I occasionally feel as overwhelmed by the information age as the next person. One of the best remedies for overloading the grid, so to speak, is the Wilson Quarterly's "Periodical Observer," an online feature that distills the content of academic publications in a simple format while preserving the core intellectual arguments and adding its critical perspective to the mix. Or, remix, if you will.
Like, on “Why Don’t the Rest of Us Like the Buildings the Architects Like?” by Robert Campbell, in Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences:
In Campbell’s view, this conflict between architects’ visions and their buildings’ reception by the general public is an indication that “the connection between memory and invention has been severed in our culture.” Architects and laypeople who pay attention to design, Campbell says, mainly fall into two camps, “trads” and “rads.” The trads—traditionalists—want all buildings to “look like the buildings of the past they have learned and been conditioned to love.” The rads— radicals—want to “use computers to make groovy new shapes that will broadcast our daring, our boldness, our march into the future.” Despite their seeming difference, both rads and trads “seek to substitute a utopia of another time for the time we actually live in. The trads find utopia in the past; the rads find it in the future.” Instead of grappling with “the complex reality of a present time and place,” both camps “inevitably create architecture that is thin, bloodless, weak, and boring.”Read the piece, and then follow the link to the original article (in .PDF format) to decide whether you've got a dog in this fight. My take: Oooh, the gloves come off, and best of all, I found a new motto: "Everything happens at parties."
Also deliciously dark and fairly dripping with scandal: Eavesdrop, the gossip column of the Architect's Newspaper, which is another current fave.
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