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Grad school: The Obfuscation
Sep. 27th, 2011 12:07 pmI don't know if you've ever had the opportunity to read a Marxian perspective on Architecture, but a word of advice: DON'T.
For fun, I read through one of the husband's assigned readings. GOOD GRIEF.
This is one of the more readable portions:
"It has often been observed that the emblematic significance of architecture today, and also its formal originality, lies in its immediacy to the social, in the ‘seam it shares with the economic’: and this is a rather different immediacy than even that experienced by other expensive art forms, such as cinema and theatre, which are certainly also dependent on investments. But this very immediacy presents theoretical dangers, which are actually themselves fairly well-known. It does not seem preposterous to assert, for example, that land speculation and the new demand for increased construction opens a space in which a new architectural style can emerge: but, to use the time-honoured epithet, it equally seems ‘reductive’ to explain the new style in terms of the new kinds of investment. It is said that this kind of reductionism fails to respect the specificity, the autonomy or semi-autonomy, of the aesthetic level and its intrinsic dynamics."
For fun, I read through one of the husband's assigned readings. GOOD GRIEF.
This is one of the more readable portions:
"It has often been observed that the emblematic significance of architecture today, and also its formal originality, lies in its immediacy to the social, in the ‘seam it shares with the economic’: and this is a rather different immediacy than even that experienced by other expensive art forms, such as cinema and theatre, which are certainly also dependent on investments. But this very immediacy presents theoretical dangers, which are actually themselves fairly well-known. It does not seem preposterous to assert, for example, that land speculation and the new demand for increased construction opens a space in which a new architectural style can emerge: but, to use the time-honoured epithet, it equally seems ‘reductive’ to explain the new style in terms of the new kinds of investment. It is said that this kind of reductionism fails to respect the specificity, the autonomy or semi-autonomy, of the aesthetic level and its intrinsic dynamics."
