Science or Art (and other assorted Hierachies)?

This was probably my favorite set of readings to date, for several reasons. The primary reason was that this seemed most relevant to the practice of architecture today. Or, at least, it was most comprehensibly linked to current architecture.

In any case, one thing I amused myself with as I read the final article about the Collage City was taking the opposed duality of art and science traced throughout as a hierarchy like that described in the first article. Sure enough, while science was for much of the 20th century the dominant member of the pair, the hierarchy has more recently begun to reverse. The Collage City article spoke devastatingly of scientific, “Utopian” design. In fact, since science is all about proving or disproving hypotheses through experimentation, scientific design could be said to have scientifically disproved itself. In any event, there has certainly been a shift, and it could be called Deconstructivist based on the qualifications given in Michael Benedikt’s essay.

This essay interested me a great deal, though not really for its definition of Deconstructivism. As he said, that is merely a label, and labels are cheap and not particularly meaningful. However, his discussion of hierarchies, beyond diverting me in the later readings, was very meaningful to me, and I can see it present in my models throughout the semester. The idea that a system of hierarchies can be turned on its head and still maintain its identity is fascinating, and one that I have seen, but perhaps not recognized, used in a great deal of architecture, often with great success.

I was also intrigued by the idea that form, or language, or in fact anything at all, cannot have meaning until it is repeated and defined by society. This is a more abstract idea than the concept of hierarchy reversal, and is certainly more esoteric in its applications, but it still has great value. Most importantly, it is to me indicative of the fact that nothing truly new is ever created. Instead, we rearrange the elements of the past with more or less inventiveness and skill. This speaks to the fact that rejection of the past is always a failure, for we are inseparable from the language and tradition of the past and cannot exist without it.