Genius Loci / From the Avant-garde to the Aesthetics — from the Revolution to the Poetics (original) (raw)

L’Architecture dans le Salon: The Civic Architecture of a Projective Modernism

Mark Crinson and Claire Zimmerman, eds., Architecture from Neo-Avant-garde to Postmodern in Britain and Beyond, 2010

Criticality was an anguished debate in contemporary architecture. A classic 1974 essay on the problem, Manfredo Tafuri’s “L’Architecture dans le Boudoir,” argued that neo-avant-garde architects manipulated the empty signifiers of their art and left the world at large unchallenged. Nevertheless, my chapter argues, neo-avant-garde modernists like Alison and Peter Smithson, James Stirling, Archigram, and the Office of Metropolitan Architecture sincerely posited design as a mode of research into architecture’s relationships to an emergent modernity. Tafuri correctly warned that this postwar celebration of Futurism, Constructivism, non-Euclidean geometry, Pop art, and technology strayed, in distinction to the interwar modernism from which it grew, toward the mimesis and celebration of capitalism and its associated social relationships. But faced with the accelerating deterritorializing effects of cultural, economic, extraurban, transnational, and technological development, this "projective modernism" was nonetheless civic, reinventing the 19th-century public-sphere typologies of concert halls, libraries, museums, and transport interchanges threatened with extinction. This pragmatic, optimistic, and liberal architecture left the boudoir, then, only to be detained in the Salon.

Aestheticide: Architecture and the death of art - 1997

Journal of Aesthetic Education, 1997

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Contemporary Architecture and the Tradition of Modernism

Architecture is the most public and political of the arts, one generally encountered in a mood of digression and complicit in social control. It could even be argued that the success of the city may have less to do with its aesthetic accomplishments and more to do with the countless emergent factors taking place in such an interface as the street: thus one learns to see buildings as good when they make possible the good lives of their users, as if ethics and aesthetics have a common root. The following article traces different current approaches to avant-gardism in architecture, but relating them to the questions of progress and estrangement so central to modernism.

Preaching to the Perverted (Spaces); Perversion in Architecture - as an Art of Spatial Design

International Journal of Civil & Environmental Engineering IJCEE-IJENS, 2013

Considering architecture as a spatial art, the paper examines the nature of ongoing change in the design of architectural spaces, in accordance with the profound conversion in the nature of social existence on Earth. The study aims to tackle the issue mainly from a morphological standpoint with cross-references to sociological dimension of space. Recently, some started to believe that virtues of modernity were not capable of coping with the emerging diversity and complexity brought by new bodies, who were gradually introduced into the urban scene through democratisation. Therefore, the de(con)struction of the canons of the modernism was the only solution in order to achieve a new phase in the material evolution of humankind. Spatial reflection of such an ongoing social transformation, that is to say, a major shift from „an ideal society centrally controlled by corporate groups‟ to a much more pragmatic one with „flexibility of control systems‟ is of prime concern in this study. In other words, a paradigm shift from „rational and sensible‟ state to a „chaotic, yet, perverse‟ state of human condition, in the name of freedom, is central to the discussion of the evolution of space design. In brief, newly emerging social and corresponding spatial phenomena seem to have took over, our cultural landscape via guerrilla war tactics, and was supported by scholars, who advocated the „death of architecture‟ for the sake of proliferation of low culture. Albeit, an initiative with good intentions of integrating all parties of the community, turned out to be working against the sense of community. Hence, the very same issues of social concerns seem to have shifted from socialist rhetoric towards the hands of a more capitalist rhetoric. Therefore, the new power and her weapons should be disguised in a seducing new skin... Fluid architecture of late 90‟s was the ideal new mediatic solution... In result, values characterised by grace, coherence, consensus, durability, order, have been replaced by pride, unquestioned wealth, corruption, falsification, distortion, humour, irony, nihilism, and „in-your-face-attitude‟ of the new generation of Murat Cetin is with the Kadir Has University, Dept. of Int. Architecture, Central Campus, Cibali, 34083, Istanbul, Turkey (phone: +90-533-344-9003; fax: +90-212-533-5853; e-mail: murat.cetin0001@gmail.com). citizens. Masochistic experience of contemporary urban life, grotesque images of environment, the parasitic and violent character of architecture, yet seductive outlook of their figures have fascinated the minds of the new (yet perverted) urban population. Hence, a fluid, vague, indeterminate archi-tectonic language was becoming politically correct decor for a rapidly eroding society. In fact, this new architecture should be evaluated within the web of concepts like otherness, utopia, fantasy, media, Post-Modern popular culture, consumption, marketability, pluralism, as well as the shift in the conception of “reality and simulation”. In this study, it is argued whether architects, as spatial artists, should shift their focus from the timeless qualities, tectonic virtues and ethical principles of modernism towards transient, ephemeral imagery of this fashionable formalism, simply because, capital is shifting hand from the former-elite towards neo-elite (formerly accepted as underground, grunge, illegal, disapproved, etc.). The decision obviously constitutes a fine line between architecture and prostitution in an age of social hysteria, schizophrenia, fetish, frenzy, disintegration, fragmentation, and thus, perversion. The argument is primarily based on the question of whether new vocabulary of fantastic images is an avant-garde formal jamborine, recurrent trend or fashion-like movement, or alternatively a major breakthrough in the sociological, epistemological, hence architectural frameworks.

ARTHI 1002: Modern to Contemporary Art and Architecture

This course addresses histories of modern art and architecture through a consideration of key works produced from the mid 19th through the late 20th century. We begin with the break from academic tradition by artists in 1860s France and the new relationship between modern art and modern life evident in their work. We consider the anti-aesthetic strategies of the historical avant-gardes, which aimed to reverse modernist claims to autonomy and imagine a different relationship between art and life. In the second half of the course, we track contentions of late modernist aesthetics and the transition to postmodernism in visual art as well as architecture. Meetings are informed by readings from the textbook, supplemented with scholarly articles that present a range of critical approaches to the study of art history. Class sessions combine a lecture component and discussion, either in the classroom or in the galleries at the Art Institute of Chicago.

From avant-garde aesthetics to everyday aesthetics: two ways to resist through art

Resistance and avant-garde are the focus of this essay's analysis, to investigate the problematic and elusive meaning of art. This singular phenomenon always appears in an evasive way, resistant to being classified in a categorical manner. It may be suggested that 'the artistic' swings between social customs and certain emancipatory tendencies, which reconfigures the entire human experience. Following several clues to classify these divided results in a revision of art as a critical exercise in society and expanding its forces to non-artistic territories. Without doubt, avant-garde leads to expressive dynamics that emerge in everyday environments in the midst of contemporary life. In other words, it's a question of thinking about how aesthetics operates in everyday life, beyond Art?