB, a smaller version of the chunk/superbook. Having read deLanda et al., I wish there were more pictures.
In Search of Wagner- Adorno, The debate surrounding the life and work of Wagner is fittingly epic.
bump
Sloterdijk - Critique of Cynical Reason
Canetti - Crowds and Power
Steinbeck - The Moon is Down
then, now and soon:
Proust Was A Neuroscientist, by Jonah Lehrer
Les Fleurs du Mal, by Baudelaire
The Snowball, by Alice Schreoder
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, by Edward Tufte
Laws of the Game of Rugby Union, 2008
Inquiry by Design, by John Zeisel
slowly trying to accomplish cover to cover...
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations.
Susan Sontag, Against Interpretations.
Joseph Rykwert, The Judicious Eye: Architecture Against the Other Arts.
and the Bilocation chapter of
Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day.
rabbit angstrom
(almost done with the third of the four novels.)
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