#assignment 05

EC380 Assignment 05 Art and Creative Development

EC380 Assignment 05 Art and Creative Development for $9 Only

Directions: Be sure to make an electronic copy of your answer before submitting it to Ashworth College for grading. Unless otherwise stated, answer in complete sentences, and be sure to use correct English spelling and grammar. Sources must be cited in APA format. Your response should be a minimum of one (1) single-spaced page to a…

EN130 Assignment 05 English Composition II for $12 Only

Directions:

Be sure to save an electronic copy of your answer before submitting it to Ashworth College for grading. Unless otherwise stated, answer in complete sentences, and be sure to use correct English, spelling and grammar. Sources must be cited in APA format. Your response should be a minimum of two (2) double-spaced pages to a maximum…

In chapter’s five and six of Anna Klingman’s Brandscapes, a thesis about the new architectural approaches spurred by the conditions of late capitalism is constructed. Kilingman opens the chapter by invoking the canonical Koolhaas essay Junkspace. In the essay, Koolhaas offers a feverish critique of modernity and it’s relation to capitalism. He argues that the primary product of modernity is not manufactured commodities, but the associated spaces from which they are manufactured and sold. Junkspace has a neutralizing effect, dampening intense experience under its even wash of fluorescent lighting. These types of spaces are easy to construct, and easy to re-skin.

Klingman offers several counter-strategies which take seek to leverage the neutralizing effects of the postmodern architecture of late capitalism. In one approach, so called lowbrow architecture is manipulated to transcend the aesthetic differentiations between it and the ‘highbrow’, in another, architecture is made liquid so as to adapt to the turbulent change of market forces. In yet another, time is appropriated by architects as a material, and in two others, parametric or pure data generate form. The final, and perhaps most interesting, is the technique used by Rem Koolhaas, called The Accommodating Critique. This technique, by way of programmatic manipulation, allows for the architect to simultaneously provide of the needs of the client while delivering a sometimes scathing critique of the project type, or the economy in which the project is suspended.

Here, we might look to Learning from Las Vegas for a way to unpack Koolhaas’s subversive technique. Venturi’s text explains the way that architecture can be understood as a vehicle for semiotics. By flattening architecture into an interplay of signs, Scott-Brown and Venturi open the discourse of architecture to transcend formal and functional considerations, assuming a new cultural agency. Koolhaas, appropriating techniques of pop-art posited by Warhol, et al, finds new interest in the previously banal. In the case of Prada stores, the act of shopping is elevated to an important human institution. The ‘epicenters’ become highly flexible stage sets from which performances of the brand-identity can be enacted.

Ironically, Koolhaas illuminates both the disease and one possible treatment. It seems that if late capitalism demands the production of junkspace, one way for the architect to operate is to generate meaning by destabilizing the preconceived notions of activities which are fundamental to the postmodern condition.

For me, this raises a few key questions:

1. Does the architect have a responsibility to destabilize certain social binaries that are unreachable by other cultural agents?

2. Would Koolhaas argue that Disneyland, as we have come to understand it in this class, is and example of junkspace?