Architecture

This week was a big one. I've learnt about the Bauhaus before, but I never knew about their experimental home setup. They were a lot more ahead of their time than I thought. I also found the propaganda around the suburb incredibly interesting, especially some of the mentions of analysing it even down to a psycho-sexual level.

The consistent metaphor of replacing god with the machine is interesting, especially with the Catholic Church having recently renounced AI LLMs. Are we seeing the same thing happen again? Or did it happen the first time, as the Church re-adapted after the age of industrialisation? It also reminds me of the church in Frank Herbert's 'Dune' doing the same thing, even at the same time in-universe.

The idea of the lethargic, trundling suburb being a planted concept on purpose to sell more cars and destroy culture didn't surprise me — I've educated myself on this a fair amount. But I think that even if the suburb hadn't been pushed forward by car companies, it would still have come about as the result of a culture that only commercialised art. If art is systematically devalued, human connection ends up being so too. Or maybe it's the other way: art being devalued might be a symptom of human connection being devalued instead.

Another key theme was the social engineering of architecture. The example in class was the Brasilia city, not unlike Canberra and (as I've recently learnt) South Hedland in Australia, but I thought the other direction. These cities were designed from nothing, before they were built, rather than developing organically like how most cities do. If you can socially engineer groups with architecture, you're affecting individual psychology too — especially in examples of brutalism and blobular architecture. Could a space scare you without being explicitly threatening? Can your psyche be projected into a space itself? These questions are answered by the internet phenomenon of 'the backrooms', where the monster is the space itself. Another example is the pseudo-popular manga BLAME!, which takes place within a megastructure city larger than the solar system, constantly expanding forever.

I think the passion for the backrooms not only comes from the international style being so widely tired of by younger generations, but also that it is a genuinely unique community that can only be accessed through searching special keywords in different internet algorithms. Through creating a new system — a new social architecture — people find freedom again from the digital suburbia. An argument: the future of the internet is a dead mall. But maybe the mall will change hands with the people, and keep running because companies forgot to turn it off.

A great movie to reference when talking about architecture and the birth of the suburb is Falling Down — where a man attempts to walk across the famously unwalkable streets of LA. It's brilliant because it's a deep critique of America and consumerism, under the setting of it being seemingly so incredibly insane to walk across LA, with all the events happening in the most mundane parts of the city.

Furthermore, the beginning of presentation production has begun. AI, face tracking, and social media propaganda is an interesting topic — somewhat touched on in Week 6, but a lot more can be said. All the ideas I have have an underlying theme of 'vision' and interpretation, so it links to the core ideas of the subject quite well. The people in my group seem nice. I hope they pull their weight.