urbanism, architecture, and prostitution

ok, last post of the day.

There has been a discussion in the studio room about urbanism and the role of architecture in it. F couldn't stress enough how strengthless architects are when it comes to urbanity. "Architects build buildings" Full stop. Urbanism, if it can ever be initiated by a work of architecture, must be as an included derivative but not the fundamental driver. To embed an architectural agenda in the systematic fabrics of an urban agenda, in an already developed city at least, is pointless, and dangerous.

I would probably go further. Everyone loves his profession, so whilst architects consider the city as a latticed web with buildings as its nodes, urban designers think that architecture is simply the solids that fills in the voids in the matrix of streets and roads, and landscape designers may just as well think that modernization is meaningless without the foundation of greens and natural colours. What if for a moment, we consider all these designers' points of views to be complete fallacies, and that the city is merely the city. People goto work, go home, go to the park, to the ball games, to the concerts, to the barbeques, grow old, and die, all in the city, but nothing more than that. It is completely possible that urbanity does not exist for the individual except the absolute essentials that evolve around his limited scope of life. In that case a building, at best, can try to be a prostitute selling her flesh on the side of the street, desperately hoping to catch the pedestrians attention whilst at the same time smoking her thoughts away into some deep philosophical questions.

It all then makes sense, urbanism to architecture is that momentary glimpse into the prostitute's cleavage whilst one walks past on that dodgy laneway; if he stops for the prostitute, they will be engaged in urban activities, and if he doesn't, it would be as if she has never existed, disappeared into the crowd. So then, architecture is, to quote Che Guevera's diary, from memory, "this is not some tale of heroic deeds but the story of two lives running parallel for a short period of time"