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.