
THE (DIS)ENCHANTED SUBJECT OF ARCHITECTURE: BETWEEN NEOLIBERALISM AND NEOBAROQUE Review
by Lennart Wolff, MA History & Critical Thinking student
By dissecting the project and walking the audience through it, Ockman sought to uncover the ways in which the built environment stimulates emotions in visitors, a phenomenon which, according to her, emerged by the mid-twentieth century, when buildings tended to become spectacle-buildings.
Reflecting on the aspect of spectacle from a different angle, Douglas Spencer compared the ideologically driven “dreamworlds“ of the cold-war era, ranging from Stalin’s monumental subway stations in Moscow to recent transit spaces. Spencer concluded that the contemporary turn towards austere and optimised designs does not mark the disappearance of dream-forms. It is in fact a continuation of the production of persuasive atmospheres with different means. Smooth and seamless surfaces enable a re-enchantment of the neoliberal maxim of production, which is based on flexibility, mobility, and self-optimisation. In relation to the above, Nina Power noted that putative public spaces constitute the realm in which governments define and police mass or group subjects, hereby suggesting that we are not just living in a reality of increasing individualisation but one that is still deeply structured by (post-)Foucaultian mechanisms of surveillance and control.
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