Week 1
In the first session we discussed a number of the features of the course, the syllabus, and the potential for reading Foucault in this context whose work on the problem of power, from the point of view of political philosophy is significant.
The stakes of the course are not laid out in the appropriation of theory or political philosophy per se. Rather it is to problematize space as a function of power in order to find among our own techniques for thinking space otherwise. So we discussed what possibly might be space, how we encounter it, how it exists. And of course immediately we had to consider that space is not that which pre-exists whatever happens in it. That is in fact of course a normal consideration. Maybe not even a consideration but a working feature of our everyday lives. We go into something, come out of something, open something close something, walk by something etc. We are after all spatial beings.
But we are after something else. Not the phenomenology of space consciousness, of kinetic sensation, or of extension. We are after its relation to power. And one working hypothesis at the moment, which we began to discuss, is space as an effect of power. That is, spatialization.
Foucault's work is essential in this regard. Medicine and the space of the body. Criminality and the birth of the prison and the diagram of power operative in the birth of the prison. Madness and confinement. Etc. These are essential themes throughout Foucault's research.
There is quite a bit, in the more recent history of architectural thought, that is indebted to the work of Foucault. We will get to that, and use some of it. Much of it is, in a context like this institution, completely disregarded. But same with other institutions. And in a sense there is a conservative default at political times such as these, to return to more safe features of the discipline of architecture, to wash out the political conflict in order to assert, say, an aesthetic one.
Modernism was in many ways an effort to clean the streets of the codes of conflict.
I put for our discussion in week three two images of Mies's famous glass tower project for the Friedrichstrasse competition. One year before this, Berlin was besieged by a rebellion, which took place in the streets known as Kapp Putsch. This historical moment had in fact many consequences for the destiny of Germany and the rise eventually of the Nazi party.
At MOMA it has been the preference for decades to show the first image. In fact it is unclear and unknown which he submitted to the competition. Most likely, it is the second. And most likely he developed the first later for publication.
We notice that the street has been erased.
We compare with Hilberseimer's ideal city, High Rise City, 1924
A function of modernism was the erasure of the political from architecture, of the obviousness of the political. And the insistence that design is a function of an ordered and yet free modern society (democratic, socialist) precisely because the relation between form and function seemed to suggest that design's only project was to fit the form and the function. We still insist on this in some sense today.
But the City is a place of constant conflict and turmoil. And what is architecture or urban design in relation to that?
The stakes of the course are not laid out in the appropriation of theory or political philosophy per se. Rather it is to problematize space as a function of power in order to find among our own techniques for thinking space otherwise. So we discussed what possibly might be space, how we encounter it, how it exists. And of course immediately we had to consider that space is not that which pre-exists whatever happens in it. That is in fact of course a normal consideration. Maybe not even a consideration but a working feature of our everyday lives. We go into something, come out of something, open something close something, walk by something etc. We are after all spatial beings.
But we are after something else. Not the phenomenology of space consciousness, of kinetic sensation, or of extension. We are after its relation to power. And one working hypothesis at the moment, which we began to discuss, is space as an effect of power. That is, spatialization.
Foucault's work is essential in this regard. Medicine and the space of the body. Criminality and the birth of the prison and the diagram of power operative in the birth of the prison. Madness and confinement. Etc. These are essential themes throughout Foucault's research.
There is quite a bit, in the more recent history of architectural thought, that is indebted to the work of Foucault. We will get to that, and use some of it. Much of it is, in a context like this institution, completely disregarded. But same with other institutions. And in a sense there is a conservative default at political times such as these, to return to more safe features of the discipline of architecture, to wash out the political conflict in order to assert, say, an aesthetic one.
Modernism was in many ways an effort to clean the streets of the codes of conflict.
I put for our discussion in week three two images of Mies's famous glass tower project for the Friedrichstrasse competition. One year before this, Berlin was besieged by a rebellion, which took place in the streets known as Kapp Putsch. This historical moment had in fact many consequences for the destiny of Germany and the rise eventually of the Nazi party.
At MOMA it has been the preference for decades to show the first image. In fact it is unclear and unknown which he submitted to the competition. Most likely, it is the second. And most likely he developed the first later for publication.
We notice that the street has been erased.
We compare with Hilberseimer's ideal city, High Rise City, 1924
A function of modernism was the erasure of the political from architecture, of the obviousness of the political. And the insistence that design is a function of an ordered and yet free modern society (democratic, socialist) precisely because the relation between form and function seemed to suggest that design's only project was to fit the form and the function. We still insist on this in some sense today.
But the City is a place of constant conflict and turmoil. And what is architecture or urban design in relation to that?
Comments
Post a Comment