Experiencing absence: Eisenman and Derrida, Benjamin and Schwitters

Deconstruction in architecture has made great claims to decentre the human subject. Architects such as Peter Eisenman claim to work with the concepts and history of architecture in a way which is free of any false hopes for a final return to an apprehension by a human subject whose needs are the origin of the discipline. However, much of the architecture of deconstruction is not consistent in this aim and, as Jacques Derrida has pointed out, indulges itself instead in constructing an experience of absence. In the politics of the discipline 'deconstruction' plays the role of a rationalist, knowledge-centred architecture, which stands in opposition to a humanist, phenomenological approach which valorizes experience. The non-sequitur 'experience of absence' forms a circuit in this pattern of oppositions and thus deconstruction in architecture tends towards being a mere negative theology, a reversed humanism. Moreover, the architectural project of constructing experiences of otherness or the absence of a privileged subject position is not unfamiliar. Kurt Schwitters' Merzbau can be shown to take mental constructs, such as the history and politics of the avant-garde, and to play them against devices which have the aim of bringing to consciousness an apprehension of the body as a perceptual apparatus. Walter Benjamin's contemporary texts on the conceptualization of experience in relation to art, technology and the city can be used to provide terms for an description of the Merzbau. The point is not to further the analysis of the Merzbau nor to exemplify Benjamin's theory but rather to remember the breadth and sophistication of these early twentieth century inquiries into experience, when compared to the present architectural deconstruction both of 'experience' and 'constructivism'. The purpose of the comparison is not to admonish Eisenman for lack of originality but rather to make a point about the hubris of 'deconstructing' categories which have already been destroyed by history

The Image as an architectural material

There is at present a fashion for the application of images onto building facades. The most common line of comment on this phenomenon is to fetishize "the image". According to such accounts, images have changed their status or locale, and become monstrous hybrids of human consciousness and the Internet. They have come to be on buildings through some will or teleology of their own, lessening the materiality of building and threatening the culture of architecture. Or so the story goes. Few remark on another obvious aspect of this trend, which is that of the relatively recent availability and rapid uptake of the technical means for the application of images onto buildings. As early as the nineteen forties, J L Sert, F Leger and S Geidion were calling for a new civic iconography of kinetic sculpture, which was to include fireworks and large-scale projection and murals. None of this was very practical, however, until the last few years when mega-screens and large-scale banner printing became available. Similarly, we have only recently gone beyond nineteenth century techniques in the etching of images into glass and masonry. To a certain extent, these two observations reverberate within the work of Walter Benjamin and his famous attempt to argue at a most general level for an interrelation of histories of technology and mentality

Baroque architecture and the system of the arts

This paper discusses the aims and one of the issues of a larger study of the 20th century historiography of baroque architecture. The larger project will study the different investments in the baroque as a corpus of exemplary buildings, and as a problem in the development of architecture. With this aim, the changing concept of architecture between the 17th and 20th centuries becomes significant, and the present paper offers a sketch of the context of architecture within the system of the arts. It argues that one cannot understand changing concepts of architecture entirely in terms of the internal development of its problematic. The idea of art, and of the arts, and of architecture’s place in the arts has changed drastically over the period. Understanding this historical variation of the concepts is not merely a methodological issue of the larger study; rather it can tell us something of why 20th century architects were so interested in the baroque, and why the baroque has remained a point of conflict between architects and architectural historians

The Look of the Object

In Modernism the category of the art-object was one of the points at which architecture and the visual arts are differentiated and articulated. The rise of so called ‘minimalist’ architecture with its fixation on object qualities, and its borrowings from art theory suggests that this difference is collapsing. By looking at works from the late nineteen sixties by Manfredo Tafuri, Michael Fried and Theodor Adorno, this polemical one page essay opens some of the complexities of the theory of the object in the end game of high modernism, and speculates on the significance of the new taste for the look of the object. The argument is developed in "The Look of the Object: minimalism in art and architecture, then and now" Architecture Theory Review, 7:1, 2002

Hallmark of discipleship

...So take your Bible, if you will. And let\u27s look at Matthew, chapter 10. I really believe that this may be the greatest section of scripture on the significance of discipleship. In the tenth chapter of Matthew, our Lord is sending out His 12 disciples. He\u27s instructing them, and though their first effort will be short term and they\u27ll come back, lick their wounds, to be sent out again after the Lord returns to heaven, this is a very important time. And He gives them basic lessons about discipleship

The Logical Framework - A tool for the management of project planning and evaluation.

yesThis paper is a literature review of Logical Framework ideas for the management of the cycle for the planning and implementation of development projects - the "Project Cycle" (MacArthur 1994) The ideas and nature of the LogFrame (as it is generally called) are deceptively simple, with all the thinking and targets for a project represented in a simple 16 cell worksheet, which it is intended should be written on one or at the most two sheets of A4 paper. The underlying intention of this approach is for the objectives of a project or any other intervention to be explicitly defined from an early stage, so as to strengthen the logic of the planning at different levels of a project's performance, and the evaluation of progress when the plans are implemented. A summary matrix for the presentation of all this was first proposed in the US Government in 1970, and the idea not only soon took firm root there in AID, but has been adopted in original or modified form by a very large proportion of Development Assistance Agencies. The appeal of the simple logic behind the LogFrame idea has been very strong, and the ideas are an established part of all the set of tools of all development planners working at the micro level.ID-7098D - Project Planning and Financial Analysi

Stakeholder Roles and Stakeholder Analysis in Project Planning: A review of approaches in three agencies - World Bank, ODA and NRI .

yesStakeholder topics are one of the main ideas in development thinking that have been introduced in the last few years, certainly a concept of the 1990s. The use of stakeholder language and the application of analysis, planning and management methods directed towards different interest groups are increasingly becoming commonplace, especially amongst some anglophone donors, Three main general applications of stakeholder ideas have been developed in the literature: - the involvement of Stakeholders in Participatory methods of Development intended to achieve sustainable poverty relief; - the use of Stakeholder Analysis to assure the implementation soundness of development projects; and - its use as a means of understanding the many economic interests and processes that relate to "systems" for Natural Resource Management, this understanding to be applied in a number of developmentally beneficial uses.Naturally the three strands of applying stakeholder ideas draw from each other. This paper looks at the emergence of thinking and applications from them all, leading towards a more full consideration of the application of Stakeholder Analysis in the planning of projects of various kinds.ID-7098D - Project Planning and Financial Analysi