Contemporary Lenses
Contaminated Ideas and Poisonous Advocacy in Architecture
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Robert Barelkowski
The architectural profession evolves and tackles new challenges of contemporaneity. This discipline, as a field of struggle between the static and the dynamic, the stable and the everchanging, the material and the immaterial, the deliberate and the spontaneous, the calculated and the experienced, appears to be constantly out of balance, fluctuating between multiple unstable, temporal states. It also witnesses the integration or the conflict between collective expectations, imaginations of built environment and human comfort nested within, and individual ideas and interpretations conceived and formulated by an architect. In this paper the author presents a selective, critical review of the problems of contemporary advocacy in architecture, seen as results of ideology-driven design effort. The article focuses on five cardinal issues which make advocacy counterproductive and even dangerous for the society and for the individual. There are five issues of advocacy covered herein: 1. The temptation of power – the tyranny of totalitarian architecture. 2.The deceit of trendsetting – the sins of unaffordable ecoarchitecture, 3. The crime of revolution – the deliberate destruction of spatial continuum. 4. The hypocrisy of narration – the rapture within anti-ethics/ the anatomy of community lie. 5.The mirage of participation – the problem of particularism and social (mis)understanding. Architects learn from design mistakes, but also from blinding trends or ideologies. Contemporary architecture brought as much hope to fulfill the mission for the improvement of life conditions of mankind as it did harm to both social stability, social ties and people’s confidence.
Imagining the Sensus Communis of Design: Exploring the Roles of the Imagination in Creating and Evaluating Novel Designed Objects
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jennifer Rempfer
Design patents exist at the juncture of art, law, and culture and provide an exemplary foundation to intertextualize philosophy of the imagination, psychology, semiotics, and the impact of these ideas in operation through aesthetic language. In this essay, I illustrate that U.S. design patent examination is executed through a tri-layered Foucauldian grid consisting of the primary codes of the imagination, the episteme of historicity, and the execution of the systemic legal process of the design patent system. The non-obviousness requirement of the design patent system brings these elements to a crux to allow insight into the practice of evaluating novelty and the philosophy of thought. This examination concludes that improvements must be made to the design patent system to take into account the primary codes of the imagination at work, such as linguistics, experience, and psychology. The U.S. Patent Office would improve the process of the design patent legal system by creating algorithmic searching aides and a connected dialogue between designers and examiners about what a “designer of ordinary skill” means over time.
