Edifice Complex Research Articles

From power to architecture: an analysis on the identity transformation of Tagaytay people’s park in the sky through edifice complex and democratization theory

The study of architecture in relation to the principles of political power places a different perspective in understanding how the built environs with heritage value were shaped in time and are being constantly shaped at the present. Its relevance cannot be understated, as in spite of its actuality, it is a side of the field that may still be considered sensitive to some. Architecture is never neutral. It corresponds to the patron’s ideals, intentions, and ideological orientation, communicated by the designer through his technical knowledge in artistic articulation of forms. In a larger scale, architectural identity can therefore be affected by those possessing power and can serve as tactile channel in redirecting society. This study presents the case of People’s Park in the Sky in the Philippines, a colossal brutalist mansion, originally named Palace in the Sky, situated at Mt. Sungay peak in Tagaytay City. Commissioned in 1981 by Imelda Marcos, the wife of authoritarian head Ferdinand Marcos, the palace was not completed and eventually transformed into a public urban park. Supported by the concept of Edifice Complex and Democratization theory, methodical assessment of the political links of the said architecture was executed in two parts: examination of historical accounts and first-hand site investigations. The findings of the analysis revealed that there is a present architectural crisis in the park, emerging from its long-time neglect since the 1986 transition years, and if not taken proper institutional action, its genuine identity and legacy could be forgotten and eventually lost in the near future.

The Edifice Complex as Goal Displacement in the Corporate Skyscraper

The Edifice Complex as Goal Displacement in the Corporate Skyscraper

Edifice Complex: Managing Risk During Construction

As the museum building serves a critical role in preventive conservation, its maintenance and repair represent important measures to ensure the safekeeping of cultural heritage. Construction projects can be key to the long-term preservation of the building, and in turn advance the need for collection care, but the construction process itself introduces risk from a variety of sources. Moreover, safety concerns related to building projects often restrict access to portions of the building, complicating the work of museum professionals who have a responsibility for preserving collection material but may not be directly involved in day-to-day construction activities. What are the problems of most potential destruction to building contents, and where can planning make a world of difference in reducing risk? This presentation presents an overview of the construction process, using a critical path schedule as an introduction for people who’ve not participated in a capital project. Discussion will identify how risk changes according to the phase of construction, where work increases the vulnerability of collection material and what measures can be taken early in a project to manage these factors. The presenters will focus on fire protection during construction, referencing published reports about incidents of damage and their causes, then connecting this data to challenges unique to museum projects. Budgets and museum professionals’ time should be directed toward mitigating damage based on a risk assessment built upon data that exists from multiple sources within the construction industry.

Convention Center Follies: Politics, Power, and Public Investment in American Cities

This book presents an important story about misguided local and state expenditures for new or expanded convention centers. It is a bigger story than the more widely known success of fabulously wealthy professional sports teams in persuading strapped local governments to build new stadiums. It is bigger because the number of U.S. local governments involved and the dollars spent dwarf what I would call the stadium scam. In the second half of the twentieth century, cities, counties, and states engaged in a race for bigger and better convention centers lest they lose out to competitors. In an arms race, there are no winners. But here there are winners, namely, some landlords and consultants. Here in a nutshell is the sad story laid out in this book: With the end of the Great Depression of the 1930s and then World War II, American cities sought to upgrade the built environment. Alarmed by massive shift to the suburbs and growing slums in or near central business districts, mayors acted to preserve and protect the center. In this, they were unfortunately aided and abetted by federal urban renewal dollars. Traditional local government infrastructure spending was funded by general obligation bonds (the issuer must pay from any revenue source). But the issuance of such bonds required voter approval, which became more difficult to win after Proposition 13 in California announced a war on local government taxes throughout the nation. Voters, more often than not, defeated proposals to build or expand convention centers. But the edifice complex of mayors and governors was not so easily defeated. Revenue bonds, where the income to pay interest and principal is earmarked, became widely used and did not require voter approval. Authorities, legally separate from municipal governments and having their own revenue streams, built and managed convention centers.

Death and the Executive: Encounters with the 'Stealth' Motivator

Death anxiety is a primary motivational force that drives much of our behavior. It puts our defenses on high alert, and we make strenuous efforts to repress or deny the unwelcome truth of our inevitable end. The way each of us denies death not only affects life in its broadest sense but also influences the way we behave in organizations. Death anxiety underlies much executive behavior and action. However, traditional motivational theories do not acknowledge the influence of death anxiety on our behavior. Although they attempt to help us better understand employee motivation, they are not sufficiently inclusive. This article takes a clinical lens to explore death anxiety as a motivational force, how it affects behavior in organizations, and how we metabolize the feelings death evokes. In addition, I examine the various ways we deal with our knowledge of death. Some of us go into overdrive in trying to suppress it, while others fall into a state of resignation and depression. To deal with the ultimate narcissistic injury that death represents, we resort to a variety of immortality strategies to create permanent or enduring meaning. Furthermore, from an organizational perspective, three maladaptive responses to death anxiety are explored: the manic defense, succession issues, and the edifice complex.

The Edifice Complex: Architecture and the Political Life of Surplus in the New Baku

Just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed . . . they . . . conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries, and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this timehonored disguise and this borrowed language. — Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Redesign of the Health Care Delivery System

THE GOVERNING DESIGN PRINCIPLE OF THE US HEALTH care system has been described as an “edifice complex” and a “field of dreams” complex—if the health system builds it, the patients will come. This clinician-centric approach to the design of delivery of health care is obsolete, contributing to health care of inferior quality and excessive cost. To meet the patient-centered needs of a modern health care system, the United States should consider adopting the Bauhaus design principle of “form follows function.” Form follows function was the guiding principle of the Bauhaus school of crafts and architecture, founded in Germany in 1919 by Walter Gropius. The structure of a chair or house was to follow logically from the intended function of that form. The Bauhaus movement emphasized rational and simplified design, reconciling craftsmanship and technology under a spirit of populism and modernism. These principles are applicable to the design of a modernist health system. Traditionally, approaches to health care delivery design view the extravagantly rococo structure of the existing health care system and propose additions or minor alterations to this dysfunctional structure. What if there was a different starting point—the intended function of the health system— and planners worked backward to determine the form most suitable to that function?

The edifice complex: how the rich and powerful shape the world

The edifice complex: how the rich and powerful shape the world

The History of the Future

The future of our field is obsolete. It has been accumulating for decades, and now we are stuck with it. Surveying the panorama of North America with a view framed by a Manhattan street ending at the Hudson, as in the old New Yorker cover, we might ask: Where is theatre research located? Can we find it on the map? It is not invisible, as some might complain. On the contrary, theatre research appears prominently as an array of widely planted scene houses, boxy protuberances rising above college and university performing-arts complexes, often located at the physical center of their campuses but rarely, if ever, close to their hearts. Set in concrete, they constitute what Harold Clurman, speaking at Murphy Hall for the Performing Arts at Kansas University in 1965, called “the Edifice Complex.” Our future, like fate, lies before us, but it was settled at our birth, when the buildings went up and acquired legions of technical specialists to service them. That's where the money went, and that's where it must go. Greater in number than the theatre scholars, well-intentioned but mostly vapid practitioners, acting with more or less skill, with more or less tenure, fill “slots” in largely indistinguishable seasons, block-booking their houses like mall multiplexes, from coast to coast. The reason that they are so visible on the map is that they stand isolated from everything else, in and out of the academy.

The Retirement Syndrome:: The Psychology of Letting Go

This article analyzes a problem that can be described as the retirement syndrome. In exploring the difficulties many leaders face in letting go at the end of a full career, it reviews a number of the barriers to exit: financial, social, and psychological. It looks at the physical and psychological effects of aging, in the context of retirement; examines the experience of nothingness that single-minded careerists often feel after retirement; describes the talion principle, a subliminal fear of reprisals; and discusses the ‘edifice complex,’ the wish to leave behind a legacy. The article concludes with suggestions as to how individuals and organizations can develop more effective and humane disengagement strategies.

Avoid the Edifice Complex and Enjoy Teaching Chaucer

Avoid the Edifice Complex and Enjoy Teaching Chaucer

Justice as the Cornerstone

Leviticus has an edifice complex. Reflecting the architecture of the tabernacle, the book is much more than a stern recitation of the dangers of impurity. With chapter 19 as its apex, Leviticus is about justice and love in the community of faith. Indeed, its relevance in Jesus' ministry may surprise Christians.

Apotheosis Of The Health Care Consumer

At the Intersection of Health, Health Care and Policy The online version of this article, along with updated information and services, is available at: http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/16/6/254.citation For Reprints, Links & Permissions : http://content.healthaffairs.org/1340 _reprints.php Email Alertings : To Subscribe : http://content.healthaffairs.org/subscription s/etoc.dtl https://fulfillment.healthaffairs.org Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution Downloaded from http://content.healthaffairs.org/ by Health Affairs on May 29, 2016 by HW Team Cite this article as: James C. Robinson Apotheosis Of The Health Care Health Affairs 16, no.6 (1997):254-255 doi: 10.1377/hlthaff.16.6.254

Video-Texts: Technology and the Teaching of Literature

quotations whose synthesis seems impossible. Looking for the word, any word, you punch radio station button after button, crossing the great plural plains of AM and FM offerings: rock, jazz, classical, all talk, all sports, and so-called easy listening. Unsatisfied, you pop in a homemade cassette whose contents are so edited, repeated, and erased that the label refers to last season's favorites: a farrago of styles, repetitions, thefts of the most harmless kind, inventions of the soundtrack that will be your morning's life. Voices and visions, for you also live in an empire of multiple perspectives and time-frames: you see through the windshield the future, the postmodern edifice complex with the juxtaposed facades of old and new; in the rear-view mirror, the familiar flow of the immediate past; and at your sides, the parallel universes (didn't Einstein learn something about relativity this way?) of the blurrily relative present. You are in your car, but your mind still moves with headlines from The Times, and with lines from last night's reading on distressed literature and the ex-centric canon. As you gear towards the classes you must teach today, you remember that you are to talk about Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose and its discussions on deconstruction, the problematic nature of logocentrism, and the spread of indeterminacy, all in the guise of a medieval mystery story. You have

St Stephen and the ‘Edifice Complex’

St Stephen and the ‘Edifice Complex’

Science must grow [ band] Fight the edifice complex : Lederman, L.M. and S.A. Rice, 1986. [Responses to an editorial.] Science, 232(4754):1096–1097

Science must grow [ band] Fight the edifice complex : Lederman, L.M. and S.A. Rice, 1986. [Responses to an editorial.] Science, 232(4754):1096–1097

Calgary, Cowboys, Culture and an Edifice Complex

Calgary is a conundrum. Cowtown. Does the city truly kow-tow to Cattle, Oil and Wheat and find its identity In a rodeo? Few cities are perceived as a persona tied to an annual bash. New Orleans springs to mind, but Mardi Gras has its roots in ritual. The Calgary Stampede is a wild west show in a west more erratic than untamed. Its star, the cowboy, retains considerable romance and power as a symbol of rugged individualism but seems increasingly out of sync with contemporary sensibilities, notably feminism.

The Edifice Complex: Motive and Accomplishment in The Fountains of Paradise

The Edifice Complex: Motive and Accomplishment in <i>The Fountains of Paradise</i>

Presidents Confront Reality: From Edifice Complex to University without Walls

In 1974, a questionnaire was sent the presidents of several thousand American colleges and universities, asking for information on enrollment, funding, curriculum, and related topics. The responses that questionnaire form the substance of this book, which, according Clark Kerr's foreword, tells a great deal about the ways institutions of higher education adjust new conditions. Regrettably, it does nothing of the kind. Even the title is misleading. For all its cuteness, the phrase From Edifice Complex University without Walls at least implies that the authors will discuss the changing attitudes of college and university presidents about the nature and purpose of their institutions. But such a discussion is never delivered in the approximately 100 pages of text and 150 pages of statistical appendices that comprise this book. And despite the title, more than half of the respondents were not presidents. Instead, a majority of the questionnaires were completed by vicepresidents, deans, directors, and other academic administrators. Finally, there is precious little reality that gets confronted in what is billed in the foreword as an enormously data base. In fact, it is the data base that provides one of the basic flaws of this book. In the instructions sent with the questionnaire, the authors asked respondents supply information to the best of your recollection, understanding, and estimation. Respondents who might not have been willing trust their recollection, understanding, or estimation were warned: Please do not take the time look up any hard data. Even without that rather curious instruction, it is unlikely that the answers this questionnaire could be considered a rich data base. Much of the information called for was quite speculative, such as question eleven, which asked, in part, the estimated change in enrollment in undergraduate architecture programs from 1974 1980. Other questions reduced very complex issues oversimplified choices. Question ten, for example, asked respondents indicate shift in arguments used obtain additional funding from your primary funding source.1 Having asked for (and undoubtedly received) unreliable data, the authors proceed quantify it as though it were revealed truth. Thus, the pages are littered with dense sentences that are, in the last analysis, spun out of surmise and guesswork: Indeed, proportionally more institutions (21 percent) say they had a decrease of more than 5 percent over the two-year period than those who say (17 percent) they had a decrease of more than 10 percent between 1968 and 1974 (Table 4).

Presidents Confront Reality: From Edifice Complex to University without Walls

Presidents Confront Reality: From Edifice Complex to University without Walls