How did we come to live in an insular tribal sphere where unwritten rules and rigid moralities — about whom to like and dislike, what is permissible to say and what must remain unsaid — are strictly enforced via social media and online disapproval, much of it anonymous? When did this band of gypsies and relentless radicals get so conservative? — vulture
Could this be translated to architecture? Sure thing... I think architecture has a built in conservatism to begin with. Just look what the architects are pooling for.., fighting territories for things those really don't matter, blaming each other for handrail details and teaching values of the empire while reinforcing its own specialized elitism to keep the trouble makers out. Look at the corporate schools, corporate offices and architects who offer nothing more than a fantasy drawings packaged as radicals riding on intern labored marketing renderings.
Who is kidding whom?
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I see Architecture's conservatives as the ones who push for a very restrictive kind of contextualism and stigmatize anything that has a hint of expression or signature as egomaniacal.
It's seems as much a function of who's consuming the art than who's producing it these days. I think art is treated more as a commodity today than at any other time in recent history. People don't so much buy art to cherish or enjoy it as they do to sell it sometime down the road (or at least cherish it's monetary value) So if art is a commodity then the only meaning it can have is it's monetary worth. Face it, the art world, and the architecture world, are entirely under the auspices of a moneyed elite who see no worth in anything beyond it's monetary value, and an uneducated, and uninterested public who are fed an ideology that protects the elite, and regurgitates those value on various social network outlets effectively eliminating any decent, and taking the voice away from the artists of the world.
Not to rekindle the old art vs. architecture debate (can't find the thread ...), but both are driven by the same thing.
Do you mean that the work itself is conservative or how the buisness of architecture is run is conservative? If offices are offering "nothing more than a fantasy drawings packaged as radicals" where are the real radicals?
In many ways, architecture is inherantly conservative in that it's usually a huge monetary investment, one which will presumably be able to stand the test of time. Thus peoples aversion to radical and whimsical architecture in general. Not everything can withstand the "newness" that ironically, corporate America relies on to sell you every upgrade they can.
Architects are much more conscious of their "audience" today than they were decades ago. I think that constant criticism online is creating a generation of "people pleaser" designers, eager for public approval. The work becomes less about translating radical philosophical or political ideas through architecture but much more about managing public relations. The feedback loop between creator and audience is almost becoming too complete and too immediate.
There is nothing in the world more conservative than regnant progressivism. I would have thought that was obvious.
To do list:
1: Stop pleasing people
2: Translate radical philosophical or political ideas through architecture
3: Pull out of this ever tightening feedback loop between creator and audience
4: Draw erotic art to prove I'm not a conservative
The most radical thing that an architect can do is to turn down a project and build nothing being that decadence has become the status quo among the client base. You never hear this..."you know what, this site is fine how it is, lets build nothing!" short of that, there is no such thing as radical architecture. There is only architecture that looks radical and architecture that doesn't.
There's a game changer: architects refusing to work on moral grounds.
No more big corporate projects, no more rape and pillage development, no more luxury houses for robber barons, etc.
Why isn't the AIA leading this charge?
Thayer-D,
Thank you for that simplistic list. Internet audiences do love lists. How very buzzfeed of you.
Manifest in your list is the same reductionist pressure being applied to architecture so that it can easily absorbed (and often misunderstood) by the community. Whatever politics or complexity or double-coding previous generations appreciated in a built form is becoming less acknowledged and more repressed. The work is getting more superficial. Even the calls by armchair critics for starchitects to refuse commissions shows movement in the direction of reduction. Politics in architecture is now reduced to the act of signing or not signing a contract.
radicals are a few but there is "rebel architecture"
btw, i find glen small's work radical.
Orhan,
Do you think Glen Small's work is still radical today?
--
I've been paying attention to work by architects and artists who are working at the blurred edges of internet culture and "real life". For example:
Andreas Angelidakis
Jon Rafman
Xavier Delory
I guess even radicals can be nostalgic.
Who knew!
davvid, they propose a new way of settlement and way of life and conceptually, specially Biomorphic Biosphere, has an ability to expand, contract and renovate itself as the new technologies evolve and social make up changes. He is talking about purging our cities into a one megastructure. I can see your point if you are stating that there are many more of those today or around time it was proposed (Glen was hosted by Kenzo Tange in Japan. I think they are still radical in a packaged structural way.
But I think what is really radical today is not anything to do with designing structures per se but new ways of thinking and developing space. More of what covers us changes or erodes into something else more different our lives become.
I posted this here, Postpolitical Infrastructures, the other day because I think it is really radical. And inevitable. We are moving to that as Easterling's work describes.
Jon Rafman images I like.
Thayer -D must you be mostly be reactionary? Sometimes you write well when you move away from those.
Orhan,
I had to look up reactionary. I assure you I have no problem with change, especially if it advances the cause of human health and happiness. In terms of fashion, yes, things get old and variety is the spice of life, but I do think there are certain values that are neither left wing or right wing but simply human values like beauty and practicality.
Socially, I'm about as liberal as they come. Architecturally, I would be classified as a conservative by the establishment, an establishment which seem to value only radicalism. This irony seems to escape many, but ultimatly I only fight for the inclusion of outside view points rather than for pleasure or team loyalty. If sites like this and academia promoted only traditional work, I'd be the first to defend exploration of new ideas, but as it stands, exploring traditional work seems to be the most radical enterprise in academia. Too bad it isn't seen as a genuine passion rather than posited as a zero sum game. And don't mistake that I don't see true reactionaries in the sense you meant, many classicists who insist on Vitruvious and the like, but at this point, change in architecture isn't about radicalism but about inclusion of the various and divergent view points.
This whole thing reminds me of an old saying: "Just because you're not making any sense doesn't mean you're being profound."
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