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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28327 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

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This is more impenetrable pomo, but I guess I'll try to respond anyway.

Not really. OOO recognises that buildings-as-real-objects fade into the background in a Heideggerian sense when they become tools,

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.

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)... Architects should become more comfortable with the vibes and ineffables, and the limited accessibility to underlying reality of objects.

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.

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.

Thoroughly endorsed, subscribing to your newsletter. Any discipline that begins to sound like graduate philosophy has a major problem.

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