Date: Fri, 21 Mar 1997 10:28:48 +1100 (EST)
Subject: M-TH: Architecture and Hunger


davidmbr-AT-sprynet.com wrote:
But if one is oppressed by the sheer fact of buildings being built by
anyone aside from a dull government bureaucrat, psychotherapy might be in
order.  Let's be a little less existentially "oppressed" by the means of
human survival and by any sight whatever of prosperity and well-being.


Well lets just forsake critical practice in total, lets be middle class
liberals, lets slip the shades on and be happy. David seems puzzled as to
how a building can be oppressive "regardless of whether the owner and his
partners actually go around oppressing anybody". Don't you find prisons
both symbolically and aesthetically oppressive. Bentham's Panoptica is a
design for oppression yet he himself may not have been guilty of
"oppressing anybody". A Calcutta slum oppresses in its own right and does
not necessarily require the indictment of its owner and designer. The
Manhatten high-rise apartment symbolises, celebrates and naturalises
inequity as well as "prosperity". It is a text that is both utopic and
ideologically functional.






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