On Tuesday, March 22, 2005, at 07:51 PM, Michael Kaplan wrote:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,60-1531757_1,00.html
As he himself put it: “Architecture and urban planning — be it at macro or micro level, a private villa or an office block — must not only be a showpiece of design and technology, but also give expression to those democratic ideals of respect for human dignity, equality and freedom that are fostered in our society.”
this is one of the reasons that the 'digital home'
movement by technology/home electronics companies to
brand 'wired homes' as being the stuff of architecture
is so far from other than technocratic dimensions that
seem further and further removed as criteria for being
in balance and understanding how dwellings have, and
probably have not, changed. i wish that what John had
listed as five ways of innovation were all working in
unison, together, not proprietary or limited pursuits
but as a total field where advances in one area would
effect others, which would absorb and add and improve
upon this, so that the digital home (or other things,
such as energy efficiency, aesthetics, planning, etc.)
could be in support of a larger idea of architecture,
its purpose, where people who are skilled at building
of buildings are not presumed to be great thinkers by
default, where one architect is not all architecture,
yet there is some singularity to the idea of what it
can encompass, varied and variegated. it is very hard
to find a middle-ground, maybe Herbert Muschamp is an
instance of this, for if there was a middle-zone, in
which interactions between various forces could occur,
there would probably be no one more capable of shaping
a certain segment of the populations view, towards the
ideas also included in the field, though so too, going
beyond the present to get into the archaeological, the
cultural, the philosophical, there too Herbert Muschamp
could do a lot of good if outside of the old framework
and judgments for the shared cause that is architecture.
then again, so could (and do) probably almost all of
the field of architects, in their own way, pursue what
are likely a certain kind of ideals, that are only an
impossible problem when they are in a vacuum and are
considered, clean-room, to be some ideological bastion
of truth, by a certain social standing or status, or
placement within the socio-politacal bureaucracy that
is architecture. recent Pritzker prize winner, even if
skewed jury ideologically, who could contend that work
is what it is, though is it 'everything'? that seems
to be the case by default made of the era of super-
stars and superhero architects, revealed as fantasy,
myth, and even deceit at times, for mass marketing PR.
though what about mutually inclusive aspects, which
integrate all the diversity into one structure of
architecture(s) which allow multiple yet also shared
legitimacies, that new common architectural values
(energy efficiency, security, networking, etc.) are
the basis for judging 'architecture' by the criteria
of the environments in which it exists, not of early
20th century worldviews and their vast shortcomings
to engage and adapt and design the realities of today.
brian