A McDonalized Society

           

           We are in danger of being seduced by the advantages that rationalization has already offered and promised in the future. It’s true. Cooking from scratch has become rare today. Much use is made of prepackaged meals, frozen TV dinners, and mostly fast-food restaurants. Almost all retailers are oriented toward increasing efficiency, and I can think of many entities, that I engage with, that have become McDonalized. 

            McDonaldization believes that almost any task can and should be rationalized. It sounds pretty good. After all, being more efficient is a good thing. Consisted, exact and measurable outcomes also sound good. So, what's the problem? It turns out that over-rationalizing a process in this manner has an unexpected side effect: irrationality. 

            I personally prefer family-owned restaurants, but the charm of TV dinners and fast-food restaurants is that they are highly predictable. On one hand, I know that it will taste exactly the same from one time to another and it will cost me the same from one city to another. I never cook from scratch: there are too many ingredients and variables involved in the cookbook. And I can’t guarantee I will like it. Even music has become McDonaldized with the expansion of technology. I have two thousand songs in my pocket. And many other customs have been made more predictable.

But on the other hand, I complain about the quality and the danger of the products.

Yet the facts remain that they are all shaped by the drive for efficiency, and that is a major problem in a rationalizing society. The emphasis on quantity rather than quality is a main concern. 

                 McDonald’s tells us it has sold many billions of hamburgers, rather than telling us about the quality of those burgers. There are many examples of the effort to substitute quantity for quality in the world. For example, in the industrial world, we are minimizing time for each task, we are lowering the price of the finished product, and we are increasing the sales, ultimately, to increase profits. We are using rational technologies to control individual independence to eventually replace human beings with machines that lack the ability to think and act in unpredictable ways. You’ve probably noticed the self-checkout stands at the grocery store. Have you called your wireless provider lately? Most companies have turned to using automated telephone operators. There isn’t much online banking and an ATM that a teller cannot do. And once people are reduced to a few robot-like actions, it becomes easy to replace them with mechanical robots.

             Moreover, McDonald’s uses specific methods to prepare the food and to to serve it in order to have great control over its employees. And a rational society also uses control over its consumers. It attracts us. The irrationality of rationality is the byproduct of the process of rationalization. It is seen as the opposite of rationality. Rationality brings with it great dehumanization as people are reduced to acting like robots. It tends to take much of the mystery and excitement. Overall, a fully rational society would be a very isolated and uninteresting place. It is apparent that our social lives have drastically changed over the past years.

            Although progressive rationalization has brought with it innumerable advantages, it has also created a number of problems which threaten to accelerate in the years to come. Rationalization is occurring throughout America. More and more emphasis is placed on efficiency, predictability, the replacement of human by nonhuman technology, and control over uncertainty. It is not possible to fight against this. However, controlling the process of rationalization is much needed as well as increasing the efforts to improve its irrational consequences. 

           Put your money where your mouth is.

Do you love Architecture?

The beauty of Architecture! 

 There are many reasons why buildings from one era look different from buildings of another. Sometimes those differences reflect developments in materials, building processes, or other technologies. Sometimes the differences arise from cultural or economic shifts. Sometimes the differences reflect an evolution in what is happening on the inside such as the buildings’ functions.

            Iron was a product of the Industrial Revolution and it was used for civil engineering to build bridges and factories. Britain led the way in the architectural adaptation of iron. The use of iron freed buildings and civic structures from historicism because ‘form’ became determined by the material and by engineering principles. With the rise of railroads, builders employed iron for train sheds as well. The first shed was London’s Euston Station and the grandest was London’s St. Pancreas Station. Although we label this era a "revolution," its title is somewhat misleading. The movement that first took root in Great Britain wasn't a sudden burst of advancement, but rather a buildup of breakthroughs that fed off one another.

            Without all those creative minds, many of the basic goods and services we use today wouldn't exist. Therefore, the revolution changed the lives of many people. Building the infrastructure to support the Industrial Revolution wasn't easy. The demand for metals, including iron, spurred industries to come up with more efficient methods for mining and transporting raw materials. Over the course of a few decades, iron companies supplied an increasing amount of iron to factories and manufacturing companies. 

            Train sheds were nothing more than small-scale pieces of bridges and the regularized repetition of arches is itself symbolic of mass production, reflecting the ability of industry to churn out an endless supply of the same exact product at a constant rhythm. The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nation was housed in the famous Crystal Palace to showcase the product development, technological advances, agriculture improvements, and fine and applied arts of the industrial nations. It celebrated Western industrialization. The building was essentially designed to be a giant greenhouse but the form resembled an English Cathedral, a cathedral of industry, which had become the new religion. Unfortunately, the building was destroyed in a fire in 1936. All that remains are the listed Italian-style terraces and they will be incorporated in the new scheme.
            Crystal Palace was named after its innovative use of plate glass, and it was a breathtaking symbol of the British Empire and the crowning achievement of the Industrial Revolution. It stood in another part of the capital, Hyde Park, where the exhibition was held. About a year ago, Chinese billionaire Ni Zhaoxing unveiled his £500million vision for a new Crystal Palace, which will put a missing piece of British history back in place. The vast glass structure, the original of which was home to the Great Exhibition of 1851, will house his priceless art collection plus a hotel, conference center and ‘other commercial space’.

            The Crystal Palace was conceived as a nontraditional building and it had a strong technological look. It hosted an exposition dedicated to technology and industry. Generally, such buildings were not built of iron; instead, they were executed in stone to be representational. Iron was reserved for industrial buildings like food markets and urban shopping malls.

Little did anyone know in 1871 that Chicago’s devastating Great Fire would launch modern architecture and make American architects for the first time the most advanced in the world. Iron is not fire-resistant and intense heat makes it soften, bend, and if hot enough, melt. Chicago had been growing rapidly and there was a need to maximize land use by building vertically. This was made possible by the invention of the safety elevator. Young designers abandoned the historicism of revival architecture and designed abstract structures as they allowed form to follow function. The abstraction of the Marshall Field Wholesale Store provided an intellectual challenge to the new generation of Chicago architects. The buildings were massive, made of stone and highly textured. They were also quite simplified, emphasizing volumetric forms.

           

Architecture is the art of designing and constructing buildings and it has always been closely intertwined with the history of art, for many reasons. First, many public works, especially religious buildings, were designed with aesthetics in mind, as well as functionality. They were built to inspire as well as serve a public function. Second, in many of these buildings, the exteriors and interiors acted as showcases for fine art painting such as the Sistine Chapel, or sculpture like European Gothic cathedrals and other artworks like mosaics and metalwork. Thirdly, public building programs typically went hand in hand with the development of visual art, and most major 'arts' movements like the Renaissance.