Jane Rendell: doing it, (un)doing it, (over)doing it yourself - Rhetorics of Architectural Abuse

Jane Rendell: doing it, (un)doing it, (over)doing it yourself

Rhetorics of Architectural Abuse

In this week’s chapter: Rhetorics of Architectural Abuse, Jane Rendall describes to the reader the doing, (un)doing and doing-it-yourself, of architecture.

To explain these three practices: we start with the “doing”, Rendell describes the “doing” of architecture as a utopian act of creation with simply no fuss or mess. Happening almost by magic the architect simply creates as if by accident.

Secondly, the “(un)doing)” of architecture is portrayed as subversive acts towards the building, for example the improper use of spaces once they have been created, or somehow using these spaces and forms of a building inappropriately.

Thirdly the act of “overdoing it” or “doing-it-yourself” is described as the time post-completion of a building and the time more specifically of when it is being used, occupied or enjoyed. It is during this time that the re-use, re-purposing, modifying, altering, decaying, destruction and general swaying from the original building’s ideologies occurs.

Rendell describes her experiences of her somewhat unconventional living arrangements, for example Rendell quotes:

“In my home the boundaries which control and contain public and private activities were intentionally blurred and transgressed. The bath sat in the centre of the room space. The roof space was bedroom, workroom and living room, and many other places all at once. From the bath you could look up into the sky, and down into the toilet, or directly onto the stove, beyond it to those eating at the table, and further through the window into the street. The beauty of lying in the bath and being able to talk to the person lying in the bed next to you, or downstairs to the person preparing food in the kitchen, showed to me the importance of rethinking the kinds of divisions of spaces which we so readily accept.”

 The reader receives an impression that Rendell has some issues with the way in which architecture has been taught to her, feeling as if she has been taught the wrong way, to obey the conventional.

Although it may be extreme, one has to admire her re-interpretation and reuse of spaces, it is interesting to imagine how spaces can be repurposed and explored in different ways from the conventional.

Mathew Crawford: The Case for Working with your Hands

Mathew Crawford: The Case for Working with Your Hands

The Separation of Thinking from Doing

In this chapter Mathew Crawford explains the purge of traditional skills in the early 1900’s with the introduction of the assembly line, the separation of the planning from the execution, and the large scale change across industry to a more fragmented approach to manufacturing with particular regards to Henry Ford’s motor car company as a catalyst to this assembly line process.

Crawford goes on to explain how this change has not only affected manufacturing and physical jobs, but also white collar and service sectors. Crawford explains how, although there is an “eagerness to end shop class & get every warm body into college, thence into a cubicle” white collar professions are also subject to the same routinizations and degradations that hit manual fabrication a hundred years ago. 

Crawford goes on to explain that the professional jobs are also being afflicted with the same processes to divide up tasks and hand over knowledgeable activities to an ever shrinking group of elite workers at the top, and use more and more administrative clerks and assistants to complete these processes, “transferring the knowledge, skill and decision making from employee to employer”.

Crawford rather eloquently compares this to how “computers are transforming the office of the future to the factory of the past”.

Crawford finishes this discussion by asking “What is it that we really want for a young person when we give them vocational advice?” and concludes that the only credible answer as seen by him, is one that “avoids utopianism while keeping an eye on the human good: work that engages the human capacity as fully as possible” perhaps indicating that a young person trying to decide on what career path to take, should pursue one of which might fully engage and challenge them as much as possible, and not for them to end up as a another cog in the corporate machine. 

Crawford concludes his thoughts by stating that this “humane and commonsensical answer goes against the central imperative of capitalism, which assiduously partitions thinking from doing”... a rather thought provoking statement. 

Paul Mason: Post Capitalism A Guide to our Future

Paul Mason: Postcapitalism - A Guide to our Future

Chapter 9: The Rational Case for Panic

This first part of this chapter discusses the direct correlation between economics (or more specifically “the market”) and climate change.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or from here on referred to as the IPCC (an organization working with the support of the United Nations) has stated in their fifth report (published in 2013) that the planet is unequivocally warming. Furthermore, the IPCC is confident that this is primarily caused by human beings using carbon to fuel economic growth.

For the past four years, even though the world has not agreed on a method for preventing dangerous climate change, the world has agreed on a target of reducing global warming to an average temperature of 2°C (3.6°F) above the pre-industrial level.

In Paul Mason’s book: Postcapitalism: a Guide to our Future, he reports that to remain under the two-degree global warming target “we – as a global population – must burn no more than 886 billion tonnes of carbon between the years 2000 and 2049 (according to the International Energy Agency). But the global oil and gas companies have declared the existence of 2.8 trillion tonnes of carbon reserves, and their shares are valued as if those reserves are burnable.”

Mason goes on to explain that with the huge amount of money invested in fossil fuels by private companies and corporations, it is not in our current interests, or rather the “Global Elite’s” interests to decrease our dependency on these limited resources. He arrives at this conclusion by suggesting that if people actually believed we would be reducing the amount of carbon we are burning, and achieve the 2 degrees’ target, the stock market valuation for the top 200 carbon burners would not accumulate to an astronomical $4 trillion in total.

Furthermore, Mason reports that in January 2014, John Aston the British Government’s special representative on Climate Change quoted “the market left to itself will not reconfigure the energy system and transform the economy within a generation”.

Mason suggest that with the energy industry owned by private corporations, no real change is going to be accomplished, or certainly not enough to meet our Climate Change initiatives.

Rowan Moore on Patrick Schumacher

Rowan Moore on Patrick Schumacher

Rowan Moore is an Architecture Critic for the Observer Newspaper, in September 2016 he published an article on Patrick Schumacher, director of Zaha Hadid Architects and alumni of London South Bank University.

In the article Rowan Schumacher is portrayed as an Architect who is Pro Capitalism, and a Brexit supporter who loves the idea of escaping the “paralysing embrace of the EU’s interventionist regulatory overreach”. Schumacher is also portrayed as unapologetic for working for various Dictators, attacking a list of “moralising critics” of whom Rowan Moore considers himself to be one of.

In the article Moore gives some background to Schumacher, born in 1961 Schumacher started working with Zaha Hadid in 1988, and rose to become her “right hand man” continuing working with her up until her death earlier this year. Now Schumacher has taken control of the 400-strong practice and continues as the lead figure in their design across the world.

Schumacher is a strong believer in Parametricism, best described as “a way of designing buildings in such a way that every element can change in response to the multiple parameters – the way people might move through it, for example, the frequency of encounter, their dwell times – to which it is subjected. It exploits the ability of computers both to process complex information and to conceive complex architectural shapes”.

This idea that you feed every single piece of data imaginable into a computer to process your building is a divisive notion, as opposed to the intuitive judgements upon which architecture usually relies upon. Schumacher sees Parametricism as architectural style of capitalism, who believes in free enterprise as the best means to the “human development of prosperity and freedom”.