Well this is a new one on me….
http://www.spatialagency.net/database/how/empowerment/architects.revolutionary.council.arc
Love the posey photo………WE ARE ALL PETER FONDAS
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If you ask me, a truly revolutionary council of architects would’ve abolished architecture, the role of the architect and itself, never mind RIBA. Next to dentists, I hate them with a passionate intensity, as they inhabit that particularly precious corner of the middle class professions. Aloof, patronising and utterly disconected from ordinary people’s lives, they build monstrosities for us to live in while lolling about in renovated 15th Century farmhouses in Tuscany and Georgian Terraced housing. The fathers of modernist architecture were complete cunts- Le Corbusier more than flirted with fascism, offering to re-design Berlin for Hitler, and the Bauhaus lot thought they could reform the dissolute working class by plopping them in concrete boxes, offering what was called an ‘existenzminimum’ – the upshot of Modernism in this country, has ben the Birmingham Bullring, Rowan Point, Thamesmead, the Brixton Wall and countless barrack-like shitholes. They control how our living environments are built, and we are never, or rarely, consulted, so while they get ‘design awards’, and fat wedges from dodgy developers, we get the condensation, broken lifts, damp, noise and misery of ‘high-density’ housing…Fuckers.
Peter Fonda? I was thinking more Starsky and Hutch…
This bunch have handed out leaflets at a few MayDay marches in recent years – I could never make sense of the texts and assumed it was some situationist blather meant to confuse the uninitiated peasantry.
ARC calls on all those architects and others involved in the built environment who believe that we should cease working only for the rich and powerful minority or the bureaucratic dictatorship of Central and Local Governments and offer our skills and services to the local communities who have little chance to work directly with architects and architecture.
- ARC manifesto, 1976
From the sound of things this lot would have agreed with a lot of your criticisms of their profession Incubus. More to the point most of the worst housing in the post war period wasn’t architect designed but was thrown up by speculative developers, some of the most successful was designed by architects working closely in conjunction with local communities, the Byker estate is a good example of this.
At it’s worst Modernism in architecture was/is patronising and authoritarian. At it’s best though, it points to the possibility of a better world and of a built environment that serves the interests of all.
Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water like.