Week Three Readings

TEMPORARY CONTRACTS: on the economy of the post-industrial landscape
By Ellen Dunham-Jones

The temporary contract is a reflection of our consumer-based culture driven by the market where major corporations want the most return for the least investment. According to Dunham-Jones the post-industrial landscape is defined by temporary contacts and an ever-increasing exodus of businesses and production from expensive central and urban locations to cheaper suburban areas creating edge cities with strip malls or mega malls as the main attraction. These edges cities have little or no public spaces and are primarily accessible only by car.

Our relationship with our landscape and our community is being affected. The profit driven market is encouraging individuals to consume based on desire more than need and people want what the market tells them is in fashion. Because profit drives the market and “gains in productivity correspond to gains in consumption,” thus creating an industry where the ‘planned obsolescence of goods’ is crucial to keep this well oiled machine running. Now the gains in productivity are generated in the purposeful lack of quality of products creating a continual demand on consumption generating continual profit. We are obsessed with profit and gains, “buy now pay later,” and less concerned with long-term goals and results of our irresponsible temporary contracts and shot term transactions.

I think that if we were to start thinking more of the future, and in reinvesting in the environment and our culture we might see the returns in the form of not only an architecture that resists commodification but also a culture as well.

OBSOLESCENCE AND DESIRE: fashion and the commodity form
By Gail Faurschou

Faurschou in referencing Baudrillard, talks of fashion as a commodity void of any symbol or sign of its own within the realm of capitalist society, that it searches outside of it to find meaning within history, non capitalist societies, marginal social groups etc. She questions capitalism as a society where objects have become the goal; the end where merely all exchange is merely a means. If we see fashion as this object then the goal of possessing the object becomes a means to an end.

Currently we seem to define ourselves by what we do, how much we make and the things we possess, all of which have the potential to change and do in their own right as well as by our own volition. We are defining ourselves, or expressing our individual identities by things that hold no meaning as with the commodity of fashion. Should we willing position ourselves in such a way that the ways in which we define ourselves be so closely connected to the existence of our capitalist society? Architecture can be seen in the same way, as a commodity, what will sell now as opposed to what will be good for the future. How does what we build express who we are? Maybe in a capitalist society meaning can only come from profit margins.

In regards to the Ralf Lauren fashion environments are we buying the products or the name? Is someone who wears him more valuable than someone ho does not? Some would say yes, is this a good thing?