Conclusion

You are asked to add one more concluding blog to your series of eleven. This last blog is an opportunity for you to sum up what you have learnt, and possibly see the links between the different texts. You are allowed to acknowledge your favourites and those which proved more elusive to comprehension. There is no secret code to break, no magic secret, no mystical link, but it should be obvious to you that certain themes connect the  texts; hopefully providing a roadmap for your own critical thinking.
Some of these themes you might like to pursue further in your dissertation, which we shall begin to discuss next semester.


The image above was taken in Cardiff recently, and certainly caused Julie and I to pause for thought. In the present political context I view it as hopeful!


Blog Submission: You are asked to print out your twelve blogs as hard copy in reverse order to the way they appear on the screen; starting with your first blog and ending with your summing up just as you would in a book. Bind your submission to A4 and submit one copy to the Faculty Office on the 3rd Floor of the Tower Block. Use one of the submission forms provided outside the office, and make sure it's marked clearly for my attention.

Date for Submission: First thing before studio teaching Monday 9th January 2017.

Session Eleven: The Epic (Pt2)

You will be relieved that this week you do not have a reading task, you simply have to come along to the session and enjoy (?!) a speedy rendering of Ayn Rand's book The Fountainhead as a movie. You should note that the tone here, that of the triumph of the individual, is markedly different to that of Dos Passos. You should also note that the publication of both book and release of the film bracket the period when McCarthyism was prevalent across the USA; when previous allies became mortal enemies, and the 'red menace' had to be stopped in it's tracks.

My own opinions on the Roark phenomenon are articulated in the Reputations feature in the December 2013 edition of Architectural Review. Go to architecturalreview.com and it's an easy search once you sign up (for free).

Session Ten: The Epic (Pt 1)

The last two 'texts' are in many ways the opposite of each other, but they share the same epic quality, and the same doorstop level in size. It is impossible to make a reading of the whole book 'USA', it will be slightly easier to abbreviate the film 'The Fountainhead'. Part of this book's epic quality is to try and do everything; in turn novel, newsreel, snapshot and biography, merging fact and fiction; in short it tries to be 'the Great American Novel'. I've selected certain sections.  

The first section I would like you to read/research/google is the chapter 'The Bitter Drink' (pg 806) a portrait of the thinker Thorstein Veblen, author of 'Theory of the Leisure Class'(1899). 

The second his portrait of Frank Lloyd Wright in the chapter 'Architect' (pg1076).

The third his portrait of Henry Ford in the chapter 'Tin Lizzie' (pg769).

These are all sections of the same, relatively short and concise, 'biographical' type.

The intension is to lodge this book in your mind for future reference. You never know when you might need reference to it, especially given the way the America it describes has developed over the last century. Certainly if Dos Passos was writing today, there would be a chapter on 'Trump'.

Session Nine: Parody

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. 

Session Eight: Colin Rowe

In this reading we will discuss the work of historian and postmodern theorist Colin Rowe. We have jumped over the Faustian imperative in Le Corbusier for a moment, and will study, in particular, Rowe's essay 'Mathematics of the Ideal Villa' (1947) and take a glance at his essay 'La Tourette' contained in the volume 'Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays'.

I wrote about Rowe for Reputations in the Architectural Review in the August edition 2015. I suggest you read it; it's easily downloadable on-line, then focus on the 1947 text.

Hint:

It is a good idea not to read too much Rowe in one go and to read it carefully. This will be especially difficult to do in class. I suggest you read MOTIV in two parts, and you will become aware of the great fastidiousness of the argument, as well as perhaps thinking it almost too good to be true!

Session Seven: The Production of Space

This reading is the chapter 'Social Space' pages 68-80. This material should be downloadable via your booklist on moodle (hopefully the Paul Mason chapter 'The Rational Reason for Panic' and Marshall Berman on Faust are also available this way- let me know if there is a bug in the system).
This reading involves materialist interrogation of words and their meanings, and in that interrogation (not a pleasant word but an appropriate one) we begin to read ideologies that lie hidden beneath appearances. Take the word 'home'. The media is rife with the screaming need for 'homes', but the word 'home' has particular connotations. Really what can only be provided is 'houses' or perhaps 'accommodations'. 'Homes' smacks of advertising.
I read this segment each year and whilst it's a bit of a struggle I always get something more out of it. In particular the difference between 'work' and 'product' talked through here. This should shine some light on discussions you no doubt find yourself having all the time about the value of technology (or for that matter the value of human labour) highly pertinent to the world in general, let alone architectural production.
If English is your second language, you may find this stuff even more difficult, but feel for the translator who had to convert it from the original French! In your reading, when the going gets tough, I would recommend searching 'short cuts' via the web to get some background on how to situate Lefebvre, and the best background of all, if you are stuck with the idea of Lefebvre's Marxism in the first place, is to read Marxism for Beginners, a cheap cartoon book by Ruis which is an invaluable springboard.

Session Six: Counterculture

Having looked at the faustian imperative and seen how we might see it mirrored in the life and career in that great believer in organisation and the new tomorrow, Le Corbusier, it's time to look at reactions against the actual consequence; the military industrial complex. You are asked to read the poem above, readily downloadable, from the father (if you like) of the Beatniks, whilst I will complement this reading with discussion of sixties counterculturalists William Burroughs, Marshall McLuhan, and the literary figure Norman Mailer, who was mentioned by Berman in the context of that curious attempt to levitate the Pentagon.

Session Five: The Tragedy of Development

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.

Session Four: Feminism

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, and should be represented in the publication of 'A Gendered Profession' under the wing of the RIBA publications, to be launched at the RCA on 8th November this 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.

Session Three: Matthew Crawford: The Case for Working with Your Hands

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 predicted by Paul Mason or the consumerist Spectacle offered by Patrik Schumacher. 

It is very clear that for many architectural students notions of the value of 'materiality' surpass their knowledge of material. Does this matter?

Session Two: Paul Mason on Postcapitalism

This week's text is the chapter 'The Rational Reason to Panic' from Paul Mason's book above.

Paul Mason’s book, Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future, 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.

What a post capitalist world might look like in terms architecture is a matter of speculation; it's the stuff of the design studio, and Mason isn't particularly good at dealing with material things rather than information exchange, but the reason for looking at this text is that at least it immediately introduces an alternative to the views of Patrik Schumacher covered in the first session. In combination, they provide us with almost solid ground from which to move backwards.

Session One: Rowan Moore on Patrik Schumacher

It's easy to Google this article recently published in the Guardian. Make sure you have read it before this first session where we will go through it.

In this course we start from today and work steadily backwards; it is an education in itself to see how passionately ideas are picked up and then discarded in support of the architectural project. By 'the architectural project' I mean some overarching imperative that comes to the fore to prop up what is basically a 'soft' subject: Architecture viv-a-vis Building. Eventually, having some awareness of these shifting historical parameters will probably colour your opinion of Schumacher's advocacy of parametricism itself. We shall see.

Patrik is one of our alumni, I have very good friends who taught him, and I remember his muttering away to my predecessor on the subject of fractals all the way through an external examiners dinner some time in the later nineties. Rowan Moore I would count as a friend, at least on Facebook, and because he kindly commissioned me (during that same period) to write for his book Vertigo: The Strange New World of The Contemporary City (1999) on the subject of Las Vegas.

I'm not going to go over the issues we might discover here in advance of the session, lets see how that develops organically (!)

Welcome!

This blog is designed to assist students through the first component (Critical Readings) of the Critical Thinking module of the PGDip/MA Architecture programme at LSBU. This component runs through the first semester, and demands each student set up their own blog to parallel this one, blogging each week their analysis of the given text. This is best done after the classroom session, where the critical issues will be made clear.

Check your timetable (via MY LSBU) regularly for room location because these can sometimes change.