Avant-Garde and Anti-Avant-Garde Moves in the Architecture of Everyday Life
Avant-Garde and Anti-Avant-Garde Moves in the Architecture of Everyday Life
Session at the EAM 2010 conference in Poznan, Poland.
The avant-gardes of the 1950s and 60s, and especially groups such as Fluxus and the Situationist International, returned to a central aspect of the historic avant-garde: the merging of art and life. A parallel interest in everyday life developed within architecture, yet much of its focus was on mass consumer culture rather than on the more material aspects of daily life. Consumer culture appeared compelling because it was enmeshed in everyday life, suggesting the possibility of authentic, popular values outside the academia of high culture; it developed in the United States and Europe as a grass-roots phenomenon which seemed liberating in contrast to the ‘elitism’ of high culture, the pre-WWII class society, and the didactic tone of a middle-brow culture promoted in the post-war years by governments. Whereas the appreciation of high culture demanded education and an aesthetic disposition, mass culture was immediately accessible to all levels of society, it served a ‘mobile’ society enabling individualism and new collective manifestations such as youth culture, and hence could claim an egalitarianism absent in its adversaries.
In architecture, an interest in mass consumer culture can be detected in The Smithsons’ collaborations and exchanges within the Independent Group, in their fascination with colour magazines, advertisements and the Citroen DS, in the work of Robert Venturi and Denis Scott Brown, who looked into the aesthetics of suburbia and Las Vegas, or that of Rem Koolhaas who claimed that shopping is the last resort for the upkeep of our public spaces. Mass consumer culture appears in the work of these and other architects as a means of liberating architecture from the limitations, dogmatism and elitism they identified as prevailing in architectural discourse and practice, and the idea of liberation was often extended, whether explicitly or not, to the market forces – commercialism, advertising, media culture – driving the development of this new culture. Subsequently, the frozen food package, the Tanya billboard on the Las Vegas Strip or the mere existence of Ryan Air could be identified as phenomena of greater importance to the contemporary city than the work of the architect or urbanist.
The architects interested in consumer culture employed strategies and procedures which were consciously borrowed from - and an elaboration of – the early avant-garde, such as the critique of the autonomy of architecture. However, the so-called logic of the avant-garde was itself undermined by subjugating architecture to a populism which rejected the idea of an enlightened elite spearheading a path for the rest of society – the very idea of the avant-garde. It is these contradictions and paradoxes, and the manner in which they were embedded in both discourse and practice, which the session wishes to study. We aim to select a series of papers which will complement each other by creating a clearer picture of the manner in which the architecture of everyday life pursued avant-garde strategies while defying the logic of the avant-garde.
Abstracts of 500 words accompanied by one page CVs clearly stating institutional affiliation and current position should be sent by November 30th 2009 to Dirk van den Heuvel d.vandenheuvel@tudelft.nl and Tahl Kaminer tkaminer@cubicle-design.com(TU Delft, The Netherlands). Submitters will be informed by the 1st of February 2010 whether their submission has been accepted. The conference will take place at Poznan, Poland, September 2010. See www.eam2010.amu.edu.pl for details.
Session at the EAM 2010 conference in Poznan, Poland.
The avant-gardes of the 1950s and 60s, and especially groups such as Fluxus and the Situationist International, returned to a central aspect of the historic avant-garde: the merging of art and life. A parallel interest in everyday life developed within architecture, yet much of its focus was on mass consumer culture rather than on the more material aspects of daily life. Consumer culture appeared compelling because it was enmeshed in everyday life, suggesting the possibility of authentic, popular values outside the academia of high culture; it developed in the United States and Europe as a grass-roots phenomenon which seemed liberating in contrast to the ‘elitism’ of high culture, the pre-WWII class society, and the didactic tone of a middle-brow culture promoted in the post-war years by governments. Whereas the appreciation of high culture demanded education and an aesthetic disposition, mass culture was immediately accessible to all levels of society, it served a ‘mobile’ society enabling individualism and new collective manifestations such as youth culture, and hence could claim an egalitarianism absent in its adversaries.
In architecture, an interest in mass consumer culture can be detected in The Smithsons’ collaborations and exchanges within the Independent Group, in their fascination with colour magazines, advertisements and the Citroen DS, in the work of Robert Venturi and Denis Scott Brown, who looked into the aesthetics of suburbia and Las Vegas, or that of Rem Koolhaas who claimed that shopping is the last resort for the upkeep of our public spaces. Mass consumer culture appears in the work of these and other architects as a means of liberating architecture from the limitations, dogmatism and elitism they identified as prevailing in architectural discourse and practice, and the idea of liberation was often extended, whether explicitly or not, to the market forces – commercialism, advertising, media culture – driving the development of this new culture. Subsequently, the frozen food package, the Tanya billboard on the Las Vegas Strip or the mere existence of Ryan Air could be identified as phenomena of greater importance to the contemporary city than the work of the architect or urbanist.
The architects interested in consumer culture employed strategies and procedures which were consciously borrowed from - and an elaboration of – the early avant-garde, such as the critique of the autonomy of architecture. However, the so-called logic of the avant-garde was itself undermined by subjugating architecture to a populism which rejected the idea of an enlightened elite spearheading a path for the rest of society – the very idea of the avant-garde. It is these contradictions and paradoxes, and the manner in which they were embedded in both discourse and practice, which the session wishes to study. We aim to select a series of papers which will complement each other by creating a clearer picture of the manner in which the architecture of everyday life pursued avant-garde strategies while defying the logic of the avant-garde.
Abstracts of 500 words accompanied by one page CVs clearly stating institutional affiliation and current position should be sent by November 30th 2009 to Dirk van den Heuvel d.vandenheuvel@tudelft.nl and Tahl Kaminer tkaminer@cubicle-design.com(TU Delft, The Netherlands). Submitters will be informed by the 1st of February 2010 whether their submission has been accepted. The conference will take place at Poznan, Poland, September 2010. See www.eam2010.amu.edu.pl for details.
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