When Alain Badiou speaks of the real he is referring to a reality counter to the current one we perceive today. The spectacle is what we accept to be truth, the stylised news crashing across the screen on the sky news info bar at 1000mph. The idea that we are free to consume (capitalist Freudian slip there) unbiased fact from agencies such as the media is a fallacy.
Badiou talks about returning to the real shifting away from the current political economic shambles into something new. Born of the mistakes of the past but inherently new, different.
This is all making sense so far, beginning with sense always seems like a good way get acquainted with the beast, creep up on it size it up before you make an assault. To launch straight at a subject like Zaha Hadid would probably reduce me to such a seething frenzy I’d be unable to finish this sentence let alone wrap the blog up into some sort of logical piece.
Much like Badiou, Hadid (to call her just Zaha just feels like buying into the hype somehow, I can’t bring myself to do it) talks about wiping away the past creating a new system. ‘It would be interesting to do a large project without looking backwards.’
Now I’m not saying that either of them is wrong in saying that a fresh start is needed sometimes. Badiou’s arguments are supported by evidence so universally obvious that most 12years olds could tell you just how fucked the current system is. Open a paper (preferably one not owned by Rupert Murdoch), turn on a news network (again Murdoch free is best) and you are bombarded by the recession the banking crisis and associated panicking and bailing out.
Hadid offers no such evidence as to why we should believe in her new world order. ‘The awkward struggle to describe the products of her capacious imagination is hampered by her disinclination to use simile, which, though it might clarify, would undermine her achievement.’ Of course it would undermine her achievement; it would show people that there is no substance behind her style.
If she wants us to believe that we should abandon 100’s of year of architectural theory, then I want to know why, I want fucking answers! I think I’m entitled!
It Makes my heart sing that until recently London has resisted these crass interventions, it shows hope that some people do see through to the ‘real’ when it comes to architecture, that a building must be more than ‘pure abstraction’. I can’t live in pure abstraction I can’t cook a pot noodle in a microwave made of pure abstraction so why should I accept that a city should be made up of it just on one person’s say so?!?!
I’d quite happily debate the validity of Badiou’s theory at great length, by explaining the processes behind the theory by accepting that it is a product of what has come before constructed on the foundations of learning from the past rather than casting it aside we can begin to think critically about it. We can begin think about catching the beast (at the least we can get the cage from the van).
Hadid, by offering no explanation, just an expectation of blind faith closes her work from the debate she offers no point to counter against.
All I’m left with is the feeling that her architecture is the embodiment of the spectacle, not once is the inhabitants of a building mentioned; a lack of wealthy people to finance her monuments is bemoaned.
In the first year of my degree I was told in no uncertain terms that ‘because it looks good’ is no justification for anything in the architectural world. Well Hadid it still isn’t I WANT ANSWERS!
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