Architecture in the Age of Uncertainty

In the past two decades, as economic bubbles inflated, architectural spending around the globe reached a fever pitch. In both well-established centers of capital accumulation and far-flung locales heretofore seldom uttered in the same breath as the name of any Pritzker Prize winner, audacious building projects sprang up like mushrooms after a good rain. At the same time, the skyscraper, heretofore more commonly associated with the hurly-burly of American capitalism seemed only a few years ago as if it might pack up and move permanently from Chicago and New York and settle instead in Dubai and Shanghai.

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take the 1 hr. gray matter(s) class

we’re teaming up with professor benjy flower for a 1 hour class this semester. please read below and sign up soon as we are limited the enrollment.

SKYSCRAPER

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press, Skyscraper: The Politics and Power of Building New York City in the Twentieth Century is a close consideration of the building type synonymous with a city’s skyline. If this book is anything like his classes, Professor Flowers (through his keen eye and equally sharp wit) is able to create an urban context which sets the stage for insightful, close analysis.

The book “explores the role of culture and ideology in shaping the construction of skyscrapers and the way wealth and power have operated to reshape the urban landscape. Flowers narrates this modern tale by closely examining the creation and reception of three significant sites: the Empire State Building, the Seagram Building, and the World Trade Center. He demonstrates how architects and their clients employed a diverse range of modernist styles to engage with and influence broader cultural themes in American society: immigration, the Cold War, and the rise of American global capitalism.”

-(quote from his gatech page)

Get it now. Get it here.

Learn more about BF.

bandaging the knife

Jospeph Beuys, the enigmatic German artist and possible inveterate liar, once said (and I loosely paraphrase): “when you cut your hand, bandage the knife.” As anyone who has spent time with me can attest, this aphorism is one I return to often when discussing architecture.

Much of what we encounter in our daily maneuvers through the urban landscape seems an effort to bandage not the wounds inflicted on our buildings and cities, but instead some terrified effort to hide the source of those wounds. We wrap an abandoned (but pleasantly proportioned) building in a winding sheet advertising cut-rate hotel space found just past the off-ramp of any anonymous freeway; thus the blight we suppose abandoned structures inflicts upon us can be avoided. At the domestic scale we build ever-larger kitchens outfitted for battle in Viking and Vulcan, and hope this means the shed we inhabit is a home. We impose on our buildings the obligation of assuaging our collective (and often unstated) anxieties. This is not a lament. After all, these conditions make for fascinating reading of the cityscape. A building’s failures can be just as illuminating as its successes, just as every lie tells a bit of truth about that which we attempt to elide.

There is, however, the question of what might develop if we stopped bandaging the knife, and instead focused our gaze and attention to our many and varied wounds.