For [Foster] the stuggle is between the "imagistic" (bad) and "embodiment and emplacement" (good), or between "stunned subjectivity and arrested sociality supported by spectacle" and "sensuous particularity of experience in the here-and-now"....Richard Serra emerges as a hero of the embodied and emplaced
What could be more 'embodied and emplaced' or more 'sensuously particular' than social housing - where people actually live and spend most of their time?
So why does Hal Foster devote so much of his 'anti-capitalist' energy to rarefied talk of the latest Hermes store in Tokyo or Zaha Hadid museum in Dubai, when social housing on both sides of the Atlantic is such a disgrace? Appallingly designed sink estates, squalid high-rises and (in this country in particular) 'shameful shoebox' homes for the poor have scarred people's lives over several decades now.
And yet champagne socialist academics like Foster blithely ignore this vital issue of social architecture in favour of meretricious trophy buildings, nitpicking over which starchitect or usual-suspect artist concurs with his latest ivory tower theory. It's laughable Foster sees himself on the anti-capitalist left when he ignores the really urgent themes in architecture in favour of a rarefied elitism.'' zibibbo
The proliferation of these monsterously ugly things is appalling and gives minimalism a bad name. Well so be it. And we that is the uber rich who sponsor this shit wonder why there are such groups as al Qaeda. I just watched an AJE on the Chinese government project for the borderlands near its frontier with Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Chinese are about to discover that such cultural imperialism isn`t appreciated by barbarian hordes.
I am having a great time with my old Mutuh draughting machine, designing a humble repair shop that is as accessible as possible to people in powerchairs. The whole interior is as rectillinear as possible with the work areas in the center and the tools and storage at the periphery. I've discovered that making a space accessible eats up a lot of floor space, which explains why it is constantly resisted by architects and developers.
I have a theory as to why these architectural horrors exist. AutoCAD. If you had to physically work with french curves for weeks on end, you would go insane, trying to calculate the shapes and then draw them. In a graphics program you can select two points and pull a line into a curve of any shape. So that's my theory of why buildings and cars look the way they do. Blame it on postscript.
CG