8/01/2014
7/29/2014
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi / Satyagraha in South Africa
At last, Gandhi's second autobiographic book is now available in Hebrew.
Published originally in 1928, Satyagraha in South Africa recounts Gandhi's formative 21 years in South Africa. Gandhi arrived to South Africa in 1893 as a young lawyer on the invitation of a wealthy Indian Muslim businessman with the purpose of helping him negotiating a minor commercial conflict. When he left South Africa in 1914 and headed to India, he was already known all over the world as Mahatma (Great Soul) Gandhi, a national and spiritual leader.
The Hebrew edition was translated by Matan Kaminer, a former refusenik, political activist and anthropologist, prefaced by Yohanan Grinshpon from the Hebrew University, author of many books about Gandhi and India and post-faced by Shimon Lev, an artist and scholar, author of the book Soulmates about Gandhi's friendship with the Jewish architect Herman Kallenbach. The book was published by Babel, in the new non-fiction series directed by Sharon Rotbard.
http://readingmachine.co.il/home/books/1404635173
An English online edition of the book is available here.
Manifesto for Free Architecture
(first published on 14 August 2012)
Free Architecture is architecture made for Free. Free architecture is made by free architects, by architects who works for free.
Free Architecture is architecture made for Free. Free architecture is made by free architects, by architects who works for free.
In fact, this is not a new idea. Most of the architects work most
of their time for free. When they are young, they work as apprentices and
interns; when they grow up, not only they work for free but they even invest
huge amount of money on lost competition entries and phantom projects. In any
international competition, for only one winning project (and one paid
architect) there would be dozens and sometime hundreds of architectural offices
who worked for free and very often even pay (collaborators, consultants,
models, 3d animation, and that besides the admittance fees and the price paid
for the program pdf file) for the privilege to work for free.
That may represent efforts of a much larger number of young people that over-worked themselves for months, days and nights, for the only sake of satisfying one's - not always their - ambition to be chosen to be paid for his work. In some cases, doing free architecture for lost competitions became a specialty of certain practices. Financially, sometimes the winners should not be envied neither, as the winning project only enables the office to lose more money for a longer period of time.
Free work is of course done massively on a daily basis in any private architectural practice in order to get new clients or to keep the old ones.
That may represent efforts of a much larger number of young people that over-worked themselves for months, days and nights, for the only sake of satisfying one's - not always their - ambition to be chosen to be paid for his work. In some cases, doing free architecture for lost competitions became a specialty of certain practices. Financially, sometimes the winners should not be envied neither, as the winning project only enables the office to lose more money for a longer period of time.
Free work is of course done massively on a daily basis in any private architectural practice in order to get new clients or to keep the old ones.
The actual economical regime of architecture is governed by the
idea of an architectural paid practice but in reality enslaves so many talented
professionals and make them work for free at the service of the ones who
promise that they can afford to build (and therefore to make them work for
free). Never in the history of architecture so many architects have been
working so hard, doing so much unnecessary work
for so few and sometimes even ill-interested people and very often for
no-one. In other words, most of the architectural work that is being done today
is done for nothing.
This had disastrous effects on the morality of the architect and
on his position as a social actor. Hoping to be paid, he cannot speak for himself anymore nor for the
public, but for the one who pays. An architect's word
is today as trustworthy as that of a lawyer or a businessman. This regime has
been corrupting the whole profession as a social body turning it into a vain, ridiculous
star-system and is actually corrupting the whole environment all over the
world, populating it with a mass of empty, expensive and useless
"landmarks".
This regime has also decreased the number of people that are
served today by architecture. If the architects work only for the few happy
ones that can pay or that can say that they can pay, there would be a much greater number of people who even when they are in great need for architecture cannot afford
to pay nor to promise to pay an architect and therefore will not be served by
architecture. In fact, the vast majority of constructions on earth is done
without architects. Today, architecture is a luxury.
The choice is
simple: it is between doing architecture for nothing and doing architecture for
free. If you can afford doing architecture for nothing, do architecture for
free: Do architecture, do not take money.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)