Day: 20-12-2011

Drumming about drumming

Posted by

0

DRUMMING ABOUT DRUMMING

Aureli:

“The “silence” of Mies’s architecture has often been interpreted by historians and critics as reflecting and incorporating the uprooting nature of modernity while defining a critical distance from it.

He gathers a mob of writers who make this proposition about Mies: Tafuri, Cacciari, Hays, Mertins, Wallenstein. I find it completely implausible to see Mies as a critical, ironic or even subversive figure. What exactly is this ‘critical distance’ Mies maintains from modernity? Was Mies actually critical of modernity? I was reminded of this from Graham Harman:

“there are those who remain especially intrigued by artworks about art, films about filming, self-referential cabaret shows, fireworks that explode into shapes of themselves, dog biscuits in the form of dogs, and drummers who drum songs about drumming – a kind of ‘drumming at the limit.’ In each case, the supposed cleverness comes from the fact that the activity in question not only happens, but also refers to itself ‘as’ what it is. But this fashionable trend only represents the worst of metaphysics in the old-fashioned sense, since it declares self-reflexivity to be a privileged moment in the relation between the two faces of being” (p. 75).

Being critical is one possibility of architecture, but the attempt to make criticality the defining characteristic of architecture, as Aureli does, is just strange.

Designing for urban resilience in Australia

Posted by

0

DAN HILL ON DESIGNING FOR URBAN RESILIENCE IN AUSTRALIA

Great piece by Dan Hill at ArchitectureAU on the Australian Government’s National Urban Policy discussion paper, arguing that it doesn’t ask searching-enough questions to enable real change or resilience:

Without addressing these core aspects of why cities exist, or indeed a wider range of policy approaches, a national urban policy focused on the traditional tools of urban planning, architecture and urban design may work for, in Tim Williams’s words, “good times and easy places,” but is unlikely to make Australian cities resilient in the face of real challenges.

He addresses the way that cities can’t be isolated from their surroundings:

There’s also a figure-ground relationship between cities and regions and, at best, a symbiotically linked ecosystem. Paradoxically, any national urban policy should have the regions at its core, finding ways to keep flood plains, allow rivers to run freely, preserve food basin soil to strengthen food security, and replant forests to reinforce flood-mitigating topsoil and act as a fast growing natural carbon sink.

And he questions the excessive reliance on public transport schemes as urban panacea:

[W]hy move so many so far in the first place? Public transport is an easier lever to pull – at least in theory it should be – but surely a better goal is ensuring that everyday needs are met locally, within walking distance, rethinking how we co-locate housing, jobs, services and amenities.

At least the Australian government is attempting to have an overarching discussion of this kind. The Auckland Plan and the Central City Plan for rebuilding Christchurch are a start, but flawed in many of the same ways as the document Hill criticises, and limited to the parochial concerns of single cities.