CRITICAL WRITING 1 Reading Summary

19.11.2018 SHERIN SUNNY VARIKKATT

Text 11
Histories of The Immediate Present- Inven ng architectural modernism
Anthony Vidler

The text starts by saying that the Postmodernism had be er connect with people than the
modernism. Vidler says modernism was nothing but a failed utopia, an avant garde a empt to
disconnect the past. A closer inspec on revealed that modernism respected the history too much in
its inten on to reject history. .......”never was history more alive than in its so-called modernist
rejection”.

Postmodernist is selective in picking what fits the moment, they may ignore the history that makes
history. “History is used and abused in postmodernism; it is feared and confronted in modernism”.

Vidler says the term postmistress symbolises combination the postwar history of modernism and the
postmodernism, meant an inevitable end point where only perfection is the thing that is left to do, else
it has reached a saturation level of history.
.... “we are presented with the end of modernity and the end of architectural history, respectively, as
the immediate corollary of a postmodern condition”.

However the argument which would arise here would be that if the history is stalled, will there be
progression? wouldn’t it become a closed setting which would repeat again and again and not open to
experimentation and mutation and thus progression That’s what happened with the postmodern,
ignoring what was required to be ignored and accepting what was required to be taken.

Text 12
Log-Stocktaking
Ed. Cynthia Davidson

I am for Tendencies- Jeffrey Kipnis

Peter Eisenman interviews Jeffrey Kipnis on the subjects of pedagogy and meta-cri cal shi in
architecture and importance of close reading in architecture.
JK says pedagogy is an essen al thing in architecture and any idea ends up in a discussion which
turns into a pedagogy. He agrees to PE that very few architects have pedagogy and there is a meta-
cri cal shi towards technology and how a building is build from that of governing ideas and
dialec cs. Ever since technology enabled the remote exchanges, people are not aware of other who
live nearby and thus puts a challenge on architecture. The need for place making does not any more
depend on sociology, says JK. He also says that pedagogy hasn’t been able to keep up the pace with
the ever-changing digital revolu on, many ideas from 80s-90s are no longer applicable any more in
digital world.

He suggests that this meta cri cal change should be able to produce necessary revisions to the
canon., stripping away the increasing irrelevance of the past. But for a star ng point it is important to
teach history, thus ignoring history en rely is not the way forward.
JK agrees with the argument of the Eisenman that the media has had an influence on the pedagogy,
saying media has made tradi onal forms of banality much more widely disseminated.
To strengthen inter-architecturality, two things are required says JK, ‘an understanding that the
ethos, the techniques, even media of close reading, have to evolve in step with the vicissitudes of
the discipline; and a consistent status of close reading.’ When one says close reading it doesn’t only
mean that it is to understand work that has intricate formalist ambi on, it can also be like a
detournement of materiality. It is a pedagogical problem says JK.

Asking about the possibility of make a group of students into excep onal close readers, PE says that
could be called a tendency. JK in response says he is for this tendency, there has to be that pedagogy
. if not architecture will dissolve into a design discipline.