This is an archive. The forum is not taking new registrations or allowing new discussion, despite what the buttons might suggest.
The Work of Architecture in the Age of Commodification
This is an important essay not to be missed. We would appreciate your comments on Kenneth Frampton views:
Regeneration Number 23, Fall 2005/Winter 2006
On Cultural Politics:
The Work of Architecture in the Age of Commodification
by Kenneth Frampton
Find this essay at: Harvard Design Magazine - http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/research/publications/hdm/current/23_Frampton.html
Regeneration Number 23, Fall 2005/Winter 2006
On Cultural Politics:
The Work of Architecture in the Age of Commodification
by Kenneth Frampton
Despite over half a century of psycho-sociological research, the formation of identity at both an individual and a group level, along with the artificial stimulation of desire, jointly remain among the more opaque aspects of Anglo-American culture, particularly in view of the disturbing fact that in the 2000 presidential election less than half of eligible U.S. voters actually voted and that a large number of those that did vote then and in 2004 gave their support to candidates whose policies run counter to their class interests. While hints of this depoliticized malaise are latent in almost every contribution to this volume, there is nonetheless a tendency to avoid any reference to the benighted socialist alternative, as though this political option is so discredited by history and the triumph of the market as to be irrelevant.
(....)
How may one offset this globalized closure becomes a question not only for architectural practice but also for all the multifarious schools of architecture and urbanism. At this juncture one can hardly emphasize enough how the substance of political process needs to be articulated within the field, both pedagogically and otherwise, not only in relation to the big politics of large-scale environmental policy, to be argued for agonistically in the public realm, but also in the small politics of psycho-social well-being and sustainability as these factors may be incorporated at a micro-scale into environmental design. On the one hand, then, political consciousness, in the broadest sense, ought to be as much part of design education as any other component in an architectural curriculum; on the other hand, it is necessary to maintain an ethical dimension in the culture of design itself. This last surely corresponds to that which Morris Berman in his book The Twilight of American Culture has called the monastic option. It is this that is implicitly advanced by Poynor as a strategy by which to transcend the spectacle of neo-avant-gardist kitsch (quasi-radical in form but nihilistic in content), and through this to re-embrace the resistant capacity of critical culture.
(....)
Find this essay at: Harvard Design Magazine - http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/research/publications/hdm/current/23_Frampton.html
Howdy, Stranger!