Concluding post

Reading every week articles on different historical periods, going back in time and writing small abstracts expressing my personal view on them, enabled me to develop my personal voice and opinion. I remember being very cautious and sometimes shy because I felt that I did not know enough and feared that my judgements might have been one-sided. Luckily, I proved wrong and I appreciate that I have expanded largely my knowledge of both , literature and critical articles, and as a result, my entries have become more confident. The best thing is that I understood that even if some of the texts we`ve covered do not necessarily always relate to architecture, there is always a way to relate and link topics and some answers might appear suddenly if one takes a different look to the subject. It was important for me to step aside from design to have a thought about what we are doing in bigger picture and how it might fit in the cultural, social, historical contexts. I`ve found it refreshing to question the things around us, the society we live in, contemporary values, how our tastes are formed and what they are influenced by, and even the purpose and usefulness of the education we are getting. The ability to question everything is really an important part of what I`ve taken from the course.

One main thing for me is that I have realised that sometimes there are no answers for the questions. I knew this before, but somehow I feel calmer accepting it now, knowing that nothing is as straight forward and easy as I wished it to be. I have also discovered that neither my opinions, nor someone else`s are 100 percent right. Gaining knowledge, making mistakes is a process one has to go through and learn from it, but no one will be able to learn without the ability to analyse - and that is what I got from the course. It is still hard to accept that we are not doing something only for the final result, but for the sake of the process as well, but I am sure it will come.

There were a few shocking thoughts for me that I`ve discovered along the course. The first was we live in a replay culture, a “product” culture. In other words events are repeated over and over on a loop. Within his book, Henry Lefebvre concludes that products are replacing works. One does not have to look far to see the signs of this product culture within our everyday lives. Furthermore, Terry Eagleton developed the thought further. As a society in general, we tend to be looking backwards, using historical examples, and we always seem to be reverting back to past for ideas to use in present. On the one hand I see it being a mistake, however, on the other it might seem as an easy way out, but we would never move forward if we are stuck discussing everyday life. I would agree with Terry Eagleton`s opinion that we inhabit "a social order which urgently needs repair" and we are told that "theory must be harnessed to practical political ends". Yet it is not quite clear what he thinks is to be done. I quite agree with the statement that we are lost generation with no cultural achievements of our own. We re-use what was done before (while it was the 'golden age' of theoretical thinking). Are we growing sick of the world that we ourselves have built up and beginning to long for the old ways of the world? The second was that we are so obsessed with the mass media that we do not really understand that we are being easily manipulated, controlled and oppressed by media now and how easy it is to constrain us (as a crowd). And what is worst of all, we`ve allowed this situation to happen to us ourselves and we don`t even realise how helpless we`ve become now.

Even from the start of the course I was aware of that fact that all the processes, social, economical, political are somehow related to architecture, but now I realize that I have deeper understanding and proof. And as designers we have responsibility to create space according to what we truly believe to be right. What is still an enigma for me is how to educate the client in such a way that he understands all those reasons for design. It is therefore up to us, architects, to get away from this replay culture.