From: olasov@cs.columbia.edu (Ben Olasov)
Subject: automobiles 
Followup-To: alt.architecture
Originator: olasov@ground.cs.columbia.edu
Reply-To: olasov@cs.columbia.edu (Ben)
Organization: none
Distribution: alt
Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1992 14:13:01 GMT


>> 'industrial' detailing such as exposed, finely machined rivets
>> on the surface that would be interesting and something like beautiful,
>> yet not based on an aerodynamic image.
>
>Not aerodynamic, but still completely derived from
>function/material/structure, and not from an external vocabulary.  For
>example, a hood ornament can literally express how a car is to be
>understood as a jaguar (extra-referential).  Rivets do not bring the Jeep
>into the level of metaphor or allegory.  It's still a machine.
 
The machine is one of the driving metaphors of Modernism (see Reyner
Banham's 'Architectural Design in the First Machine Age' / Corbu's
countless references to 'machines for living').  Your phrasing "It's
still a machine." seems to dismiss the machine on a conceptual level
as though what a machine is is something that's understood at every
level and insigificant.  Questionable at best, since one aspect of our
existance is that our bodies function as inconceivably complex
machines.
 
>> The cultural expectations of architecture are substantial, maybe
>> greater than that for automobiles, partially because architecture has
>> to exist by public consensus in some limited way.  Architecture is
>> specifically designed to support the things we do and reflect the
>> things we value, both of which are continuously changing.  In that
>> sense, architecture is a way of defining culture, which is why it's an
>> essential way we analyze the condition of a society at a given moment
>> in history.                        
>
>I've heard it said over and over again that architecture represents a
>culture's mores, etc, and I've never accepted it.  If anything,
>architecture represents an architect's values and fits a client's function.
>
>How is it justifiable to inflate the practice of architecture to such a
>heroic, important scale?
 
Perhaps you've spent too much time in New Haven. >#^/\ From where I
sit, architecture - some at least - is physically done at an
important, if not not heroic, scale.  Ideologically, architecture has
always been closely associated with power.
 
>Perhaps there is no such thing as being able to "represent a culture's
>values" and it is only a phrase architects have fabricated in order to
>ambush complaints of ugliness.  
 
To the extent that architecture does 'represent a culture's values',
it does so unconsciously or by accident.  I don't know of any
architects who would consider 'representing a culture's values' an
interesting or worthwhile goal.  When I wrote about architecture being
an essential way we analyze the condition of a culture, I was thinking
of it as an artifact - of the readings modern architecture will yield
when viewed as a fragment of an archeological ruin.
 
> After all, the history of architecture is
>marked by the architect's egomaniacal urge to design anew, and not to
>serve.
 
Characterizing the 'urge to design anew' as egomaniacal seems
me perverse at best.
 
 

-- 
Ben Olasov		olasov@cs.columbia.edu
Newsgroups: alt.architecture