Neil Leach, in Aesthetics of Architecture, has selected a useful and generally admirable group of texts written by philosophers and cultural critics over the last century, from the well known “Metropolis and Mental Life,” written by the sociologist Georg Simmel in 1903, to more recent studies of the cultural condition of architecture by Jean Baudrillard and many others, and examining some of the notions he encourages readers to come to their own conclusions.
Leach, in his chapter on ‘saturation of the image’, talks about being watchful in fetishizing the image, as the world of image is a world of architect and the “world of an image is enemy of imagination” (p.10) We, as an architects, tend to privilege the image which distances us form the users and their buildings. In addition, by adopting heavily aestheticized language of architectural commentary it is possible to compare sensitive architecture of past to, for example, Brutalism.
And “everything aestheticizes itself: politics aestheticizes itself into the spectacle..” (p.6) In his second chapter of ‘the architect asa fascist’, leach suggest that the Fascism should be recognized as an extreme moment that will always be prone to reappear whenever politics becomes aestheticized. With anesthetization a social and political displacement occurs, when ethical concerns are displaced by aesthetic ones.
from www.dataphone.se
Nazis were fully aware of this process of anesthetization of politics. Exploiting this notion architect Albert Speer turned political rally into the work of art, when he, in 1937, engaged public into the creation of his famous ‘cathedral of light’ with flashlights pointed to the sky creating luminous columns. This drew the veil over the whole parade of not so glamorous bureaucrats and marching figures.
What image do we want to create today?
How people identify with their space/place?
What are the elements for successful people – government relationship?
Leach, Neil. Anaesthetics of Architecture, Cambridge : The MIT Press. 1999.