Critical Agenda [a critique of both the current state and future directions of the modern city and the culture of the people who dwell within it (and the inevitable direction of an eternally progress-driven society, one that continues to disregard and distance itself from nature and the reality of climactic issues] Architecture, particularly in urban settings, has a strict legacy of control over the forces of nature. While this creates the illusion of a safe, cohesive abstract system that represents progress, we are actually growing apart, more than ever, from both the external environment and each other. Relationships are fragmented and abstract, and our effect on our surroundings is no longer significant or obvious. According to the French product designer Philippe Starck, “We are in a world where we have everything and nothing, or rather too much and nothing at the same time. A person can have a house crammed with equipment and furniture and still feel very much alone, you can be in tears in a huge mansion. And our environment can only evolve towards immateriality”. Relating life to the design of architecture, which is traditionally always geared towards monumentality, he goes on to say, “life is a symphony with loud movements and soft movements. Otherwise it becomes something unbearably strident”. Architecture has built itself up on a pedestal of monumentality, this strategy to resist time and the forces of nature unlike the reality that which our human condition provides. The buildings we’ve put up now and before contribute to a legacy of permanence and stasis, which now suddenly turns against architecture itself, as a fast-paced, image-obsessed society no longer places any value on these aging principles. Now that architecture doesn’t need to be monumental to be relevant, it needs to respond to and engage its inhabitants to remain significant. Meanwhile, the over-saturation of information and the complexity of current society has caused us to become even more numb, apathetic, and completely too comfortable with our day-to-day existence. It could be argued that with the progress of society, science, and technology-culminating in the endless urban city-we have become numb to even our mortality. The city, this human-controlled, almost completely artificial environment of concrete and steel, static world or shapes and shadow, has replaced nature with our strangely ideal new world. The city promises opportunity, excitement, success, social interaction, and the end-game that we should be happier. Our crowning human achievement-this playing of “God” on an epic scale, should be accompanied by dramatic social improvements as well. Consequently, have architectural design and a positive social agenda completely disconnected? What has gone wrong in the process that we are designing emotionless boxes of productivity, that oppress the inhabitants and confine them within restrictive spaces. It is interesting, especially in a city, that we might spend by far the largest percentage of our living moments in buildings, yet for the most part we don’t even acknowledge their presence. The average person is apathetic to the vast majority of well-intended architecture, beyond a purely aesthetic and basic functional critique, because without ever experiencing an architecture that promotes more than just an image and an expected function, they couldn’t possibly have higher expectations. These static, monumental forms that tower around us, enclose us, direct us, become boundaries and memories of a dated past and hopeless future. They offer nothing new. “The forces of capitalism have converted places that could encourage difference and interaction into non-places of homogenization and indifference. Diversity, encounter and change, qualities that urban environments seek to encourage are substituted by alienation and passive consumption. Commodification within capitalist cultural contexts has reinforced separation, fragmentation and atomization. Open spaces promote corporate images that reduce the public to mere consumers. Corporate plazas, shopping malls and commercialized skywalks arc all evidence of the privatization of what once was perceived as public space. Crucially, the ideology of corporations has infected public bodies, becoming the model for the redevelopment and expansion of the urban realm as a whole” (Parkour Reading). One area of life in particular, the traditional office work place, seems to suffer greatly from so-called modernity. These value-engineered spaces have become so efficient that they are almost considered non-places. The only character they possess comes about in direct relationship with the aesthetic manipulations of the workers at a micro-scale (I.e. cubicle
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