Thank you for listening - and stay connected for the next phase of cultural research on design, architecture and the creative arts:
The Shape of Things That Work.
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Here's a taste of The Shape of Things . . . - from the Introduction to a series of essays, which will also be the basis for continuing conversations in the cloud-based internet radio format!
The
Shape of Things That Work
Introduction
Architecture
is the synthesis of all arts, all sciences, all human experiences. It is a
solution, or an attempt at a solution, of serving humankind.
Lacking
an objective standard or measure of beauty, our recent architectural school
graduates also lack of measure of discernment. In a world beset by social
promotion, where all are winners, none is a champion.
R.
Buckminster Fuller once remarked "when I think I've solved a problem, if
it's not beautiful I know I haven't solved it." His argument, then, is my
premise – that to find some measure of beauty, or rightness of form, we must
gain discernment by examining the shapes of forms that are not only beautiful, but
beautiful in their utility, that solve
problems.
And
from that we can – because we must –
recapture the essence of architectures that engage the spirit – and, which is most important – serve to
elevate the quality of life.
Art
cannot be useful. Architecture that is primarily art therefore cannot be
useful. Where is the genius of the architect’s role as prime integrator of all
technologies, all needs, all uses in that? Without this integration, this
service to humankind, then architects become aesthetes and others – less well
trained – will decide how our built environment is crafted.
What
a pity.
Part
I. The Elusive Spirit of Beauty
My
mentor and teacher, the architect-poet John Q. Hejduk argued:
“The fundamental issue of architecture is: does it
affect the spirit, or doesn’t it? If
it doesn’t affect the spirit, it’s building. If it affects the spirit, it’s
architecture.” He went on to say “An
architecture doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the final form of a built building; a drawing, to me, is a
completed piece of architecture, a building is a completed piece of
architecture, a photograph of a[n] architecture is a piece of architecture.
Each act is individually an act of architecture.” (1)
Consider
these essays then, on our current state of architecture, as an act of
architecture, an offering to the spirit of architecture, and an examination of
spirit imbued with natural meaning.
I
would like to take Hejduk’s argument one step further by examining how these acts of building, or of
architecture – affect the spirit. How shapes and form work to improve or to
impoverish the human spirit in ordinary life.
II.
Quality and Meaning
Why
are our recent architectural wonders so marked by their emphasis purely on visual
form and not on utility, or function? What is the cumulative effect of
buildings whose primary reason to be is
to be novel? Where is meaning? Where is quality?
"Architecture
has to have meaning, not just novelty. The biggest ambition can't be just to be
different. When we only talk about what architecture looks like, its colour or
what's in the lobby we are just becoming decorators. We have lost confidence in
our ability to really do things. The conversation has become too introverted.
How come there is such a disconnect between what architects think they are
doing and how they wish to serve society and how they really serve society?.
All good architects think they are making a contribution to society: why does
society think architects are just a bunch of profiteering egotistical
joyriders?" [my emphasis] So
pronounced Sir David Chipperfield, director of the 13th Venice Biennale of
Architecture in August 2014.
On
a macro level, why do millions of us live no better than we did 40 or 100 years
ago – our houses’ air quality as poor as when we cooked on coal-burning stoves;
our outdoor air worse than in the days of wood-burning fireplaces? Is it the
density of life? If so, what excuse is there for grandiose buildings that exalt
the ego of the bad actors on the stage of our landscape – the for-profit
developers, self-promoting cultural institutions, struggling civic governments
seeking to achieve a degree of legitimacy, effectively saying: “Look at this
grand colossus, isn’t it marvelous, are we not superb leaders?”
III.
Utility
The
form of buildings should do more than
be visually stimulating.
Why?
This
is not a new argument.
“Socrates writes in Pistias that the beautiful
(eurythmon) in relation to a purpose is superior to the beautiful in itself,”
note Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre in their 1984 essay “The Question
of Autonomy in Architecture” (2)
They
argue that this attitude marks the transition in western, Hellenistic thought
from mystical or religious rules of order and form – to the rational urge to
integrate form with useful utility. So I am scarcely original in this regard. Who
amongst us is sufficiently Sophist to argue with Socrates?
IV.
Antecedents
Eugene
Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, in his “Discourses on Architecture” (translated by
Henry Van Brunt, 1875) declares:
“Art,
therefore, must be recognized as one of the elements of [French] civilization;
and if this civilization is on the broad road, not of decline, but of progress,
her arts should naturally be in a flourishing condition; if they are not, the
misfortune can only be attributed to the artists. Now, as regards architecture,
I am convinced that we are far behind the times. In this respect we are just at
the point where the West was in the time of Galileo in regard to science. Those
who consider themselves the guardians of the eternal principles of beauty would gladly shut up, if they could,
as a dangerous madman, any one who should undertake to demonstrate that such
principles are independent of any particular form of expression, and that there
is no reason why, because the principles are invariable, these forms should
remain eternally unchanged and confined to certain traditional rules governing
all detail and proportion.” (3)
So
what are the reasons that directed
and informed how and what we built in ages past? What lessons can be
re-learned? Should we even look to the past, when our current technologies are
so superior, so sublime, so advanced?
In
1896 the Chicago
architect Louis Sullivan penned this famous sentiment:
“It is the pervading law of all things organic and
inorganic, of all things physical and metaphysical, of all things human and all
things superhuman, of all true manifestations of the head, of the heart, of the
soul, that life is recognizable in its expression, that form ever follows
function. This is the law. [Emphasis
by Sullivan in the original printing.] (4)
Handmaiden to utility is a belief
in structural honesty. As recently as 1971 the Philadelphia architect Louis Kahn argued that
structure be revealed and self-evident, writing:
“The
structure of the room must be evident in the room itself. Structure, I believe
is the giver of light. A square room asks for its own light to read the square.
It would expect the light either from above or from its four sides as windows
or entrances.” (5)
V.
Formal bias
Certainly
the radical modernists of the early 20th century thought that we
should not look to the past; for them, the past was marked by centuries of war,
of unparalleled poverty, of pestilence. For them, a total break from history was not
only a matter of inventive necessity; it was also a political statement against
monarchy and plutocracy, in favor of liberal ideas of freedom, expressed in new
forms not beholden to tradition or historical habit.
In
this sentiment I find resonance, but also a failure in method, for failing to carry
forward basic knowledge inextricably tied in history.
The
mid-twentieth century students of Walter Gropius – one of the founders and for
a time the director of the legendary art school “Bauhaus” in Dessau, Germany –
for example, were not taught architectural history, and in many schools of
architecture still, students are in total ignorance even of the professions more
recent experiments, successes and failures carried out in the name of this
modern break from history; and therefore, are doomed to repeat cartoon versions
of cartoon reiterations of ideas once well-meant, novel in their time, but
which may not actually work, and whose appeal to the spirit has faded. I find
recent graduates who know nothing about Brutalism, the Post-WWII social housing
experiments carried out by Peter and Alison Smithson, the architectural
evangelism of CIAM (the early 20th century Congrès internationaux d'architecture moderne – influential
proponents of modernism.)
So
what, you say? We have trained barbarians, if we have not trained future
architects with sufficient discernment to know what works and what does not
work. We are left being no more than decorators.(6)
VI.
So what?
Continuing
in the spirit, if not the substance, of the Gropius/Bauhaus “out with history”
approach to architectural design is a kind of
computer-generated formalism,
whose chief proponent has called “Parametricism” and claims this to be
the emerging new style of modern architecture. Its adherents are Patrik
Schumacher, along with his partner, the British-Iranian architect Zaha Hadid.
So,
you might say: so what is wrong with
computer-generated, algorithm-driven form making? Isn’t that scientific? It
certainly is modern, in that such forms could never have been created before
the advent of cheap computing power. Isn’t it wonderful to create novel shapes?
Isn’t that progress?
I
will argue that whether parametrically created (as in the practice of Hadid and
Schumacher), or studied by use of physical models (as seen in the work of Cesar
Pelli, most notably in the filigreed facades of Petronas Towers in Kuala
Lumpur), or roughly sketched then translated into a CAD-CAM (Computer-Aided
Design and Drafting to Computer-Aided Manufacturing) program (any dozens of
buildings of Frank Gehry) – what has resulted is a style, not a fashion, of
work that is placeless, free of any relationship to site, and certainly
willfully ignorant of the realities of patterns of use, human habit, comfort,
or ease. Resulting in buildings that could – and are – be found in Paris or New
York or on the shores of Lake Michigan or in the deserts of the United Arab
Emirates; therefore, buildings that are everywhere – and nowhere, created for
no place in particular, and have nothing to do with where they’ve been plopped
down, like so many Martian invasion vehicles.
So
this is not my argument for a return to neo-Classicism, nor for “traditional”
forms, but rather for creating Shapes That Work. In our architecture My goal is
to indentify demonstrable solutions for improving the lives of those people who
live in, work in, or visit.
Riffing
on something that Buckminster Fuller once quipped – something to the effect
that “when I’m done solving a problem and it’s not beautiful, then I know that
I haven’t solved the problem,” I trust, and will prove if I can, that Shapes
That Work are beautiful, not simply because they have utility, but because it
is the nature of forms that work to be the elemental foundations of all we find
to be beautiful.
But
there are those (q.v: Dr Peter Eisenman) who will, and do, say that the purpose
of architecture is only to create structures
that elevate the spirit with form alone, irrespective of utility or function.
That architecture is not a charitable enterprise, and cannot possibly engage
issues of the common good in the ordinary sense of the quality of individual
life, but only and most emphatically the common and communal life – through our
contemporary temples of culture: our museums, the residences of the most
economically favored, and our office towers – themselves, to adapt the
jingoistic language and thought of Franklin W Woolworth – “the cathedrals of
commerce.”
I
refute the ego-monument-makers. I deny their legitimacy. I denounce their works
as simply more of the “bread and circus” diversions of the Roman
Empire. (Not an original thought; see Manfredo Tafuri’s
“Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development, MIT 1976”) For
indeed, ours is an empire of capital that far exceeds the reach, if not the
grasp, of that late empire, over two millennia past. And our circuses are just
as sumptuous, diverting, and no less bloody.
It
is time to face down the leering clowns, to demand an end to novelty.
I
look to recapture a reasoned approach to architecture and design, an approach
founded on the making of shapes that provide a function in service to the
quality of life of the individual.
These
are my arguments. And in making them one thing to which I most stringently
commit: these arguments will not be made in the fashionable jargon of so-called
architectural academicians. In closing, let us consider what Viollet-le-Duc had
to say about this topic:
“Here for four hundred years we have been disputing
about the relative value of ancient and modern art, and during all that time
our discussions have turned, not upon essential principles, but upon quibbles
and equivocations, upon details and principles, upon the authority for this,
that, or the other form. The result is, that we architects, absorbed in an art
half science and half sentiment, have succeeded in developing for the public
only certain mysterious hieroglyphics which they cannot possibly understand,
and so they let us wrangle among ourselves in the empty vanity of our
exclusiveness. Shall we never have our Moliere to treat us as he did the
physicians of his time? We too have our Hippocrates and Galen; must we harp on
them forever?” (7)
Viollet-le-Duc,
bound by his time in history has it almost right when he continues, saying:
“I am ready to agree with any one that pure invention
is not necessary to architecture; that the duty of architects is not to create,
but to analyze, combine and appropriate the traditionary forms at their
disposal; that the art is so imperious concerning the means of execution, that
we must take all the elements of design from the experience of the past.
Architecture, in fact, requires two different operations of the mind, ––– the
study and the application of precedent; application, because if all the
masterpieces of the past were collected together in the brain of a single man,
if he did not know how to avail himself of this knowledge, if he had no method
to enable him to design properly by the aid of these masterpieces, he could
only produce incongruous combinations of poor copies, mere limitations, which,
in artistic value, would be far beneath the work of the barbarian who has no
research, and has never studied the works of the past.” (8)
We
do not live in an era in which there are barbarians at our gates. We are the
barbarians who desecrate the landscape, “who [have] no research, and [have]
never studied the works of the past.”
Again
– so what? Or worse: won’t these researches stifle the levels of invention
necessary to create new architectures? I think not, nor did Viollet-le-Duc:
“Enlarge your knowledge of precedent, form your
judgment, learn to reason, and your faculty of invention will be increased.” (9)
I
welcome thoughtful rebuttal.
Curtis
B Wayne, Architect
(1)
“Education of An
Architect” Video, Michael Blackwood Productions, no date. Available for sale
at: http://www.michaelblackwoodproductions.com/archs_cooperunion.php
Viewable
online at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chEfhs-kEXQ
(2)
A. Tzonis and L.
Lefaivre “Architecture and Autonomy” Harvard
University, 1984.
Available online at:
(3)
Discourses on Architecture, Eugène
Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Translated with an introductory Essay by
Henry Van Brunt, James R. Osgood and Company, Boston, 1875. Available on
Google Books.
(4)
“The Tall Office
Building, Artistically
Considered,” Lippincott’s Monthly
Magazine, a Popular Journal of General Literature, Science, and Politics.
Volume LVII, Page 408 – Available online at: http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.b5213377;seq=423;view=1up;num=403
(5)
Louis I. Kahn,
1971 American Institute of Architects Gold Medal Acceptance Speech, Detroit, MI
June 24, 1971
(6)
David
Chipperfield, RIBA. “Chipperfield: More Community” Interview by Julie Iovine, Il Giornale dell’Architettura with The
Architect’s Newspaper,
27
August 2012, page 6, in which Chipperfield is quoted as saying:
“Architecture
has to have meaning, not just novelty. The biggest ambition can't be just to be
different. When we only talk about what architecture looks like, its colour or
what's in the lobby we are just becoming decorators.”
Available
online at: http://issuu.com/archpaper/docs/biennale_27_agosto/7
(7)
(8) and (9) Viollet-le-Duc, loc. cit.
Thanks to you all for listening - and: Keep the Faith (in making the world a better place through design!)
CB Wayne
