My Final Post

I have just skimmed over some of my past entries to this theory blog. In doing this, I realise just how much I’ve learnt. In looking back at my first entries, I was really cautious about what I was saying; I was worried to give an opinion because I didn’t feel like I knew enough. As the lecture series has gone on, I feel like I have built up a good basis of knowledge to these subjects, and my entries have definitely become more confident. To me, the best thing about this series is that I feel like it has enabled us to go on to find out more ourselves. I admitted at the start of the blog entries that even though I had an interest in the topics that we would be covering over the months, I hadn’t ever made the effort to find out more. With half of my Christmas presents this year being books from the theory list, I’m confident that I’ve made a step in the right direction. Maybe it’s just that I’m growing up and its natural to develop more of an interest in these things, but I’m glad that it has been part of my education.

It is important to step aside from the design units at times and think about what we doing in the bigger picture. This can be in terms of our future careers and the education that we are getting right now. I’ve found it refreshing to question the things around us, and the society we live in, and even the usefulness of the education that we are getting. I think that the ability to question everything is a really important part of what I’ve taken from the course.

Another key point that I have taken from theory (which I have mentioned a few times in previous blog entries), is that sometimes there aren’t answers. I obviously knew this before the course started, but I suppose now I feel happier to accept it, and I also feel like my opinions are not necessarily wrong, maybe just different to others. I suppose it is a good view to take on life, that it is a continuous struggle and journey, where along the way you will always make mistakes, but you will always learn from them, and it is this process that you must learn to enjoy, and not the final result.  If you spend the majority of your life working towards something in a way that you never enjoy, to then have a limited time of actually doing what you want to do and feeling what you want to feel then is it worth it? I feel like I’m going off on a bit of a tangent here, and in the past I might have been hitting the delete key by now, but I feel that its ok to go off on one every now and then! It’s good to just write down the things that go on inside your head, and it can actually make you pay more attention to them when you consciously take the time to write it down.

So I think that’s about it. At the start of the theory course I was surprised at how the connection to architecture was not so direct, but I now realise that it is in fact incredibly direct. The buildings and spaces that we design are influenced by and take on an approach to all of the social, economic and political issues that surround our everyday lives. We have a real responsibility as designers to design for the right reasons and to do what we truly believe to be right. Aside from that, in general we owe it to ourselves and the people around us, to learn as much about the spectacle as possible. We shouldn’t be ignorant to important issues that affect our everyday lives. We should not be lazy, and should find the truth for ourselves.

I am confident that this is only the beginning for me, I have Marx and Freud for Beginners alongside ‘High Rise’ by J G Ballard on my bookshelf, all waiting for me to read once I’ve had a decent nights sleep after this madly intensive month of design work. Eventually I’ll be ready to read the rest of ‘All that is solid melts into air’. I’m looking forward to it.

'USA' by Dos Passos

My final read as part of this course was USA by Dos Passos – specifically the chapters ‘Tin Lizzie’, ‘The Bitter Drink’ and ‘Architect’. I found these short stories really enjoyable to read.

Dos Passos writes honest descriptions of the subjects’ lives. He chooses to focus attention on personal details that make people like Frank Lloyd Wright seem more human, and more understandable. He talks of how they are proud of achievements, and ashamed of mistakes, but at the same time how they have shown qualities that have led to their success in life. He writes how Henry ford admired Edison, and always listened to his mum’s advice. In doing this he makes the character easier to relate to, they seem more real, and this makes them seem more vulnerable. It is because of this that when characters like Ford spend the end of their lives reminiscing back to the times before their interventions had changed the world, that you start to feel for them more. Despite success and fortune, you feel something for them.

For Thorstein Veblen in ‘The Bitter Drink’, he ends up in a shack as an old man, alone, and with no interest in being remembered after his death. How can such a brilliant mind end up in this situation? It is because he is human.

All of these men were successful and have been remembered. All of these men are human. They all lived lives very similar to our own in many parts, and this can be forgotten. I suppose these chapters are fairly inspirational, in that you can start to see yourself reaching the same level of success as these men – why not? But then you see how even after all of this, it can end in disappointment and misery. I’m not sure what I’m getting at here but I think its great to think of our own lives being told in story in a similar way. Lots of things happen to us, lots of little stories to tell. We all have good and bad moments. We all have different kinds of relationships with different kinds of people. Some people make more money than others. Some people measure success by money, some don’t.  For some, money makes them happy, and for others it is something else. I suppose it is important to remember that these people are the same as everyone else, it’s so easy to think of achievements as beyond our own capabilities, but they’re not.

Henri Lefebvre's 'Social Space'

Ok, so I have just read Henri Lefebvre’s chapter on ‘Social Space’ from the book ‘The production of Space’. We were warned in advance that this would be difficult, and I think it is even more difficult than I imagined! After finishing the chapter, I realise I’ve written two A4 pages of notes, with the intention of extracting the essential points from the text, and being able to arrive at some kind of conclusion when I read over them again. Well unfortunately it hasn’t been quite as simple as that!

Lefebvre seems to know what he is talking about, but the way he writes confuses the hell out of me. He starts talking about one point and seems to either leave it with another question or give an explanation that even after ten attempts of reading over the same paragraph, doesn’t seem to make sense in my head. I have to say that it is frustrating to read a piece of writing that shows me enough that I am really interested in what he has to say, but then finding that the way it is written doesn’t let me get to grips with it.

I think there is a real skill in being able to convey a complicated idea in a way that makes it more easily understandable. This related directly to our design units too – the main challenge is turning a complicated idea in your head into a language that anyone can start to understand. I don’t know, I’m sure many brilliant theorists would disagree with me making a big deal out of this, and argue that what Lefebvre writes makes perfect sense, but I just think that writing in the way he does gives the impression that he is hiding in words.

With this said, I still got something out of this text, if not particularly a conclusion – and having said that, that is one of the main things that I have taken from this course; that sometimes there are no answers, but there is a process, and things must not stop or settle, they must keep going. As frustrating as that can be, constantly questioning what we usually except as the ‘right thing’ or the ‘truth’, will make us better people (as well as drive us mad).

So Lefebvre looks into the true meanings of production, work, and social space. Throughout the chapter he finds different meanings such as a ‘work’ being unique and a ‘product’ being reproduced exactly. He talks about nature being a work, and gives the example of a rose not knowing that it is a rose.  He goes on to say that humanity is killing off nature with signs and images, and labour and products. When talking about social space he describes it as the outcome of a sequence, and set or operations, and so cannot be reduced to the rank of a simple object, but at the same time there is nothing imagined or unreal about it.

The problem is, I am taking this all in, but I have no idea what the point is that he’s getting at. Maybe that will become clear when I read more chapters of the book, but I suspect that it might not… as mentioned before, I believe that maybe Lefebvre’s level of thinking is above his level of writing. Writing is about communicating ideas clearly, and at least in my case he hasn’t been successful!

'The Fountainhead'

‘The Fountainhead’ is a novel by Ayn Rand, written in 1943. It was later made into a film. I really enjoyed this film, and found it incredibly inspiring.

‘The Fountainhead’ is about architect Howard Roark, who spends his career battling against the mass of the ‘mob’ and the controllers of this mob. Where others give into the pressures of the society, and let their designs be controlled by others, Roark stands strong, determined to create architecture that he is proud of. His defiance against the system sees him struggle financially, and he is driven to work away from his office as labour. But he is happier at this point, working away from architecture, than being involved in projects that go against everything that he believes in.

In doing this, he stands alone against other architects, who are considered successful and are earning plenty of money from plenty of jobs, cowering to the needs of the mob and the men who run the mob. Success is the key point here – to Roark, success is the personal achievement of creating a building that he sees as his own; a building that does everything that he wants it to do, and everything that he sees as right.  An idea from his mind becomes a reality. To nearly everyone else, success is measured by money and fame, and the respect from the mob. Roark’s motivation for designing buildings is different to every other architect’s, and this is highlighted by the fact that he offers to design a building for fellow architect Peter Keating, with the only return being the satisfaction of the design being unchanged from his original idea. Unfortunately, the power of the ‘men in charge’ crushes Keating’s attempts to stop alterations to the design.

Roark’s passion for his architecture is so strong that one night he plants explosives around the building site and destroys what has been built. With almost everything and everyone against him, Roark struggles on, and stands up for what he believes in. He is the individual against the collective, and only wants to exist for himself – ‘mans right to exist for his own sake’. His mind is not an object of sacrifice, he has the right to think for himself, and will not let anyone take away his right to see through his own eyes and think with his own brain.

Ellsworth Toohey, Roark’s antagonist, writes a popular art criticism column. In a dramatic speech to Keating, Toohey openly admits his desire for control, and how he intends to go about it. Roark is such a threat to him because he stands against him, and cannot be controlled by him. There are so many quotes from this section of the film, but they all seem to speak for themselves, so I think its best if I just write the lot down!

‘Power. What do you think is power? Whips? Guns? Money? You can’t turn men into slaves unless you break their spirit. Kill their capacity to think and act on their own. Tie them together, teach them to conform, to unite, to agree, to obey. That makes one neck ready for one leash. You heard me preaching it for years but you didn’t have the wits to know what you were hearing. Why do you suppose I denounced greatness and praised mediocrities like you? Great men can’t be ruled. Why did I preach self-sacrifice? If you kill a man’s sense of personal value, he’ll submit. Can you do that to Howard Roark? No? Then don’t ask me why I want to destroy him.’

Roark is such a threat because he sees past what is presented to him in every day life as ‘normal’. He doesn’t accept that this is the way things have to be, he sees something different and is prepared to work hard to achieve what he personally believes is right. Through Roark’s determination, others start to see that there is hope for something better, and there is another way things can be done. Gail Wynand, head of the ‘Banner’ newspaper realises that before he wasn’t a ruler of the mob as he thought previously, he was in fact its tool. He tries to stand up to the powers but is eventually defeated, as he lacks the courage and determination of Roark.

This film, (along with the other texts in this course which are starting to feel as though they all tie together) has made me think about two main points. For one, we must never accept what we are told as the truth, we must find the truth ourselves. Just because things have been done a certain way for many years does not mean they are the right way, or do not need changing.

Secondly, if we passionately believe in something, we cannot give up. It will never be easy to stand up against collectivism, but an individual can make a difference. One person can inspire others, and there is always hope that can keep an idea going. In my own career as an architect, I am determined to be proud of every building that I design, and to truly believe that I have done the best job that I am capable of.

Marshall Berman - 'All That Is Solid Melts Into Air' The Experience of Modernity

We were asked to read the chapters on Goethe’s Faust from ‘All That Is Solid Melts Into Air’ by Marshall Berman. Berman tells and analyses the story of Faust. Faust is successful, intelligent man, who has achieved a lot. But he is unhappy with the way he is moving through life, and doesn’t feel that he fits into the society around him, and so he secludes himself from it.

‘The further his mind has expanded, the deeper his sensitivity has grown, the more he has isolated himself, and the more impoverished have become his relationships to life outside – to other people, to nature, even to his own needs and active powers. His culture has developed by detaching itself from the totality of life.’ He is a prisoner of his own mind.

He is briefly given hope to joining the old world that he has detached himself from as he hears the church bells ring, and he is taken back to his childhood, but this satisfaction soon passes. He realises that he has to participate in society in a way that allows his ambitions and spirit to not be restricted as it was before. In order to do this he makes a pact with the devil.

His pact with the devil enables him to seduce Gretchen, a girl who symbolises innocence and world of his childhood. However, as she personally develops, she looses her innocence, and Faust looses the girl that he fell in love with.

Faust goes on to involve himself with society by becoming a leader, who through politics, develops society in the direction he wants, but this thirst for development is all-encompassing, and with it, Faust looses complete control of what he is doing by unknowingly killing an innocent couple who represent the goodness in the past. Faust is saved from hell, because of his commitment and continuous striving for development to improve the world around him.

There is a lot to learnt from this story and I think that I will come back to it and probably realise a few more important messages each time I read it, Berman certainly makes it clear in the way he breaks it down.

After reading this text, along with all of the others so far in this course, I feel that development must happen. We must keep moving forward but not disregard what has happened in the past. We must learn from everything that has happened to us, the good and the bad, and use this knowledge to move forward again. There will be mistakes made along the way, but the attempt to move forward is more important than this. It is better to do this than to not try and to not take risks. The past means a lot to everyone, if we loose sight of the things that we love about the past, we could loose sight of the part of ourselves that helped us become who we are today.

We must not see ourselves moving forward in an attempt to eventually arrive at our destination and then stop. Going back to Eagleton’s ‘After Theory’, we must not settle. We cannot expect to be presented with the answers that will solve every problem, so we must be prepared to accept that we will constantly have to think in new ways to deal with new issues.

As said earlier, this text shows that we can be torn between two different worlds – one which holds onto the past in a nostalgic way, and one which is moving forward from this first world into something different. In this process of development, we must never stop, and we must never loose sight of where we have come from.

Evelyn Waugh's 'Decline and Fall'

This week we discussed Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Decline and Fall’. This short novel tells the story of Paul Pennyfeather. This was a bit more easy-going than what I am used to from the theory lectures, and I enjoyed how quickly I could read it! The main part of the book discussed on Friday was that on Silenus, Margot’s architect. Silenus resembles Le Corbusier, and his modernist viewpoint. His attitude towards most things in life can be summed up in his approach to assessing a beautiful woman, which is by rating the efficiency of her digestive system.

Le Corbusier was obsessed with truth and order, which he tried to place on everything. Every decision made in the design process needed solid reasoning behind it - this approach led to the 5 points of modern architecture, which derived from the use of concrete in building.

Le Corbusier’s modernist perception did not allow for human needs. For his designs to remain pure, there would be no room for individual character – everyone would have the same of everything, and everything that existed would be designed to do a specific job, there would be no variation. The problem with this attitude towards design is that humans need more than the bare minimum – to bring the excitement and life to the things around us, there needs to be a higher level of stimulation. When everything is reduced to its functional form, it can mean it does not have its own unique character, and it becomes soulless.

I think that there are great rewards taken from the design process of form following function, and looking for purity in every day objects. However, it cannot be taken to the point that it neglects human nature. Homes and cars are designed for people, and so fulfilling people’s needs should be the main objective in designing them. This includes psychological needs and goes beyond the purely functional.

'Howl' and 'The Job'

This week we were asked to read ‘Howl’ by Allen Ginsberg. For the first time, I decided to wait until after the lecture to write anything about it for my blog, purely because I wanted to have a better understanding of it before I wrote this.

Firstly, I’m glad I now know something about this poem, as it is an important classic, so I feel like I should know about it! It has lead me to find out more about Beat Poetry, and the 50’s and 60’s in general. It seems strange that I already knew quite a bit about the history of this era, but didn’t really think about why the changes happened the way they did. The 50’s / 60’s were full of new discoveries - space exploration being hugely influential. More and more people’s minds were thinking beyond the conventional and they were questioning and objecting to their previous generations’ ways of thinking. LSD was being used to experience new things and think outside the box. People were thinking and acting freely about sex, music and language, and these people were the children that came from the end of the second world war.

Times were changing dramatically, and this meant that the way people wrote needed to change with it. ‘Howl’ is an important poem as it stated a debate as to what was acceptable to write about, and gave new ideas to how it could be written about, it essentially expanded creativity. Ginsberg writes a continuous flow of thoughts, feelings and impressions of what he sees happening around him. He tells it like it is. His attitude to what he sees and how he writes about it was the starting point for a revolution in writing.

Briefly looking at William Burroughs in ‘The Job’, the main thing that I took from this was his idea of images and words being used as an instrument of control. He believed that to get to the origin we must scrutinise the instrument itself. This ‘suspicious’ attitude towards words lead him to use his ‘cut-up’ technique, which would undermine the power structures that control language. By rearranging the words he was given on a page, he believed that he could start to understand what the message that these words were being used for really meant. It’s an interesting idea, and a fascinating attempt to looking beyond what we all accept as truth in the way we communicate, but if words are not an accurate tool to understanding the truth, I don’t think that randomly rearranging them is the answer. To me, I think that a whole new method of communicating would be needed, but I have no idea what that could be!