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Not really. OOO recognises that buildings-as-real-objects fade into the background in a Heideggerian sense when they become tools, i.e. the salience of their qualities is flattened to that which is relational (to the observer and the observer's use, to its constituent parts, and to the larger systems in which itself is a part). OOO questions whether it continues to be valuable for the practice of architecture to load potential buildings under a multiplicity of these relations (to zoning, environmental impact, situation within the street, ad infinitum), such that the reality of the building is obscured rather than elucidated. A building is not a 'machine for living' per corbu, it simply is in a way that is necessarily independent of the observer. The reality of the building is simply too dense to be fully described and taxonomised. Architects should become more comfortable with the vibes and ineffables, and the limited accessibility to underlying reality of objects. An invisible tool, per Harman, is a tool whose myriad qualities other than its specific utility--including and especially its aesthetic qualities--have receded from cognisance.
I have some sympathy for it, first because my time in architecture school was mostly spent within (more egological) phenomenological explorations. Second, because I think we're completely oversaturated with psychofauna in general in today's age (I recently became a parent, and it is here where this saturation is perhaps the worst of all). However, I don't much care for Harman's weird realism as a very practicable defense, and I think OOO has some unresolved boundary issues in its attempts to consider objects as real gestalten independent of their constituent parts.
This is more impenetrable pomo, but I guess I'll try to respond anyway.
Yes really - the whole point of the article is how architects can prevent their buildings from fading into the background, i.e., horror of horrors, fitting in to their environments. That's why it literally ends with endorsing Lovecraftian architecture as the wave of the future. If architects can pull off building stuff that looks disturbing and maddening, it will surely not fade away.
I don't even know what this is supposed to mean. Obviously buildings have to take into account the physical reality of the place they are built.
Reading this gives me vertigo. How did architecture become entirely centered around philosophical navel gazing? We'd all be better off if architects put down the continental philosophers and started again with firmitas, utilitas, venustas.
Again, don't you see the tension here in these two sentences?
What you've suggested here - architecture should be beautiful, architecture should serve a function - is itself a non-trivial philosophical program that must be argued for rather than assumed. Architects can't operate in the absence of philosophical commitments altogether, because this is impossible. Instead, you're asking that they adopt your own philosophical commitments without reflection. Phrased in this way, your recommendation no longer seems as manifestly self-evident.
That (important) buildings should be beautiful appears to be the consensus opinion throughout human history and across cultures wherever humans have been able to build anything more grandiose than a mud hut.
The burden is on the postmodernists to convince us that a five thousand year old architectural tradition is mistaken, not the other way around. They must prove to us that everyone had somehow missed the point until a few French and German intellectuals of the 20th century figured it all out.
So far I've found their arguments lacking.
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Thoroughly endorsed, subscribing to your newsletter. Any discipline that begins to sound like graduate philosophy has a major problem.
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