Architecture and Identity: Towards a Global Eco Culture.Chris Abel is a nomad nomad (nō`măd'), one of a group of people without fixed habitation, especially pastoralists. (Some authorities prefer the terms "nonsedentary" or "migratory" rather than "nomadic" to describe mobile hunter-gatherers. by nature. For 30 years or more he has travelled around the world from teaching post to teaching post and conference to conference, reinterpreting current fashions in architectural theory Architectural theory is the act of thinking, discussing, or most importantly writing about architecture. Architectural theory is taught in most architecture schools and is practiced by the world's leading architects. according to his own intellectual preoccupations. This book brings together his most important essays and groups them under three headings: Science and Technology, Critical Theory, and Regionalism re·gion·al·ism n. 1. a. Political division of an area into partially autonomous regions. b. Advocacy of such a political system. 2. Loyalty to the interests of a particular region. 3. and Globalisation. From these headings alone it is clear that he is a nomad in the intellectual as well as the geographical sense. His reading has been wide ranging and eclectic. He borrows freely from science, philosophy, systems theory, semiotics semiotics or semiology, discipline deriving from the American logician C. S. Peirce and the French linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. It has come to mean generally the study of any cultural product (e.g., a text) as a formal system of signs. , cybernetics cybernetics [Gr.,=steersman], term coined by American mathematician Norbert Wiener to refer to the general analysis of control systems and communication systems in living organisms and machines. and a dozen other disciplines and sub-disciplines, bringing them all to bear on his central concern: architecture. The result is always unconventional and challenging, and sometimes impressively prescient pre·scient adj. 1. Of or relating to prescience. 2. Possessing prescience. [French, from Old French, from Latin praesci . Way back in 1969, for example, he was writing about the way that computers would transform manufacturing processes, undermining common assumptions about standardisation and mass production. When, in 1986, he came to write about HongKong Bank he could point to Norman Foster's 'design development' method as an example of what he had predicted 17 years earlier. But it would wrong to think of Abel as a technologist. He is equally at ease with linguistic philosophy or Jungian psychology Jungian psychology, n.pr psychologic approach based on the ideas and theories developed by Carl Jung (1875–1961). Includes the concepts of the collective unconscious and symbolic archetypes. or the problems of cultural imperialism. If there is a common theme to these essays it is not, as the title suggests, architecture and identity, but a distrust of form, whether philosophical or architectural. He has no time for Post Modernism or Deconstruction, for example, because, in their architectural manifestations at least, they are primarily concerned with the manipulation of form. Abel is more interested in process, the process of making and process of thinking. These essays are not difficult to read, or for that matter particularly profound. Their virtue is in their restless, searching quality, their unwillingness to settle in any cosy intellectual homeland. |
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