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The physical elements of modern cities are being formed by the most influential impulse of this century: mechanised commerce. As we move around our daily environments, whether by foot or in a car, advertising slogans and signs surround us capturing our attention towards noticing specific promotional messages. How have we as a society come to silently accept this visual domination of our daily lives by commercial interests? If this tacit approval of commercial propaganda has a psychological basis, what are the elements in the powers of advertising that accord with the modern view of culture? A little while ago, while rummaging through my own history in search of clues to analyse the way I approach my design work, I came to a sudden realisation that up till now, I had been caught up in searching for inspiration from the material world. I had a sudden sense that I had truly neglected the cultivation of my spirit. The raw motivator of life itself does not necessarily lie within my mind but in the given talents that I can use to act in the world. If, as it seems, these talents are gifts of nature, to exploit them for the purposes of profit would seem akin to selling my soul. Instead it would seem better to cultivate my talents and use them to enrich my daily existence and empower my sense of freedom.
If our cultural passivity is a symptom of a deeper insidious sickness of the spirit then this has still to be diagnosed as a result of living in a meaningless architectural environment. In proposing a new humanism, architects working in the classical and traditional styles must embrace a sense of mission greater than just offering a stylistic alternative to apply over the same old pragmatic concepts.
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© Taeho Paik Architect Rome
The modern view of
culture is that it is something that we can partake of passively. There is
an expectation that cultural material will be produced for us. We take it
for granted that our cultural institutions will train excellent performers
for our appreciation and enjoyment in the comfort of seated auditoriums or
on television. We eagerly await new movies and music CDs produced to
perfection. We employ entire industries to tell us what we should eat and
where, what music we should listen to, and why, and how we should decorate
our houses. Air travel has reduced the idea of the 'tour' to 'tourism'.
This passivity confuses us into believing that we can start to understand
life just by being discerning in our cultural tastes. We believe that
cultivating our spirit can be achieved simply by absorbing processed
information, that somehow we know what's good just because we are keen
readers and watchers. We are all becoming armchair critics who forget that
the real pleasure is more in the singing and less in the listening. The
paradox being that, as we think we are becoming more discerning, we also
lose our powers of spontaneity. We forget that the primary task of
performing is to move the heart of the simple man and not the mind of the
complex aesthete. This passivity destroys the very seeds of culture by
homogenising and stratifying all artistic endeavours by critical
conventions. Thus we lose the will to invent and create art that surges
from the need to speak, to sing and to tell stories. We forget that the
gift of the senses is the central instrument for turning simple expression
into art. This passivity may also affect artists. Passive audiences turn
artists into nervous performers; thus comedy is reduced to satire and
tragedy to news reporting.
Advertising plays
aggressively on this passivity, exploiting and reinforcing it in turn. It
is the voodoo of the modern age. What was once a simple matter of
illustrating the object for sale, the design of advertising now uses
multi-media and cinematic techniques to 'brand' the object in such as way
as to build dream-like imageries around specific products. If most
people's lives hover in a tensile state somewhere between dream-like
imaginations of how life could be and how life actually unfolds, then the
choice of particular products poses an interesting conundrum, given that
goods are always purchased in anticipation of use at a future moment,
imagined or otherwise. Surrounding a product with powerful imagery is
persuasive to a society becoming culturally passive because one begins to
believe that deep desires may also be satisfied passively, that is, by
purchasing the set of products that nourishes the dream of how life could
be.
If our public
realm becomes a forum for working through fantasy, what cost might we pay?
Quite simply: our sense of connection with nature. Our public realm is
unrelentingly consumerist not because we necessarily like it that way but
because our own cultural passivity cuts us off from our need to respect
nature. Nature is treated as a 'resource'. When this attitude is taken to
the next logical step, people stop being God's children and become 'human
resources'. In many corporate organisations, the departments that were
once called 'Personnel' have been replaced by ones called 'Human
Resources'. Industrial peace has been secured with the aid of cultural
passivity.
There are no demons in this story, only an
observation of what I would consider manifestations of human folly. I have
emphasised advertising because it has become the most authoritative
physical and mental transaction that defines contemporary society. The
effects of this style of living on the human soul can be attributed to the
social forces that were unleashed by the Industrial Revolution. If
architecture has anything to say about the human soul, then modern
architecture tells us very clearly that human society has changed. But
how? If modern life has made us less capable of spontaneous expression,
less capable of tasting the fruits of nature, less capable of loving, less
capable of giving and taking, then I would say that modern life has made
us humanly deficient and our spiritual emptiness is expressed very clearly
by an abstract, mute and neutral architecture. The realisation of the
human utopia that was the ultimate aim of modernism has not been achieved.
The failure in retrospect was inevitable given the human propensity to
err. The error was in excluding from the set of utopian ingredients, a
strategy for overcoming inherent human imperfections - a reality that our
fore-fathers knew better how to harness and appreciate rather than negate.
The sharp unadorned lines of
their designs, the eternally pure walls of their constructions, the
shining glass of the perfect idea, in the end vainly tried to resist
nature, believing that the powers of the human mind lived in the greater
Universe and not on the muddy earth. Fortunately we have recognised the
errors of the Industrial Revolution and there is now a unanimity of view
that we need to clean up. Not many have yet seen that this is only one
aspect of our environmental problem. 