Re: [design] public/private culture

On Sunday, March 13, 2005, at 09:55 AM, John Young wrote:

The consequence, for architecture, is that it is critiqued
virtually in a vacuum while the real estate and construction
industires rampage at will, usually totally supported by
the profession of architecture.

to me this gets at a certain built-in, systemic,
negative process that may be a type of negative-
consumption (like negative feedback, or entropy)
that is exemplified in relation to buildings and
weather systems, ironically enough...

Same is true of environmental depredation: weather reports
say nothing about that unless there is a catastropher like
hurricane, tornado, flood, then the billion-dollar repair
costs get headlines just like building collapses get
sensational, evanescent coverage.

a case study in this backwards view (retrograde
'vision' of some type of historicist fantasia) is
the lack of planning and designed adaptations to
known and knowable events, that instead are like
the footsoldiers in the trenches of world war 1,
forced to march or charge even, lock-step, into
the line of fire, just another casualty/number.

so too with energy issues, with hurricanes and
other types of standards and code-related issues
where changing behaviors could actually change
outcomes -- it is at the point of destruction-,
and the insurance industry- that the changes are
seeming to first occur, rather than in innovation
and adaptation within designs, as part of a goal
of better or more adaptable, stronger, and safer
housing, including aesthetics (bomb shelter chic,
or industrial stormproof systems/metal shutters.)
like the lack of incentive for sustainable energy
designs ("a client's ideology always comes first")
it seems the same with issues related to global-
warming/climate change, where even the basics of
wind and water and other energy (and the entire
economies of regions dependent upon predictable
weather patterns) are now going into chaos-mode,
here up north snowmobile races are canceled, ice
fishing contests in jeopardy, dog sled courses
rerouted in search of seasonal snowfalls, cross-
country races and others almost canceled due to
missing snowflakes, snowmobile dealers going dry,
though even more serious and larger than just of
recreational entertainment, or the small business
sector- entire patterns of electrical consumption
and current efficiencies depend on knowing what
the weather and temperature will be, days and
weeks in advance- to purchase energy and power
and other things in advance, which can buffer,
or cause a buffer-overflow of the entire system
should patterns start to collude and collide...

take, for instance, the often hopeful wind power
industry as a supplement to fossil fuel powers...
the wind patterns and maps are changing, humidity
and other levels are changing, entire regions are
taking on traits of others, which can be the basis
for types of agriculture, local industries, etc.
with wind power, if the wind maps change, there's
little incentive to using wind if it is not there.
so too with hydroelectric dams and changes in rain-
fall patterns, and the increasing desertification.
so too with housing i would imagine, what happens
if basic environmental characteristics of local
buildings take on other fundamental dynamics...

what is the plan?

is it is to maintain an 'extreme' status quo?

where is the planning in the .US, or is it non-
existent, has it been banished in the grand-
ideologies of early modernism (i do not know)
though is city comfort as far as it goes in
this new urb world surburb?

in the .US the plan is equated with INSURANCE.
http://www.google.com/search?q=define%3A+insurance

this system locks-in negative consumption behavior
(despotic commercialism) and rewards doing nothing
in order to regenerate the process and flows (of
capital investment, it seems) in order to, like a
machine, continue some linear progression from bad
to slightly better, or bad to worse in the long-
term case of requiring fundamental rethinking of
basic premises, and instead always prefers to be
the guarantor should anything go wrong, to keep
investing in the same model, weather buildings in
which energy is 90% wasted, economic systems in
which most work is lost and profit is a disguise,
these are insured against their own losses by
being buffered from bad decisions in the worst
cases of architecture -- WTC is ultimate display
of Insurance refunding a disaster with another.

'architecture' is insured against its own failures
in ways that its falsity in advertising never have
to address, it is insured it can be the loss-leader
in the development business as long as it maintains
its relationships and principles in relation to the
other functions (real estate, schooling, AIA drones).
competitions as insurance, degrees/PhDs as insurance,
textbooks as insurance, certification as insurance
against the outside criteria, the risks of realities
outside the proscribed boundaries of this facadism.

maybe most of it is naive and unspecific though i
maintain that commercialism and insurance are key to
the paradigmatic issues of change than are 'capital'
or even grand revolutionary narratives of Empire,
rather the mundane and unspectacular banality of
Daniel Libeskind's architecture can only be truly
dealt their unspectacular achievement in terms of
not a failure of reaching great heights with ideas,
but rather the ideologies of commercialism and of
insurance (against ideas) that have been achieved
through the role of the architect as a bureaucrat,
not even a full-fledged technocrat, pseudo-artist.


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    • From: John Young
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