Smarts
This essay from
Any Architect | De-mystifying architecture claims that today's non-mathematical architecture is making us all dumb. (Don't bother reading the whole thing, just know that it's there.) I've been noticing a disturbing trend in the architecture/blog world: there's an attraction to simplified, pattern-based, haptic, 70's Yale type ideas. Praise of shadows and quiet spaces, anti-ego-design, Chris Alexander, things like that. I'd like to think that the medium (blogs) pre-selects for this kind of person, but I don't think that's what's going on. I think there's an anti-intellectual movement growing that isn't so different from the pomo movement 25 years ago. The funny thing is, this anti-intellectualism is really anti-signature-form-making, which itself is anti-intellectual. Architecture isn't about intellectualism these days. Architects make buildings, not books (how novel). Liebskind had a chance at tying form to thought, but he threw that opportunity out the slitted 5" window.
I guess I don't care anymore. Too much theory is a drag (here's
George Baird in case you missed him), too much blob/crumpled paper/shardkitecture is boring, and resisting either is so tired.
Well, until the next recession I suppose all architecture will be mute and perhaps exuberantly shaped. Then there'll be a market crash, people will stop hiring architects for a while, and the bookstores will overflow with good old-fashioned intellectualism. Lather, rinse, repeat.
* Ray, 4/12/2005 01:57:55 PM
