Killing modernism - deceptive architecture
Postmodernism can be described as a peculiar movement away from modernism, the style that claimed there should be truth in architecture. Mies van der Rohe famously used I-beams as nonstructural elements in order to reflect the inner structure of his high rises, giving truth to the aesthetic. But postmodernists rejected that idea, instead choosing to deliberately obscure this interior "truth". It's a artificial fake reality.
This is similar to the premise of the movie in Blade Runner. In the film, old technology has been replaced by new, and must be eliminated. In a way, this is present in today's culture (for instance, functioning phones are discarded annually with the release of the latest model). The movie also parallels the idea of artifice vs. real. This actually made me think about landscape architecture, where design is consciously artificial, but never fake. Claude Cormier's philosophy is exactly this: "artificial, not fake", and can be seen in his Lipstick Forest. The difference between artificial and fake is that artificiality does not attempt to be real, whereas "fake" is intentionally deceiving, like a copy or mimic of something real. Designed landscapes inherently cannot be entirely real, but a humility and awareness of this fact exists that prevents it from becoming fake. Postmodern architecture lacks this awareness and instead purposefully sets out to hide the truth, inevitably defaulting to fake.
This is similar to the premise of the movie in Blade Runner. In the film, old technology has been replaced by new, and must be eliminated. In a way, this is present in today's culture (for instance, functioning phones are discarded annually with the release of the latest model). The movie also parallels the idea of artifice vs. real. This actually made me think about landscape architecture, where design is consciously artificial, but never fake. Claude Cormier's philosophy is exactly this: "artificial, not fake", and can be seen in his Lipstick Forest. The difference between artificial and fake is that artificiality does not attempt to be real, whereas "fake" is intentionally deceiving, like a copy or mimic of something real. Designed landscapes inherently cannot be entirely real, but a humility and awareness of this fact exists that prevents it from becoming fake. Postmodern architecture lacks this awareness and instead purposefully sets out to hide the truth, inevitably defaulting to fake.
I like your discussion of the difference between artificial and fake but where does artificial fall in relation to real? Is it a spectrum between real and fake or a separate idea all together?
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