Grimmer

<dn%PIPELINE.COM> wrote:

>I wonder what architects and designers are thinking about this
>country's largest - and growing - civic architectural project,
>the grim national prison program, an expensive residential plan
>for upwards of 1 in 260 of our ignoble citizens, and related
>justice and enforcement facilities: courts, detention centers,
>criminal lawyers' offices, jails.

 System, Order, Control    the values of technology, machine t.p.hughes
                           the technological society-- ellul
                           m.o.m. the pentagon of power-- mumford

>Massive budgets, materiel, professional fees, construction jobs
>-- regional, local, landscape and site planning are involved.
>And how does all this relate to recent discussions about urban
>villages, unresponsive lurkers, venn diagrams, and sacred
>geometry?

           lots-o-violence in the urban village,
           lots-o-lurkers letting others speak for them,

           lots-o-pyramid building, maintaining, worshipping.

  the American Institute of Architects will love it!
  Will they have a National or International Competition?

  Locals will love it!   Designed Buildings (not architecture, of course)
  will go up, offices productive, students hired, and the design-jury's
  will have a prison theme where ethics are the unspoken assumption.

      ______________________________________________________
      |                                              WAR   |
      |            __________  ____________          on    |
      |           /          \/            \         CRIME |
      |          /   Death   /\   Prison    \              |
      |         |    CAMPS  |<>|  CAMPS      |             |
      |          \           \/             /              |
      |           \__________/\____________/               |
      |                                                    |
      |____________________________________________________|

      <> = freedom of speech is limited, so goes architecture.

>The lachrymose cultural and aesthetic industry (architecture
>included) devoted to mourning Ur-apocalyptic historical moments
>--  War,  Human Tragedy, etc. -- is surely well intentioned if
>retroactive, but seems too frequently to suffer from a
>suspicious preoccupation with heroic motifs, monumentalisms,
>rhetorical excesses, bombastic homilizing.

  The commercial teachings derive meaning from academic past
  and not present, real, experience.  Now the death camps are in the
  present, possibly as a way of "revealing" the present.

>Does this not thrive on the remote epic horror it exoticizes --
>distracting its shocked audience from the smaller scale,
>simple, ambiguous even petty local tragedies unfolding around
>them in which they participate, or in which they could
>conceivably intervene in humane, if un-heroic, ways?

    Yes.  It is an economic/political/social machine, in which
    architecture can not address, because it is outside the limits
    of its experience, that being technology having a soci/poli/econ
    presence and experience.   And blindly and deaf, ideas of V.R.
    occupy the architects head.

    Intervention, what a word, may be most effective in the real-
    ization of what is driving the top, such as CNN in the basement
    of the Whitehouse, among other anomalies in this time.  Then look
    at your local broadcast station (arch), and local police station
    wired for this new old ordering, and which would you rather address?
    Neither?  Well, it seems most necessary that to address an omnipotent
    organization of public/private, it would be most worthwhile to do it
    national.  At least the local news won't destroy you for 2 weeks,
    whereas if you went locally with such an issue, you would be shut
    down or shut up by the system, by the systematic bureaucracy that
    maintains the system, and dehumanizes people into dollars and scents.

    Then the possiblity arrises, only of course if you want it to, that
    this national thing might be an international thing, say, with tech-
    a global (satellite, gps, military, tv, survey-lance) thing may be
    going on, and this New Order thing, that policy thing that nobody
    ever gets to vote on, is creeping through the window like a draft
    through glass.  If it were true that this local thing is a national
    thing, and not some regional thing, or state thing, or thing that says
    its a state thing but really is a fed thing, or metro thing, or even
    television thing, and that all the same all over again, then is there
    also a possibility that this local, boring, thing is also a U.N. thing?

    Is that satellite used by ruskies and columbus really expanding our
    ability to act, or is it that thing, the thing that is the _big_ thing
    that nobody can really say is _real_ because we just don't think about
    it?  May be this thing, this satellite thing, is a universal thing for
    when we meet the martians who are just like us, or send us to them
    martians.  Maybe the local thing is a metro thing is a state thing
    is a regional thing is a national or federal thing is a international
    or United Nations thing is a New World Order thing, which is, if not
    mistaken, add 1 part sci + 1 part tech with Old World Order, and then
    this thing is "chaos"ed up, and the old order invisibly creeps through
    the window while all the architects are looking at their thumbs and
    wondering "why?" and then the Great Eisenman plays a card trick with
    the devil, as does academia, and this wooshing sound is heard and
    suddenly all the ugly and bad and discomforting people are gone in
    these undiscussed places, being tested and injected, and analyzed and
    programmed moreso than the rest of us, for we are free in some respect.

    And the order that goes through the glass is invisible, not to the
    eyes or ears, experience, but rather to education and the telling of
    how to experience and the "what is" of things "is" explained in full
    detail at which you can research at will, it does matter, however,
    how good you are, how pious in your devout faith and divinity in
    "the word" of how things "is" when they are really not, when you step
    outside of the box.

    Of course something can be done to change things, but it will not
    happen on a local level, a bureaucracy is not designed this way.
    That United Nations satellite program with all them national's
    launching objects into orbit, well, that "is" the unified action of
    the same New Old World Order, or a GB says, the Brave New World, and
    as Huxley says "Ape and Essence."

    To change that locally, to recognize and address that locally, that
    is a lot to ask a lot of people and a lot of media, of whom it is not
    in their best systematic interest to unleash the dog, but that this
    system can be revealed and held to humanity, when at present theirs is
    a world government run by private government, which meets with private
    industry, which is selling us all this stuff.

    Then, it may be the connection that the local national international
    global universal order or law or War on Crime is _real_ in the sense
    that the New World Information and Communication Order is _real_ and
    that the one is fueling the "other" and to speak of the other as the
    one is to recognize part of this larger one, in the way that it is
    based on certain things that are non-subject, in the humanities, and
    that are directing our systematic control and order over ourselves,
    and that we have lost the ability to Enframe this in a better way than
    the system that created this current enframing, and that all the
    academic and commercial educations are not going to question this
    element because it defeats their logic, it is outside of their
    realm of thinking, and on an individual basis, where the truth,
    the rational facts of "what is" is defeated by "i don't believe you"

  light bulb <--------------------------------------> [POWER]

    If the light bulb is still a mystery as to what it is, and not the
light, then how are we to discuss this New Order of the United Nations as
revealed through communciation, energy and transportation?  Are we lurkers
in the world of evidence, and are we so oppressed that we say what is
true is not true?  How much programming does it take to ignore "technology"
as evidence of a larger system, order and control?  especially in the
arts.  And in that, how can architecture ignore the origin of the species
of the old ordering which calls itself New (consumer keywords)?  And how
can teachers honestly think they are teaching when they are teaching what
was taught them, if not more specifically, while something has been
"ignored" and then when a student is to learn, and to question "what is,"
the teacher does not allow this thought into the equation, for we do not
ask for it.  If education does notwant the local prison issue to interfere
the economy of ideas, of ways of rearranging the furniture as do the policy
makers, architects, and the whole lot of them, then where is the outside to
this inside if the inside has no capacity to see the outside?  The prison
issue will not be inside, not inside the local mind at least, or if it is,
the opinion of this will be determined by the local poli/ticians/tv et al.
so we can feel Safe with the way we are, fucked up.

This is not political, this is human.  Architecture could address this issue
only if it would start opening the doorways to real thinking.  The way to
do this will not be a corporate model of excellence in training, but rather
a humility existing around the quesiton of "what is."

  science/technology  can be revealed by the definition of architecture,
                      and architecture can create a better, more _real_
                      Enframing between humans and this relationship with
                      technology, which is this current enframing. ex.nwiaco

>As there is banality in evil, there is also an evil in
>insidiously unremarkable events, so ordinary that their
>accumulating cruelty is not iconographically alluring to the
>monumentalist artistic imagination, or to audiences trained in
>a particular dramatic genre of epic evil until ... well, until
>it's just too late to do something other than bemoan a new
>cycle of tragedy and grieving.

  Heidegger says that one possibility is to reveal that which is
  the Enframing that exists in our way of "seeing" and in recognizing this,
  creating a closer real understanding, constructed and ordered humanely.

  keyword:  electricity

electric vitruvius