Pre-Thesis Blog — Wk. 7
This week, in preparation for the second round of presentations, I delved deeper into the well of authors, researchers, world builders, that navigate their respective mediums of envisioning future realities. During this process, I watched a PBS documentary on Ursula K. Le Guin, Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin, and found a lot of takeaways from her life experience, and literary career.
Her success as an influential writer that focused on world building, allowed the larger body of discussion around themes of gender and racial identity, alternative societies, and insightful perspectives on the human condition. It serves as a guiding example of taking the exploratory use of world building and storytelling to convey ideas to a broader public, especially at a time when to do so is to radically challenge the status quo of the culture. One of the great takeaways from the film was this statement: Imaginative fiction trains people to be aware that there are other ways to do things, and other ways to be. That there is not just one civilization and it is good and it is the way we have to be…it trains the imagination. In the documentary, Le Guin shares her feelings on art within the paradigm of capitalism. She states:
The profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.
This past week, the research has been focused on diving into the portion related to the first part of my focus (I). To return back to Cedric Price’s provocation:
Technology is the answer, but what was the question?
In architecture, an obsession with technology within the past decades, oscillated between an answer for efficiency, efficacy, novelty, innovation, uniqueness that leads to explorations that create work that signifies the authorship and transformation of communities from a singular vision. Order seems to be the name of the game. An imposition of a way of design stems from the turn of the 20th Century Modernism movement. As that developed, the radical architects that developed methods of representing assembly systems predicated on the industrial practice of mass production.
The works of Archigram, Archizoom, and Superstudio imagined megastructures that manifest themselves into the infrastructure of cities. The avant-garde movements in the 60s drew up ideas of modular components making up a city in line with the industrial process of mass production. They promoted these concepts in drawings that illustrated the awe of these kinds of city structures.
During this time, Robert Moses proposed a highway that would connect the Holland Tunnel to the Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges. This proposal was then imagined by architect Paul Rudolph, where he implemented his ideas of creating a corridor of framed apartments that were inserted within the greater structural frame. A way to integrate the infrastructure of the highway with an anchored datum of housing towers of communities that would find the existing surrounding housing razed from the construction of Moses’ highway.
An unrealized project due to the efforts of Jane Jacobs and the collection of galvanized Lower Manhattan denizens determined to preserve their existing enclaves. Decades later, a European office, JDSA, would recreate Rudolph’s plan for his envisioned megastructure. Whether or not this would have been beneficial or detrimental to the overall future of Lower Manhattan’s neighborhoods and subsequent quality of life, if Rudolph and Moses’ vision were to be built, I can only imagine the buildings being plastered with advertisement signs.
From my research, it seems as though technology ought to be utilized as a means to leverage itself for spatial justice opportunities to reexamine culture, and architecture as a political/spatial act simultaneously. Where the concepts of power and politics are framed by that act.
As Le Guin states on her views of the future and the progress of humanity:
I guess I have a long term hope, and short term terror. We don’t have to keep the door shut. We could live in a different way than we do.
