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demonstrates the international quality of the hopeful dreams which influenced their art. More’s the pity that this is not convincingly shown in relation to the nightmares. Although Miss Fletcher specifically states that “antiUtopian art transcends political, economic, national and ideological limitations” and does not “serve as a political tool” (p. 138), the dystopian section of her study, and of the exhibition itself, fails to establish this clearly. We are not given the essence of the DystopidUtopia polemic (the seminal nineteenth century Dostoyevsky/Chernyshevsky skirmish not being considered at all). Instead the dystopians are shown to be protesting against definite abuses (Stalinism, Hitler, MacCarthy, bureaucracy, Hiroshima). This accounts for such anomalies as Orwell’s 1984 (90% about 1948)being lumped together with Huxley’s genuinely dystopian Brave New World as a classic of the genre, whereas Zampatin’s equally genuinely dystopian (and thus not specifically political) We is seen as “attacking emerging signs of totalitarian control in the USSR”. The art of political protest should be contrasted not with Utopian art but rather with the art of political conformism, rightly accorded no place in this exhibition. The fact that the dystopian nightmares are less sharply defined than the utopian dreams leads to the curiously bland conclusion that both represent a kind of ‘humanism’, working for measure and synthesis in the waking world by a good, oldfashioned dialectic progression of thesis/antithesis . This is not quite the impression left by the pictures. Nevertheless, this is a thought-provoking, important and accessible study that should help both artists and their publicto definetheir own position and direction in these catastrophically changing times. Reviewed by Kirill Sokolov, 213 Gilesgate, Durham City DH1 lQN, U.K. Architecture and the C r i s i s of Modern Science. Albert0 Pkrez-G6mez: MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1983. 400 pp., illus. Cloth, $30.00. ISBN: 0-262-16091-9. The author’s fundamental proposition isthat, through two centuries, architecture was deprived of the power of symbolic communicaion and has never recovered it. In the postGalilean intellectual tradition, certain scientific and mathematical derivatives had the effect of stimulating new theories and, inthe process, changed the thinking of architects and builders. In order to demonstrate this thesis, P6rez-G6mez, director of the school of Architecture at Carleton University, discusses such subjects as proportion, number, geometry and technology. Beginning with Claude Perrault in the eighteenth century, the argument is carried forward to include the writings of Jacques N. L. Durand in the nineteenth century, and throughout there is an insistence on linking architectural ‘failure’ to the new science which, he asserts, “implied a radical subversion of the traditional astrobiological world view”. As the author describes it, there were two great transformations inthought after Galileo. In the first, at the end of the seventeenth century, the idea that number and geometry constitute a link between the human and the divine was questioned in both science and philosophy; in the second, at the end of the eighteenth century, there occurred the rejection of any implied Newtonian Platonism and the divorce of faith and reason. Theresults, for architecture, were to emphasize technical challenges and to create an architecture “deprived of a legitimate poetic content”, becoming “prosaic technological process or mere decoration”. Thus, Perrault, who is associated in France with progressivearchitecture , is shown as a rationalist who criticized submission tothe ancients and wanted to begin “a continuous line of development in aprocess of ever increasing rationalization”. In the years between Perllault (1628-1703) and Durand (1760-1834). all of the following occurred and contributed to the loss, in architecture, of its myth, poetry, and meaningfulness : technology became dominant in architecture; education in architecture became formalized; measurement and geometrical drawing became increasingly systematized so that rational planning and programming of construction could become a reality; geometry was applied to mechanics (from Galileo) thus permitting technical control of nature; civil architecture was described as having scientific objectives; technical domination occurred as a result of the exclusion of metaphysical speculation - that is, the road to positivism was taken; the advent of the technical expert was seen; an architect could use descriptive geometry (knowledge of it) to compensate for a lack of familiarity with building techniques; efficiency and...

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