Session Nine: Marshall McLuhan

This week I'm going to try something different.We are going to deflect ourselves for one week only from 'readings' to 'browsings' in the spirit of Marshall McLuhan. You are asked to browse YouTube for material on McLuhan's 'media is the message' (even clips from 'Annie Hall'), Reyner Banham's love of Los Angeles and William Burrough's paranoia. Spend about an hour doing doing this, and select your favourite clip so that when we discuss this arena further in the class, you can contribute by saying 'look at this!' 
I tried it this morning and it was amazing how much interrelated material came up, from Norman Mailer ranting about Clinton's 'sexgate' to Hunter S Thompson interviewing Keith Richards. I started somewhere, but I ended up somewhere else that was somehow in the same field.

Our aim is to:

a) get some kind of grip on what the hell Marshall McLuhan was talking about
and
b) ask the poignant question 'what if he's right?'

I suspect this is an ever more important task for our age, since knowledge seems to be changing. The world of Colin Rowe seems light years away. The most paranoid see the objective is to abolish thinking altogether!

Hint for Dissertation Nine:

This is a highly pertinent topic, since the mode of production of architecture has changed so quickly over the space of one generation (mine!) It is important that if you take on such an issue of current interest, it is backed up by historical enquiry, otherwise it just becomes musing and speculation.

Session Eight: Colin Rowe

Colin Rowe managed to shift opinion entirely on Le Corbusier in the essay 'Mathematics of the Ideal Villa' first published in 1947. He went on to shift it further with the book Collage City in the mid seventies. Firstly Rowe recognised certain historic references within Le Corbusier's formalism that seemed almost antique, and hence established him within a tradition, then secondly, in ditching Le Corbusier's urban theories as simply wrong, he allowed a reversal toward contextualism. In short, whilst valuing Le Corbusier the architect, he allowed you to go back and live in the Cotswolds.

You are asked to read 'Mathematics of the Ideal Villa'. You can brush up on his overall importance by reading my Reputations piece on Rowe in the Architectural Review.

Hint for Dissertation No 8:

It's a fact that we have never (at least not over the last twenty years) had a dissertation that has looked at Colin Rowe's work in particular. This remains an opportunity. However the idealisation of the countryside that we read in the Roman poet Virgil is presently a subject for a dissertation by Bryan Strom.

Session Seven: Evelyn Waugh

This novel, set in the roaring twenties in Britain, is a parody of England's class ridden society. The architect, Professor Silenus, is (of course) and emigre from Eastern Europe where things are far more progressive. You are asked to read Part Two of the story, but Silenus reappears at the end, almost enjoying the last laugh. Given the progressive, perhaps utopian, nature of modernism it is illuminating to read Waugh's witty scorn that implies that here really things will ever be the same, and to understand his view of modernism written for laughs. 

Notes for Dissertation Seven:

At first it looked a tough call to see this piece of satire as a vehicle for a dissertation, except when I realised that writing askance at the world of architects is exactly what I do myself on a regular basis for Reputations in the Architectural Review. 
There are generally two ways to assess any piece of architectural production, one considering it's significance within the canon of the subject, and one a view from outside. For instance, from inside the canon, Peter Eisenman's embrace of deconstruction as a philosophy is simply an event with certain consequences, but viewed in another way it is a demonstration of the need for the architect to mythologise themselves in the context of late capitalist development; having nothing to to do with provision for use at all. The insiders view suggests it gets discussed, the outsiders view suggests it might be damned.

Session Six: Beatriz Colomina and Jane Rendell

Perhaps I should call this reading 'Post- Structuralist Feminism' or maybe just 'Women Writers' but both sound unfortunately inadequate. We shall at least approach the subject broadly, with two texts for you to choose between; Jane Rendell's chapter in Occupying Architecture (1998) 'doing it, (un) doing it, (over) doing it yourself- Rhetorics of Architectural Abuse' and Beatriz Colomina's 'The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism' from Sexuality and Space (1992). I suggest both mark a time when our pre-occupations rather shifted from making architecture to interpreting it, from production to consumption, aside from any feminist debate.

Above is that canonical picture of Carolyn Butterworth licking the Barcelona Pavillion in 1992, first published (to my knowledge) in Occupying Architecture.

I am keen to periodise these pieces within some concept of the history of the recent past, one where I cannot extricate myself from the proceedings. The current debate may well have moved on somewhere else entirely; represented in the publication of 'A Gendered Profession' (RIBA publications) published last year.

Students intrigued by this reading might like to look at my blog: Architecture & Other Habits Too, where two consecutive posts, 'Serendipity' and 'Reading Between the Lines' concern themselves in some way with the texts by Jane Rendell and Beatriz Colomina respectively.

Notes for Dissertation 6:

I waved a copy of Chris Jeffcoate's excellent dissertation at this weeks session, titled 'Mies was from Mars; Women are from Venus'. It looked at Mies's personal life from the perspective of relationships as they appear to stand today; a place of relative equality, a physical place somewhere in Essex, with jobs that pay the mortgage and so on. This proves an excellent antidote to the 'heroism' or Faustian imperative demonstrated in Reading 5.

Notice

Please note there is no session for the Full-Time cohort this Friday 3rd November. Please use the time to read Berman's piece on Faust and generally catch up. I will be covering Faust and the readings for Session Six (since they go well together) the following week.

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.