- Le Corbusier, Vers une architecture (1923)
A hundred times I've looked at the Lloyd's building,an insurance company headquarters, and I've thought its a catastrophe. But fifty times I've thought it is a serious masterpiece, even with all its sinister late-capitalist implication. It seems that capital gained so much hubris pre-crisis that it stopped pretending to be doing anything, and gave itself to the renderworld of non-euclidean shapes. Unearthly buildings that say nothing about function for people doing an infinite amount of fake work. An aesthetic fraud for criminal frauds.
High-tech architecture at least says, we are doing good work like our blue collar forebears! They cast molten metal here, they built ships here. We are doing important money work!
But it simply became WE ARE SO BEYOND YOU PATHETIC MORTALS. YOU CANNOT STOP US, WE CONTROL YOUR GOVERNMENT. YOU MUST DO WHAT WE SAY. It was all very Wizard of Oz -esque.
Capitalism is eating itself, and on the brink of devouring itself into nothingness. It's screaming in agony as it is twisted beyond rational forms. Perfect for the designs of Zaha Hadid or Frank Gehry.
Once we smash it to pieces, we can have something better, something that is hopeful for the future while being attractive and functional in real terms. Not kitsch nostalgia, something that yearns for a better future while functioning perfectly for the present.
Thanks for reading my words. Discuss a thing
Edited by big_dean_caves ()
noavbazzer posted:
the lovecraftian school of architecture
yeah. unfortunately not properly cthonic, in any sense. our culture can only produce idolatry
germanjoey posted:
is... is that beached cruise ship in that second picture?? someone better throw some martinis on it quick - it'll die if it gets too dry!
its a Zaha Hadid crapterpiece. she makes really cool paintings sometimes
but mostly she just sticks her render blobs in the capitals of the oil bubble
babyfinland posted:
this is dumb
i dont think so dude. i think anyone who doesn't like modernism is an enemy of the people. buildings can be such an important part of your class that people want to tear them down just because poor people like them.
this is especially true in britain when most buildings post-war were in the brutalist style. and then low income housing in the brutalist style was targeted by every print media as a place where rapists and mad scientists live.
crime is caused by living in the same building as someone else! give everyone a chimney!
The lloyds building is like the single best postmodern building in the world. It's a grinning monument to the destruction of british industry by the banking kings. It's like how when a predator is endangered people fall all over themselves to venerate it and wear t shirts with it on them, like wolves before that was an ironic childhood nostalgia thing, and lions all over asia. The scary dirty force of industry and the blood chilling idea of unionized lower class people gettting what they want from the state has been defeated. Let's build a big marble silhouette of a factory and their children can come by and weep and thank us for our generosity in building of the monument.
The other render garbage postmodernist buildings all say, look at us, we have the money, we have the power. And what we do is so futuristic and complex that you could never understand it. Of course the roof leaks and the claimed environmental features don't work but those were just to fool the rubes on the building commission anyway.
When you look back at the architecture of the most leftist forward thinking places, there's a huge absence of this kind of dick waving, and a complete opposite philosophical background. They made buildings for better people, for a better world. It assumed that the best was ahead and was made to have lots of utility and inspire people to exist in the future.
Of course those buildings are being torn down as fast as possible now that the counterrevolution is complete, its gross as hell. Like that eyesore of the month guy fucking hates modernist buildings but I don't think anyone with half a mind could say the barclay brothers brecqhou castle and not be completely disgusted
and as for like contemporary capitalist architecture, it's sort of ceased to exist at a certain point. american houses are alll made by builders as cheaply as possible, it's all fucking ugly and it's all going to rot and collapse because of the corners cut in its making, really convenient metaphor for everything
We're saying the same thing reeallllyyy
Edited by Myfanwy ()
Tsargon posted:
n-not suburban America's ruin value. . .
Um, if you don't like nice buildings and leaving a legacy of good usable spaces to your children maybe you should move to the maghreb and let the shifting sands of time grind your body to dust. Like all of industrial america left behind plenty of cute victorian and other houses made of bricks and stuff that were happy to last as long as european houses. But literally because of people like you and the guys who invented vinyl siding all americans have to live in little stick huts made of tar and plastic. That's why there are so many problems, that's why youre a noob
animedad posted:
So ive been wondering how the term “postmodernism” is used in architecture, as opposed to its relation to authenticity in literature and such? Like are these non-functional monstrosities structurally equivalent to bourgeois “cleverness” in literature where the most important attribute is the wink and the nod? Mebbe I just talked myself into an understanding…
*My Opinion* is that all those terms are used due to some lack of imagination and to build a narrative, however they don't really relate to one another in each field or genre except perhaps (sometimes) chronologically, which is more a coincidence or symptom of cross-genre exchange than anything else (i.e. art and literature).
Myfanwy posted:Tsargon posted:
n-not suburban America's ruin value. . .Um, if you don't like nice buildings and leaving a legacy of good usable spaces to your children maybe you should move to the maghreb and let the shifting sands of time grind your body to dust. Like all of industrial america left behind plenty of cute victorian and other houses made of bricks and stuff that were happy to last as long as european houses. But literally because of people like you and the guys who invented vinyl siding all americans have to live in little stick huts made of tar and plastic. That's why there are so many problems, that's why youre a noob
for 10 thousand years everyone built their house out of untreated timber and mud, theres no reason to expect, or want, normal type people to leave Monuments To Their Existence across the landscape.
babyfinland posted:animedad posted:
So ive been wondering how the term “postmodernism” is used in architecture, as opposed to its relation to authenticity in literature and such? Like are these non-functional monstrosities structurally equivalent to bourgeois “cleverness” in literature where the most important attribute is the wink and the nod? Mebbe I just talked myself into an understanding…*My Opinion* is that all those terms are used due to some lack of imagination and to build a narrative, however they don't really relate to one another in each field or genre except perhaps (sometimes) chronologically, which is more a coincidence or symptom of cross-genre exchange than anything else (i.e. art and literature).
ya. it's all very confusing, which is why im trying to clarify what the OP means exactly
animedad posted:
So ive been wondering how the term “postmodernism” is used in architecture, as opposed to its relation to authenticity in literature and such? Like are these non-functional monstrosities structurally equivalent to bourgeois “cleverness” in literature where the most important attribute is the wink and the nod? Mebbe I just talked myself into an understanding…
aesthetically, postmodern architecture is very much a reaction against the modernists' rigid formalism, so you see buildings with deliberate ornamentation or references to historical or vernacular styles. there's also a greater tendency to analyse the needs and behaviour of the building's inhabitants/users, which is also evident in contemporary urban planning after the rejection of the vision of Le Corbusier et al.
I think that the parallels are very clear when comparing various fields, I also think that's it pretty clear that the aesthetic and philosophical influences of certain fields immediately effect others causing a chronological correlation.
It's basically thus:
1. Classical - A strict adherence to formal rules and conventions, furthermore, the belief that beauty\truth only emerge through the adherence to the rules. That which does not conform, whether dissonant intervals or 'heathen philosophies', is automatically rejected.
2. Modern - The realization that the current framework is sometimes arbitrary, feeling that some rules and conventions are counterproductive and attempting to re imagine the system by trying to exceed its limitations.
3. Post-Modern - rejecting the very legitimacy of a framework, drawing elements for various competing framework to create a new individual framework. A shift in view from "the framework allows the creation\exploration of beauty and meaning" to "the framework, through its limitations, dictates the meaning, through the rejection of the framework we can create new meanings, new beauty"
fart