Mapping sitting: datable structures, state imagination and the subordinated body
Ömür Harmansah ~ October 2, 2007 ~ Blue State cafe.
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N.B. This piece was written in the context of my graduate seminar The Rise (and Demise) of the State in the Near East taught at Brown University's Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World in Fall 2007. I am grateful to the whole group for the intriguing and heated discussions in that seminar.
Modernist architect Adolf Loos's notorious dictum "ornament is crime" continues to haunt me fourteen years after I finished architecture school. I was simply hoping to "loose" him at some point, but no. He found me again in David Wengrow's chapter on "the evolution of simplicity" (Wengrow 2006): he had surreptitiously sneaked his way into this book on the archaeology of early Egypt, parading as an eccentric character who sees "the evolution of civilization [as] tantamount to the removal of ornament from objects of use." Striking as he may sound in this context, he actually represents the central modernist discourse in architecture. For our rebellious postmodern little minds, Loos's statement was still equally forceful for us for what it represented: the functionalist view of modernist architecture that saw ornament and structure as distinct entities and sacrificed the former for the purity of the latter. This of course is not a simple and naive act: the representational surfaces of buildings have always been associated with references to the past, local identity and narrativity, with which modernism has had a sour relationship. The utopian project of modernity as the brainchild of modern European nation-state ideologies, promoted the idea of the "democratization of everyday life" which can now be read as subordination of the embodied self within the context of panoptically controlled urban landscapes of Hausmann, Mussolini and others. |