06 August 2008

Manufacturing Consent

In a follow-up to some posts last month about this subject. An editorial by Robert Adam, for those interested in the debate about modern architecture vs traditionalism:

The justification for anti-traditionalism is that if you’re going to be “of your time”, “for today” or “for the future”, you have to be very obviously different. This is, of course, nonsense. The future isn’t fixed, it’s what we want to make it. Being different is often billed as innovation – generally a good thing in an industrialised consumer society. But this muddles up innovation in industry, which is technical, with innovation in aesthetics, which is just taste.

2 comments:

VisuaLingual said...

But this muddles up innovation in industry, which is technical, with innovation in aesthetics, which is just taste.

Doesn't that argument depend on where you draw the boundaries between "industry" and "aesthetics" and, indeed, whether you draw a distinction at all? The author distinguished the two as "technical" versus "taste," but I just don't see that as being true. To me, the two are always intertwined in some way and, in fact, I prefer to see some trace of "industry" in the "aesthetic" end result; it helps me make sense of what surrounds me.

CityKin said...

I don't think he is against display of the structure or clear distinction of the technical parts so that the technology is understandable. He is against innovation for the sake of being different aka Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas. He may be against the "machine aesthetic" (I think he is) but that is not his argument here.