Reacting to an increasingly aesthetically sophisticated general audience, architects transfixed by the image of their work become commodity producers of visual beauty, obsessing over drawings and details without a thought to the sociological implications of their projects.
This is also a symptom of the discipline’s ongoing identity crisis. Emerging once from the gothic tradition of stonemasonry, the profession brushed itself off during the nineteenth century to be told it was literally a form of Art alongside painting, sculpture, literature and music and that they could put down their chisels and start expressing their ideas free of any stylistic constraint.
(Strange then, that at the beginning of the twenty-first century we should assume beauty to be the ultimate goal of architecture, as this is the one thing the other art forms were told was no longer a restriction.)
Caught unaware with no art theory tradition of our own, we borrowed from painting – converting the visual languages of neo-plasticism, cubism and Russian constructivism directly into built form. We adopted the habit of sorting our work into visual styles – this week’s press announces the death of ‘Blobism’ and the nascence of ‘NeoPoMo’ – however unlike terms such as surrealism or impressionism, stylistic groupings in architecture bear little relation to discursive trends.
This rote application of visual theory prevented us from extracting an art theory from within our own discipline, such that we have not yet properly tested the proposition that architecture is a form of art at all, nor explored such questions as to what the medium of this form might be: materials, space, light, people?
If architecture is only an applied art, the problem of designing a house would be simply a question of technique. The drape of sunlight across a wall, an interweaving of volumes – these kinds of issues require merely an iterative process of drawing and modelling. We would be content as long as our buildings were beautiful.
Yet if architecture is to produce works capable of social critique, there must be something initially impossible about it, something to reject at first glance, like the immediate objections to Duchamp’s urinal or Warhol’s soup cans. In the case of buildings there must be something initially unliveable about it.
This observation leads us towards the essential medium of architecture. Mies van der Rohe’s original glass house for Edith Farnsworth was challenging to inhabit not so much for its visual minimalism or transparency as for its extreme construction of voyeurism and exhibitionism.
Such a game is playing with social constructs of domestic life more than strictly spatial constructs. Unlike the visual arts, which play with social constructs through imagery, only architecture plays directly upon their organisation, redetermining the social structure of ongoing activity.
The central medium of this artform is the manifestation of social activity itself, not a building’s materials, nor its forms and volumes.
The Japanese cosmetics company Saishunkan Seiyaku trains its all female staff in a common dormitory for their first year of employment. The female architect Kazuyo Sejima organised the building plan to intensify the surreality of communal life.
Each bedroom is screened with translucent glass from a common living space, itself visible from the street, in which ranks of bathroom sinks and toilet cubicles alternate with kitchen benches and dining tables. Showers and ritual baths are reached by a bridge flying over the common space, making an awkward parade of a normally private routine.
The material qualities of this building (in fact, all her buildings) are all white steel and glass to neuter its physical properties and concentrate all the architectural meaning upon the activity of its inhabitants.
In his project for Paris’ Parc de La Villette, the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas divided the 50 hectare site into thin parallel strips each containing one of the various thematic gardens, sports fields or activity centres required by the brief. Distending the activities in this way such that they are perceived in close juxtaposition with others rather than as discrete foci allows the ensemble of the park to be seen as a broader societal instrument beyond our individual interactions with it, and provides a structure in which to dynamically reconfigure this instrument. A bowling strip might for example be replaced by a science park or market gardens as the city’s demographics shift over time.
These are a kind of proposition that bears no relation to the traditionally considered media of architecture of space, light and materiality, nor are they such ideas that can emerge from a drawing-based practice. They emerge directly from programmatic planning, which is a task required for every project, whether it be a work of beauty or not.
This fact that programming is unavoidable in every project demonstrates that it is this level of organisation which is essential to the medium of architecture, and that the spatial or material aspects of building are a secondary product of this thinking.
This is perhaps why it is often disappointing to see the work of visual artists who attempt a dialogue with architecture through spatial investigations – neither the majority of artists nor architects realises that space itself is meaningless except in support of a conceived framework of social activity.
Architects with an interest in these intangible structures will insist that they work essentially in space, having been raised on texts such as Sigfried Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture and Bruno Zevi’s Architecture as Space: how to look at Architecture.
The fact is that space is just one of the architect’s techniques for structuring activity, just as colour is one of the painter’s techniques for structuring an image. As there are paintings that may neglect the issue of colour in pursuit of a different kind of image (Mondrian’s Pier and Ocean, for example), so architectural projects such as La Villette may neglect the question of space.
As Robert Venturi has pointed out, a preoccupation with space and a denial of all other organisational techniques merely marks out the whole generation of modernists as a school of abstract expressionism, with the implicit credo that wordless beauty is enough to solve the problems of the built environment.
We could distinguish making and building by saying that making is to create things smaller than ourselves, an individual pursuit, and building to create things larger than ourselves, a societal pursuit. We build structures such as ships and bridges, but we can also build broader social phenomena – activities, organisations, etc., – in the sense of nation-building, the building up of a philanthropic legacy or a pedagogical tradition. Architecture could be thought of loosely as the art of building in all of these senses.
In fact, to say that architecture acts upon social activity allows us to dissociate it from buildings, to conceive of an architecture comprised solely of reconceived social structure, art works that can reshape directly some of these larger social institutions.
One possible example is laid out in the New York architect Michael Sorkin’s book Local Code – the constitution of a city at 42 degrees north latitude. We can also imagine an artwork which lays out the restructuring of a resource giant like Royal Dutch Shell, or perhaps the organisation of an online university.
Sensing all of this, Koolhaas created his second consultancy AMO, a loose acronym for Architecture Must go Outside itself. Its work has included redressing the “iconographic deficit” of the European Union’s institutions, a lexicographic analysis of Wired magazine (its fifty most commonly used nouns, the recurrence of the word ‘revolution’) as a tool for its rebranding, and proposals for the pre-emptive indiscriminate preservation of each future generation of Beijing’s urban landscape.
In an era where beautiful things are part of the currency of global consumer culture, the idea that architecture should be about making beautiful buildings seems to render our discipline supplicant to this culture, and ornamental to society’s problems. It is possible that the most useful application of the architect’s training is in problems that seek neither beauty nor buildings in response.
Architects must get away from their obsession with drawings, models, with form and materiality for their own sake, and get back to the task of thinking about and proposing for. The preoccupation with beauty could not possibly be the greatest use of an architect’s intellect.
Kerwin Datu, Paris, February 2006