change week 7
25/05
LOTTE VAN HULST
LAURENS STUDIO 17
Revolution or revolutionary To be revolutionary has lost actual meaning because it is so commonly used in advertising. The same goes for progress. The term is vague and does not necessarily say on which of the ends of the political spectrum you are. But it entails moving forward in a way. The connotation of change has changed as well. People have become lazy. Why do people use “revolutionary” all the time but seem to be scared of the word “revolution”? I would say revolution entails something someone would have to work for. Revolutionary is a label and an easy way to wear the identity of being progressive. People have become lazy Hail the Maintainers is an essay that resonates with this, saying capitalism produces a tunnel vision of innovation and progress, but fails in maintaining the mundane. Whereas, in the end, maintenance has the greatest impact on inhabitants of a society (Russell & Vinsel, 2015). The necessary day-to-day labour is lost from sight due to the solutionist drive of constant innovation through technology. Andrew Russel also mentions that ‘economics had already
turned to technology to explain the economic growth and high standards of living in capitalist democracies’ (2015).
As soon as they figured that innovation had lost its meaning because it was used so excessively, it was already too late and more books with meaningless innovative titles were on their way to the shop shelves. The same happened to CIAM in the first half of the 20th century. This International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM) had radical ideas about how to design a city. An example of one of their modernist projects is the Bijlmer (shown in the photograph). This design also went down in history as a result of fancy progressive words without regard for the necessities and maintenance of the daily lives of the people who would actually be living in it. By the time they realised it was not working as they expected, new apartment blocks were already shooting up out of the ground like mushrooms, explains Pi de Bruijn, co-architect of the Bijlmermeer, in an interview for the podcast 99% Invisible Modernist Bijlmer tower blocks in hexagonal honeycomb (Mingle, 2019). formation (ANP & Anefo, 1994). The construction workers had contracts to build as many as 30 flats in the next few years. But finding tenants was already becoming difficult because of the lack of roads and shops (Mingle, 2019). The innovation outpaced the infrastructure. Russel (2015) refers to this by explaining the unattractive connotation of the word “infrastructure”. But as he says, and as is evident in the example of the Bijlmermeer, infrastructure is essential for the social success of
