Corporation Takes Command: The Project of the Sir John Cass Faculty of Architecture and Design between Complicity and Resistance

IF 1.1 0 ARCHITECTURE

Architecture and Culture Pub Date : 2021-01-02 DOI:10.1080/20507828.2021.1888212

S. Puddu, Francesco Zuddas

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引用次数: 1

Abstract

Abstract In the mid-1990s, Bill Readings compared universities to business corporations, sounding the alarm for an incipient corporatization of the academy that has provoked commentary since. Under neoliberalism, public universities are run as private corporations striving to survive in the increasingly competitive higher education market. The spatial side of this phenomenon is an architectural portfolio consisting of corporate style reception desks, turnstile-controlled entrances, bookable meeting rooms, and café spaces to learn. This article examines “the slow death” of the university as a space of scholarship focusing on the Sir John Cass Faculty of Architecture and Design (or Cass) in Central House (2012–17), London. As a public university acting like a real estate operator in a large metropolis, the Cass displays both complicity and resistance toward the managerial logics of universities. Its resistance lies in the architectural reconfiguration of Central House, which was eventually defeated by the institution’s real estate ambitions.

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公司掌权：约翰·卡斯爵士建筑与设计学院在复杂与阻力之间的项目

摘要在20世纪90年代中期，Bill Readings将大学比作商业公司，为学院最初的公司化敲响了警钟，此后引发了评论。在新自由主义下，公立大学是作为私营公司运营的，它们努力在竞争日益激烈的高等教育市场中生存。这种现象的空间方面是一个建筑组合，包括企业风格的接待台、旋转门控制的入口、可预订的会议室和咖啡馆学习空间。这篇文章探讨了该大学作为一个学术空间的“缓慢死亡”，重点关注位于伦敦中央大厦的约翰·卡斯爵士建筑与设计学院（或卡斯）（2012-2017）。作为一所公立大学，作为大都市中的房地产运营商，CAS对大学的管理逻辑既表现出共谋，也表现出抵制。它的阻力在于中央大厦的建筑重组，最终被该机构的房地产野心所击败。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Architecture and Culture ARCHITECTURE-

CiteScore

0.80

自引率

0.00%

发文量

期刊介绍： Architecture and Culture, the international award winning, peer-reviewed journal of the Architectural Humanities Research Association, investigates the relationship between architecture and the culture that shapes and is shaped by it. Whether culture is understood extensively, as shared experience of everyday life, or in terms of the rules and habits of different disciplinary practices, Architecture and Culture asks how architecture participates in and engages with it – and how both culture and architecture might be reciprocally transformed. Architecture and Culture publishes exploratory research that is purposively imaginative, rigorously speculative, visually and verbally stimulating. From architects, artists and urban designers, film-makers, animators and poets, from historians of culture and architecture, from geographers, anthropologists and other social scientists, from thinkers and writers of all kinds, established and new, it solicits essays, critical reviews, interviews, fictional narratives in both images and words, art and building projects, and design hypotheses. Architecture and Culture aims to promote a conversation between all those who are curious about what architecture might be and what it can do.