Architecture – Houman Riazi

November 12, 2019 — No Comments

Which One Is Hotter, Architecture or Cinema?

For those who have read any of Marshall McLuhan’s book or have heard of him, hard-to-read is an inevitable feature of his text; and it is not because of being pretentious, rather the opposite, for that the text is understandable but the structure is confusing. As Mark Federman puts it in On Reading McLuhan:

“McLuhan’s work is mosaic. It cannot be understood as a linear construction, beginning at the beginning and proceeding through the middle to the end. He presents no linear argument, no consistently built case of evidence, yet his body of work is remarkably consistent, except when it’s not. His evidence is clearly presented, except when it’s obscure. His arguments and examples are easily caught, mainly because they are reiterated throughout all his works — if you miss it the first, second, third or seventh times through, you’re sure to catch it the tenth or fifteenth or twentieth time you see it. Reading McLuhan is an exercise in pattern recognition, and once you see the patterns that emerge from the McLuhan mosaic, you will never, ever, be able not to see them — anywhere and everywhere.” [1]

Car As a Heterotopia

Talking about automobiles in an architectural, urban and social context may seem to be a boring cliché since there has been never-ending discourses and countless projects on the basis of this topic, and it has been accepted as an inevitable part of the urban life for long. But it may also be true, on the other hand, that framing effect–as a cognitive bias–blinds us, in this case, to see other aspects of the topic and put us in a situation where we “cannot see the wood for the trees”. Regarding the probability of being biased and a personal interest in the unique character of the car–specifically as a moving micro-space inside a macro-space (the city or streets)–an architectural practice started recently.

Is There Any Common Dominator Between Architecture, Economy, And Culture?

Despite the examples in history of architecture, which rarely were connected with business or hardly found by financial initiatives, it seems hard to think of the same relationship today and the main reason is the drastic change of economic systems. Yuval Noah Harari in his book Sapiens: a brief history of humankind simply explains how the notion of money came into the world. He comprehensively draws the picture of an economic framework by introducing the power of imagination in human’s mind and the matter of trust which can run the wheels of the economy. In part of the book about barter, he writes: “An economy of favors and obligations doesn’t work when large numbers of strangers try to cooperate.”, “… barter is effective only when exchanging a limited range of products. It cannot form the basis for a complex economy.”[1] Which points to one of the reasons why there are no more examples of architecture regardless of financial concerns. In fact, architecture as a complex product, was not exchangeable because it was not easy to find out its value and the relative prices of dozens of commodities and exchange rates.