September 2010
1 post
December 2009
9 posts
This is a really interesting article about WalMart’s corporate culture told through the lens of Julie Roehm’s experience as a mid-level marketing exec there.
via Businessweek
November 2009
14 posts
“In 1947, Lewis Mumford published a remarkable essay titled simply “Social Effects.” In it, he presented four scenarios of possible social futures in the atomic age. The first three result in nuclear war; yet the fourth scenario, in which war never comes, is actually the most chilling of all, for it describes a world in which the preparation, anticipation, and adjustments necessary for atomic war...
Sprawl as Strategy: Urban Planners Face the Bomb →
Suburban Growth, Character, & Change
From the section on “Cold War, Disaster Scenarios, and the Fear Factor.”
The solution was decentralization and urban dispersal (Borden, 1969). Forms of limited dispersal did occur such as, remote locations for bomb production, placement of war contracts in small towns, creation of new satellite cities, increased highway construction, and control of inner-city building – policies that...
“1. It aims to destroy
2. It isolates its members from the world
3. It claims special knowledge and morality
4. It demands strict obedience
5. It applies brainwashing
6. It replaces one’s world view
7. It has an auto-referential philosophy
8. It creates its own language, incomprehensible to outsiders”
via
This is a widely held...
Anti-architecture and deconstruction →
By Nikos Angelos Salingaros, Christopher Alexander
Fascinated upon reading excerpts from the chapter about modern architecture as a cult. I don’t know if this guy is a nut or a genius but I love this so far, especially the zingers about zaha & gehry.
“A machine that makes the land pay.”
– Cass Gilbert, describing the skyscraper.
Jackson Lears - The American Way of Debt →
“The equation of debt and decline assumes that once upon a time Americans lived within their means and saved for what they bought. This is fantasy: there never was a golden age of thrift. Debt has always played an important role in Americans’ lives — not merely as a means of instant gratification but also as a strategy for survival and a tool for economic advance.”
Did Christianity Cause the Crash?
“Your Best Life Now, which has fueled a TV show that Osteen claims is now seen in 200 million homes worldwide, opens with a story of a man on vacation in Hawaii. He was “a good man who had achieved a modest measure of success, but he was coasting along, thinking that he’d already reached his limits.” While sightseeing, he and his wife admired a gorgeous house on a hill. “I can’t even imagine...
October 2009
20 posts
What Main Street Can Learn From the Mall →
“A guided tour with a landscape architect and retailing specialist who believes that shopping malls — vilify them though we might — can offer moribund cities what they desperately need: practical lessons in the psychology of commerce”
via the atlantic
Design Problem
The last 50 years of increased consumer spending mean that there is no new “market” to speak of for Proctor and Gamble. There is only complete market saturation, meaning that a new strategy of need creation has been implemented. This strategy creates products that target specific consumer “types” and “categories,” aimed at creating consumer desire for multiple products to suit their “type,” where...
Rajiv, you should check out the new episode of Parks and Recreation - it’s all about a their sister city in Venezuela and Chavez trying to shame America by building a beautiful park in Pawnee, Indiana. hahaha.
How big is bad? - Charles Jencks →
bakos122:
“In the mid-’70s, I tried to wrestle with this question and formulated a law of architecture that explains why the bigger corporate modernism gets, the more boring it usually gets. I called this ‘the Ivan Illich Law of Diminishing Architecture’, after the man who discovered counter-productive growth in other fields.”
diminishing returns for architecture.. very interesting..
diminishing returns: the biggest problem
Diminishing Returns is at the heart of the problem for Away, P&G and other mega-corporations that sell every day products like cosmetics, soap, appliances and electronics. The basic idea behind the Law “refers to how the marginal production of a factor of production, in contrast to the increase that would otherwise be normally expected, actually starts to progressively decrease the more...
Which Woodfield Shopper are You? →
While researching sites, i stumbled across this soul-crushing website for the Woodfield Mall. Click on the different “Everyone gets their own Woodfield” boxes and prepare to feel gross.
“+ Not to lie, rather to emphasize the exact precision of mechanical production...”
– Peter Behrens, re: AEG corporate architecture, 1907
The Evil Participant's Toolbox.
evil-kazys:
Cognitive Dissonance
We understand that working for an evil client must be frustrating. If it’s not, that’s only temporary. Repressing such frustration will only cause it to rise to the surface more dramatically later. One of the reasons we are teaching this studio is that architects have not developed a theoretical toolbox for dealing with evil. It’s the task of...
A Marxist Defense of Shopping →
evil-kazys:
For Emily, especially.
“An interest in shopping is as legitimate a pursuit within the range of human interests as any other…And what about the fact that not everyone is in a position to enjoy shopping, because some don’t have the means for it? This is a critique of systemic inequality and poverty and their effects and it is a valid one.”
This is a critical...
September 2009
26 posts
Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil... →
“He argues that the bedrock of present-day ethics—the normative conception of human rights—is morally bankrupt. “It amounts to a genuine nihilism, a threatening denial of thought as such,” he writes. As Badiou sees it, current ethics has been enlisted in the army of capitalist-liberalism: “The theme of ethics and of human rights is compatible with the...
