9/11, how about a design actual human beings might like?

beatriz

Art Deco at Ground Zero
Five years after 9/11, how about a design actual human beings might like?
Todd Seavey | December 2006 Print Edition

When Mohammed Atta flew a plane into the World Trade Center five years ago, he was not only a terrorist striking a blow against America. He was a former architecture student striking a blow against modernism, the mid-20th-century style often characterized by geometric shapes, cold glass and steel, Louis Sullivan’s minimalist principle that “form follows function,” and Adolf Loos’ more puritanical rule that “ornament is crime.”

We’ll never know if such a thought crossed Atta’s mind in his final moments, but it wouldn’t have been the first time terrorists saw modernist architecture as a weird imperialist imposition. In 1997 Basque separatists threatened to blow up Frank Gehry’s Spanish branch of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilboa, which looks something like a giant titanium cabbage. A variety of traditionalists and leftists have criticized ostentatious, gaudy-modern sites like the Planet Hollywood restaurant bombed by Muslim terrorists in Capetown, South Africa, in 1998. Not all the critics are insane.....

continue reading: http://reason.com/news/show/116813.html
originally found at: ArchNewsNow.com

peter_j

Another sample from the article:

It would be nice if the planners of Ground Zero’s reconstruction adopted an attitude that has become more common among architects in recent years: humbly pick the style that’s “right for the job,” then adhere to it with some deference to that style’s internal, traditional rules.

It is worth noting while reading this magazine that Reason is a socially conservative and pro free market magazine that is part of the Reason Foundation, which receives a lot of its funding from industry - including annual grants from Exxon. According to George Monbiot in his new book 'Heat', Reason is partly responsible for stalling the global reaction to climate change by casting doubt where there should be none.

George Monbiot's investigations led him to conclude:

.. many of the other bodies that have been sponsored by Exxon and have sought to repudiate climate change were also funded by the [Philip Morris] tobacco company. Among them are some of the world's best-known "thinktanks": the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Hudson Institute, the Frontiers of Freedom Institute, the Reason Foundation and the Independent Institute, as well as George Mason University's Law and Economics Centre. I can't help wondering whether there is any aspect of conservative thought in the United States that has not been formed and funded by the corporations.
GUARDIAN 19.09.06

This article, an extract from the new Monbiot book, is a startling read.

Reason magazine also helped trigger the conservative reaction to the anti-sprawl movement (refer this forum thread).

beatriz

Those are important points Peter and it is interesting to note, as in many other political doctrines, that a discussion taking place on the issue of who is liberal and who is conservative – not too dissimilar to the discussions here in Australia, when M. Fraser calls himself a true liberal, as he opposes most of the most draconian liberal’s policies of the Howard government – by this, exposing the stand of the government as conservative.
“Speaking in Melbourne last night, Mr Fraser said he's considered quitting the party because he believes it's departed from the founding principles of liberalism saying it has instead become a conservative collective operating on fear.”, http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2005/s1520049.htm

In an article about Friedman, a discussion on the degree of conservatism or liberalism takes place. “Such questions are especially relevant at a time when a president who calls himself a “compassionate conservative” is widely accused by other self-described conservatives of abandoning their cause, when many conservatives are ambivalent or even happy about the Republicans’ losses in this month’s elections because they feel the party has forsaken their principles.” “Milton Friedman, Archliberal”

Whether the term used is one or the other, the end result may be similar. However, for the sake of the discussion, it is important know these distinctions, as our government assumes a “liberal” label which is once again, deceiving.

Back to the “Art Deco”, to me it just signals the above fracture – the reign of tradition v/s the reign of market, neither satisfactory in my view. However, as for the role of the conservative party in Australia, sometimes at least one is a bit more humane than the other.

I find the omissions in this article as interesting and sometimes shocking, as some of the statements, for example: “It would be nice if the planners of Ground Zero’s reconstruction adopted an attitude that has become more common among architects in recent years: humbly pick the style that’s “right for the job,” then adhere to it with some deference to that style’s internal, traditional rules. As the Chicago architect Stanley Tigerman says, we want buildings to please their users, not help architects make a philosophical point—a self-indulgent tendency in 20th-century architecture that reached its reductio ad absurdum with the “deconstructionist” architects, who deliberately designed buildings that no one would want to live in.”