Modernism and the Post-Humanist Subject: The Architecture, Essay Example

Demanding much of the customary understanding concerning modernism and the avant-grade, Hays squabbles that a scrupulously expressed post humanist position was really developed in the modernist architecture of Ludwig Hilberseimer and Hannes Meyer.  He reinterprets their building, projects and writings as structures of the new group of subjectivity. Illustrating mutually on the work of modern theorists and more current poststructuralist thought, he generates a completely new technique of reading architectural invention. Demanding greatly of the traditional wisdom concerning modernism and avant-garde, Hays argues that a meticulously articulated post humanist position was essentially developed in the modernist architecture of Hannes and Ludwig. The significance of Ludwig and Hannes has conventionally been underemphasized. This is due to the political conflicts that Meyer fought and lost with some other men. It also fallout from Meyer’s denunciation of situation of much avant-garde architectural works in Europe. Hays’ effort was to talk about the unconventional post- humanist practices of these architects, to reincorporate their stories into the history of contemporary architecture and to present them as substitute models for prospect architectural exploration. (Hays, 1992).

On the other hand, the issues raised by Hays’s book are part of a longer conversation in architectural history, and a wider one in criticism and art history. Thus the book may justify greater concentration than it has thus far received. The comparison used is useful. It serves to re-introduce the situation in which Meyer was working, and from which he has been more or less efficiently stripped. Lastly, Marxist’s ideological obligation and his longing to make a desirable quality of requirement are connected to practices of Berlin Dada. These affiliations are straightforward to establish in Meyer’s work. His discriminatory use of photomontage and the extraordinary angles of the photographs organized in design managements all demonstrate to the authority of Moholy-Nagy and other practitioners of photomontage. In general, what stands out from Hilberseimer’s work is a frequently developing set of propositions concerning urban and common life as controlled or raised by architecture.

His own proclamations concerning the disappointment of the Hochhausstadt model, that the consequence was more a necropolis than a metropolis designates a superfluous normal frankness concerning fruition of his own ideas regarding the city. K. Michael Hays’ book signifies one attempt to bring Meyer and Hilberseimer into current discussions of modernism (Gay, 1965). The post-traumatic urbanism research project is devoted to thinking throughout urbanism in the aftermath of conflict via architectural practice. Certain questions can only be raised through the scheme of a design project. Architecture as a mode of spatial research works to reallocate a field of possibilities that is exclusive to other modes of inquiry; in this regard it is a unique mode of irritation. There is no considerable development without rate, no societal transformation without strain. How to deal with urban strain is an urgent problem. The swift transformation of nations, cities, economies, the attendant risks of political instability and environmental damage make burdens on the profession that cannot be noticed.

The difficult query we face is how to umpire the demands of enlargement with the tenderness of the situations we find ourselves in. In this sense, the role of the architect with regards to trauma is not to avert but to assume responsibility for its production, which is to work without virtue. Through a sequence of workshops, starting with Beirut and Berlin in 2008, design projects will be used to rehearse and test a sequence of strategies and techniques in different post traumatic urban conditions.  The content of these studios will stretch out in their association to the extent that their object of study. For the reason that we are interested in the actuality of our position and what is likely within it, these workshops aim to reproduce the environment of contemporary architectural practice in the following ways: Simulating the speed of contemporary architectural production through short exhaustive workshops with project based outcomes, by rising urban design teams that temporarily coalesce around a venture, by having team members in different cities cooperate with each other on a single project across different time zones.

The affiliation of the psychological sort of trauma to this spatio-temporal model of the blind spot is worth exploring. According to Freud, trauma refers to an excitation of the psyche that is too powerful to get purge of. The trauma is thus characterized by our failure to deal with it, to incorporate it within our reality. Trauma is somehow inassimilable to experience. The book affirms itself as both policy and critical explanation, with all the unambiguous aspiration of the policy implicit in its author’s articulated position. Ant -humanism is a term pertained to numerous thinkers opposed to the development of philosophical anthropology. Vital to ant- humanism are the concepts that talk of human nature in conceptual should be abandoned as historically relative or as metaphysical, as well as the denunciation of the view of humans as independent subject. In the late 18^th century and 19^th century, the philosophy of humanism was a comer stone of the illumination. It was alleged that there was a universal honorable core to humanity, it followed that all persons could be said to be intrinsically equal and free. From others, the general law of reason guided the way towards total liberation from any kind of oppression (Friedman, 1975). Such thoughts did not go unchallenged. Karl Marx criticized the project of political liberation, declaring it to be suggestive of the very dehumanization it is supposed to be against of. He squabbled that since under capitalism, insensitive individuals are always in disagreement with one another; rights are needed to defend them from one another.

Exact liberation can only come through the founding of socialism, which eliminates all private possessions. While the mature Marx may have preserved a belief in the inexorableness of advancement, he also became more vigorous in his criticism of the conception of human rights as optimist or utopian. For him, humanity is an incredible concept since rights themselves are theoretical, the equality and justice they defend is also abstract, permitting tremendous inequalities in authenticity. According to Friedrich Nietzsche, humanism was nothing more than a worldly version of theism.

He squabbles that human rights subsist as a means for the frail to collectively confine the strong. On this observation, such rights do not ease emancipation life, but rather reject it. In the 20^th century, the idea that human beings are realistically independent was confronted by Sigmund Freud, who alleged humans to be driven by insensible unreasonable desires. Martin Heidegger alleged humanism to be a metaphysical philosophy, in that it attributes to humanity a universal quintessence, benefiting it above all other forms of survival. For him, humanism takes awareness as the prototype of philosophy, leading it to an idealism and subjectivism that have to be kept away from. What is more, Heidegger discarded the Kantian concept of sovereignty, maintaining humans to be social and historical beings. He also rejected the Kant’s concept of a forming perception that constructs the world around it. In spite of this, Heidegger was alleged as an antecedent to the supposedly humanist movement of existentialism, leading him to distance himself from humanism. The improvement of structuralism was originally greeted as a means of overcoming the challenging perception of man. Much as modern pragmatic science had replaced philosophical assumption concerning the nature of matter, so would abstract philosophical assumption be outmoded by solid sciences such as anthropology or linguistic (Etlin, 1991). Althusser believed social dealings to have primacy over personality awareness. For him, the desires, preferences, beliefs and judgments of the human personality are the creation of social practices.

That is to say, society makes the personality in its personal image. The human individual’s belief that he is a matter accountable for his own actions is not instinctive; rather, he is represented as a subject by society and its principles. Intimately associated to Althusser’s anti-humanism were the philosophies of post- structuralists. While their philosophies are fairly different, they both problematize the subject.  A common neologism for this is the decentered theme, which entails the nonattendance of human agency. For example, Jacques Derrida squabbled that the essentially indefinite nature of language makes objective incomprehensible and leaves language to structure and rule thoughts and actions. Michael Foucault argued that there is a foundation for knowledge in every period, which he called episteme. He squabbled that this modern time is the age of man and he imagined and supported a time where thought lastly moves away from the human as the object of investigation (Etlin, 1991).  According to the book, lots of modernists understood that by rejecting tradition they could find out fundamentally new ways of making art. Challenging much of the traditional wisdom concerning modernism and the avant-garde, Hays argues that a rigorously articulated post humanist’ position was actually developed in the modernist architecture of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer.

References

Etlin, Richard A. Modernism in Italian architecture, 1890-1940. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991.

Friedman, Martin L. Charles Sheeler.  New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 1975.

Gay, Peter. Weimar culture: the outsider as insider. New York: Harper & Row, 1968.

Hays, K. Michael.  Modernism and the post humanist subject: the architecture of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992.