Open Source Architecture, The Power of Collaboration

(www.worldchanging.com)

Worldchanging: Bright Green: Open Source Architecture, The Power of Collaboration

"By the middle of the century, one in three people on the planet will be living in inadequate, often illegal housing," says Cameron Sinclair, co-founder of Architecture for Humanity. "I mean, think about that! The formal architectural profession does not have anything like the capacity to meet people's needs on that scale. Worse, many of the people working in this space are unaware of each other's work. There's a vast replication of effort, not only the same successes, but the same failures. We need millions of solutions, and we need to share them all across the world."

Shadow Cities and the Urbanization of the World

Rio (www.worldchaning.com)

Worldchanging: Bright Green: Shadow Cities and the Urbanization of the World

An article by Jamais Cascio at Worldchanging

"Some numbers: today, there are approximately one billion squatters -- about 1 in 6 people on the planet; by 2030, it's estimated there will be two billion squatters, or about 1 in 4; by 2050, there could be three billion squatters, or 1 in 3. Some 200,000 people move from rural communities to urban communities every day, globally. That's around 70 million per year, or 130 every minute. Inevitably, the cities of the future will be built by squatters."

What is Kitsch? (T. Kulka)

Romanticism is outmoded, symbolism disused, surrealism has always appealed to a small elite but kitsch is everywhere. Even more pervasive and indestructible now that it is fused to a civilization based on excess consumption.   - Jacques Sternberg

"One of the questions often raised in connection with kitsch is whether it is a distinctly modern phenomena, or whether it has accompanied art throughout its history. Is kitsch historically dated, having made its appearance some hundred and fifty years ago, or is it as old as art itself?

www.corbis.com

Most of the authors who have dealt with this issue believe that kitsch is indeed a relatively recent arrival in Western culture. Although the reasons they cite in support if this claim vary, two distinct lines of argument can be discerned. The authors who focus on the sociological and sociocultural aspects of the phenomenon emphasize that the proper conditions for both the consumption and the production of kitsch did not exist prior to the modern era (Greenberg, Morreall & Loy, Calinescu). They invoke factors like the emergence of the middle class, urbanization and the influx of peasant populations to the towns, the decline of aristocracy, the disintegration of folk art and folk culture, increased literacy among the ploretariat, more time for leisure, mass production, and technological progress, as preconditions for kitsch. Thus, for example, Clement Greenberg, who sees the emergence of kitsch as more or les simultaneous with that of modernism, claims that "[k]itsch is a product of the industrial revolution" (Art and Culture 9).

Authors who are more concerned with its art-historical, stylistic, and aesthetic aspects consider kitsch to be an offspring of the Romantic movement (Dorfles, Broch). Hermann Broch, for example, maintains that "every form of kitsch... owes its existence to the specific structure of the Romanticism." He claims that Romanticism, "without being kitsch itself, is the mother of kitsch and that there are moments when the child becomes so like its mother that one cannot differentiate between them".

The two perspectives support each other, since they claim roughly the same starting point for the appearance of kitsch. This stance seems to be further strengthened by the fact that the term kitsch has nowhere been recorded before the second half of the nineteenth century.

Yet there are dissenters. Arthur Koestler, for example, maintains that when Petronius in his Supper of Trimalchio describes the bad taste of the newly established class of the merchants, he is clearly referring to kitsch. A similar claim is made by Susan Sontag about Cervantes, who makes fun of seventeenth-century chivalric romances. Others maintain that the small Hellenistic painted statues that were produced in large quantities mainly for export, as well as many of the objects in Pompeii, can be seen as examples of kitsch from the distant past.

[...] Kitsch as we know it cannot be divorce from the socio-economic conditions described by those who see this phenomenon as a product of industrial revolution. It also seems true that of all artistic movements it is the Romantic movement that created the most fertile grounds for kitsch. One can hardly deny that Romanticism, with its emphasis on dramatic effects, pathos, and overall sentimentality, displays intrinsic affinities with kitsch. It seems also plausible to claim that since the term kitsch is relatively new, there was probably no acute need for its use in early times. Yet, the denial of the existence of kitsch prior to the nineteenth century seems too strong."

Kulka, Thomas (2002 [1996]) Kitsch and Art. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press.

Plastic Flowers Are Almost All Right (A. L. Huxtable) III

Part II

From Learning from Las Vegaswww.decoratingtheduck.com

"They [the Venturis] have a gift for that kind of outrage. Not content to score the "personalized essay in civic monumentality," they add the ultimate insult, "It's a bore." With more-than-candour, they point out that the renunciation of decoration has led the modern architect to so manipulate his "structural" forms that the entire building becomes a decoration. Then, with less-than-innocence, they draw an analogy between the building as decoration and symbol and the building in the shape of a duck or the highway. Furious, architects reply that the Parthenon is a duck, too.

The Venturis design "ducks" and "decorated sheds". To them, Main Street "is almost all right." So is history, and it is not surprising that mannerism suits them best. They accord the dumb and ordinary, the full seventeenth.century treatment. Piling paradox on paradox, they combine the obvious and the arcane. You can peel off the layers of meaning. Call it pop mannerism.

Guild House, a perfectly dumb and ordinary, and incidentally, very satisfactory, apartment house for the elderly in Philadelphia, is a mannerist exercises that uses blatant façadism and a perverse assortment of details that sets other architects' teeth on edge. Like all Venturi and Rauch buildings, it is intensely personal, idiosyncratic, and arbitrary, done in an intelligent but totally unsettling way. It is meant to make the educated viewer look twice, to see why the ordinary is extraordinary. Because never doubt it for a moment, the Venturis are determined to make it so.

The results are undeniably extraordinary, and many qualified judges think they are perfectly awful. I have a kind of love-hate relationship with Venturi designs, more for their ideological input, their profound comments on our culture, their intense and often angry wit, their consummate one-upmanship, than for their architectural quality. Yes, I am avoiding the issue of quality.

I suspect that the conscious application of theory always produces noble experiments and abysmal failures. If theory is valid, it usually leads to something else. The ultimate irony is that the cost of building today is making the dumb and ordinary inevitable. The prophecy is self-fulfilling. But this work is eye-opening and catalytic, and if response is complex and contradictory, so are the Venturis, and life and art.

New York Times, October 10, 1971."

Huxtable, Ada Louise (1971) "Plastic Flowers Are Almost All Right". En: Huxtable, Ada Louise (2008) On Architecture. Collected Reflections on a Century of Change. New York: Walker & Company.

Plastic Flowers Are Almost All Right (A. L. Huxtable) II

Part I

"Now that the "environment" has been rediscovered, it seems that the architect has never been there. Its mixed bag is not his bag at all. And because its mix is exactly what society is made of, the architect is looking more and more like a mastodon than a saviour.

Which brings us back to the Venturis. The Venturis tell us that "the world can't wait for the architect to build his utopia, and the architect's concern ought not to be with what it ought to be but with what it is - and with how to help improve it now. This is a humbler role for architects than the modern movement has wanted to accept."

To play this role, the Venturis suggest that the architect meet the environment on its own terms, because it is there. And because it is there we might study it, including the despised highway strip and the subdivision, to see what works and why. Their two eyebrow-raising studies in this vein, done as studios exercises with Yale architecture students, are called "Learning from Las Vegas" and "Learning from Levittown."

I will co clearly on the record by saying that I think these studies are brilliant. There are the inevitable blind spots of the totally committed; the fast buck has shaped the scene as much as real need. The big sign often means the big deal. There are false values behind the false fronts. But complexity and paradox are the stuff of which the Venturis are made.

www.arcspace.com

Their insight and analysis, reasoned back through the history of style and symbolism and forward to the recognition of a new kind of building that responds directly to speed, mobility, the superhighway, and changing lifestyles, is the kind of art history and theory that is rarely produced. The rapid evolution of modern architecture from Le Corbusier to Brazil to Miami to the roadside motel in a brief forty-year span, with all of the behavioural aesthetics involved, is something neither architect nor historian has deigned to notice. All that has been offered by either are diatribes against the end product.

The Venturis see much of pop art in this pop scene, and they admire both. This admiration extends to the full range of expediency and mediocrity with which America has housed and serviced itself while the architect looked the other way or for "enlightened" clients. The Venturis vie with each other in the acceptance of the commonplace. And because these are cheap and practical answers, they suggest we use them.

They use them. But with such and educated filtering to suit their own subtle and ironic "pop" tastes that perversity and paradox are the name of the game. When one outraged architect called their work "dumb and ordinary," they said that in a way he had exactly gotten the point and adopted the phrase themselves."

Part III

Huxtable, Ada Louise (1971) "Plastic Flowers Are Almost All Right". En: Huxtable, Ada Louise (2008) On Architecture. Collected Reflections on a Century of Change. New York: Walker & Company.

Plastic Flowers Are Almost All Right (A. L. Huxtable) I

observatory.designobserver.com

"I don't know if critics are allowed to be ambivalent. We're supposed to have the answers. I am about to express some personal feelings and guarded opinions about the work and theory of Venturi and Rauch that are in large part favourable, due to my conditioning as an architectural historian.

First, I really can't see the uproar the Venturis are creating. The fuss that greeted Robert Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (Museum of Modern Art and Graham Foundation, 1966), the article "Learning from las Vegas" with Denise Scott Brown, now his wife (Architectural Forum, March 1968), and is currently being repeated for the Venturi and Rauch exhibition in the Whitney Museum (through October 31) is probably due to three things.

Almost everything that the Venturis have to say is heresy, if you have been brought up as a true believer in modern architectural doctrine as formulated in the early part of this century. Everything Venturi and Rauch designs is a slap in the face of the true believers. And to use irony or wit in the pursuit of either theory or design - as a tool to shock awareness or as a comment on the cultural condition - is the unforgivable sin.

Architects will tell you this is not so - that they are just appalled by the Venturi brand of design. But then why go into such rage? There is a lot of work around that people don't like. The answer is that architects do not build the way accountants add up figures; through education and inclination they design from a set of strong philosophical and aesthetic convictions, a polemical position, that has the highest place in their scheme of essential beliefs. Attack that, and you've got a religious war.

As a historian, I don't believe in religious wars. What is despised today was enshrined yesterday or will be tomorrow. I believe not only in complexity and contradiction but also in continuity and change. I do not share a good part of the modernist dogma of the modern architects whose work I admire most, at the same time that I recognise and respect its place in the development of modern architectural history. An I think the dogma of the recent past, in the light of the problems of the present, is doing the others in.

The modern architect is a hero figure who sets his buildings in shining isolation. He sees his job as showing a benighted populace, by terribly limited example, how "rational" and "tasteful" things should be. In this antienvironmental, antihistorical stance taught by the modern movement, the architect has become the man clients often cannot get a direct answer from because he is too busy being heroic and original, or the mand contractors double their estimates for to take care of the problems of unconventional construction to serve those heroic and original designs."

Part II

Huxtable, Ada Louise (1971) "Plastic Flowers Are Almost All Right". En: Huxtable, Ada Louise (2008) On Architecture. Collected Reflections on a Century of Change. New York: Walker & Company.

Informality: Spontaneous Process in Dwelling, the Lima Case

Lecture at the College of Design, Iowa State University.
Thursday, April 12th.

"The phenomena related to the rapid growth of cities, often linked to massive internal migrations, have a profound impact on many aspects of the established structure. Urban boundaries are blurred, and infrastructure and services (e.g. transportation and housing) frequently can't keep pace with the needs of emerging areas.

Throughout the world, citizens respond by "building their own city," using whatever materials and resources might be at hand. New environments appear gradually growing from the requirements of the inhabitants. As their budgets allow, families add sections to their homes."

Open publication - Free publishing - More architecture

Kitsch (C. Dreifuss)

According to Moles, the word kitsch has German origins and appears in Munich around 1860. “Kitschen means to mess and, particularly, to make new furniture with old ones, it is a well known expression; verkitschen means cheating, selling a thing in lieu of than what had been agreed.” (Moles, 1972, pág. 10). Other definitions also mention a possible origin in the Anglo-Saxon word sketch, a simple and cheap drawing that often mimics a true picture of much greater value (Dorfles, 1969 [1968]; Crick, 1983). 

A common feature of all the possible origins of the word kitsch is the pejorative connotation of the term. The fact that the term is recent also indicates that the phenomenon itself is not very old. While fraud and imitation products probably existed throughout the history of mankind, there are certain peculiarities of kitsch phenomenon that distinguish it from a simple forgery. 

Firstly, there is its modern character: just as mass art, kitsch is possible only in an industrialized society, capable of rapidly producing replicas in a significant amount and, therefore, reducing costs production. It is no coincidence that many times kitsch is equated with the avant-garde or some of the phenomena clearly linked to modernity (Greenberg, 1965 [1939]; Calinescu, 1995). Meanwhile, the existence of kitsch implies the existence of a society willing to consume it, formed by what Broch calls Kitsch-Menschen or Kitsch-men (Broch, 1966 [1950]). There are groups aiming to be entertained, and which not necessarily have access either to the original sources of so called educated art, or - in many cases - to the training needed to like them. They will prefer the copy already processed, cheap and understandable that satisfies this need for entertainment, in a way both economically and culturally assailable. 

Abraham Moles will single out five principles that, in a unified way, but more often put together, define the characteristics of kitsch, both as an object and as an event. 

(1) The principle of inadequacy, which has to do with an existing deviation “in relation to its nominal target, deviation in relation to the function which is supposed to fulfill, in the case of a product [...] deviation in relation to realism in the case of any figurative art.” (Moles, 1972, pág. 71). Under this principle, an object is placed simultaneously right and wrong: it may be an alteration of proportions, a change in the materials used, the use of the object in a singular context, the relative independence between object and function, etc. 

(2) The accumulation, that is to say, to collect with a sort of frenzy to ever more. It has to do with the horror of the void, with giving more than one function to one object, to combine in one space objects from diverse backgrounds. 

(3) The synesthetic perception, understood as stimuli to the greatest possible number of sensory channels simultaneously. This aspect, closely related to the accumulation, has to do with promoting aesthetic experiences that fully capture the consumer's attention by the assault on his or her senses, with a certain theatricality and deployment of resources; often kitsch is based on the technology to achieve this effect in its production. 

(4) Being average; even if there is a vast quantity of resources in place, it stops midway of becoming new, opposing to avant-garde and remaining essentially an art of mass. (Moles, 1972, pág. 75). 

(5) The perceived need to generate comfort, Gemütlichkeit, through all these forms than seek to easy acceptance, and that to achieve this, cast away from his speech any form of conflict, tension or difficulty, even if it means moving away from the real world. 

Beyond these five principles, we can identify other characteristics typical of kitsch, such as the will of imitation: the essentials of a work of art or kitsch event for those who consume it is not only in its formal characteristics but and above all in that to which it is hope through the copy. That's why Calinescu (Calinescu, 1995, pág. 229) argues that kitsch can be defined as specifically aesthetic form of lying. 

This desire of imitation turns into alienation, another essential characteristic of kitsch (also related to the principle of inadequacy), which “manifests itself as a sum of global changes in attitudes.” (Moles, 1972, pág. 40) It is not that kitsch objects that require this alienation, but the mode of appropriation and use of these objects can become alienating to the user in reference to the group to which he or she belongs. 

One of the most criticized aspects of kitsch refers to a sort of shallowness in awakening emotions. The scenes presented tend to introduce simple emotions, linked to a kind of romanticism that idealizes the happy ending or, in any case, that clings to sentimentality. 

Returning to the idea of kitsch as a product of modernity and industrialization, Calinescu sees in it a triumphant demonstration of ethics and aesthetics of consumerism. At the same time, its occurrence and distribution is invariably a sign of modernity so obvious “that one could take the presence of kitsch in countries of the 'second' and 'third' world as an unmistakable sign of 'modernization'.” (Calinescu, 1995 , p. 226) Clearly this circuit of production and consumption drives away from other type of user of kitsch, who is often both manufacturer and consumer, in a way close enough to craft production, which provides an aesthetic relationship with the object produced. This consumer does not view the object, event or experience as kitsch, but often reaches the point of comparing its qualities with those of high art that has no access.

References

Broch, H. (1966 [1950]). Notes on the Problem of Kitsch. In G. Dorfles, Kitsch, the World of Bad Taste. New York: Bell Publishing Company.

Calinescu, M. (1995). Five Faces of Modernity. Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodern. Durham: Duke University Press.

Crick, P. (1983). Kitsch. British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 23, No. 1 , 48-52.

Dorfles, G. (1969 [1968]). Kitsch. The World of Bad Taste. New York: Bell Publishing Company.

Greenberg, C. (1965 [1939]). Avant-Garde and Kitsch. In C. Greenberg, Art and Culture. Critical Essays (pp. 3-21). Boston: Beacon Press.

Moles, A. (1972). O Kitsch. Sao Paulo: Perspectiva.

From L'estetica (del huachafo) nell'architettura contemporanea a Lima. PhD thesis at Università degli Studi di Roma, La Sapienza. June 2011.

McDonald's

Kitschy McDonald's at Chicago Navy Pier

Harold Washington Library (Hammond, Beeby & Babka)

The Harold Washington Library Center is the central library for the Chicago Public Library System. It is named for former Mayor Harold Washington. It is located just south of the Loop 'L', at 400 S. State Street in Chicago. [...] It is approximately 70,294 m2.

The building was designed by the architectural firm of Hammond, Beeby and Babka, now known as Hammond Beeby Rupert Ainge, Inc., winners of a design competition held in 1987 to replace the old central library, which had been housed in the present Chicago Cultural Center.

More, even more

Kitsch (M. Sturken)

"The term "kitsch" emerged in the mid-nineteenth century in Germany as a description of an aesthetic that was seen as banal, trite, predictable, and in bad taste (Calinescu). Thus, the original meanings of the term defines is as an outcome of mass culture and situated kitsch in relation to the emergent mass production of modern culture (MacDonald). The world itself is derived from the German verkitschen, meaning "to cheapen"; Herman Broch's pivotal 1933 essay on kitsch negatively referred to those who relish kitsch as "kitschmensch" or "kitsch men". Kitsch is often associated with cheapness in terms of cost and production, as well as the idea that such cheap things are without any cultural refinement or taste. Mass production is a key component in this definition of kitsch, since these objects have no relationship to craftsmanship. Yet, a kitsch aesthetic is hardly restricted to cheap, mass-produced object. Matei Calinescu notes that many objects that constitute kitsch, while they may be inexpensive, are intended to suggest richness in the form of imitation fold and silver, and that luxury goods can often be seen as kitsch in style. Similarly, high-end design can often engage in a kitsch form of sentimentality.

Kitsch was thus initially associated with a set of social factors that accompanied modernity: the rise of mass culture, the sense of alienation that accompanied the shift to industrialization and urbanization, and the widespread commodification of daily life. Calinescu writes that kitsch "has a lot to do with the modern illusion that beauty can be bought and sold" and that "the desire to escape from adverse or simply dull reality is perhaps the main reason for the wide appeal of kitsch." This sense of easy formular and predictable emotional registers which form a kind og escapism is essential to most definitions of kitsch.

Debates abour kitsch in the context of modernity have often focused on distinctions between high and low culture and between art and mass culture. Clement Greenberg famous 1939 essay, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," set up a clear contrast between kitsch and art: "Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and fake sensations... Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times. Kitsch pretends to demand nothing of its customers except their money - not even their time." It is not incidental to this critique of kitsch as innocent and naïve taste that kitsch is an important aesthetic for children's cultures. Thus, the cute cultures of children's aesthetics form a continuum with the cute cultures of adult kitsch."

Sturken, Marita (2007) Tourists of History. Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero. Durham: Duke University Press. p 19.

Beauty