McDonough's article explores social geography, reorganizing physical space into abstract space, and then further into social meanings. It contrasts Debord's The Naked City with Plan de Paris. Plan de Paris is presented from a bird's eye view, an impossible viewpoint that no person or subject see, thus making it strictly a functional document, with no feeling, presence, or being. It is also structured to give "false continuity" to the city, hiding the soul and culture of the actual city. McDonough describes The Naked City as a relief, a breath of fresh air, suggesting that its artistic fragmentation mirrors real violence in Paris's past and creation. (Haussmann's work) He argues that while at a cursory glance, The Naked City may look like a disjarred and fragmented image of the city it actually embraces struggle in the city by incorporated spaces, products of society. A lot of his points seemed to draw parallels to some of the themes we have been discussing in class.
I liked the last bit where McDonough points out that the new city is "evacuated" that its vitality and fullness no longer run through the streets but are actually tucked away in the residential homes, ever since the onset of "spectacle-culture". But the liveliness and richness of the city is actually killed, in its traditional sense, by spectacle-culture. What life and energy is there to a culture that is centered around passively watching?
Q1: Why only include the large and famous monuments (of both New York and Paris)? Aren't the unnamed and 'underground' locations what actually make up the flow and energy of a city?
Q2: It would be interesting to see this same concept applied to different areas of social relation building and inhabiting (where there are different "unities of atmosphere") , for example, institutions - schools, churches.. Has this been done before?
No comments:
Post a Comment