Oct 11 -

evil-kazys: We understand that working for an evil client must be frustrating. If it’s not, that’s only temporary. Repressing such frustration will only cause it to rise to the surface more dramatically later. One of the reasons we are teaching this studio is that architects have not developed a theoretical toolbox for dealing with evil. It’s the task of the studio members to develop such a toolbox this term. Social psychologists—for example, Stanley Milgram, who we have already mentioned here—have spent a great deal of time thinking about such matters. To start the process of building the toolbox, every student should suggest an addition to it via Tumblr in the next week (most of you have been very good about posting to Tumblr… which is important since it is part of your grade). I’ll start off with this post, a link to the wikipedia entry on Cognitive Dissonance, a disorder which is common to situations where people work for others that they don’t agree with. Cognitive Dissonance is the result of trying to hold two contradictory beliefs simultanously. Now, cognitive dissonance is clearly not a successful strategy as given, yet it is the most common way of dealing with the conditions we are facing in studio (in our studio, for example, it is easy to rationalize that the condition is not real so you can do anything you want, but that would be a mistake). What might a direct consequence of cognitive dissonace be in architecture?