Entry two: Paul Mason on Postcapitalism - 'The Rational Case for Panic'

In this blog entry I will discuss Paul Mason's book 'Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future', focussing on the Chapter: 'The Rational Case for Panic'.

I have been passionate about the environment since my early teenage years when I first started to develop a greater understanding of the planet and how the world's population uses and abuses the Earth as they please. I found Paul Mason's chapter 'The Rational Case for Panic' very compelling and it has certainly made me panic in a positive way. I have never known too much on economics but obviously I am aware that the world is driven by profit and is controlled by wealthy corporations. However I did not know just quite how outrageous the situation was in regards to control and power over the strength of the carbon fuel industry.

For example, Mason highlights that in 2011 $674 billion was invested into exploration and development of fossil fuels. (Then Saudi Arabia decided to collapse the price of oil, with the aim of destroying America's new hydrocarbon industries, bankrupting Putin's Russia in the process.)

Also, between 2003 and 2010, climate-denial lobby groups received $558 million from donors in the USA.

Although this seems so evidently ludicrous and unjustifiable, those who have power in these industries fail to understand the catastrophic damage we have already done to our planet and the inevitable and pending chaos we face imminently. In my eyes, these kind of actions deserve jail time for those who are involved.

The wealthy companies who control the big markets (such as the US markets) have pulled the wool over their eyes and will not let the knowledge of extreme destabilisation of a 4.5 billion-year-old planet get in their way. 

Germany however have managed to fight against the carbon fuel industries and completely destroy them by heavily investing in renewable energy and giving priority to renewable generators over carbon fuel producers to supply energy. These kind of decisions need to be implemented on a worldwide level in order to make desperate drastic changes. Overruling decisions need to be enforced by powers of governments worldwide, as in Germany's case, power stations were forced to pay the German electricity grid to take unwanted electricity off their hands on days where renewables have been able to produce more energy than normal and have taken priority. 

Overruling powers need to be put into place in order to have any attempt at slowing down the destruction of our own planet and to safeguard future populations. 

Entry one: Rowan Moore on Patrik Schumacher

Discussed text: Zaha Hadid’s successor: my blueprint for the future

I am writing this blog in order to start a continuous dialogue with myself where I will try to decipher articles of architectural interest. The first article, see link above, discusses a fresh idea of 'parametricism', an ideology imagined by Patrik Schumacher where all future buildings should be delivered by inputting every imaginable factor into a computer which leads to a building which can change in response to all these parameters. He is certain in its 'rationality' and 'obvious superiority', thriving in the thought of a logical ending- there are no doubts or uncertainty, just scientific reasoning. Through this process parametric designs will have the same curvy and complex 'look'.

However, there are many flaws to this way of thinking, the results of this equation will entirely depend on what parameters are put into the program.
Who will decide what they are? Will that not be an endless list which can never possibly be perfected?
If a human will be deciding what needs to be fed into the computer in the first place, it is still subjective as to what the important factors affecting a building are to be. This still leaves us without a conclusive formula for creating the 'perfect' building, every site will have a multitude of factors and there will always be a multitude of answers, never one definitive answer.

Although, I am not entirely overlooking the fact that computers can provide us with unimaginable ways of delivering and progressing architecture. I believe we have only just begun to unleash the possibilities which computers and programming can give to the world of architecture. There are many ways we can use programs to architecture's great benefit. Even in the beginning of my architectural career I have benefitted from using 'Ecotect' which analyses solar gains when placing your 3D Sketchup model of your building into the program. It helps you to figure out where to place your windows/how many/which size in order to create your required daylight and sunlight levels. I am very intrigued as to where computer programming can take architecture, however, Schumacher seems to want to cut out the middle man (the human mind) and I don't see this as ever working as ultimately a human will always have an input.
The lack of proof also puts Schumacher in a strange position seeing as he is so forthright in the philosophy of parametricism. Zaha Hadid's Riverside Museum in Glasgow looks completely incongruous with its surrounding and much of  the internal spaces are redundant. Seeing as Schumacher now runs Hadid's former practice, I would've expected him to provide us with a wealth of evidence to backup his claims, this is not the case.

I do not see how architecture can base itself entirely on scientific data in the future, rather than human intuitive judgements and I don't believe that there can ever be an ultimate algorithm which answers all as who would decide the definitive list of all important factors? I am yet to be persuaded of this ideology, Schumacher.