Architects of fact and fiction

2015 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 249-258 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Hill
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Natural World ◽  
First Century ◽  
English Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
Relevant Today ◽  
Nature And Culture ◽  
The Future ◽  
Art Forms

Conceiving a design as both a history and a fiction is not exclusive to the analogy of architecture to landscape. But it is central to this tradition because of the simultaneous and interdependent emergence in the early eighteenth century of new art forms, each of them a creative and questioning response to empiricism's detailed investigation of subjective experience and the natural world: the picturesque landscape, analytical history and English novel, which its early advocates conceived as a fictional autobiography and characterised as a history not a story. The conjunction of new art forms stimulated a lyrical environmentalism that profoundly influenced subsequent centuries, and is increasing relevant today due to anthropogenic climate change, which is now the principal means to consider the relations between nature and culture.While a prospect of the future is implicit in many histories and novels, it is explicit in a design, which is always imagined before it is built. Creative architects have often looked to the past to imagine the future, studying an earlier architecture not to replicate it but to understand and transform it, revealing its relevance to the present. Twenty-first century architects need to appreciate the shock of the old as well as the shock of the new.

‘We will change’

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 395-412
Author(s):  
Christy Tidwell
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Natural World ◽  
First Century ◽  
Environmental Concerns ◽  
Glacier Change ◽  
New Combinations ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Western Values ◽  
The Many

One of the many threats accompanying climate change is that of deadly viruses being revived or uncovered when the permafrost melts, as in the 2016 uncovering of anthrax in Siberia. Blood Glacier (Kren Austria 2013, originally Blutgletscher) addresses this in creature feature form, telling the story of something nasty emerging from the natural world (in this case, microorganisms emerging from a melting glacier) to threaten humans and human superiority. Blood Glacier reflects a larger twenty-first-century creature-feature trope of prehistoric creatures emerging from thawing ice as well as an expansion of ecohorror beyond familiar nature-strikes-back anxieties or fears of humans becoming food for animals. Instead, the microorganisms discovered within the glacier change people (and other animals), causing mutations and leading to the creation of new combinations of species. The film juxtaposes these environmental concerns with one character’s past abortion, which comes to represent another, more personal, challenge to Western values. As a result, the film asks questions not addressed by other similar creature features: Which life has value? What does the future look like, and who decides that? The film therefore addresses the ethics of bringing life into being, gesturing toward the responsibilities inherent both in bearing children and in choosing not to bear children. These questions are addressed in the end of the film, with the birth and then adoption of a mutant baby. By bringing these issues of reproduction and environmental futures together, the film asks us to consider how our past and current choices help shape the future - both personal and planetary. The conclusion of the film serves in part to reinforce heteronormativity and reproductive futurism, both of which stake the future on the replication of the past through traditional relationships and by reproducing ourselves and our values through our children. Simultaneously, however, it gestures toward new possibilities for queer, nonhuman, mutant kinship and care.

Prayers

2018 ◽  
pp. 118-149
Author(s):  
Matthew D. O'Hara
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New Spain ◽  
Self Regulation ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future

This chapter studies the logic of traditional innovation by investigating a form of sanctioned Catholic practice. In the eighteenth century, a new movement flourished in many of the most important cities and towns of New Spain. Calling themselves Holy Schools of Christ, these groups combined collective piety sometimes associated with baroque Catholicism, such as the lashing of flesh, with an intense demand for self-regulation of an individual's thoughts and actions. The participants in the Holy Schools might appear as surprisingly modern in their attitude toward controlling the future and their attempts to achieve individual or collective improvement. Yet to characterize this movement as a moment of hybrid modernity in which elements of the past persisted despite a turn toward the modern would be deeply misleading. For the members and supporters of the Holy Schools, innovation required tradition. Individuals of this period, in other words, were often future-oriented without being modern.

Gaining a Past, Losing a Future: Web 2.0 and Internet Historicity

2012 ◽  
Vol 143 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Allen
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Web 2.0 ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Historical Interpretation ◽  
Web 3.0 ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Or Practice ◽  
The Web

This article explore how, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the internet became historicised, meaning that its public existence is now explicitly framed through a narrative that locates the current internet in relation to a past internet. Up until this time, in popular culture, the internet had been understood mainly as the future-in-the-present, as if it had no past. The internet might have had a history, but it had no historicity. That has changed because of Web 2.0, and the effects of Tim O'Reilly's creative marketing of that label. Web 2.0, in this sense not a technology or practice but the marker of a discourse of historical interpretation dependent on versions, created for us a second version of the web, different from (and yet connected to) that of the 1990s. This historicising moment aligned the past and future in ways suitable to those who might control or manage the present. And while Web 3.0, implied or real, suggests the ‘future’, it also marks out a loss of other times, or the possibility of alterity understood through temporality.

Между природой и культурой: экологические мотивы в поэзии Баира Дугарова

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 286-293
Author(s):  
Galina P. Dondukova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Russian Language ◽  
Language Poetry ◽  
The Past ◽  
Nature And Culture ◽  
Ecological Problems ◽  
Nomadic Life

The article analyses the motif of contrasting the natural world and the technical civilization in the works of the Buryat poet Bair Dugarov as one of the aspects forming the ecological problems of the present. Dichotomy between nature and culture reflected in the opposition of a countryside and a city that is characteristic of Russian-language poetry of Buryatia, in Dugarov’s works gains a deep tone and expresses inner thoughts of the persona about the past and present, about forgotten nomadic life and modern globalization. Keywords: Buryat literature, environmental motifs, nature and culture

David Mitchell’s Inefficiency

2021 ◽  
pp. 149-183
Author(s):  
Thom Dancer
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Literary Realism ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
Global Problems ◽  
The Future ◽  
Massive Scale ◽  
And Function ◽  
Prior State ◽  
Cultural Force

David Mitchell’s fiction provides an opportunity to reconsider the claims of modesty in the context of globalization. This chapter draws upon the arguments of the previous ones to put critical modesty to its most difficult test. Are minor achievements enough given the massive scale of planetary life and of urgent global problems facing humanity, not the least of which is environmental ruin? I argue that Mitchell’s novels directly face the problems of scaling that cast into doubt the place and function of the novel as a relevant cultural force in the twenty-first century and beyond. Mitchell’s work helps us to reconcile realism as a kind of modest speculation. Where the novel has long been understood as a form that easily scales from the local to the global, Mitchell emphasizes the discontinuity afforded by novelistic thinking. The efficient causality that has subtended literary realism aims to retroactively recreate the events that lead inevitably from the past to the future. Mitchell’s formal investment in discontinuity resists the tyranny of the inevitable by narrating moments of bifurcation in which a new possibility for action suddenly and unexpectedly emerges. Thus, his novels adopt an inefficient causality that give expression to the feeling that things might be different than they are, that inevitability (optimistic or pessimistic) is a dangerous trap. The challenge that Mitchell poses for himself and other novelists is to imagine a disposition modest enough to nurture and shepherd into being these moments of bifurcation when, by definition, there is nothing in the prior state that predicts them.

The Third Manifesto: ‘We Shall Come to See’

1988 ◽  
Vol 4 (14) ◽  
pp. 120-121
Author(s):  
John Andreasen
Keyword(s):  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Art Forms ◽  
Science And Politics ◽  
The University ◽  
Changing Society

In June 1985, a fortnight's discussions on ‘The Theatre in the Future’ were held as part of the Fools' Festival in Copenhagen. The seminars discussed the position of theatre and its possibilities in a rapidly changing society, often from deeply opposed positions – socially engaged versus wildly avant-garde, verbal versus imagistic, anthropological versus robotic, and so on. Participants were an exciting mix of professional performers of many kinds, plus theatre critics and ‘ordinary’ engaged people, who for two weeks exchanged experiences and visions of theatre in conjunction with other art forms, and with science and politics. The manifesto below was the contribution to these seminars of John Andreasen, a veteran of ‘sixties happenings, who has subsequently concentrated on street and environmental theatre, and for the past twelve years has taught and directed in the Drama Department of the University of Aarhus.

The promotion of peace and humanity in the twenty-first century — What role for the Red Cross and the Red Crescent?

1994 ◽  
Vol 34 (303) ◽  
pp. 595-610 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacques Moreillon
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Red Cross ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Impossible Task ◽  
Twenty First Century

Dealing with a question of this breadth may seem an impossible task. Furthermore, it would certainly not be intelligent to claim to have found the solution to the problem of peace and humanity. The first mark of intelligence is precisely knowing one's limits, and it is clear that we can only try to guess at potential answers to such a vast question; to do this we would need to look at the past so as better to understand the future.

scholarly journals ANALYSIS OF COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH IN ARCHITECTURE AND PSYCHOLOGY OF THE LATE TWENTIETH-EARLY TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Articult ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 137-148
Author(s):  
Evgenia I. Vinogradova ◽  
◽  
Evgeny V. Kilimnik ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Collaborative Research ◽  
First Century ◽  
The West ◽  
The Past ◽  
Relevant Today ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

The article analyzes the work of Western and Russian scientists, conducted in the past three decades, on the relationship of psychology and architecture. It is shown that in the West, the neuropsychological aspects of the relationship of psychology and architecture are studied thanks to modern neurobiological equipment, while in Russia there is a clear gap between the representatives of neuroscience, their technical support, and the architectural scientific community. As a result of the analysis conducted in the article, it is concluded that two research blocks can be distinguished. The first of them highlights the relationship between the psyche of the viewer and architecture. This may include research, both revealing the features of the perception of objects, and the influence of an architectural object on the viewer. Another block of research is connected with the psyche of the architect: and here the features of the design process itself are examined, as well as the influence of the personality of the architect on the features of the architectural object. It is concluded that the topic of reflecting the individual or individually-typological psychological characteristics of the personality of an architect in a specific architectural work remains undeveloped both in the West and in Russia, although it is extremely relevant today.

scholarly journals Leading Beautifully: The Creative Economy and Beyond

2018 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 11-39
Author(s):  
Nancy J. Adler
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Creative Economy ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
Passionate Commitment ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Traditional Structures ◽  
First Time

<p align="right">Only by investing in the artistry of our humanity <br/>will we create a peaceful, prosperous planet</p> “These times are riven with anxiety and uncertainty” asserts John O’Donohue.<sup>1</sup> “In the hearts of people some natural ease has been broken. … Our trust in the future has lost its innocence. We know now that anything can happen. … The traditional structures of shelter are shaking, their foundations revealed to be no longer stone but sand. We are suddenly thrown back on ourselves. At first, it sounds completely naïve to suggest that now might be the time to invoke beauty. Yet this is exactly what … [we claim]. Why? Because there is nowhere else to turn and we are desperate; furthermore, it is because we have so disastrously neglected the Beautiful that we now find ourselves in such a terrible crisis.”<sup>2</sup> Twenty‑first century society yearns for a leadership of possibility, a leadership based more on hope, aspiration, innovation, and beauty than on the replication of historical patterns of constrained pragmatism. Luckily, such a leadership is possible today. For the first time in history, leaders can work backward from their aspirations and imagination rather than forward from the past.<sup>3</sup> “The gap between what people can imagine and what they can accomplish has never been smaller.”<sup>4</sup> Responding to the challenges and yearnings of the twenty‑first century demands anticipatory creativity. Designing options worthy of implementation calls for levels of inspiration, creativity, and a passionate commitment to beauty that, until recently, have been more the province of artists and artistic processes than the domain of most managers. The time is right for the artistic imagination of each of us to co‑create the leadership that the world most needs and deserves.

Medea Overlived: The Future of Catastrophe

2020 ◽  
pp. 174-198
Author(s):  
Juliette Cherbuliez
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
Isabelle Stengers

The final chapter turns to the particular nature of a Medean tragedy—that is, the tragedy of what Isabelle Stengers has called the “challenge” of a mother who kills her children but does not perish and is therefore without issue or, paradoxically, finality. This idea of tragedy in the neoclassical age is taken up through this temporal lens, by considering primarily Racine’s last play Athalie (1690). Through the idea of “lastness,” the chapter considers how tragedy demands a peculiar reading of time, of history, of our place in time, and of our relationship to a temporality out of our control. It considers the changing concept of “catastrophe,” originally a theatrical term that originally meant the final steps of a tragedy’s resolution, but shifted, in the eighteenth century, to designate an unpredictable cataclysm. Both within its verse and in its reception Athalie is the drama of a shift in temporalities, from one in which we lived history as an unfolding of events in the past, present, and future; to one in which the future’s devastations are always a surprise.

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