kuntakinte

Then we started looking at the interval or the distance between the present and what was preserved. In 1818, it was 2,000 years. In 1900, it was only 200 years. And near the 1960s, it became 20 years. We are living in an incredibly exciting and slightly absurd moment, namely that preservation is overtaking us. Maybe we can be the first to actually experience the moment that preservation is no longer a retroactive activity but becomes a prospective activity. This makes perfect sense because it is clear that we built so much mediocrity that it is literally threatening our lives. Therefore, we will have to decide in advance what we are going to build for posterity sooner or later. Actually, this seems an absurd hypothesis, but it has happened, for instance, in the cases of some houses that were preserved at the moment they were finished, putting the inhabitants in a very complex conundrum.

We then looked at the history of preservation in terms of what was being preserved, and it started logically enough with ancient monuments, then religious buildings, etc. Later, structures with more and more (and also less and less) sacred substance and more and more sociological substance were preserved, to the point that we now preserve concentration camps, department stores, factories, and amusement rides. In other words, everything we inhabit is potentially susceptible to preservation. That was another important discovery: The scale of preservation escalates relentlessly to include entire landscapes, and there is now even a campaign to preserve part of the moon as an important site.

Indeed, the city as center is far from becoming obsolete. But as a center, the city is increasingly affected and structured by our culture of media images. In the move from the city as regional or national center of production to the city as international center of communications media, and services, the very image of the city itself becomes central to its success in a globally competitive world

Empire, war and revolution, democracy, fascism, Stalinism, and the Cold War all were played out here. Indelibly etched into our memory is the idea of Berlin as the capital site of a discontinuous, ruptured history, of the collapse of four successive German states; Berlin as ground ofliterary expressionism and the revolt against the old order; Berlin as epicenter of the vibrant cultural avant-gardism ofWeimar and its elimination by Nazism; Berlin as command center of world war and the Holocaust; and, finally, Berlin as symbolic space oft he East-West confrontation of the nuclear age with American and Soviet tanks staring each other down at Checkpoint Charlie, which is now being turned into an American business center watched over, temporarily, by a towering photographic cutout of Philip Johnson and a shrunken, gilded Statue of Liberty placed atop the former East German watchtower.

The notion of the city as sign, however, is as pertinent as before, though perhaps more now in a pictorial and imagistic rather than a textual sense. But this shift from script to image comes with a significant reversal. Put bluntly: The discourse of the city as text in the 1970s was primarily a critical discourse involving architects, literary critics, theorists, and philosophers bent on exploring and creating the new vocabularies of urban space after modernism. The current discourse of the city as image is one of"city fathers," developers, and politicians trying to increase revenue from mass tourism, conventions, and office or commercial rental. Central to this new kind of urban politics are aesthetic spaces for cultural consumption, megastores and blockbuster museal events, Festspiele and spectacles of all kinds, all intended to lure that new species of the city-tourist, the urban vacationer or even the metropolitan marathoner, who has replaced the older leisurely flaneur. The flaneur, though always something of an outsider in his city, was still figured as a dweller rather than as a traveler on the move. But today it is the tourist rather than the flaneur to whom the new city culture wants to appeal--even as it fears the tourist's underside, the displaced and illegal migrant.

gelecege kisisel bir not

....Cambridge'de, çarpıcı ama gelip geçici adetlerin yanı sıra, törenlerden ya da kurallardan daha derinde bir yerde, birçok vakur üniversite mezununun tanımlamaya çalıştığı kalıcı bir tortu bulunduğunu ister istemez fark ediyorum. Bu temel niteliği, insanın kısıtlamasızca geçirdiği bir zaman dilimine dair farkındalığı olarak değerlendiriyorum. Bilmem ki birileri, futbol ayakkabılarımın kale önündeki siyah çamurda bıraktığı krampon izlerimi aramak ya da kepimin, öğretmenimin oda merdiveni önündeki avluya düşen gölgesini takip etmek için Cambridge'e gider mi; ama biliyorum ki ben, o muhterem duvarların yanından geçerken, bir turistin duyduğundan daha büyük bir heyecanla, Milton'ı, Marvell'i ve Marlowe'u aklımdan geçirirdim....

ilan edecek bunu kasabanin davulu koskoca bir bavulu on kuru$a ta$idi.

In the twenties a work of art or a piece of architecture was a finite composition of simple elements, elements which have no separate identity but exist only in relation to the whole; the problem of the fifties is to retain the clarity of intention of the whole but to give the parts their own internal disciplines and complexities. This kind of ordering, as opposed to geometric ordering, must be the basis of all creative endeavours from the city to the object.