Design Context: Lecture - Cities and Film

This lecture looked at:

•The city in Modernism
•The beginnings of an urban sociology
•The city as public and private space
•The city in Postmodernism
•The relation of the individual to the crowd in the city

Georg Simmel (1858- 1918)

•German sociologist
•Writes Metropolis and Mental Life in 1903
•Influences critical theory of the Frankfurt School thinkers eg: Walter Benjamin, Kracauer, Adorno and Horkheimer

Dresden Exhibition 1903

•Simmel is asked to lecture on the role of intellectual life in the city but instead reverses the idea and writes about the effect of the city on the individual
•(Herbert Bayer Lonely Metropolitan 1932)

Urban sociology

Lewis Hine 1932

• the resistance of the individual to being leveled, swallowed up in the social-technological mechanism.
• Georg Simmel The Metropolis and Mental Life 1903

Architect Louis Sullivan (1856-1924)

•creator of the modern skyscraper,
•an influential architect and critic of the Chicago School
•Guaranty Building was built in 1894 by Adler & Sullivan in Buffalo NY

•Skyscrapers represent the upwardly mobile city of business opportunity
•Fire cleared buildings in Chicago in 1871 and made way for Louis Sullivan new aspirational buildings

Charles Scheeler

Fire cleared buildings in Chicago in 1871 and made way for Louis Sullivan new aspirational buildings

Fordism: mechanised labour relations

Charlie Chaplin: Modern times 1936

Stock market crash of 1929

•Factories close and unemployment goes up dramatically
•Leads to “the Great Depression”
•Margaret Bourke-White

Flaneur

The term flâneur comes from the French masculine noun flâneur—which has the basic meanings of "stroller", "lounger", "saunterer", "loafer"—which itself comes from the French verb flâner, which means "to stroll"

Walter Benjamin

•Adopts the concept of the urban observer as an analytical tool and as a lifestyle as seen in his writings
•(Arcades Project, 1927–40), Benjamin’s final, incomplete book about Parisian city life in the 19th century
•Berlin Chronicle/Berlin Childhood (memoirs)