i just realised, the critique of modernism with a decidedly architectural determinism is merely a veiled attempt to uphold the moral integrity of the profession and its relevance.
it is a bitter jealousy that behind the monolithic, uncanny, completely void of aesthetic could still breed cultural life. it is thought to be blasphemous that architecture had no role and effect on the cultural incidences that sprout out naturally from socisalisation.
architecture, itself, could not come to terms with the fact that it is never all encompassing.
Friday, June 01, 2007
modernism
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hmm actually i think my dissertation topic is somewhat related to what you have pointed out. heres the re-re-revised hypothesis/topic:
Physical conservation does not ensure authenticity, instead products of physical conservation manifests as hyperreal-scapes that serve to propogate dominant culture. On the other hand, the everyday living experience- the soft city, a more meaningful gauge of authenticity, acts as resistance to the totalitarianism of the hyperreal-scape.
The practice of everyday life by Michel de Certeau is an extremely interesting read, you may be interested.
hmm... the sad thing is... more and more pple wld rather be under the totalitarian regime and enjoy the gratification of the hypereality.
most pple here in spore wld prefer disneyland as opposed to heritage museum (ok darn bad eg)
u recall the scene in matrix 1, where this dude betrays zion and neo coz he wanted to enjoy more of the matrix, savouring on the artificial flavour of the beef steak.
anyways chua beng huat writes pretty neat stuff on everyday life in spore context as well. very succinct writing, refreshing.
yeah well i guess sociologists r much more interesting people than architects.....
on another note, i do not totally agree with your statement that more and more people would surrender themselves to the totalitarian disney-scape. in fact, i believe none of them has, at least not completely. this is what de certeau was trying to prove, claiming that while consumers are no doubt reading and consuming products asserted upon them by the dominant, the fact remains they are still reading and consuming in their own way. much like how the same language can be spoken in so many different accents by people from different places.
such personalization of products (you may include - yes - architecture) which consumers have no part in producing forms an everyday resistance against totalitarianism.
singapore is conceptualized and designed much like disneyland, but it never is, for there can never be an inhabited disneyland. Chinatown may seem to be disneyfied but the real 'chinatown' is everywhere else - in the ubiquitous new towns, where aunties shop in wet markets and uncles sip coffee in coffee shops.
perhaps with the death of the vernacular, what architects and designers should and have been trying to do is to make visible such individualized expressions that people exhibit when using (consuming) spaces, which may otherwise remain as temporal, invisible forms. however such might have the effect of institutionalizing events that should remain spontaneous.
i guess this also highlights the importance of knowing what NOT to design. indeed this is one of the strengths highlighted for field operations' design for fresh kills park. and this is exactly why some of the ABC water programme proposals are so laughable... haha
yeah yeah... we are the greatest designers saving the "heartlanders"! woot~
which bring the entire discussion here into focus. that akitects and designers are guilty of architectural determinism and are intent on bringing every scope of the world into design.
hmm in spore it is not disneyscape i guess. but more like turfclubscape. it is not the absence of culture per se, but an overriding capital materialist culture that rationalises aesthetics and moral value into dollar and cents. but that is another subject altogether i guess.
and hor... use ENTER and paragraph leh...
I am not sure whether anyone is still reading comments on this as it was posted some time back.
I think the main fault with architecture/construction industry as a whole is that we usually stopped designing after TOP. To design, you perhaps need some 'determinisms', thinking that this 'design' will be for the greater good (not going to discuss whether 100 percent make the right assumptions). The key to improving your 'determinisms' is to refine them over time. And to do that you need to execute them as well. Unite de Habitation may be deterministic but over time, the knowledge and lessons learnt from it is supposed to 'update' Corb on his 'determinisms' and let the rest of the world be aware of them too. The idea is not to slam 'determinism' but to slam the lack of courage to improve on what are apparently 'failures' and to slam the perpatuators who copy these 'determinisms' blindly.
My above comments are made as a reaction to "What Not to design'. Cos if the first flying machine failed and we all stopped trying to design one; we will never have planes today.
We may seem intent to cover every scope in our design which is part of our job as well...to consider every scope.
The architects are also culprits to the language of money. Money is used to communicate ideas with clients and the government. Unless we find a language that is not money or even more powerful than money, we will be trapped in this cycle of placing monetary value for everything.
We talk about culture, authenticity etc. My question is, besides some idealistic architectural students and some enlightened academia, are there anyone out there who gives a damn?
hmm there is lots of difference when we talk of designers and role of design in different epochs of time.
therein lies designers who critically challenge norms, designers who are charged with altruism, designers who design for the masses, designers who design for the nouveu rich, designers who cross interpret each other, etc.
remy is talking abt prevailing criticism and not really nihilistic anti architecture notions.
but ya. i find it difficult to strike a chord with the continued low cultural self esteem of spore, which places material wealth, symbols of material wealth, aesthetics of material wealth, above everything else. my personal take is in spore, as long as a design is appreciated by like minded pple, design is more or less sucessful.
i guess remy, like myself, need to really look into terms like "dominant culture', "totalitarian", and the cross section of the niched grp of society lest we fall into self contradicting cycles of false assumptions...
we do not stop designing after TOP, we got HDB upgrading ok!
i think hao misunderstood my definition of "dominant culture" as being prevalent culture which has greater influence and acceptance among the people. i meant "dominant culture" as culture and products produced by the empowered, which most of the time may not be individuals but systems of control.
as for issues of culture and authenticity, i believe the only way to attain or preserve authenticity and culture is for everyone (perhaps we should exclude academics from this 'everyone') NOT TO GIVE A DAMN. of course, not in issues like preservation of important historical monuments.
let me just quote from john mcmorrough, commenting on 42nd street in New York:
"While 42nd Street can be understood as an orchestrated construction like the more obvious example of the shopping mall, the difference lies in the introduction of a self-consciousness that prevents the possibility of action free of contrivance. So that even as every attempt is made to separate from a perceived artificial mode, this separation is negated internally by the very effort to capture the real. Put another way, in seeking to define and construct the authentic, it becomes unattainable. "
I just got some queries. Authenticity to be achieved when nobody gives a damn seem to strike a bit of logic in me but i would like to question,
1.Why the discussion of authenticity in the 1st place? Who is this 'authenticity' for? For tourists? For locals? For 'show'?
2. Authenticity. A western concept in a linear idea of time? Are the Easterners really concerned with authenticity? and what about their previously cyclical notion of time.
3.Personally, I think the past can hardly be authentic. Writing, documenting history is already interpreting and presenting the past in a manner that can hardly be said as authentic. Unless we freeze frame dinosaurs the moment they die, things past can hardly be termed authentic in any sense. For me, (i guess 'r's too) anything authentic got to be in the present. Any decent angmoh will definitely choose sitting in Bukit Batok Kopitiam drinking kopi and eating chwee kway over understanding Singapore from Sentosa's wax museum.
Hey, by the way, care sharing with us your dissertation topic?
hmm i do agree that the concept of authenticity involves a ME vs OTHER dichotomy.
maybe shdnt use that word. arouses a long history of semantics.
Who is authenticity for? I would think that its for nobody and everybody. Authenticity can probably only be unravelled through an objective eye, which would thus mostly exclude the everyday man, and include instead the 'bystanders', academics and tourists. Yet authenticity can only be produced through the everyman's practice of his daily life. I remember LKY (gasp!) once saying that the production of culture is only possible through an unconscious, and relatively isolated process, although in today's context, the relative impossibility of isolation (due to globalization) critical for production of 'culture' means that culture has to evolve through fusion of different influences over time. Perhaps thats why korea and japan have such unique cultures since language itself forms a barrier to provide some form of isolation.
Yes I would agree that authenticity is a western concept and the realisation of such a concept in the east created some form of self-consciousness which an exist at varying levels altho most of the time its the institutions. in a way its also an anxiety to differentiate ourselves from the west. In fact the very concept of 'east' and 'west' is a product of such self-consciousness: are we really that different in today's context? is there really an eastern perception of things? for all you know, our perception has but been homogenized.
History is a selective reconstruction, perhaps only memory is authentic, but then memory is tricky since it is personal, fragmented and may be affected by the present.
Chang Jiat Hwee wrote a dissertation 10,000yrs ago on "The myth of conservation" and noted through a quote from pierre nora that history was established as a device to conquer and reconstruct memory.
Heres my revised dissertation topic statement:
Physical urban fabric, when manipulated (conserved, reconstructed) to propogate strategic cultures, produces 'hyperreal-scapes' and stand as poor means to preserve meanings of site (genius loci). On the other hand, certain everyday experiences (tactics) acts as resistance against the totalising effects of hyperreal-scapes and serve as better agents to sustain meanings of site.
I chose to stress on certain everyday experiences since the everyday exists in various forms, i.e. there are many everydays. In any case, the topic is in constant state of revision...
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