The Architecture of Failure

The Architecture of Failure

Douglas Murphy

Language: English

Pages: 167

ISBN: 1780990227

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub



Against those who considerarchitecture to be a wholly optimistic activity, this book shows how the history of modern architecture is inextricably tied to ideas of failure and ruin. By means of an original reading of the earliest origins of modernism, the Architecture of Failure exposes the ways in which failure has been suppressed, ignored and denied in the way we design our cities. It examines the 19th century fantasy architecture of the iron and glass exhibition palaces, strange, unprecedented, dream-like structures, almost all now lost, existing only as melancholy archive fragments; it traces the cultural legacy of these buildings through the heroics of the early 20th century, post-war radicals and recent developments, discussing related themes in art, literature, politics and philosophy. Critiquing the capitalist symbolism of the self-styled contemporary avant-garde, the book outlines a new history of contemporary architecture, and attempts to recover a radical approach to understanding what we build. Douglas Murphy blogs at http://www.youyouidiot.blogspot.com/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Greek Slave, with its subject matter of a nude chained to a post who is at once both chaste and lascivious, achieved that very Victorian mixture of the naïvely moral and the unseemly.36 Indeed, the opening of the Sydenham Palace was delayed under puritanical pressure to add plaster fig-leaves to the genitalia of the (specifically male) statuary.37 Scenes of a very peculiar quality abounded in the Sydenham Palace: extant photographs show images of marble nudes, surrounded by ivy and other unruly

the beginning of the pavilion system, with each participating country building their own exhibit. The Paris Exposition of 1937, thoroughly overshadowed by the impending war, was notable for the absence of the USA, for Picasso’s Guernica, and for the grim sight of the reactionary neoclassical German and Soviet pavilions facing off against each other in front of the Eiffel Tower. But at another level of historical significance below that, the late 19 century saw the construction of a great number

the most infamous writer of ‘Theory’.134 Making much of the semiotic drift between different contexts for the term ‘modernism’, in the 1970s Eisenman would call for a ‘post-functionalism’ for what he described as a ‘post-humanist’ society. ‘Modernism’ in his case basically meant abstraction, or a de-centering of man’s supposedly central position in the world. Although this de-centering is often ascribed to the 16 century heliocentric discoveries of Copernicus, or the 18 century transcendental

extreme; Eisenman, for example, would utilise software that mimicked brain wave patterns to design a library (Bibliothèque de L’IHUEI, 1996, unbuilt), or that simulated fluid dynamics to design a ferry terminal (Staten Island Ferry Terminal, 1997, unbuilt). This process makes sense in the way that it utilises the new digital technology to try to create a ‘new’, indeterminate form of space. However, the limitation is that the ‘new space’ remains in the computer; the product is merely a strangely

Life of the Crystal Palace, p.42. There are numerous examples of contemporary accounts of the acoustic properties of the Crystal Palaces; Musgrave quotes the Musical Times referring to the ‘fogginess and uncertainty’ of the sound of the concerts. In fact one can approximately experience this in the acoustic qualities of the railway sheds, which reverberate and muffle sound as if one were underwater. 44. This is true to a certain extent; the phonautogram, which was developed by Édouard-Léon

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