Thursday, 29 October 2015
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.
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