Jenga Analogy 19-9-2010 - 1830






The other day I was talking to Sian R about the public funding cuts (it was fun) and she made the brilliant point that eventually it was going to end up like the highest stakes jenga game. If you keep taking these funding elements - each like a block in that fun party game - away from society and culture it will eventually topple, catastrophically. Like the game each block seems not to matter, every block is the same and insignificant, and when the prevailing rhetoric is geared to efficiency any part of culture or society can be said to be likewise the same. But when the you keep pilling up these little pieces on top there's going to be a BIG ensuing mess.

Thinking about culture / society as Jenga bricks reminded me of an idea about civic* stratification in components but as a unified whole being linked to late C19th to early C20th brick building.


At the height of enlightenment ideas about civic responsibility, each brick represented a unit of society, the citizen, built in to the structure of institution, housing and infrastructure. Although this firmly places every member of society IN THEIR PLACE, it also means that every member of society is part of that whole, by built location and symbolically. Brick buildings are not just aesthetically pleasing because of their pattern, but because, their structure broken up into units, they appear to coalesce out of mundane, small and on their own, insignificant parts.

Now this does not feel at least to be the case since the emergence of the privatised, postmodern landscape of glass and concrete. This architecture both alienates and distances the person in the street by its bulk and reflectiveness, but also merging in to a single mass, defines itself as a whole that represents nothing but the entity it houses. Each building becomes a private(iced) space which you navigate amongst any other commodity signifier.


As Zaha Hadid et al. perpetuate this other-worldly, hyper / unreal architecture it seems that this idea of symbolically building the heterogeneity and multiplicity of society into the urban landscape, is ever further forgotten. As the brick work of society is forgotten it becomes easier and easier to keep removing the rhetorically immunised 'Jenga' blocks of funding and community and adding it to the increasingly unstable peak.

The resurgence of wooden structures does nothing to exacerbate the lost symbolism in visually modular construction. In spite of its green credentials (sic), and a sense of the hand made - and therefore the human, these structure still tend to be private constructions. Latent anti-instutionanlism, refusing to disappear too, the structure of society stays focused on future architecture, and on the singular whole.



*I think this was on David Heathcote's BBC documentary on BBC Four Art Deco Icons: