Again a bit of a lengthy post but interesting in relation to my current essay progression. I will run back through my lecture notes and see what else I could apply to the rebranding of the Co-operative.
Lecture Aims
The city in Modernism
The possibility of an urban sociology
The city as public and private space
The city in Postmodernism
The relation of the individual to the crowd
Dresden Exhibition 1903
Simmel is asked to lecture on the role of intellectual life in the city but instead reverses the idea and writes about the effect of the city on the individual
Urban Sociology - the resistance of the individual to being levelled, swallowed up in the social-technological mechanism.
— Georg Simmel The Metropolis and Mental Life 1903
Architect Louis Sullivan (1856-1924)
creator of the modern skyscraper,
an influential architect and critic of the Chicago School
mentor to Frank Lloyd Wright,
Guaranty Building was built in 1894 by Adler & Sullivan in Buffalo NY
'coined the phrase, in 1896, in his article «The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered». Here Sullivan actually said 'form ever follows function’ Red terracotta
Carson Pririe Scott store in Chicago (1904)
Skyscrapers represent the upwardly mobile city of business opportunity
Fire cleared buildings in Chicago in 1871 and made way for Louis Sullivan new aspirational buildings
Fordism: mechanised labour relations
Coined by Antonio Gramsci in his essay "Americanism and Fordism”
"the eponymous manufacturing system designed to spew out standardized, low-cost goods and afford its workers decent enough wages to buy them” De Grazia 2005. p. 4
Production line
Sought to gain maximum productivity with minimum effort through repetitive mechanical action
Cycle of mass production and mass consumption- in this case cars
Modern Times (1936) Charlie Chaplin
Wrote directed and starred in
Modern Times portrays Chaplin as a factory worker, employed on an assembly line. After being subjected to such indignities as being force-fed by a "modern" feeding machine and an accelerating assembly line where Chaplin screws nuts at an ever-increasing rate onto pieces of machinery, he suffers a mental breakdown that causes him to run amok throwing the factory into chaos.
Stock market crash of 1929
Factories close and unemployment goes up dramatically
Leads to “the Great Depression”
Margaret Bourke-White
Man with a Movie Camera (1929)
"Vertov strove to create a futuristic city that would serve as a commentary on existing ideals in the Soviet world. This imagined city’s purpose was to awaken the Soviet citizen through truth and to ultimately bring about understanding and action. Celebrates industrialisation mechanisation transport communication. The camera has access to intimate moments bed/birth as well as public street life. World peopled by mannequins"
Flaneur
he term flâneur comes from the French masculine noun flâneur—which has the basic meanings of "stroller", "lounger", "saunterer", "loafer"—which itself comes from the French verb flâner, which means "to stroll"
Charles Baudelaire
The nineteenth century French poet Charles Baudelaire proposes a version of the flâneur—that of "a person who walks the city in order to experience it".
Art should capture this
Simultaneously apart from and a part of the crowd
Walter Benjamin
Adopts the concept of the urban observer as an analytical tool and as a lifestyle as seen in his writings
(Arcades Project, 1927–40), Benjamin’s final, incomplete book about Parisian city life in the 19th century
Berlin Chronicle/Berlin Childhood (memoirs)
- Not unlike victorian arcades of leeds
Café society
Figure of the flaneur also becomes important in contemporary architecture and urban planning which seek to harmonise the environment with the human experience of the city
The Naked City
Based on a story by Malvin Wald, The Naked City portrays the police investigation that follows the murder of a young model. A veteran cop is placed in charge of the case and he sets about, with the help of other beat cops and detectives, finding the girl's killer. The Naked City producer Mark Hellinger's voice was used for the film's narration. Hellinger died of a sudden heart attack after a preview of the movie. The film was the inspiration for the 1958-63 TV series Naked City and its closing tag line, "There are eight million stories in the Naked City. This has been one of them.”
Postmodern City in photography: Joel Meyerowitz Broadway and West 46th Street NY 1976
Taken at street level this offers an eye level view of incipient confusion. The eye is overwhelmed by signs, and colour adds to the effect of chaos. Although the image is full of deail there is no sense of tradition or of unity. Indeed it is difficult to find a solid building at all. Clarke
Further Research
Cityscapes of modernity: critical explorations
By David Frisby
Art of America: Modern Dreams (2/3) Andrew Grahame Dixon BBC 4 21/11/11
Grahame Clarke The City in
De Grazia, Victoria (2005), Irresistible Empire: America's Advance Through 20th-Century Europe, Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (1989)
Grahame Clarke (1997) The Photograph Chapter 5 the city in photography
