Platypus

The Sociohistoric Mission of Modern Architecture

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A Platypus teach-in by Ross Wolfe and Sammy Medina meant to explore some issues connected to the “Ruins of Modernity: The failure of revolutionary architecture in the 20th century,” an upcoming panel event at NYU featuring Peter Eisenman, Reinhold Martin, Joan Ockman, and (hopefully) Bernard Tschumi.

This presentation will touch on modernist architecture’s attempt to address problems like the housing shortage, the poor living conditions of the urban proletariat, and the liberation of woman from domestic slavery. Approaches to homelessness past and present: the 1920s-1930s Social-Democratic utopia of the Siedlung vs. the 1990s-2000s anarchist utopia of the Squat. Housing the unemployed and underemployed — the so-called “reserve army of labor” or “surplus population” — from the sotsgorod to Occupy Your Home.

A room, or perhaps a “pod,” of one’s own, and its importance for modern bourgeois subjectivity. Annihilating the antithesis between town and country (Karl Marx, Ebenezer Howard, Mikhail Okhitovich), the absurdity of the nuptial bed (Karel Teige), the city of children (Leonid Sabsovich), and the creation of a hermaphroditic humanity (El Lissitzky).

Kitchen factory, 1928

Kitchen factory, 1928

Vladimir Maiakovskii’s “The Flying Proletarian”

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This is what I’m planning to read at the Platypus Affiliated Society’s Prometheus in Drift: A Night of Modernist Readings event: Maiakovskii’s 1925 sci-fi piece, “The Flying Proletarian.” Here’s the description that Viktor Terras provided of it:

…set in the year 2125 and features a giant air battle, with death rays and such, between the Soviet proletarian and the American bourgeois air forces. The latter prevails until an uprising of New York workers against their government turns the tide. Maiakovskii’s communist future is all comfort and electric ease: electric razors, electric toothbrushes, everybody with his own private airplane (Moscow no longer has any streets, just airports). Labor is wholly mechanized, so that a worker merely operates a keyboard. Altogether, Maiakovskii’s utopia is written from the viewpoint of a laborer who is tired of backbreaking, dirty work…There are no kitchens, no housework. People eat in aerocafeterias and amuse themselves with cosmic cinemas, cosmic dances, and such — all nonalcoholic (alcohol is served by prescription only). The sport of the future is avio-polo — football has long since been abandoned as crude and boring.

The cartoon itself is a degenerate Khrushchev-era attempt to retrieve the contributions of the avant-garde movement that Stalinism crushed. Notice the space-age imagery, the cosmonauts. But something of the original futurism survives even still here. It’s something that’s been lost.

[vodpod id=Video.16162674&w=425&h=350&fv=]

So anyway, to plug the event taking place tomorrow, here’s the info:

Prometheus in Drift

G o e t h e   |   H ö l d e r l i n   |   R e n a r d   |   K l e i s t   |   W a l s e r   |   V a l e r y   |   B e c k e t t

|   K a f k a   |   S t e v e n s   |   E s e n i n   |   B a u d e l a i r e   |   M a i a k o v s k i i   |   C e l a n

friday, 03.02.12, 7pm | nyu kimmel, rm 909, 60 washington sq s

if you would like to volunteer to read one of the selections or have any questions about the event, please contact nyu@platypus1917.org.