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Notes -
On Communist Supervillains, Cognitive Dissonance, and IQ.
1 . Communist Supervillains.
Somewhere on the motte I found a link to a 1983 Harvard debate between architects Christopher Alexander and Peter Eisenman. The debate was shocking not only for its content, but for its clarity and its age. It made me do some thinking about communism, cognitive dissonance and IQ. Hence this post.
Alexander and Eisenman are/were eminent architects and professors of architecture. In the debate, Alexander explains his philosophy of architecture. Alexander focuses on harmony. He explains how important it is for the building to accomplish its purpose, for the persons who use the building to literally feel comfortable in whatever that purpose might be. Alexander also explains his process (iteration and full-scale mock up) of achieving that harmony. If the purpose of a square is to provide students a place to relax and feel free from distraction, the square must actually create that mental state. There must be harmony between these things.
Eisenman is a deconstructivist (socialist). Eisenman views the creation of disharmony as a moral imperative. Eisenman explains that architecture is meant to make people psychologically (and sometimes physically) uncomfortable. Buildings must literally impose psychic harm and pain on the people who view and use the building, or it has failed its purpose. An architect has a moral imperative to create such pain among the populous.
This is real supervillain shit. Eisenman is an influential architect, part of a whole school of architecture, who spends his time, and his students time, and untold sums of money, refining their skill at creating buildings that are mathematically ugly, disharmonious, and cause psychological pain to those who view and occupy them. And he explains all of this in absolutely clear and calm language.
Now, for students of socialism, Eisenman's outlook is not noteworthy. Socialists of all stripes are notorious for compulsively committing their thoughts and plans to paper or speeches. However, for me, the Alexander v Eisenman debate highlights the absence of public backlash. At least, not enough to prevent them from making such buildings.
You would think that if an architect responded to a city's call for plans for a new middle school building and said 'my plan is to create this building, which I believe will maximize the amount of discomfort and pain felt by anyone who gazes upon or enters it,' that his plan would be immediately rejected and that he would probably suffer some sort of social consequences. Apparently, that is not the case. Apparently, you can successfully make that pitch without much trouble.
How is that possible?
2 . IQ
My first hypothesis is that a sufficient number of persons are literally incapable of comprehending these words and ideas, even when spoken plainly and directly. However, I am not familiar enough with the IQ literature to validate this hypothesis.
I am familiar with the basics of literacy levels. As you can see, the levels come with clear examples, and explain what a person at a given level can or cannot understand. If Eisenman's statements were written, then we could plug them into the levels, and determine who would understand.
However, I am interested in who could understand Eisenman's plain statements regardless of medium (written, spoken, etc.). What IQ would be necessary to understand the statement 'I am an architect. I build buildings that harm your mind.'? Does anyone have a source which equates IQ scores with conceptual understanding in a manner similar to the literacy levels?
3. Cognitive Dissonance
My second hypothesis is that sufficiently many people do understand what's going on when they encounter socialists like Eisenman extolling their plans to do evil, but that a majority of those people with an IQ sufficient to understand in theory, are in fact blinded by cognitive dissonance. That is to say, most people's minds will not let them take seriously the idea that whole departments of people believe that turning buildings into psychic weapons is a moral imperative. Even when the evil doers state their intentions plainly and have a decades (millennia) long history of success.
Edit: Adding a comment I made downthread. I rest my case.
@sansampersamp is an architect. Let's see what he has to say about 'where architecture has gone' since Eisenman.
Okay. What does Gage say?
There might be some youngsters or non-english speakers in the audience. Let's double check the essence of Lovecraft:
So architecture has moved on from Eisenman to getting as close to emparting "cosmic dread, forbidden and dangerous knowledge, madness, non-human influences on humanity, religion and superstition, fate and inevitability, and the risks associated with scientific discoveries" as they can.
No, no. They're not evil. They're just trying to create buildings that replicate the effect of an alien presence so profoundly dangerous that merely conceptualizing a infinitesimal part of it drives you to madness.
I don't think someone would need a particularly high reading grade level to understand that statement, is this what one would expect someone with low reading grade would take way from Eisenman? Eisenman is saying that comfort and harmony do not constitute the totality of either aesthetic preference or human experience, and just like someone might listen to metal or prefer picasso to kinkade, buildings may accomodate and respond to a broader spectrum of experience. Eisenman's most famous work is the holocaust memorial in Berlin, and it's a good example of both a deconstructive minimalism (removal of ornament and complex form for simple geometry), and pursuit of typically discomfiting vibes: instability, envelopment, angularity. Stripping away detail raises the salience of other aspects of the way the memorial is experienced, e.g. the way the acoustics narrow and quiet, and how temperatures drop as you descend, and how your descent has no clean demarcation between inside and outside, over and under. How the relation to other visitors shifts from the communal ("I am one of visible dozens visiting the memorial") to the incidental ("I bumped into a specific other visitor, who then turned the other way and is again out of sight"). Maya Lin's Vietnam memorial achieves a similar minimalism that is well suited to these kind of structures, which accomodate what Etlin called a 'space of absence' -- visitors can interact with what isn't there, or against what they may have expected to be there. What is appropriate for recognition of tragedy is not necessarily what is appropriate for the home, but our lives have tragedy in them and one of the most difficult and essential functions of art is to articulate and reconcile us to that tragedy.
The first result I see for your 'brutalist high school' search is this Nikken Sekkei project. My own high school's gymnasium was a massive concrete aggregate structure repurposed from a 1917 abattoir, so I am open to arguments my aesthetic baseline is not standard here, but I'd expect kids to mostly regard the scarred-meteor interior there as incredibly cool.
Philosophical perspectives in architecture have also largely moved on from Eisenman's deconstructive minimalism in the (an) opposite direction somewhat towards Heidegger's object-relational ontology/phenomenology via Harman. See Mark Foster Gage's Killing Simplicity.
Great, we've gone from actively villainous architects to those who simply advance a kind of architectural nihilism (yes, I know he denies the charge of nihilism in the next sentence. No, I don't believe him). To the extent that I can glean a point from this, he seems to still be advocating for buildings that are in some way ugly or broken so that people notice them so that they don't merely "fade into the background." This is not so different from Eisenman's perspective of discomfiting people on purpose.
Architecture continues to suffer from "notice me!" syndrome. I don't care one iota about the self actualization of architects or about Heidegger. Architects should be seeking to make beautiful, harmonious buildings. Instead they are writing pomo nonsense and Ctrl+f beauty zero results. So it goes.
Isn't there a certain tension here?
Why should architects care what you think if you don't care what they think?
Whether I like it or not, I am forced to engage with the buildings that architects build. If architects build repulsive monstrosities, then I, along with however many thousands or millions of fellow poor souls live among the same buildings, have to be subjected to them daily. In contrast, even if I make mean comments about architects online, the architect will almost certainly not even be aware of my existence. Usually, when people’s actions greatly affect the lives of countless others, then we tend to think that they should take those others’ opinions into account.
Now, an architect might respond that he should be unconstrained by the ressentiment of the plebs when he is exerting his own will upon the built environment at massive scales. But if that’s how architects see themselves, then my relationship with them is most analogous to some Persian peasant massacred at the whims of Ghengis Khan’s ambitions. I won’t look fondly upon the Khan among the slaughter as Merv burns.
This is roughly the position I would endorse, yes.
It's ironic that on the one hand Eisenman is being accused of being a socialist, and on the other hand we have multiple people arguing that Eisenman has a moral duty to uphold a certain traditional standard of beauty in the public commons, even if this runs contrary to the intentions of his private financial backers. Should we put all architectural decisions up to a public vote, to ensure that no buildings are ever constructed which the majority would find offensive? If I found the appeal to democracy to be persuasive, then perhaps I would be more likely to be a socialist! But I am not a socialist, and I have no particular fondness for democracy. I will celebrate any opportunity for an artist to carry on his work while unconstrained by the demands of mass taste.
As for Eisenman's work itself, it's maybe not perfectly aligned with my own taste, but it's also not nearly as grotesque as some of the people here are making it out to be. I think his House VI is quite lovely, although admittedly that's largely due to the juxtaposition of the structure with the environs rather than due to the intrinsic properties of the structure itself.
"Quite lovely."
I absolutely love this delivery. My other same-energy example is the Russian Wikipedia page for the one-line poem "Oh, cover thy pale feet!" by Valery Bryusov inviting the reader to access the full text of the poem on Wikisource.
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Why did you fail to quote the most important part?
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