CIRCLE OF (ARCHITECTURAL) LIFE
Distraction → Creation → Transformation
Is it okay to destroy chaos and create
uniformity if ultimately it does good end?
Is it okay to disregard who and what you
are going to destroy if it does good in the end?
Is it okay if it’s going to financially
recharge your city or country?
Is it okay if we hurt a small group of people to boost the majority?
In class, we discussed how the world
expresses their political conflicts through physical actions, usually resulting
in the destruction of architecture. Architecture is something than is fast and
makes an easy, yet detrimental impact on an area. If you want the city to
become a city of shambles, all you have to do is light a match—start a fight—stand
in the road, etc.
Some of the things that caught my attention
the most this week during class was that it is a constant battle between destroying
and recreating things that makes the political and economic issues dissipate. As
we are witnessing in the world now, other people do not care who or what they are
going to hurt to get what they want, which is such a scary thought—however,
there types of issues are just the things that rebuild and make things better. We
destroy chaos and create uniformity and structure.
Throughout history I don’t believe
that people have truly thought about the large-scale gentrification that they
have caused because they didn’t think about ALL of the things that were going
to happen because of their actions. I’m not saying that some of these terrible
things haven’t helped countries and economies, but it is a hard concept to
grasp, hurting others to help others? Seems wrong. It doesn’t have to be
violent either, you see it happening when we think of construction and
developers buying land out from under slums, too.
“a process of displacement and what I call
“accumulation by dispossession” also lies at the core of the urban process under
capitalism. It is the mirror image of capital absorption through urban redevelopment
and is giving rise to all manner of conflicts over the capture of high value
land from low income populations that may have lived there for many years.”
David Harvey
Creating uniformity and structure. I like how you used structure here and relating it to the human experience. I think, especially in this country, we get caught up in the perspective of: how does it make money? How much does it cost? It's a cost culture we are devouring and with that being first we are habituated with thinking on the economic benefit of destruction... more specifically of urban space. It is so hard to understand that some built form must be destroyed. What does that look like? Are the avenues sole purpose to be a space for destruction? Maybe so in some cities, but nonetheless it is extremely important to see that physical destruction in words and picture because the rumble signifies new dust for life to be created from.
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