I appreciate her voice is exactly the same in the official videos of Daughter. I wonder how these sad songs make me smile. how modest and sincere it is?
From the very beginning of the “Order of Things,” Michel Foucault questioned the groupings, divisions and taxonomies; we accepted unconsciously and searched for the ways of thinking outside of these unities without extreme artificiality. These taxonomies, resemblances make things easy to understand, but they hide the structures beneath and all the relations within different events. We should not place ourselves inside these unities but instead study the questions they posed, their internal configurations, and secret contradictions.
Foucauldian perspective implies that for a discourse on architecture, one should first abandon the narrow understanding of thinking architecture as an act of building but rather analyze its domains and objects individually. Architecture is operated through the profession, practice, education and theory, which also makes us question the unity of all these domains as “architecture.” If we accept them “discursive formations” rather than unities, an element of a building and statement floating around became separate and similar individuals to such a way that the body is a discursive object in “Birth of the Clinic.” So that discursive objects are not fixed, given entities, yet they are in continuous transition and transformation, which breaks their possible unity. Search for relations between these statements is interrupted by this ongoing transition with the failure of defining a common object, style, or theme of study.
In the same manner, discursive objects and statements are not necessarily linguistic, along with the writing; observing, drawing, representing become discursive activities. (1) Similar to language, architecture produces its representations and signs through the distinctive use of sections, plans and elevations so that the statement is translated. Representation of these statements are also ongoing entities, and their meaning changes. At that point, since the statements are not freely appeared in mind, they need a surface of emergence to appeared.
With all this way of analysis in mind, I question the excessive use of the word “smart-city” in current architecture discourse. Ever since smart-phones brought limitless possibilities and started to shape our daily life, we could not get enough of these “smart” notions. We do not know when this notion introduced us or does it have a concrete definition or not, but it promises to use cameras to monitor everyone and uses this data for managing the “smart city.” The technology of any kind makes our life easier, but what happens when the sensor fails, and the city just cannot afford this crash. What if revisiting old solutions again, instead of processing with always new technologies and new solutions. (2) Some call this kind of thinking in design “low technology with high tech mind” or “a global exploration of nature-based technology”, but I shall not limit the discourse by defining another way to construct the city, but rather as critical thinking that emerged in contemporary architecture. This approach actually did not appear inside the architecture; it is deeply based on the desire for the human to control nature. As Bruno Latour, with introducing the actor-network theory to social science, opened the argument of human and non-human conflict. Similarly, Foucault, by broadening the field of discursive objects, changed a view of the subject as an agent from the author-as-subject perspective within the discursive formation. Not only nature and technology but also politics and economics are surfaces to analyze because of the neverending global-local tension affected this architecture.
REFERENCES:
1.Hirst, Pault. “Foucault And Archıtecture.” AA Files, 1993.
2 Julia Watson, a lecturer in urban design at Harvard and Columbia Universities, launched her book Lo-Tek: Design by Radical Indigenism.
Fleming, Amy. “The Case for ... Making Low-Tech 'Dumb' Cities Instead of 'Smart' Ones.” The Guardian
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