Architecture and the City

Reading:

1. Deyan Sudjic, The Edifice Complex: How the Rich and Powerful Shape the World, Chapter 1 (pp. 1-17, available on the Blackboard site).
2. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity, Preface and Introduction (on Blackboard).

Opinion paper question: To what extent is Deyan Sudjic’s explanation of how architecture is produced, and who produces it, compatible with Marshall Berman’s interpretation of modernity, modernization, and modernism? Are these two readings compatible or incompatible? Why?

Sudjic, the abstract thinking grand-envisioning architect:

Top-down: The colossal egos of the powerful and wealthy determine what actually gets built and the real reasons why people build.

Berman, the mulling-Marxist of an urban intellectual:

Bottom-up:

In light of the despair, desolation, and apparent emptiness of the current landscape, the author proposes a re-examination and return to the modernism of the recent past as a way of revitalizing and transforming, an ambitious effort of socio-cultural regeneration of the present to guarantee the future:

It may turn out, then, that going back can be a way to go forward: That remembering the modernisms of the nineteenth century can give us the vision and courage to create the modernisms of the twenty-first. This act of remembering can help us bring modernism back to its roots, so that it can nourish and renew itself, to confront the adventures and dangers that lie ahead. To appropriate the modernities of yesterday can be at once a critique of the modernities of today and an act of faith in the modernities—and in the modern men and women—of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow.

These two readings are compatible in that they offer a sort of framework to see development and an individual’s place within this paradigm of ideas and dynamic world.