Essay on the socially devastating and visually gorgeous.
Socially devastating, visually gorgeous, is a neat encapsulation of the main dilemma for a twenty-first century architect. This architect is assailed by two contesting pressures. On one side, he is aware that the most prominent and fashionable style of contemporary architecture promotes glamorous and glitzy designs that bewilder the eye and imagination. On the other side, he observes that such architecture betrays a distressing lack of social and cultural consciousness, and indeed exalts style over substance. The British development industry favours such contemporary architecture and with its enormous power and influence it exerts much pressure upon architects to conform to this style no matter what the social implications. Successive governments too have been complicit in this shift away from socially-minded development towards that which is outwardly stunning but inwardly barren. This dissertation then is an examination of the various pressures and influences that circle about and press upon the modern architect. It observes and analyses too the changing role of architects from ‘form-providers’ to their present status as ‘problem-solvers’.
The causes of these influences and evolutions of the architect’s role are to be found in the economic and cultural milieu of the second half of the twentieth century. Thus this essay, by an analysis of the available literature, makes an examination of the economic and social events that have led to our present world-view, and so to the particular influences upon the modern architect. These events and theories centre upon the changes to systems of capitalism and to the corresponding Marxist interpretations that have been given to them. For this, the work of scholars such as David Harvey, Manfredo Tafuri, Ira Katznelson, Frederic Jameson and others are discussed at length. The ideas of these authors lead to a discussion of postmodernism as the prevailing spirit of our age, and of…
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Tags: architect, architectural forms, Architecture, capitalism, modernism, modernist buildings, postmodern age, postmodernism
