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charpenterie · 6 years

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"High-tech never went away, though many wish it had" https://ift.tt/2qZLNXf

High-tech architecture is not on the verge of a comeback – it actually never went away, says Owen Hatherley.

Every era comes back as a revival eventually. The fact that, in 2025, semi-ironically liking Make or Will Alsop buildings will be a top edgelord position is depressing, but an inevitability that it is pointless to lament.

But not all revivals are the same. In contemporary architecture, there are major revivals of brutalism and postmodernism, with online cults, books, and a few architects designing in a manner inspired by the original. But the difference between the politicised nostalgia of one and the raised eyebrow does-it-offend-you-yeah tone of the other is glaring. But what if there are architectures that are revival-proof?

Only one important architectural ideology of the last few decades has never returned – high-tech. It never went away, though clearly many wish it had.

Few recent works by the great British masters of the genre have pleased critics much, although a few, like Grimshaw's Carbuncle Cup-winning suspension of the Cutty Sark inside an overengineered glass skirt, have infuriated them.

There is a retrospective on high-tech superstructures on now at one of Norman Foster's finest early buildings, the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich. There, the peculiar fact that these 1970s and 1980s buildings feel neither retro nor nostalgic can be explored more fully.

Few recent works by the great British masters of the genre have pleased critics much

Great glass spans, aluminium panels, ETFE and smooth steel members, services on the outside and a feeling of machine-made luxury and interchangability – it would would be odd for these totally normal features of the 21st-century built environment to provoke the sentimental feeling of distinct pastness that creates nostalgia.

If they were interested in the question at all – unlikely, as architects who have always professed to find notions of style and aesthetics to be mere distractions, and who would consider the idea of buildings eliciting emotional responses to be totally absurd – then most high-tech designers would consider this a victory. Their architecture has always just been an expression of the zeitgeist, nothing more; just 'the style of the day', as that old Hegelian Nikolaus Pevsner, used to say.

At the same time, this is the architecture that most critics and architects under 50 find most infuriating, a global, homogenising slurry of luxury flats, airports and stacked trading floors, devoid of any apparent interest in place, history or urban grain. Worst of all are the ritual arguments it forces us into, the tedious scrap where we have to accept, say, those octogenerian bad boys, the high-tech lords, on the one side, and comedy reactionaries like Quinlan Terry and Leon Krier on the other as the only options for urban architecture.

This is the architecture that most critics and architects under 50 find most infuriating

For all the interest that Richard Rogers, for instance, professes to have in historic piazzas, it is striking how high-tech architects lose the plot most when in historic environments, from the mangling of the Cutty Sark to Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners attaching a chunk of Stockley Park to the British Museum or Hopkins Architects' overbearing Portcullis House opposite Parliament. However civic they may look on the plan, in reality these have a CGI-like quality, and the buildings around may as well just be a blue screen.

There's a political dimension to this too. It's increasingly widely accepted that something was seriously lost in the denunciation and destruction of welfare state modernism, but Foster and Rogers, along with Michael and Patty Hopkins and Nicholas Grimshaw, were the first major generation of British architects to never build council housing – unless we count Foster's very early, notoriously non-functional and now-unrecognisable Bean Hill estate of tin shacks in Milton Keynes.

Rogers' bizarre but charming idea, recently expressed, that the gorgeous Eames-via-Blofeld lair he designed for his parents in Wimbledon at the end of the 1960s was "meant to solve the whole of the British housing problem", because it was made of mass-produced components, suggests that this wasn't high-tech architects' fault. This was apparently meant to be a better, smoother version of, say, the large panel systems that were used for thousands of 1960s council flats, but somehow, it never worked out that way.

This is a great example of what Douglas Murphy has described as the solutionism of a certain strain of techno-architecture, always convinced there is an architectural answer to a social, political and economic problem. But it was the zeitgeist, after all, that shifted away from state social democracy into privatisation and property-obsession. In order to get work, of course, you have to accept that, and from Rogers' urban theorising, Foster's peculiar belief that what his firm does is ecologically sustainable, to Hopkins' more-or-less successful attempts to create a high-tech classicism, it's notable that this generation haven't just accepted the status quo, but have tried to make it just a little nicer, just a bit more pleasant. Perhaps that's the real problem.

The most thrilling and enduring high-tech buildings are not tasteful

As the Sainsbury Centre exhibition reveals, the most thrilling and enduring high-tech buildings are not tasteful. Works like Hopkins' Schlumberger Laboratories in Cambridge or Grimshaw's flats and supermarket in Camden are War of the Worlds steampunk kitsch, and all the better for it, exciting and strange in a way that neither firm would be again. The most fascinating of these buildings are outright nasty. They celebrate the Zeitgeist not as an ongoing march of technology, progress and precision engineering, but as something crushing and frightening, something much bigger and more powerful than you are.

In the Centre Pompidou anything too unnerving is hidden by the jugglers, but those two monumental financial headquarters, Foster's for HSBC, and Rogers' for Lloyds of London, are modern architecture at its most daunting and sinister – made even more so by the architects' straight-faced insistence that they were merely carrying out the logic of the brief, the will of the era.

The atria aren't the calm lobbies of today, but vertiginous drops, designed to intimidate. The spiky exposed services of lifts and pipes made these buildings resemble monstrous human threshing machines, oil refineries for people. At the top were monstrous gothic skylines. All this has long since been streamlined and straightened-out, as if it had all gone too far. High-tech was interesting when it reflected the fact that the world is not a nice place, and that the people running it are not savoury. When it tried instead to be friendly, eco and civic, it just became architectural background noise, a mutely approving backdrop.

Owen Hatherley is a critic and author, focusing on architecture, politics and culture. His books include Militant Modernism (2009), A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain (2010), A New Kind of Bleak: Journeys Through Urban Britain (2012) and The Ministry of Nostalgia (2016).

Photograph is by Ken Kirkwood.

The post "High-tech never went away, though many wish it had" appeared first on Dezeen.

April 25, 2018 at 08:06PM

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ramrodd · 7 years

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Jesus Before the Gospels by Bart Ehrman | A Critique by John Warwick Mon...

COMMENTARY:

Bart Ehrman is the Ayn Rand of liberal Christian theology. There is a psychosis in operation here that President Trump just revealed relative to his on-going response to Charlottesville, The difference between Bart Ehrman and Ayn Rand is that she authentically believed that the shit she constructed was revealed wisdom, while Bart Ehrman is just a lying piece of shit who has discovered he can sell a whole lot more books saying "Hell to YOU, Jesus, and the butt-hole buddy the Holy Spirit you rode in on" than "Hallelujah" Christ is RISEN!"

At 45:16 in the video, Ehrman is recorded as saying publically that 1st Century Jews had no concept of either history or "Transcendent Truth". He is half right about history: what he means is that all history was ad hoc and particular to that writer. That's the important thing to understand: these people had no reliable way to record events and pass that understanding of those events across the ages, which means they had no history, conceptual or recorded.

Well, that's pure bullshit wrapped around the reality that our concept of history, is very Hegelian and Hegel couldn't happen until Isaac Newton happened and Kant demonstrated the epistemological significance of that as a mechenism of inquiry. Chronology, as a structure of history is identical for Tacitus and Hegel. What Hegel has that Tacitus didn't was Newton's transliteration of karma into the measurable relationship of action to reaction which has been assumed in engineering as well as history since well before the time of Tacitus, but Newton brought it forward in a useful gestalt and that gestalt transfers neatly to the forces of history Hegel pioneered and Bart Ehrman now assumes represents a unique product of the Enlightenment.

When considering the sophistry of Bart Ehrman (or Richard Carrier or Richard Dawkins or any of the purely mercenary anti-theist of that ilk), add into your calculus that the Egyptians had the social organization necessary to put men on the moon, but they didn't have Isaac Newton and Isaac Newton wouldn't have happened if the resurrection is a fraud. He, Bart Ehrman, wouldn't have this gig employing the Socratic method to trash Chritianity,

The second part of his statement at 45:16, if it was to be developed as a Freshman Thesis in a Chapel Hill history class, he'd fail the course. John 1:1 - 18 is a hymn to Jesus as the essence of Platonic Transcendent Truth. I belive the author of the Gospel of John is John Mark, son of Mary of Jerusalem, whose home tends to assume to be the venue of the Last Supper, and that John Mark was in Alexander running the manusript copyists producing the Gospels of Mark, beginning no later than 50, but probably 47 and that the Gospel of Mark was written in 40 by Cornelius, the centurion featured in Acts 10, and, beginning about the same time Paul issued his Epistle to the Romans, the Gospel of Matthew,

That's a long, confusing sentence, but work it out. The important thing is that John Mark was in Alexandria when Philo of Alexandria was a leading mid-Platonic scholar, 1700 years or so before the ne-Platonism of the Enlightenment, John Mark imported Platonic Transcendent Truth into Christianity whole cloth. Bart Ehrman is either too stupid to make the connection between Plato of the Enlightenment with the Gospel of John or his specializaation in textual criticism has produced a cultural myopia which defeats normal cross-discipline intellectual pollination the liberal arts cirriculum is specifcally designed to create (which, as a graduate of a rigid Evangelical undergraduate and masters study, is entirely probable) to the extent he was never introduced to Plato except in the "Plato: BAD!" context of Protestant apologists, generally.

Or, he's just a lying piece of shit determined to create the moral confusion most congenial to his position on the New York Times Best Seller List, which he covets above all things, especially Transcendent Truth.

I have additonal observations on this video, but that's for another day, Stay tuned.

#transformingjesus

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