The ArgumentThe avant-garde's fascination with technology around 1900 grew out of several motivations: to shock the antitechnological bourgeois public; to experience a sense of mastery toward the material world, especially with cars, airplanes, and other machines; and to overcome the nineteenth-century separation of art and technology. The article highlights the radical shifts in the perception of technology that correspond with the emerging hands-on encounter with technological objects in homes, cities and at the workplace at the turn of the century. This (...) technological fundamentalism differed sharply from the anxious and symbolically mediated approach to the “materialism” of the machine in the nineteenth century. It was accompanied by a concept of liberation through technological purity which is reflected by the fact that Gropius, Mies van der Rohe and Corbusier did not just design functional objects but also made special efforts to accentuate their functionalism as part of the aesthetic experience of modernity. As French and Italian artists, especially the Futurists, incorporated speed, virility, and the experience of the elementary in the metaphoric construction of technology, they even expressed a kinship with those painters and sculptors who shifted their focus to the rediscovery of the “primitive” magic in the art works from Africa and Polynesia. (shrink)

This article explores the defining tendencies of urban expansion taking place in mega-cities of the Global South, as exemplified by recent trends in Metropolitan Manila and elsewhere. What I call the process of ‘uber-urbanization’ entails the construction of city emulants as platforms for the value-productive movements of globopolitical urban life, a fractal enterprise whose animating program involves the mediatization of human capacities in technologized forms of servitude. Such meditatized human capacities can be understood as comprising a kind of vital infrastructure (...) exemplified in long-standing experimental, risk-taking, shifting, multi-tasking modes of living developed out of urban conditions in the Global South. I discuss the liquidity of such modes of living on the part of surplus populations and its temporal dynamics as the newly discovered resource undergirding the expansion of city everywhere. (shrink)

Discussions of green design and sustainable architecture have become common in the architectural profession, but not in philosophy. This is unfortunate, as philosophers could make important contributions to this discussion, given that these terms rife with ambiguities and that the relationships between these ideas and the traditional Vitruvian values of architecture (beauty, structure, and utility) are unclear. In a recent article, Tom Spector addresses some of these issues to assess whether the notion of sustainability could underpin an entire design philosophy. (...) He concludes that it cannot. I argue that Spector’s argumentsare flawed. After discussing the history of green design, I connect a number of theories in the new field of environmental aesthetics to the question of architectural aesthetics to show how sustainability might inform architecture. (shrink)

Many critics have pointed to the failures of modernist urban design, which include its obliteration of thriving neighborhoods, isolation of functions and production of alienating spaces hostile to the human form. Less focus has been placed on defining the source of the modernists’ errors. This essay argues that these errors were in part due to neglect of the nature of fully embodied experience, a neglect manifested in an overwhelmingly visual disposition in embodiment. The author argues that a visual disposition is (...) implicated in the occlusion of place by the modern concept of abstract space. This concept of space and the visual disposition that is implicated in it undergird the utopianism and veneration for abstract forms that characterized the project of modernist urban design. The author concludes by suggesting that the basis for a humanizing urbanism should be the solicitation of all the senses in synesthetic interaction. This phenomenological critique can help us to see precisely where modernist urban design went wrong; it can also help lead us out of the false dichotomy between alienating modernism and orthodox traditionalism by establishing a basis for successful urban environments in embodiment rather than in any rigidly determined formula for urban design. (shrink)

Using theories by Pierre Bourdieu and the Frankfurt School that causally link art to class interests, this article examines the differential development of modern architecture in the United States and central Europe during the early 20th century. Modern architecture was the aesthetic expression of technocracy, a movement of the new class of professionals, managers and engineers to place itself at the center of rationalized capitalism. The aesthetic of modernism, which glorified technology and instrumental reason, was weak and undeveloped in the (...) US, because this class defined by its cultural capital was quickly integrated into modernizing corporations, where it was compelled to cater to the emerging mass market and drop its distinctive aesthetic. Modern architecture emerged mainly in interwar central Europe, because here industrial modernization was blocked, forcing the new class to pursue an alliance with state managers pushing modernization. Thus unencumbered by the demands of the mass market, modern architects were free to express their machine aesthetic in state-financed housing projects. (shrink)

Previous research has suggested that in cultural production fields the concatenation of eminence explains success, defined as influence and innovation. We propose that individuals in fields as diverse as philosophy, literature, mathematics, painting, or architecture gain visibility by cumulating the eminence of others connected to them across and within generations. We draw on interaction ritual chain and social movement theories, and use evidence from the field of modernist architecture, to formulate a model of how networks of very strong ties generate (...) motivations and emotional enthusiasm, change reputations, and form collective movements that over time transform the structure of cultural fields. Because major aesthetic innovations break sharply with older styles, they need very strong group solidarity over a long period of time to propagate a new standard of practice. We propose mutual halo effects, i.e., the reciprocal reinforcement of upstream and downstream prestige on a given individual node, as the key factor accounting for success in a cultural production field. We discuss the relevance of these results for building a model of influence and innovation in cultural production fields in which networks—reshaped by shifting technological, political, and economic conditions—trigger new styles. (shrink)

Tussen zijn veertigste en zijn zestigste levensjaar was Jan Hendrik van den Berg (1914) een uitermate succesvol en populair auteur. Boeken van zijn hand, zoals Metabletica (1956) en Medische macht en medische ethiek (1969), waren ongekende bestsellers. Hij was de Nederlandse vertegenwoordiger van een belangrijke Europese stroming in de filosofie: de historische fenomenologie. In de jaren zeventig raakte hij echter in conflict met zijn tijd. Terwijl de Nederlandse publieke opinie een wending naar links doormaakte, bond Van den Berg de strijd (...) aan tegen verloedering, hooliganisme en anarchisme. Dit ging ten koste van zijn populariteit, maar niet van zijn productiviteit, noch van zijn innovativiteit. Tot op de dag van vandaag werkt hij aan een indrukwekkend , panoramisch oeuvre. Hij is de belangrijkste Nederlandse filosoof sinds Bolland. -/- Deze studie wil het werk van Van den Berg reconstrueren, situeren en beoordelen. Reconstrueren door de methodische en thematische coherentie ervan zichtbaar te maken. Situeren door het te confronteren met dat van andere, verwante auteurs zoals Husserl, Freud, Bachelard en Foucault. Beoordelen door na te gaan in hoeverre Van den Berg de inzet van zijn project, zowel inhoudelijk als methodologisch, waarmaakte. -/- Het werk van Van den Berg is geen curiosum, maar opvallend actueel. Hij onderzoekt het begin, de aanvang van wetenschappelijke en maatschappelijke ontwikkelingen waarvan het belang in de huidige situatie met nadruk zichtbaar wordt. Zijn beeldende stijl wekt de geschiedenis van de wetenschap tot leven, maar werd vaak als ‘anekdotisch’ afgedaan; zijn talent voor polemiek lokte soms felle reacties uit en zijn methodologische flexibiliteit maakte hem een gemakkelijk doelwit van academische kritiek. Aan de positieve kant van de balans staan echter zijn intellectuele enthousiasme en zijn internationale faam. Zijn werk verdient een rehabilitatie. (shrink)