>
> Erik: I suggest you look at the work of Fredric Jameson on space & architecture. There, as I recall, the issue
>is not so much one of prescription vs. description but rather a matter of designing or shaping spaces (within a
>particular mode of production, eg. postmodernism,given the available material conditions and social realities)
>that will enable certain kinds of social behavior and forestall others. Hal Foster edited a book that may help
>too, called <<The Anti-Aesthetic>>. There is one essay in particular that might direct your thinking.It's
>Kenneth Frampton's "Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance." Critical
>regionalism, according to Frampton, is a strategy "to mediate the impact of universal civilization [the same
>bad movie, "the same plastic or aluminum atrocities" (acc Ricoeur in History & Truth) with elements derived
>indirectly from the peculiarities of a particular place. It is clear," Frampton continues, "that Critical Regionalism
>depends upon maintaining a high level of critical self-consciousness. It may find its governing inspiration in
>such things as the range and quality of the local light, or ina tectonic derived from a peculiar structural mode,
>or in the topography of a given site" (21). Heidegger informs this effort, but, as you can see, Frampton
>enables us to get passed the repetition of tautologies so common in these discussions whenever they leave
>behind the specificity of the material base with all of its frequently painful social and political limitations. I
>hope this helps.
>
> Patrick M. Murphy English Department SUNY Oswego pmurphy@xxxxxxxxxx iiiixmmmmmiiii+++
I know the work of both Jameson and Frampton well enough. The former is interesting to me as a CRITIC
rather than a CREATOR, the second is more someone who wishes to have a theory of design but really
founders on attempting to incorporate Habermas into a stripped down modernism, which really is what he is
most comfortable with. There is scarce enough 'meat' to his .solutions'.
I admired Jameson's remark that revolution was taught in schools of architecture so that without realising it
these schools in turn turned the revolution into the accepted, eg "Heroic" architects.
However, I think even this is not to the heart of the matter.
Anthony Saville's article on architecture and Kantian aesthetics was interesting and in line with some of my
thoughts, but I feel Scruton is really out of line, Collingwood inappropriate, Derrida (in and out of) collaboration
with Eisenmann disasterous, the Phillip Johnson and Mies derivation of Nietzsche misguided, let alone the
Columbian aura of Frampton, who in desperation of a Critical Theory, talks of textural gradient etc without any
knowledge or attempt to encompass say the issue of thematic design. His article on the Stockholm raadhuset
is a case in point: architectural historians talk of effects and influences in the fighting with the industry, in this
way they maybe 100% better than art historians. Yet they talk not of work via any coherent theory of
evaluative criteria. Argument is purely by hyperbole and suggestion.
And people fail to notice the discrepancy between art and artist, between the need to talk of the architect's
intentions and the need to talk of the product of those intentions AS architecture without such considerations
as to past intentions of maker being important. NOBODY GROUNDS AESTHETICS!
I do not care if the ground is of mud, if it floats on a pool of lava, if it dissolves into another ground, if it is on
the edge of the abyss, as long as it is grounded in some way!
I do not even see enough content from the above to feel that they could even have enough for a tautology!
thank you for your well intentioned suggestions, unfortunately I am after bigger game .
Erik Champion
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