Session Five: The Tragedy of Development

This reading is the three chapters on the story of Faust by Goethe, as retold by Marshall Berman in what has become a standard text on (as it says on the cover) 'the experience of modernity'.
It is a slightly longer reading than previously, and is downloadable via your booklist on moodle. It is important to register the three sections; dreamer, lover and developer which are Berman's interpretation of the great work by Faust which took him pretty much all his life to write, and that encompassed pretty much everything he saw on the horizon whilst he was writing it! There is also an epilogue to those three sections you might want to look at too.

Postscript:

The consequences of 'the experience of modernity' for the architect are hardly better illustrated than in the career of Le Corbusier. His enthusiasm for the possibilities of the new age are evident throughout; but especially manifest in his book The City of Tomorrow when he visits the building of a  great dam high up in the alps. Later we will see that energy and enthusiasm turn to despair as he looks back over all his magnificent plans (especially the plan for Antwerp) in the last page of his Radiant City and sees nothing but failure; failure in others particularly. So when it is remarked that L-C was a 'fascist' or a 'communist' it is perhaps best to note that, indeed, he virtually humiliated himself trying to gain the support of the Vichy government during the German occupation of France, and again, decided to present his 'House of the Soviets' under a death shroud, but these were indicative more of his Faustian psychology; that he would build for anyone.
It is important to note that L-C, in self image, primarily saw himself as an urbanist, as the administrator/developer of a golden new age, and hated everything to do with the academy, or schools rooted in the past, also that his wife Yvonne might be seen to parellel Gretchen; the list of potential 'tragedies' here gets quite long.

Session Four: Marxist Thinking

This reading is the chapter 'Social Space' pages 68-80. This material should be downloadable via your booklist on moodle (and as of now, the Paul Mason chapter 'The Rational Reason for Panic' is also available this way).
Before you panic yourselves at the mention of Marxism, just remember that it is just the materialist interrogation of words and their meanings that is the project here, and that interrogation (not a pleasant word but an appropriate one) we begin to read ideologies that lie hidden beneath appearances. Take the word 'home'. The media is rife with the screaming need for 'homes', but as we saw with Dave Hickey (and with Will Self!) the word 'home' has particular connotations. Really what can only be provided is 'houses' or perhaps 'accommodations'. 'Homes' smacks of advertising!
I read this segment each year and whilst it's a bit of a struggle I always get something more out of it. In particular it is the difference between 'work' and 'product' that is talked through here, and this should shine some light on discussions you no doubt find yourself having all the time about the value of technology (or for that matter the value of human labour) which is highly pertinent to architectural production.
If English is your second language, you may find this stuff even more difficult, but feel for the translator who had to convert it from the original French! In your reading, when the going gets tough, I would recommend searching 'short cuts' via the web to get some background on how to situate Lefebvre, and the best background of all, if you are stuck with the idea of Marxism in the first place, is to read Marxism for Beginners, a cheap cartoon book by Ruis which is an invaluable springboard to an investigation such as this one.

Session Three: Neoliberalism

What is neoliberalism? The word isn't even recognised in spellcheck!
This of course might confirm it as part of the conspiracy, to keep you in the dark about what's really going on, or perhaps it's just a silly notion, meaning nothing at all!
These two texts, the chapter 'At Home in the Neon' from Dave Hickey's Air Guitar, and 'Sand Fear and Money in Dubai' by Mike Davis might help us work it out.
Dave Hickey became my critical hero almost just as soon as I first read him, and heard him lecture in Las Vegas and on Las Vegas on the subject of why Santa Fe being more fake than Vegas. He can write like a dream on art, literature, rock n' roll or for that matter your local topless bar.
Mike Davis is a bit more grumpy, he's a Marxist critic who made his name with a book; City of Quartz, that documented amongst other things the declining fortunes of LA's poor, and he's never liked Las Vegas, while Hickey was a long time enthusiast and resident.

When you google these texts you are likely to come across work by people who've done this course before. PLEASE make sure you source the original material and do not rely on students various interpretations, although a glance at them will give you a bit of confidence that you can do at least as well as they did.

Postscript No 1 : Write about the Writer!

Sometimes I'll add a postscript to this guide blog if something comes to mind in our tooing and frowing of e-mail 'conversation'. This advice is simple and predictable, make sure you write about the voice of the author of you text, not just the thing he or she is talking about and your opinion of it. So you should be writing about Will Self's way of talking about BPS, or Jonathan Meades way of talking about Zaha.

To give you an example, on reading Dave Hickey again, I sense a writer 'who rolls along as easily and robustly as a Harley Davidson' (my quote). That isn't a great encapsulation of his style, but if I add 'it's clear from reading Hickey that there is not much point in criticising 'America' in the abstract, because so much of the value of America is as seductive as a the gunning of a Harley or the greatest taste in a hamburger, it is blue collar and under the radar. It's only when those abstract qualities start to infringe on Hickey's basically Taxan outlaw lifestyle (big business comes to mind!) that he gets antsy and moves on'.

In that rather ordinary paragraph I actually say quite a lot; his life, his sense of things, the things he likes and doesn't, all riding on an exemplar (the Harley) we can all understand. Geddit?

Session Two: Writing from the Last Decade

You are asked to read Will Self on Battersea Power Station (2013) and Jonathan Meades on Zaha Hadid (2008). These are well known writers and broadcasters and simply Googling will bring up the texts, although you may have to register (for free) to get the whole text. We shall be looking not just at the content of these two pieces of writing but the tone, one rather resigned to events (Self) and one cleverly bemused (if you can be such a thing).