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What can we say about this? First, this is a pristine example of the sort of
critique of cybernetics that I mentioned in the opening chapters, which
is why it deserves some attention. Second, the cyberneticians asked for it.
They were rhetorically inept, to say the least. They went on endlessly about
“control,” and “modified people” in figure 7.23 sets one's teeth on edge. It
invites Mathews's slide to “behavior-modification,” which is a polite way to
say “brainwashing.” But third, of course, I think the critique is misdirected.
It hinges on what I called the Big Brother sense of control—of hierarchical
domination, of enframing—and nothing in Pask's work on the Fun Palace
contradicts the idea that he was in the same space as Littlewood and Price
(and the Situationists before them) in trying to imagine a building in which,
far from being stamped by some machine, people could experiment with new
and unforeseen ways to be. 65 Littlewood was not being naive in agreeing with
Pask's goals. The Fun Palace, from Pask's perspective, continued the lineage of
Musicolour, a machine that would get bored and encourage the performer to
try something new. On a different level, as I have tried to show in this chapter
and throughout the topic, the cybernetic ontology was one of exceedingly
complex systems which necessarily escape domination and with which we
have to get along—Pask's notion of “conversation”—and the Fun Palace was
just another staging of that ontology. As I also said before, the control critique
might be better directed here at the established architectural tradition, which
in its symbolic aspect attempts, at least, to tell us what to think and feel, and
in its functional guise tries to structure what we do: the factory as a place to
work (not to play games, learn or have sex), the school as a place to learn, the
home as the dwelling place of the nuclear family . . . This repetitious critique
of cybernetics stifles its own object. 66
after the sixties: adaptive architecture
aN evolutioNary architecture. . . . Not a static Picture of beiNg,
but a dyNamic Picture of becomiNg aNd uNfoldiNg—a direct aNalogy
with a descriPtioN of the Natural world.
JoHn FrazEr, An EVoLUTIonAry ArChITECTUrE (1995, 103)
The social history of adaptive architecture closely mirrored that of cybernetic
art, reaching a zenith in the sixties with the Fun Palace and receding into the
margins thereafter, but here we can glance briefly at some postsixties develop-
ments that connect to Pask.
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