have a dig - week 10

That Integral theory has hardly impacted architecture to date is damning testimony to the damage wrought by the distractions of theory courses and academic publications still recycling the same irrelevant philosophical and literary theories.

"Modernity simply exploits and seeks power over nature rather than seeking any symbiosis with it, or ‘transcending and including’ it as part of an Integral culture that recognises it evolved, rather than is separate, from nature − and thrives and is healthy only to the degree nature does too.

Much postmodern architecture has strong parallels with Conceptual Art, once you have got the idea there is nothing more to engage you.

Much very good architecture is being produced in the pursuit of the green agenda. But the common flaw in this work is that it focuses on objective issues such as ecology and technology; it does not yet give due emphasis to the subjective dimensions of psychology and culture. The conceptual thinking still conforms to the paradigm of modernity. But as Einstein pointed out, a problem cannot be solved with the same level of thinking as created it

Now, instead of subduing it we must seek to live in symbiosis with nature, not least by applying the ecological understandings bequeathed by modernity.

The fundamental purposes of modern architecture are thus limited to such right quadrant concerns as shelter, security, function and so on − all of them important, but not enough for a truly sustainable architecture because they ignore what sustains us psychologically and culturally.

This is an area where modernity conspicuously failed. It promised freedom for self-realisation unconstrained by culture, community, place and history. Yet without these we are not at home in the world, hence the pervasive alienation, and the atomisation of communities into lonely individuals, characteristic of modernity. We now understand that self-realisation needs the support of and sense of belonging to this larger context.

Besides transcending self-expression, creativity then escapes the current frivolous obsessions with form and theory − a symptom of how lost we are and lacking in vision as to the purposes of architecture − to be about expanding the world of human possibility so that we can become more of who we aspire to be in our emerging view of what it is to be fully human."

- Peter Bunchanan 

as iam not as swift or strategic with the words i choose to say and write, i wish that when i read literature and completely agree with the author's notion - i could just reproduce it.  as i believe they have already written it more accurately then i could ever establish.