Session 5: Marshall Berman

This reading is the three chapters on the story of Faust by Goethe, as retold by Marshall Berman in what has become a standard text on (as it says on the cover) 'the experience of modernity'.
It is a slightly longer reading than previously, and is downloadable via your booklist on moodle. It is important to register the three sections; dreamer, lover and developer which are Berman's interpretation of the great work by Goethe which took him pretty much all his life to write, and that encompassed pretty much everything he saw on the horizon whilst he was writing it! There is also an epilogue to those three sections you might want to look at too.

Notes for Dissertation 5: 

Only this morning I was helping a student with his plan of work for his dissertation, his subject being the notion of 'community' in a Welsh mining town, and of course I found myself referring him back to the session on Faust, where development comes under such clear scrutiny. My conclusion was that 'community' was not so much 'created' (as 'desire' might have it today) as in actuality 'pressed'. Understanding this would seem, indeed, critical.

Session Four: Dave Hickey

For this session I have decided to lighten the tone by asking you to read 'A Home in the Neon', one of the essays collected in this volume, Air Guitar which dates from the mid nineties. It presents a contrasting view in extolling the virtues of a city few people would want to stay in for more than a few days. Hearing Hickey lecture on the phoniness of Santa Fee against the 'authenticity' of Las Vegas was a huge relief to me back in the day, moreover the quality of his writing is exceptional.

To write well, it tends to be the case that you have to read well, and this is the second aspect you should appreciate in this essay.

Lesson for Dissertation No 4:

We looked at the context for Dave Hickey's refreshing style of writing; coming out of the 'New Journalism' (which in turn came out of the Beatnik culture of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Karouac) of Tom Wolfe, Hunter S Thompson and so on in an era where it became cool to right seriously about popular culture, and where many of the assumptions of cultural stratification (highbrow/lowbrow) were questioned within media outside the control of either the education system (stuffy universities) or government (outdated & corrupt politicians; see Nixon). Dave Hickey's piece 'Magazine Writer' in Air Guitar sums it up, but if you dip in to a second volume of his essays Pirates and Farmers this experience is made all the more vivid, as he reflects back with age and in candour.

We discussed if their might be a similar tradition is British culture (Punk, the NME, Julie Birchill, Toby Young, later YBAs and so on) and where this attitude might have gone.

There has been a consistent interest in the electric/wired nomad within dissertations, either by exploring further the cross cultural themes of the fifties and sixties that could easily dissolve architecture into amplification and cities in to fields for three day pop festivals. Whilst a second trajectory is to enjoy the possible revelations of the road trip yourself. The second is harder, and demands, dare I say it, practiced writing skills to complete with any degree of satisfaction, along with that candour Hickey summons himself.

Whilst the writers mentioned here are predominantly male, it is by no means the case that this field is gender specific. 

Session Three: Matthew Crawford

The chapter this week is 'The Separation of Thinking from Doing' in this book, apparently something that has even found it's way on to the desk of the Minister for Work and Pensions. Whilst a review in the Guardian was wary about some of it's small time, small 'r' republican values, this text brings us to a consideration of the world of 'work' far more tangible than the world of information exchange as predicated by Paul Mason.

Many architectural students enjoy the idea of 'materiality' way beyond their ability to control material. Does this matter?

Lesson for Dissertation No3:

Last year one student tackled the issues brought up in this session directly and successfully in his dissertation, by comparing and contrasting the work processes of Gehry and Hadid amongst others, and attempting a hypothesis of his own.

To illustrate how we might go about this, I discussed the column designs of Mies van de Rohe both in terms of their design and fabrication:

I then discussed the development in section of the designs of Frank Gehry, from Vitra to Vuitton, demonstrating the a sequence that runs from structure to skin to sail. Thinking about this sequence in terms of a transition from 'use value' to 'exchange value' seemed appropriate.

Session Two: Paul Mason

Here we will discuss Paul Mason's book Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future, and you are asked to read the chapter 'The Rational Reason to Panic'. 

You should be familiar with who Paul Mason is (he was economics editor of Channel 4) but given last week's reading, this can hardly be guaranteed, but perhaps you've looked his stuff up on YouTube.

The book is a good one. It sets out a dramatic need for change and the tangles we need to get out of. The challenges (and they are all linked) are:

1.     Debt

2.     Lack of Profit

3.     Aging population

4.     Disparity of wealth

5.     Climate Change

We could add microtechnologies or biotechnologies (as Slavoj Zizek does in Living in the End of Times) but Mason doesn’t. He has faith in these new technologies as a positive force that will escape by their very nature the forces of monopoly capitalism (Google/Apple etc) that are presently artificially constricting them. In the future, according to Mason, more stuff will be free and more work will be shared, and moreover everybody will get an automatic universal living wage so that they can afford to do this. 

If there is a glaring problem for architects in this analysis, it is that Mason doesn’t seem to consider the quality or materiality of things very much. It’s all very well to be able to exchange a recipe for monkfish free on the web, but it’s another thing getting hold of the fish, and to my mind, you can’t eat a recipe. Architects, when thinking about a house, know that it has to be built, their problem is where and for who and of what and by who and for how much (if everything isn’t free). It’s a material not a digital problem. Mason is constructing his thought around a process of ephemeralisation that so far has always worked against the sensibilities of the architect, or for that matter, chef.

Lesson for Dissertation No 2:

Since this text is quite dense, discussing processes that architectural students are rarely familiar with, I decided it would be a good idea to consider Mason's ideas only after we were sure we were familiar with the processes of capitalism itself before jumping to it's imminent demise. In doing this we highlighted some overall pressures and trajectories caused by the process of capitalism. Some of these, especially the overall squeeze on profit, were anticipated by Marx (although this is still debated). We can pin-point events in our everyday lives even now; the difficulties of running a second hand book shop in the age of eBay for instance. 

What Mason suggests is that it is technology itself that will render capitalism obsolete, that our own ingenuity will undermine it's capacity to function effectively. Popular opinion might render this as the 'death of the book', but my own reading of it would be eBay's squeeze on the marketplace. 

If we were to ask how many students of architecture have pondered such issues profit and long term sustainability of the architectural practice in a dissertation, the initial answer would be a big fat zero. However, there is precisely such interest in critique of traditional methods across the global south (the fate of nomadic tribes for instance) and of the architectural education system itself, that both subjects might fall in to this category. Also, the fate of the physical library, the high street and the marketplace, are all highly pertinent topics that can be elucidated by historical enquiry.