Architecture Posted: April 12th, 2014
Charles Baudelaire discusses the flaneur as an individual, one who is searching, “for that quality which you must allow me to call ‘modernity’…”, searching by roaming the ‘desert of human life’, of fashion, of anything that will help in finding meaning.
Georg Simmel describes in The Metropolis and Mental Life, the individual must distinguish himself in metropolitan society in order to survive. “This leads ultimately to the strangest eccentricities, to specifically metropolitan extravagances of self-distanciation, of caprice, etc., the meaning of which is no longer found in the content of such activity itself but rather in its being a form of being
different.‟
Considering our Modules on Beauty, how might we contrast and compare these two writers and their impressions of the individual and the city? How is beauty understood/processed in each case? Respond in a short essay (introduction, body, conclusion). Your answer should be succinct and relevant to the question