What ideology does...

... Hadid represent? Whatever it is, her recognition via the Pritzker Prize is sad news.

Comments

[Carl Jahnes]

Hmm...her ideology? Hard to tell. At the lecture I went to two weeks ago in Columbus, she showed slide afer slide of these streamlined white forms shown as objects in black void-space, telling us what they were, describing them while we scratched our provincial heads, and many students stood up and went off to more important activities. It was interesting to me to see these objects presented as if floating in a void like updated models of Buck Rogers' space vehicle without a hint of how they function, except to see what appeared in almost every slide as long and tangled sinews of concrete walkways, which looked, actually, like five carat polished plastic surfaces going on to infinity, to Heaven Itself.

I like the concluding 'admonitions' of Kimball in his New Criterion article, 'Architecture and Ideology' which you referenced here some time ago. Eisenman and Krier, I think, are just Late Modernists... and they exhibit two varying forms of the Utopian Urge of Modernism. Both of them want to use Architecture to Preach. One function of historic art is to 'convict and persuade', but to convict and persuade a post modernist dogma that existence is basically unintelligible, incommunicable, and that one can adopt a 'personal definition of Architecture' such that Kimball wonders if Eisenman is in the business of purveying Architectural Spoofs? Krier is not much better in that he belives the world has to be 'remade' into a new urbanist salvation for all of us. But the built forms get inhabited, and are slowly altered by the folks...

Hadid didn't preach at her lecture. Perhaps others have heard 'official' reasons to justify the forms...

Somewhere, maybe it was in one of Gowan's books, he has a sketch of Corbusier's white suburban 'laboratories for living' as if they are lined up in their purity on a suburban street. Another sketch showed them after 20 years of habitation and they looked like Levittown having been humanized by real folk who have slowly customized them to make them liveable and to turn them into homes. Out appear the trellisses, the gardens, the bay window additions, the shutters, the door knockers, the paint jobs, wood shingle wall coverings over stucco, (vinyl siding??).

Alexander says that Architecture is like a garden. You have to tend it every day, weed it, cultivate it, water it, and hope, some day to walk in it and enjoy its beauty.

These monstosities which media stars produce, if we are lucky, like Serra's 'wall' in New York, will be tended and incrementally repaired so that, perhaps, over time, one or two of the three principles can be renovated into them?

[Haystack]

Hmm, I'll have to double-check it, but off the top of my head I'd say she represents the flowering of Late High Obtuseness.