Kanye West through L.Architecture theory & philosophy
Gerard Snowdon gerardsnowdon@gmail.com @gerardsnowdon
A designer provides contemporary design theory and philosophical references to make sense of Kanye West’s positions. • I decided to make this after watching an October 2019 Beats 1 interview, and my mind went to Walden, modernist planning principles, Pallasmaa, natural aesthetics, Noguchi, Kate Orff, Alain de Botton. This booklet shares sources from design, architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, history and philosophy on themes from the interview. • Gerard Snowdon 2019
Rome is the true Silicon Valley of humanity, a lot of the ideas and things that we need are thousands of years old ‌ that’s why we gather together.
In conversation, 1972 Noguchi: We don’t only live in today, but in the past too. The past is ours to preserve, but to live in, too. Fuller: You know when you pull a bow, if you want to shoot this way, well you pull the bow this way, don’t you? See: Interview between Isamu Noguchi and Buckminster Fuller, 1972 Arjan Zuiderhoek, The Ancient City, 2017
Cities have been designed ‌ that your job is 45 minutes away and in traffic.
Modernist post-WW2 planning has introduced a range of zoning controls, that permeate the way we live today. Urban design phases since industrialisation, adapted from Waldheim; • pre-Fordist, landscape as an escape from the spatial structure of the city. • Fordist economy, decentralised twentiethcentury city, landscape as a medium of planning and defining spatial limits. • Post-Fordist, in transition from economic order to another, landscape remediates the post-industrial site ‘animating the latent cultural, economic, and ecological potentials of derelict and distressed sites’.
See: Charles Waldheim, Landscape as urbanism, 2016 Jeff Speck, The walkable city, Ted Talk, 2013
With social media, people are brainwashed. They are addicted to it - the new cigarettes ‌ people invest more into a photo in social media than they invest in real life.
So, you used to be in a shop. Now your phone can connect you to people, check prices, shop around, the shop checkout system is connected to inventory management. The physical experience in the shop is different. In a restaurant, on a train, in the park. So on. ‘the social and cultural functions of built spaces have become inseparable from the simultaneous operations of multiple communications systems within and among them’ Mitchell, 2005 ‘The circulation of media, its images and effects, now provide an alternate register of common experience. Mediated images of cities now compete with their material reference to be loci of collective association’ Clutter, 2015
See: W Mitchell, Placing words : symbols, space, and the city, 2005 McClain Clutter, Imaginary Apparatus : New York City and its mediated representation, 2015
(I’ll take) like a 30-40 minute walk … (but, to go for longer) it’s just like for four hours? I’ve got other things on my schedule.
Walking is a technique for designers to connect to site, and to themselves. Gunther Vogt, Swiss landscape architect, conducts ‘Walkshops’ in his studio as a method of slowing down perceptions in the urban environment, and testing the boundaries of acceptable social behaviour in public. Further, see artist Richard Long, their walking work can be understood as a performance translating to sculptures.
See: Henrik Schultz (2014) Designing large-scale landscapes through walking, JoLA, pp. 6-15, Vol 2-2014 Gunther Vogt, Landscape as a cabinet of curiosities,2015 Richard Long, artist. See ‘Cotopaxi Circle’ as a starter. Henry David Thoreau, Walking, 1862
I was expecting something really green ‘cause that’s what I was used to, so I didn’t like it when I first got here … but then I was like ‘wow, these are the Yeezy tones right here.
The less natural-looking a place, the less it can be appreciated as an environment, though it can be appreciated as art. Appreciation is our framing and point of reference. We use ‘natural aesthetic’ as coded language to describe a lowly maintained place, of little beauty. ‘beauty is not a detached aesthetic quality; the experience of beauty arises from grasping the unquestioned casualties and interdependences of life’. Pallasmaa See: Frank Bruggeman & Hans Engelbrecht, Het Nieuwe Garden, Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam, 2015Jonathan Maskit, Line of Wreckage: Towards a Postindustrial Environmental Aesthetics, 2007, Matthew Gandy, Marginalia: aesthetics, ecology and urban wastelands, 2013 Matthey Gandy, Natura urbana, 2018, film Juhani Pallasmaa, The thinking hand, 2009
We’re building farms here because of the climate, because of the soil, we’re going to have hydroponic cotton, we’re going to have wheat, hemp, and we’re developing our own fabrics to go seed to sow. We gotta sustain, right?
In the life-threatening Anthropocene, with industrial agriculture aims of ‘productivism’, we find farming practices implemented without a) regard for unintended, long-term consequences b) consideration of the ecological dynamics of agro-ecosystems
Crucial landscape functions, Massy • solar-energy function, capture of solar energy by as much plant sugars, photosynthesis, as possible • water cycle, maximisation of water infiltration, storage and recycling of the soil • soil-mineral cycle, inculcating biologically alive soils that contain and recycle minerals and chemicals • dynamic ecosystems, maximum biodiversity and health of integrated eco-systems at all levels • human social aspect, human agency triggering landscape regeneration by working in harmony with natural systems
See: Charles Massy, Call of the reed warbler, 2017
It always seem like all the innovators were working for, I don’t know, Ayn Rand, I heard the term, or something, these ideas that there is no God, and they’re just working for the valuation of a company.
Ayn Rand, a Russian-US far-right author from the 1950s, espousing individualism and a society without hierarchy. Influential on the mostly male visionaries in Silicon Valley, who determine the globalised systems that are increasingly controlling the world. ‘Randian heroes’ have ideas that individual decision making underlies a stable societal order. Some of this decision making resulted in destabilisation of financial markets and social order in the U.S. and Asia in the late 1990s and early 2000s. This thinking is at the risk of informing our built environment, through the Google developed Sidewalk Labs urban design of Toronto.
See: BBC, All watched over by Machines of Loving Grace, Love & Power, 2011, Google Sidewalk Labs.
This understanding that we will not destroy the Earth, we could destroy the resources, and we could destroy ourselves, and then, the Earth goes on.
‘When we look at a site, we see ways to redefine it and acknowledge its underlying physical, political, and social foundations. We ask questions about who is stewarding the landscape and develop time-based approaches to solutions.’ Orff ‘Smithson’s engagement with time as both concept and medium is most frequently equated with entropy - the gradual disintegration of all matter into a state of stable elementary chaos over time.’ Barikin & McAuliffe
See: Kate Orff, Toward an urban ecology, 2016 Barikin & McAuliffe, Robert Smithson: Time Crystals, 2018
It feels a bit cramped for my mind. When you drove here you didn’t see a lot of extra noise. The road, and then, just God. Part of the reason I came to this ranch was to get-out-side.
In the 1850s, perhaps as a response to the industrialisation of cities, Henry David Thoreau, an American male, lived simply in the woods, slowing down his life. He remained connected to his social circles, while immersing himself in nature and removing himself from the bustle of the changing urban life he found in his town.
See: Alain de Botton, On Travel, 2002 Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854
I go into this transcendent state, where like, all, I’m actually reading Larry’s mind as we’re speaking, I’m actually, reading Josh’s mind, I’m reading Mister Boy’s mind, but what happened is exactly case in point, something on the internet, took away, distracted Boo’s mind, that’s what we’re talking about … when you’re in a room together and you can think things all the way through, when that energy builds up.
As people, we are not simply passive sense receptors. Our body exists with our senses, and stores existential knowledge. ‘The human body is a knowing entity … communication takes place even on a chemical level.’ Pallasmaa
See: Juhani Pallasmaa, The thinking hand : existential and embodied wisdom in architecture, 2009
A designer provides contemporary design theory and philosophical references to make sense of Kanye West’s positions from a recent interview in Arizona. Kanye West through L.Architecture theory & philosophy November 2019 Gerard Snowdon self-published
Funds from any sales go to SLAB at the Royal Melbourne University of Technology, to encourage further exploration of design and culture.