Cedric Price : Opera

Rating:
Summary: architecture: the biggest "show" of power and consumism
Review: This book is very interesting for phylosophers as well as architects/designers, but also for all the people who wants to be politically active.
It is s review of essays by Jean Baudriallard, a french phylosopher and a real genius of our times. As in most of his books, he explains perfectly how our society works, this time he uses architecture to tell us new things about our life.
We live in the "dream of democracy" because the real political power is an effect of the communicational power (that is to say: money to buy advertising). How architecture explains it?
Take the centre pompidou, for example. People think to go there to see the works of art, but most of them are just getting into a temple of culture to make their own show: the mass getting into aristicracy. It's all a big farce...
The transparency of the walls and the exibition of the structures is showing the box and revealing the inside. This is the obscene of our society, the pornography of reality, that is to say - in few words - an over-exibition of it.
We are all so used to be part of a show, to be "other from ourselves" that we are now missing reality.
Please, notice also the foreword by Francesco Proto, that suggests new idea about the "doubleness" of contemporary society.
Forgive my poor english and have a good reading!