LSBU Critical Reading 2017 - James Pinkney

The day before my 19 th birthday, in the long thin final monuments to modernism that made up the studios of England’s most northern school of Architecture, I was perched on a table surrounded by peers yet unknown. The event marked the beginning of the end for any hope I had of living the life of a fully functioning normal member of society. The glass was shattered, or maybe more it was the initial first effort required to move lock mechanism allowing the gates to begin to be prized open. Addressing a room of fresh faced, architecturally innocent and naïve first year students, the head of the faculty of the built environment welcomed us with words which have come to haunt and follow me ever since. “Architecture is a disease! It may take time, but eventually throughout studying it, you will catch it and there is no cure for it.” Nervous laughter rippled through out the room. Ha! What a fantastic line. But obviously it’s just buildings, right? The knowing smirk across the face to...

The context in which Rendell began to explore what ‘doing’ Architecture really means cannot be ignored. At the end of the 1990s, as my earliest memories begin to form, Architecture was even more male dominated than it is today. A profession which in a practical sense had barely changed since the 1960s was beginning to finally enter the information age in earnest as only now was the CAD and modelling systems which are relied on so heavily in today’s society becoming common place. So with a strong feminist movement beginning to rise on the back of ‘Girlpower’ in popular culture (although more and more so this movement is being critiqued into todays media), and maybe more importantly the rise of the most revered female architect, Zaha Hadid, we have the young Jane Rendell comes forward with a radical set of ideas for a profession only just starting to invite change. Rendell’s concept of ‘doing’ architecture, un-doing architecture and then maybe more interestingly the reaction and inter...

Speed. Speed. Quicker, faster. Speed. Speed. Destroy and progress. Mesphisto’s guide to modernity, or as Berman suggests, a guide to the modern capitalism. The crux of Berman’s exploration of Goethe’s Faust with regards to modernity. In the first of the three elements of Goethe’s Faust, Berman discusses Faust’s recovery from suicidal despair. How the bells of the church returned the happiness of childhood. Exploring the concept from an architectural perspective, is this a manifestation of the need to carry on copying the traditions. A barrier to modernity? As a part of psychological study, in the early 20 th century Sigmund Freud famously was exploring how childhood experiences affect decision making in later life. So is this why many people still hark back for ‘traditional’ architecture? The safety of the childhood memories physically manifesting itself in the style of one’s choice of dwelling (Cost dependant). If we follow the allegory of Goethe’s Faust further, the re-joining...