Advertisement
Your Email:
Your Name:
To:
Subject:
Message: Architecture is not politics, but it's relevant to politics because we create our physical environment in the image of what we believe about the world generally. We need to make sense of our surroundings. If they're too much at odds with the world we believe in, they seem stupid, phony and aside the point. A divine-right monarch would seem bizarre to Ronald Dworkin, a purely secular state to Joseph de Maistre. If they were on a city planning commission together, their disagreements would lead to disagreements on the work of the commission—for example, on the appearance of the cathedral and town hall and where they should be in relation to each other. City and building provide the physical setting for public life. The political goal implicit in the tendencies of thought now generally dominant is to replace the familial, civic and religious core of public life with technologically rational processes embodied in world markets and neutral transnational bureaucracies. That goal helps explain why the arch-modernist Le Corbusier said, "The core of our old cities, with their domes and cathedrals, must be broken up and skyscrapers put in their place." http://www.takimag.com/2257/