Much to my dismay, I’ve made a hobby of being sickly cynical about capital-”A” Architecture. We are in, perhaps, the latest late period. The question: what now? Architecture clings to relevancy by the very tips of its fingers.
(The following was originally an email.)
Mornin’ folks, three cynical things:
Kieran Long skewers the 2008 Venice Biennale: “Venice architecture biennale is like nerds talking about sex.” Basically, he makes the point that the architectural avant-garde has become comically impotent. Money quotes:
“It’s a truth commonly held about Hadid’s work that whatever you think of her now, those early paintings were simply amazing. I bumped into Geoff Shearcroft from London architect AOC in that room. He suggested to me that despite that axiom, The Peak is actually a really boring building—’a dog,’ in his words. ‘Look at the section,’ he said. I did, and he’s right: 3m ceiling heights in a kind of car-park arrangement, no discernible spatial quality or tuning of light, little description, let alone celebration of the circulation.”
“The Arsenale is full of pieces like this—by people who are getting old and have a pressing need to reassure each other that they are artists.”
“This is not a strong time for architecture. It can be seen from the lack of publications, the lack of vision in exhibitions, and the focus on design service rather than the art of architecture. It is irresponsible not to focus a biennale on buildings.” -Greg Lynn
Robert Sumrell’s 2001 thesis at SCI_Arc on, among other things, the emotional deadening represented by Muzak. (Unfortunately the final thesis doc seems to be missing, but check out the visual argument and the proposal, in that order.)
“The mass acceptance of Kurt Cobain points to the fact that all resistance, sadness, and pain is now relegated to a background condition and is experienced solely as an aesthetic. Cobain made alienation desirable and attractive to mass culture. After 1994, disaffection is no longer something to be relieved or feared. This is the final collapse of naturalized emotion and the total flattening of affect. Muzak no longer produces canned music to direct emotion, it is emotion itself which is now canned.”
Finally, a September 10th post from Kazys Varnelis’ blog, “Ambience and Attention,” on the fall and decline of architecture’s first and last experiential outpost—the ambient.
“…our ambient attention is increasingly being occupied by digital media, from a constant stream of Facebook status updates, Twitter tweets, and SMS messages. I should add that the iPod also figures in this, painting a soundscape on the environment that creates an emotional ambience that simply overwhelms any architectural environment…. (…) If architecture cedes the ambient environment to technology, what of architecture’s ambitions?”
So where did the meaning go? It’s a complex issue, perhaps the end result of the modernization project—but, in the spirit of the lynching party, may I finger the Circulation Diagram… the goddamn Circulation Diagram. Why are we so obsessed with the nominal connection of tortured, pastel-shaded chunks of “program”? We’ve completely abstracted everything human, everything relevant out of architecture.
“It’s the sense of touch. In any real city, you walk, you know? You brush past people, people bump into you. In L.A., nobody touches you. We’re always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something.” -”Graham”/Don Cheadle, Crash
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