- Title
- Architectural principles in the age of the car and the bike
- Creator
- Fleming, Steven
- Relation
- 29th Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians Australia & New Zealand (SAHANZ XXIX 2012). Fabulation: Proceedings of the 29th Annual SAHANZ Conference (Launceston, Tas. 5-8 July, 2012) p. 288-298
- Publisher
- Society of Architectural Historians Australia & New Zealand (SAHANZ)
- Resource Type
- conference paper
- Date
- 2012
- Description
- A rise in interest in bicycle transit in cities has led to a rise in architect designed infrastructure, end-of-trip cycling facilities, and other works that do more than simply provide material support for this mode of transportation: they actively propagandise for cycling. This paper offers explanations for design strategies, and attendant architectural rhetoric, drawn from a study of architecture produced during an age when architects were propagandising for cars. It will argue that what we're seeing now, with pro-cycling works by MVRDV, West-8, KGP Design Studio, BIG, and other firms, is a supplanting of the automobile as a prime emblem for progressive architects, with a new emblem, the bicycle. The paper proceeds from Derridean readings of Sant'Elia, Pevsner and Siegfried Giedion, in order to establish movement as an absent presence in architecture, expressed in the machine age through associations with aeroplanes and ocean liners, but most notably cars. Inserting the bike into those sorts of theoretical schemas, does not change the schemas themselves, but is a means, rather, for the bike's adoption as an emblem for the contemporary (green), Modernist Project. It helps explain some of the visual intrigue of buildings for bikes, that echo famous buildings for cars. It explains, too, why architects like Ingels and Foster, parade their designer bikes, the way Le Corbusier paraded his Voisin. Although architecture celebrating the car was a product of paradigms many urban planners now want to reverse, understanding the myth-making behind buildings for cars, and their mass appeal, is helpful in understanding what role architecture can play at this time when cities are aiming to increase their bike use.
- Subject
- bicycle transit; architecture; architect designed infrastructure; cycling
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1340734
- Identifier
- uon:28562
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781862956582
- Language
- eng
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