Martin Pawley (1938–2008)

I’m surprised this book hasn’t found some sort of resurgence nowadays as its main idea is very applicable to today’s burning world. I’m sure if the author had lived into pandemic times he would have written a sequel. It was an easy enough read as these types of books (mostly ideas, references/examples & footnotes) go. I found the main idea interesting, but the author saves any panache for a few paragraphs in the final two chapters. The only real barriers to enjoying or understanding it are time, it was first published in 1974, and the author was a British person thus he used the examples he knew well though he brought in examples from the U.S. as well especially when it comes to the subject of the Vietnam war.
The main idea of the book is that modern convenience and media allow individuals to indulge in the romanticized idea of selfish individual exclusion exacerbated by consumer culture fueled by capitalism and weaponized by those in power by way of moralization and encouraging the fall of individuals into fantasy, in the book referred to as secondary reality. Boy, if Martin Pawley could see the Western World now: conglomeration of massive world spanning media companies into a dominating handful, social media bubbles, money hoarding as a substitution for morality, organized conspiracy theory cults, individuals demanding rights to weapons and social viciousness without consequence while deliberately ignoring and even mocking the human rights of their compatriots. I wonder how much of that he could’ve guessed as he passed in the early 2000s. I would really like to read a book contemporizing the ideas in The Private Future.
I do have a few favorite passages I would like to share though.
The triumph of mass media as the purveyors of secondary reality reflects the refusal of the people of the West to accept the implications of the collapse of community. The fragmentation of society is a reality, but the priceless distraction of erotic and sensory fantasy products and services conceals it. … Today the true descendent of Rimbaud’s “I” who is “someone else” is not the poet living on welfare or the student revolutionary, but the worker offering his life to a meaningless job because it pays off in the fantasy reward of the endless consumer dream. … Consumer society has become a form of barter for dreams, and nothing in it is more surrealistic than the practice of work itself: no one more dedicated to the relentless servicing of his “other self” than the worker. Compared to any consumer the artist has become a monk, the revolutionary a fakir lying on a bed of nails. (pg.186)
Maybe employers, corporations, and billionaires should take note: Pay your workers well so they can survive easily and stay distracted with the “fruits of culture” i.e., mass media, intoxicants, self-pleasure. The former quote best encapsulates the core of this book’s main idea. Even the thing needed to sustain a community at its foundational level, work, plays into the fragmentation of society into isolated individualism under capitalism and the pressures of technological advancement.
In the summer of 1969 at the apogee of the festival movement, half a million young people gathered at Woodstock, New York, and constituted briefly the tenth largest city in the United States. This counter-culture army – as large as the force sent by Napoleon to conquer Russia – survived for only a few days, supplied in the main by the helicopters and trucks of its establishment enemies, whose security forces had been overwhelmed by the unexpected numbers. At the height of this unprecedented event the Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman seized a microphone to announce that the festival was meaningless as long as the manager of MC5 (a Detroit rock band) was still in jail on a marijuana charge. This logical attempt to draw the attention of the army to the more serious issues that confronted it was summarily dealt with. The guitarist Pete Townsend beat him off the stage with his instrument[.] (pg.202)
Pretty much the stewardship of the Boomers in a nutshell in my opinion.
Yeah, I liked this book, I definitely enjoyed its ideas, I even took a bit of enjoyment in its view from the early 1970’s with a few concerns that have already passed by a long time ago. Would I recommend this one? Yeah, I would, the fragmentation of society through insulated selfish individualism that it explores is still very relevant today. These ideas are due for a direct update (if works like this already exist, I’ll be looking for them). So, to conclude, here is a quote from the last paragraph of the book (the same one quoted on the front of the dustjacket of my copy no less).
Alone in a centrally heated, air-conditioned capsule, drugged, fed with music and erotic imagery, the parts of his consciousness separated into components that reach everywhere and nowhere, the private citizen of the future will have become one with the end of effort and the triumph of sensation divorced from action. When the barbarians arrive they will find him, like some ancient Greek sage, lost in contemplation, terrified yet fearless, listening to himself. (pg.211)
It sort of reminds me of completely immersive virtual reality and leads me to question who exactly are those “barbarians”. I mean, when have you ever known corporations, power mongers, banks, and governments to stop short of complete domination of the world? Well, that’s a depressing note to end on.
… (meer)

The Architectural critic and journalist Martin Pawley assesses some of Fuller's most significant designs: the 3-wheel (“Dymaxion”) car, homes and housing (the “4D” house or “Dymaxion House”, the “Dymaxion Deployment Unit”, the “Wichita House”), the geodesic dome, and, in collaboration with architect Shoji Sadao, large-scale projects (a dome spanning most of the city of Manhattan, tensegrity “Cloud Structures”, “Tetrahedronal Cities” for San Francisco and for Tokyo, the “Old Man River” megastructure for East Saint Louis, Missouri, a global high-voltage transmission grid for world energy use, and others.

This book is part is a series called “Design Heroes”, and the author acknowledges at the start that it is mainly based on secondary material. He mentions the books The Dymaxion World of Buckminster Fuller, R. Buckminster Fuller, The Buckminster Fuller Reader, Buckminster Fuller's Universe, in particular. However, the final chapter of the book seems to be mainly his own assessment of Fuller. He compares Fuller to his more celebrated contemporaries and notes the larger objective that drove Fuller's work:
“Unlike the early masterpieces of his architect contemporaries Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and others, Buckminster Fuller's designs … were all steps towards the ephemeralization, or rendering insignificant, of the problem of shelter, rather than works of architecture.”

The author also incidentally expresses his personal condemnation of what he calls “art history”:
“The art historical system perpetually endeavors to lever invention away from the restlessly evolving vocabulary of art and science in the service of man – the language that Buckminster Fuller spoke – back into the passive world of scarcity and value judgement that he correctly identified as the greatest enemy of human success.”

This is a short, but concise book that is well worth reading. And in spite of its small size, it contains many well produced photos and sketches of Fuller's works.… (meer)

In the fifth chapter of this collection of book reviews by the late, great English architecture critic Martin Pawley, he comments on the cover of Paul Shepheard's 1994 book What Is Architecture?, which features nine jets in formation over the Great Pyramids of Giza. Pawley is able to summarize the book's mix of history and technology from this starting point. I mention it here because the same can be said about Pawley's collection of reviews, which is clearly about architecture, but which features a wide expressway overlooked by some bland buildings. The photo is not credited, captioned or commented upon, but I take it to be the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago (precisely the photo on this page). What this cover photo says about Pawley's book is that it treats architecture in the widest sense: he includes the masters and other books on capital-A architecture, but he is also interested in cities, politics, power, technology, and other realms that shape the built environment.

The reviews (typically two or three pages long) are grouped into eight thematic chapters: Pioneers, Stars, Buildings, Cities, etc. While the reviews are not dated, I assume they were written around the time each book was published. Given this, the consistency of Pawley's proses and positions is remarkable. My reviews fall far short from his in terms of depth and bite, but reading his short but dense takes on so many books make me wish there were mainstream architecture critics today who would bother with book reviews. Books are still an important part of architectural culture, and they deserve to be discussed more widely than in just academic journals and year-end best-of lists.… (meer)