Dirty Details

• The civil practice of social democracy, especially the Dutch ‘polder model’, idolizes blissful, prosperous mediocrity. People preach a humanism that is neither able nor allowed to go beyond nurturing and domesticating. ‘The humanist gets hold of the person and subjects him to his taming, training, educating regime – convinced as he is of the necessary connection between reading, sitting and calming,’ Peter Sloterdijk notes in his article ‘Rules for the Human Zoo’ (1999). Mankind has instituted a system that turns people into domesticated animals. Mankind creates a park around itself, a park that testifies to absolute beauty, consensus and order. Every hazard, every form of signal noise, every trace of roughness, ugliness or incompleteness, every hint of alienation and schizophrenia, is barred. This is contrary to the idea of a radical democracy which instead sees potential in the antagonism of the beautiful and the ugly, of the wild and the domesticated, in convention and liberation, in the one and the other, in design and non-design, in good and evil, and in place and non–place.

Subject headings

HUMANIORA  -- Konst -- Arkitektur (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Arts -- Architecture (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Architecture

Architecture Theory

Architecture in the Netherlands

aesthetics

estetik

design

design

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

ovr (subject category)