Modernity and Ambivalence

"Bauman is actually the mentor for my own book. He is so important to me because I had come up with this way of thinking about architecture, and was quite happy with it and beginning to write. Then I discovered Bauman – what he was saying about society, about the way it had evolved into modernity, was similar to what I was clumsily trying to do in my own book. It gave me a sort of intellectual confidence that what I was talking about was real. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The argument in the book is simply that modernity, in its will to order and reason, had waged a war on ambivalence, on the other, on outsiders and on contingency. I likewise think that architects are waging a war on contingency. They can’t stand dirt for example. All those classic shots of architects’ houses, where everything is neatly lined up, are a symptom of this war on ambivalence. This architectural control is what Bauman puts into the context of a wider trend in society. The obvious thing to say is climate change . But with climate change, architects tend to see it as a technical issue and try to deal with it through technical fixes. However, I think climate change is bigger than this. It’s very much bound up with social justice, particularly social justice in relation to the developing world. I think the biggest challenges today are about social justice, and how, therefore, architects might respond to these challenges in an ethically responsible and politically aware manner."