history

Via Kottke.org and PSFK Philippe Starck announces that design is dead and he is retiring. Long an advocate of immaterial culture, Starck confessed to Die Zeit "I was a producer of materiality and I am ashamed of this fact." "Everything I designed was unnecessary. … design is a dreadful form of expression."

This is building toward another post that I've been hoping to make, which is to bring together my review of Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody with the MoMA Design and the Elastic Mind show. Just as we seem to have more faith in design than ever, just as design seems to be exploding, we are also faced with a culture for which design (as conventionally practiced) is simply not appropriate anymore. 

More later…developing.

An excerpt from Blue Monday:

Muzak developed during the era of Art Deco architecture and “jazzy” design. Like Art Deco, Muzak was meant to inspire office workers to move along to the increasingly fast pace of the modern corporation. Just as design and architecture evolved from Art Deco to the International Style, Muzak moved to the Stimulus Progression.

The streamlined geometry of Art Deco design attempted to mask the repetitive nature of office work with a representation of the speed and tempo of modern music. But Art Deco failed to keep its promise: fixed in architectural form, it could only represent change, and was not itself capable of changing over time. As workers grew accustomed to Art Deco, they grew bored of it, associate its forms with the overheated exuberance of the 1920s and the desperate salesmanship of the Great Depression. As International Style modern architecture spread in the postwar era, Muzak spread with it. Muzak punctuated activity on the floors of the Johnson Wax Company building, Lever House, the Seagram building, the Chase Manhattan bank building, the Pan Am building, the Sears Tower, the Apollo XI command module and countless other modernist structures. Muzak is the hidden element in every Ezra Stoller photograph of a modernist office interior. By 1950, some 50 million people heard Muzak every year.

Muzak made modernism palatable sonically. The new, hermetically sealed office buildings that the glass curtain wall and postwar air conditioning system permitted were capable of blocking out distracting sounds from outside, but without these sounds, two new conditions emerged. In some areas, office machines, building control systems, and fellow employees became more distracting while in others, you simply had too much quiet making the artificial lack of environmental sound uncomfortably noticeable. Broadcasting Muzak ensured a superior, controlled background condition.

Muzak’s slogan during this period was “Muzak fills the deadly silences.” But Muzak isn’t just invisible to the eyes, in the company’s own words, Muzak “is meant to be heard, but not listened to.” Aimed at a subliminal level, the immaterial gestures of the Stimulus Progression were neither ornamental nor representational, but rather physiological. Workers did not think about Muzak, they were programmed by it. As soon as Muzak received any requests for songs, they immediately removed them from the library. Like the Fordist worker, Muzak that drew attention to itself was deemed unsuccessful and dismissed.

By filling the deadly silences, Muzak supported modernism and made the impersonality of the Fordist management system more palatable. In bridging melody (individuality) and monotony (the abstract field), Muzak provided an element of accommodation against a background of abstraction, acting as a palliative for both the modern office and for modern architecture. Interactions between individuals that would otherwise have been uncomfortable, such as disciplinary reprimands, terminations, and general office tension could all be alleviated by its soothing background tones.

Composed almost exclusively of love songs stripped of their lyrics, the Stimulus Progression provided a gentle state of erotic arousal throughout the day. Desire, union, and disappointment could all be felt collectively, albeit subconsciously, thereby adding color to the day and blunting the impact of such emotions when real life erupted in the workplace. James Keenen, Ph.D., the Chairman of Muzak’s Board of Scientific Advisors concluded that “Muzak promotes the sharing of meaning because it massifies symbolism in which not few but all can participate.” Muzak provided the same symbolic experience as the pre-Industrial song did, but this sharing of meaning happened below the threshold of consciousness.

I watched the "Supersonic Dreams" episode of NOVA last night which recounted the history of the Concorde. I can't say that the episode was among the best episodes of NOVA or even the best thing I've seen on the Concorde, but what struck me was that the Concorde was cancelled not so much because of the July 25, 2000 crash but rather because of 9/11. Apparently the loss of forty of its most reliable customers was enough to kill the SST. In a certain sense, this after-effect meant the end of real glamour in air travel and, to some degree, the end of supermodernism as an architectural strategy. 

This got me to thinking, what other very direct effects did 9/11 have? Obviously, there was personal tragedy, something I think of as I pass the 9/11 memorial on my way back home from the train at Watchung Plaza. But this had very real economic consequences. What other strange historical effects might it have had?    

Bored of Youtube? Then try Ubuweb,which is the kind of archive of avant-garde video that you always hoped existed on the Internet but didn't, until now. I had a chance to watch a video performance by Joseph Beuys, an Yves Klein's Anthropometries of the Blue Period and Fire Paintings, and a Brief Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in time. Well, you get the drift.

I'm putting the finishing touches on the Networked Publics book, including a conclusion reflecting on the phenomenon of network culture that I've outlined here. When that's done, I'll be uploading it as well as the entire book, for comments. 2007 is a year for a number of books and certainly for me to discuss what network culture is in depth on this blog.

For now then, here's a rumination on periodization and network culture. The reviews of an earlier draft of the conclusion generally suggested that the section on periodization needed to be reworked. For now, I've excised it and edited it to stand on its own and am planning to reference this page instead. In a future version of the essay, perhaps it can make its way back in again. I suppose it does say something quite definite about our era that the readers reacted so instinctively against my discussion of periodization.

Yes, history is my discipline and therefore I have a certain bias towards such explanations, but the question of periodization was central to Jameson's essay on postmodernism. Why was it not a problem then when it is now? My hunch is that we're afraid of periodization precisely because it's so absent right now. As I say in the excised excerpt from that essay,

Although modernism and postmodernism relentlessly defined themselves, we just are. Even this decade remains nameless””?is it the 2000s? the ‘00s? Or as the BBC suggested, the “noughties”?

Our collective fear of periodization says a lot about us, and why we are not postmodern. Read on for more and please comment! The captcha system I've put in place is annoying but it takes care of all the spam that was crippling comments for so long.

The issue of the Journal of Architectural Education that George Dodds of University of Tennessee, Knoxville (and the editor elect of the journal) and I put together to mark 40 years after 1966 is online and, as luck has it, the publisher has made the contents available for free as a sample issue.

I blogged the release of the journal in February so I'll lift the announcement from that post wholesale…

This issue looks back to 1966, 40 years after Robert Stern put together the seminal 40 under 40 exhibit. An interview with Stern about the show is a highlight, as are Simon Sadler's essay "Drop City Revisited," Hadas Steiner's "Brutalism Exposed. Photography and the Zoom Wave," Mary Lou Lobsinger's "The New Urban Scale in Italy. On Aldo Rossi's L'architettura della citt?ɬ†," Stanley Mathews's "The Fun Palace as Virtual Architecture. Cedric Price and the Practices of Indeterminacy," and Peter L. Laurence's "Contradictions and Complexities. Jane Jacobs's and Robert Venturi's Complexity Theories." In the book reviews section, Andrew Ballentyne reviews Sadler's The Situationist City and Patrick Harrop reviews the CCA's The Sixties: Montreal Thinks Big.
Technorati Tags: 1966, architecture, cities, history, 1960s

At BLDGBLOG, Geoff Manaugh interviews me about AUDC, the Columbia NetLab, architecture, urbanism and other matters. See The Logistics of Distance.

Praxis 8 is now available from amazon.com.

My essay "Programming After Program: Archizoom's No Stop City" explores the history of the Italian radical architecture group as a kind of retroactive manifesto for the sort of work that I am doing these days.

The editors explain the issue theme:

"RE: programming” reflects upon the complex, ambiguous and ultimately paradoxical set of ideas denoted by the term program. The elusive definition of program is not only because of its complex history but more importantly because of its continuous redefinition in contemporary architectural practice. A broader shift in the term program, with the emergence of computer culture, has empowered architects to see what was traditionally considered a given, as something that can be reprogrammed at will.

Fortune Magazine carries an article Robert Propst and the history of the cubicle. As moves away from physical offices toward more fluid, cybernetically conceived spaces, cubicles were an evolutionary step toward the networked workplace of our own day. Along with the fascinating history of this ubiquitous part of office design, the article makes some surprising observations about the present, most notably that 26 million Americans now telecommute via broadband. The article is, unfortunately, vague about whether this mean they just check their email once a day from home or whether they don't bother going into the office at all.
Technorati Tags: cubicle culture, cybernetics, networked publics

Archinect's Yale school blogger Enrique sums up the Philip Johnson symposium in an eloquent post. Enrique mentions that the symposium left him feeling "a little creepy." Harrowing might have been the term I would have used. If it was billed as a celebration of Johnson, the symposium was far from that, by no means the kind of pre-digested conference so common in architecture schools. Much praise goes to conference organizers Emmanuel Petit and Robert Stern for not shrinking from debate in organizing the conference.

Technorati Tags: architecture, history, philip johnson