September 25, 2003
notes for a future post
I walked through the deserted streets of Adelaide last Saturday in the late afternoon. I went scouring the few bookshops that exist in this strange oversized country town whose repressed violence and meanness of spirit scares me.
I walked quickly. Did I hear the dogs howl in the distance?
image courtesy of Boynton
A sense of belonging? Adelaide was a place where community had broken down and dreams shattered. The inner city was scarred with holes in the ground now filled with water from the winter rains. Signs of failed developments in the 1980s.
The inner city was now the place of the destitute, the homeless and the dying-----the social outsiders marked by law and order.
I was on the hunt for a book on (postmodern) philosophy, architecture and place. I was tired of the hidden place of utopia of modernism. I yearned for rupture as that utopia as a freezing of time was no place. It was an ideal.
Adelaide as a place is full of a desire for order and perfectionism. It sees itself as better than all the other Australian cities: it is more caring, more ethical, more reasonable, more cultured and so on. That is the dead weight of the utopian Enlightenment heritage in this place.
I had no specific text in mind as a crusied the bookshops, apart from this, which I then forget about.
Place is the inbetween that links (mediates) the two indifferents---philosophy and architecture.
Well, that's where I'm at. It feels like being in a mudpool as the stormy night comes learning how to celebrate achievement. Those who passed n me by commented that I was really yearning for an inside position.
I felt lonely there. The outside of one space is the inside of another.
I have come to architecture from the outside-----from the philosophy institution-----and I felt that I needed a text or two that could act as my companion. I'm an interested outsider, as the stranger who is outside the disciplines of architecture and philosophy who wants to get them exploring each other. I was looking for something like this. Or this.
Bataille had whetted my appetite. But I wanted something other than being against architecture.
I found a couple of texts. They cost an arm and a leg. So one was put on layby.
I bought the other. It is Architecture from the Outside by Elizabeth Grosz, an Australian feninist philosopher now working in the US.
Here are some comments. An interesting site.
It seems as if I have stumbled into a world.
Walking back home with the dogs was pleasant in the late afternoon sun. But the city was empty. No one around. Was everyone at the beach? At the barbecue?
It was eerie:---a city of no people. You can see why Adelaide promotes itself as exciting and sensational. It is currently promoting itself as the space where you can sip a latte and access the Net (via thecitilan network) without needing a phone line.
I hate lattes. And to access the citilan network you neeed to within 200 metres of of a WLAN access point. In the boosting of Adelaide's wireless technology is utopia yet again.
What I need is a space where can examine architecture philosophically and philosophy architectually.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at September 25, 2003 01:02 AM | TrackBack