Interrogating The Architectural Conscience

PRELUDE - ugliness and the mindset

Exploring the mindset behind the increasingly intrusive aspect of 'ugliness' in our urban environment today, one can assume that one is a reflection of the other. I think I can assuredly say that this aesthetic state of ‘ugliness’ is a universally recognized predicament transpiring in the architecture of today that is valid and urgent. I am very curious as to how this came to be and how architects are a part of it.

I would like to probe into the role of the architect and the dilemmas challenging the architectural practice today along with the rest of society touching on issues of ethics, morality, tradition and general well-being. The intention is to analyze this persistent phenomenon and suggest avenues for further investigation in order to inspire solutions.

My probe starts with traffic in today's cities!

TRAFFIC & ugliness in the modern day city

Alexei Sayle (The Telegraph 2012), expresses an opinion shared by many commentators, urban planners and architects, who have come to realize that we live in cities whose built environment is fast turning into the embodiment of ugliness with all its vexing faces: unsightly buildings in disunity forming unbalanced street vistas; ever expanding transport systems; and unrelenting traffic, pollution, stress and general unhappiness. In an article on visual pollution, Sayle describes the thoroughfares in British cities as:

“… littered with all manner of unpleasantness, our streetscape contaminated not just with unnecessary traffic lights but with all kinds of hideous signage, ziggy-zaggy lines, yellow lines, red lines plus hideous fences (which are often dented, dirty and twisted eyesores) designed to stop you throwing yourself under the wheels of passing trucks because you have become so depressed with the ghastliness of the urban environment......to my mind the responsibility for all this lies in the fact that, in Britain, control of our city streets is in the hands of traffic engineers who see all roads merely as conduits for traffic. They have no sense of beauty and indeed revel in ugliness (I coined the term uglitarianism to describe their attitude) and do not see streets as living, breathing entities that require a complex set of solutions.”

'The Diabolical Symbolism of the Automobile' - Rodney Blackhirst

This is a paper that I find most interesting and a way to expand one's mind into the real effect of the car and the ripple effect of this man-made vehicle on man and the well-being of earth. Good to read. Below are some excerpts and here is a link to the online full version:

" With the possible exception of the television no other item of modern technology is so pervasive and so ubiquitous and is so inseparable from the identity of modern man as that of the automobile."

"The lakes of oil under the earth are, in fact, the residuum of the aurumic humus of Edenic times, the physical residue of the gardens of the Golden Age, and so are in that sense the treasure of the alchemical dragon. Modern man has stolen this treasure and unleashed the dragon. The petroleum sciences are, then, a counter-alchemy, a diabolical alchemy that hastens the onset of cyclic dissolution rather than preparing the way for the new cycle. In recent decades it has become obvious that this technology entails transposing the heat and carbon contained in these lakes of oil from the earth into the atmosphere and that this is likely to have a profound impact on the polar structures of the earth and so constitutes a transformation of global, geological proportions. In the long run this must have an impact upon the entire balance of the terrestrial system and perhaps even upon the earth's axial balance and magnetic polarities and such like. We are belatedly beginning to realise that this - equal to the atom bomb - looms as the greatest threat to our own existence we have yet engineered."

Stay tuned for the next part of 'Interrogating The Architectural Conscience' coming up shortly.