Badiou and Meades write the same Hollywood blockbuster under different titles. Hadid struggles to put her design process into words, whilst bankers and politicians fail to communicate the financial crisis, the credit crunch, into a language that we, the majority, understand. Both architects and bankers resort to using technical jargon, of which the majority ignore and trust, as that is easier than questioning. By sitting back and allowing others to make decisions for us we have lost control of our lives, money and environment, creating a crisis. And in an age of globalisation this has become a global crisis. and decisions sitting back and letting others make the important decisions.
Terms thrown around by the media such as The Global Crisis and The Credit Crunch (with its irresistible alliteration) conjure up images of a dramatic thriller movie, encouraging us to view the world through a lens, detaching us from reality. Badiou clearly explains without the aid of any seductive terms, how the financial crisis is essentially a housing crisis, directly relating the crisis to the reader (as we all need somewhere to live).
If a picture says 1,000 words, then a building says 10 times that, and a financial crisis, well that says 3 years worth and counting. The difficulty is putting things (stuff, objects, events, the physical and the non-physical) into words that make sense, into the vocabulary of the everyday. Economics is centred around incomprehensible figures, whilst the design process is indeterminable. How to describe, in words an invisible process, or something that we may not even ourselves understand?
Above: The BBCs attempt to show us in the Eurozone debt crisis (in somewhat ridiculous) graphics. One immediately questions how the UK can own France Eur.209.9 billion if France owes the UK Eur.227 billion, surely some simple Maths could reduce this debt to a Eur.17.1 billion payment from France to the UK - a comparatively easier, though still somewhat incomprehensible, figure to understand.[1]
Freedom of speech is not freedom of understanding. By talking in jargon people select their audience. It is a problem in society that professions such as doctors, lawyers, architects, engineers, politicians, all have their own vocabulary, or jargon, encouraging others to switch-off when things become too technical, particularly when events don't appear to directly affect us.
It is all too easy to feel removed from, and so ignore what is happening elsewhere. But this makes us vulnerable when the inevitable does happen - we live in a global society, a distant crisis quickly becomes our present. Many switched-off, when the banking crisis began - lots of strange words and incomprehensible figures floating around - who had heard of Bear Stearns anyway? Our global economy, combined with our disinterest in others business, allowed the crisis hit us in the face. High unemployment rates, service cuts, job cuts...nearly all of us around the world have been affected some way. The crisis began to grab our attention, but how are we to understand a system built upon mystifying numbers and words. 3 years on how many of us really understand the problem?
We are detached from disaster in the news, watching as though it were a perverse thriller, changing channels when it all gets too much. Miners trapped in Chile, a hurricane in New York, war in Libya. But as soon as that film strikes closer to home, and you, your friends and family are lead roles, things become uncomfortable, the movie becomes reality. The summer riots in England was Meades' movie smacking us in the face. Ordinarily when being confronted by rioting one can just change channels, switch off the t.v., fold up the newspaper...essentially walk away. This time the violence was outside our windows. Our safe haven, our comfort zone, vanished. And whilst politicians and the police try to put their own spin on the events, we still don't understand why they happened.
In the built environment, our cities and buildings affect us all, but how many actually understand the architects vocabulary and intentions, the design concept? This question of understanding the vocabulary can be extended across the board to so many professions. We get bored of the jargon and just trust. It's easier to trust the people who we least understand than to question them. To trust the worlds biggest bullshitters. And it is unnerving to realise that perhaps it is they, the people we trust, the people using these strange terms, who least understand what they mean.
Hadid is famous for her competition work, but paper-architecture is the ultimate architectural jargon – architecture for architects. Who judges these competitions, how many of the general population can understand a building drawn in plan and section and displayed at the design museum. For most people, plans and sections are tools for development, not a final product.
In fact jargon can be seen as a very dangerous kind of adverting. On the one hand it makes you switch off, but on the other it fills you with a strange kind of confidence that the others must know what they are talking about. Simon Cowell used his confidence to sell the role of starring in a Pepsi commercial as a prize on X Factor USA – what an utterly ridiculous prize – normally people get paid to appear in adverts not the other way round.
This is an age where we live our lives through the computer and online profiles. Over 800 million people have a facebook account, allowing them to escape reality and lead idyllic online lives through status updates.[2] There are stories of married couples getting divorced over an affair on the game Second Life[3], and parents becoming so addicted World of Warcraft that they neglect their children, their real lives.[4] Badiou is reminding us to live our lives, not these online fantasies - “It is not the film that is the real: it is the cinema”. Surely there is more of an adrenalin rush in running around and playing football in the park than twiddling your thumbs on a control and staring at a computer screen.
Our t.v., news obsessed world has hypnotised us into seeing the world in black and white. But this is not the way the world works. Hadid struggles in clarifying her ideas, perhaps in part as a result of this. In trying to clarify her ideas she jumps from saying her work all derives from painting and pure abstraction, to the contradicting herself and saying that she attributes her inspiration to landscape, topography, sedimentology and geological patterns.
Meades describes Hadid’s apartment as encompassing the vision of who her clients want her to be. In this capitalist and confused world architects have become branded with style, a label that you must use as propaganda – Vitra is an architectural Disneyland – you have your Hadid, Gehry and Ando. It is making a joke of the profession. Buildings become physical adverts for a brand (eg. Prada store), and also for the architects.
Our global world has many problems, which, as selfish as we are, we cannot ignore. Problems elsewhere can, and will, affect us. We need to understand in order to solve and prevent, and to do so we must use the same vocabulary, between professions, and among the people. Question the jargon. Keep interrogating until you understand it. Keep interrogating until they understand it.
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