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City and the Festival: Architecture, Play, Urban Experience

Young, Michael E.
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin990813665

Abstract Details

2001, MS, University of Cincinnati, Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning : Architecture.
In the Modern period, the problem of architecture seems to have been cast as one of function and commodity towards form. As such, space is understood as the functional void which is defined by the boundaries of the commodity/building. All other considerations have been relegated to ornament or "mere" aesthetics. Is inhabitation of these voids, then, a purposeless act carried out by unthinking, uninvolved human beings? Is culture really a fixed structure such that it a) is nakedly borne by members of society? b) can be read by researchers and predicted by architects? Since the beginning of this century, theorists, such as Henri Lefebvre, have been skeptical of these presumptions and have shown space as an active, participatory structure which carries culture with it, bound up in its "spatiality". Two settings will be analyzed in this respect. First, in the example of New Orleans Mardi Gras, an event that merges practice and criticism of social structure and roles, we see the human at play-a play defined not as leisure, but a participatory act. This ludic activity gives rise to speculation regarding our Modern assumptions about architecture. Space is no longer defined by any formalism. The event and the environment depend on one another for definition and the urban space of this festival seems to be one of convenience and irregularity. Inversion and transgression provide the mechanisms for exploration of the representational, architectural and symbolic mode of being. Second, In the early postwar era in France the Situationists formulated a revolutionary stance against the advance of capitalism which by their definition appeared as a spectacle of alienated life. Through art and criticism they explored the relationship between the commodity-form and the alienation that mechanisms of production and consumption create in society. Searching for a way of supplanting that "alienated experience" with "directly lived experience," the Situationists moved from Surrealism's desire to merge art and society, through a Utopian vision of the city in a so-called "unitary urbanism" to a strictly political agenda eventually giving rise to the events of 1968 in the universities and workplaces of France. The Situationists developed a set of revolutionary tools to use towards this goal and the city (Paris) was their experimental laboratory. Emphasizing that which is unpredictable in Human Nature and openly hostile to Modern, functional urban planning, the Situationists created a self-defining paradox of attitudes whose themes prefigure postmodern perspectives on history, objectivity and multiplicity. Finally, Gadamer shows that the being of architecture is play. Play is constitutive of both art and architecture as it forms the structure of release from and return to self which for him is the opening of the artwork to the world. The phenomenon of architecture, therefore, is misunderstood without a firm account of the experience of its "working." Through Gadamer's re-definition of ornament and decoration as something which opens out onto its context, we propose an interpretation of Mardi Gras as a decoration of the city-a doubling of the decoration performed by architecture. The overall intent is an experiential critique of space. It is not a prescription for producing better architecture; and certainly not by conventional means. It can only serve to point out that there is in fact an architecture in-between the solids of architectural form-forms which not only synthesize the raw materials of the earth into their abstract, unrecognizable, useful character, but also solidify the values of political, economic, and social force.
John Hancock (Advisor)
1 p.
Urban and Regional Planning
Mardi Gras; situationist international; architectural theory; Hermeneutics

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Young, M. E. (2001). City and the Festival: Architecture, Play, Urban Experience [Master's thesis, University of Cincinnati]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin990813665

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Young, Michael. City and the Festival: Architecture, Play, Urban Experience. 2001. University of Cincinnati, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin990813665.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Young, Michael. "City and the Festival: Architecture, Play, Urban Experience." Master's thesis, University of Cincinnati, 2001. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin990813665

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

ucin990813665
© 2001, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by University of Cincinnati and OhioLINK.