Our generation has willingly chosen to promote and build anxiety-producing buildings, while at the same time destroying what is left of life-enhancing geometries. The media is successful in convincing the rest of the world to import these designs into the remotest regions of the world, and to erase their own architectural traditions. The developing world has been sold the image of anxiety-producing architecture as the key to modernization, and as being essential for social and economic progress. – Nikos A. Salingaros, Twelve Lectures on Architecture, page161
Kigali’s master plan. Illustration: World Architecture News
The “starchitects” and their soldiers (with Le Corbusier as their evil idol) are about to invade the very core of Africa, dropping silent bombs of terror and anxiety onto the African landscape. This is now to be done by altering Kigali, the capital of Rwanda. Their mission is to make the city part of the global monoculture of economy and architecture, reducing Africans to being subservients of corporate laws and structures. To fulfill this process they have to eradicate all traditional African architecture, ripping the heart out of the African soul.
Africans, please revolt against this crime against your heritage and character. Don’t allow yourselves to be enslaved again by white man’s dogmas — this time in the evil shape of Modernism.
Further reading:
- Life and the Geometry of the Environment
- Cognitive Dissonance and Non-adaptive Architecture: Seven Tactics for Denying the Truth
- Nikos Salingaros on Peer to Peer Urbanism. Indeed a very interesting interview!
- Vil forandre Rwandas hovedstad
- Slik blir de nye WTC-tårnene
True, but one cannot fight evil with evil. Using propagandistic means is not a good way to go. And please stop bashing Le Corbusier, he lived in another time and another media reality. It is all the liars and traitors in our closest circles that deserves bashing.
ReplyDeleteAre you sure you followed the link to Le Corbusier above? Here is a section from the article I linked to:
ReplyDelete"Yet just as Lenin was revered long after his monstrosity should have been obvious to all, so Le Corbusier continues to be revered. Indeed, there is something of a revival in the adulation. Nicholas Fox Weber has just published an exhaustive and generally laudatory biography, and Phaidon has put out a huge, expensive book lovingly devoted to Le Corbusier’s work. Further, a hagiographic exhibition devoted to Le Corbusier recently ran in London and Rotterdam. In London, the exhibition fittingly took place in a hideous complex of buildings, built in the 1960s, called the Barbican, whose concrete brutalism seems designed to overawe, humiliate, and confuse any human being unfortunate enough to try to find his way in it. The Barbican was not designed by Le Corbusier, but it was surely inspired by his particular style of soulless architecture."
Oops, did not notice there was a link... I'm trying to say that I think the impact of ideology is overestimated. Le Corbusier may be a _convenient_ leader figure to bash, but he would not have been able to have such influence if he had not been helped by numerous "invisible" others, that never cared about ideology, only their own egos...(Those I refer to as "liars and traitors in our closest circles") These people do much more harm than any ideology, and they do it by free will.
ReplyDeleteAlso the change in media reality should be taken into consideration, but I'll have to come back and write a longer text on that. My point is that the use of propagandistic tools from the pre-internet era may work against its purpose now (Even if is's well done).
Maybe you are right there are better ways to condemn these kinds of projects? Anyway, the most important is that they are condemnd, one way or another. And as I'm not an architect or a person with an important title of any kind, I'm free to condemn it without risking social status or my career. Very few speak this openhearted these days.
ReplyDelete