Vol. 6, No1 ( September 2001)
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Seeking the Centre: Architectural Praxis in the Network Society. |
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___James
McQuillan Cambridge |
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In 1901 following the death of Queen Victoria, a young architect studied the demolition of a great symbol of order and power, the famous, indeed notorious, Newgate Prison in the centre of London. As dusk gathered, this very successful and well-known designer of country houses in the English Free Style watched the tumbling of the great rusticated walls and looming arches of George Dance’s gloomy pile, as he consciously repositioned himself professionally after the demise of the Queen-Empress. This event meant that there was a demand for emphatically memorialising structures expressing the serious mien of a worldwide empire, something that the rustic references of Sussex vernacular could not readily supply. An empire greater than the world had ever seen demanded, many felt, the expression of the most noble sentiments in the homage to Victoria that were to be placed everywhere throughout her domains. The architect was Sir Edwin Lutyens, later president of the Royal Academy, when he died in 1944 – a household word for architecture in the English-speaking world at that time.
Little more than half a century after the destruction of Newgate, another young English architect was moved in quite another way.News and photographs of his hero, le Corbusier, and his latest building – the pilgrimage chapel of Notre Dame at Ronchamps. Having been oriented towards modernism during and after World War II when he was a Normandy paratrooper, he was now dismayed that the ‘white architecture’ of pure crystalline forms had been rejected by the foremost propagator of Modernism, in favour of a dark interior, with roughcast surfaces and thick walls with no allegiance to industrialisation or standardisation – watchwords of the new order. This young architect wrestled with the intellectual issues implicit in this chapel and the brick-and-raw-concrete Maison Jaoul, eventually imbibing some of the ‘new’/old lessons that le Corbusier was propounding, leading to a great diversity of work that led to world-wide recognition; he was Sir James Stirling RIBA, winner of the Pritzker Prize and the RIBA Gold Medal.
The Problem of Zeitgeist
As in no other profession is the occasion of such intellectual summersaults so obvious and so public. For many fashion is the very stuff of excellence and relevance in design, but architecture, due to the great amount of capital expenditure and permanence that implicitly accompanies even the smallest building, not to mention the time needed for execution from planning, contracting and on to site, refers to a stability above the ordinary. Such was the age-old image of building, when the search for truth was identified in ‘pillars of wisdom’ – seven in the Bible, and other images of ‘foundations’ and ‘structures’ of knowledge and virtue. Yet the Tower of Babel was an image of man overreaching himself and forced to suffer accordingly. The image of stability expressed in a link between building and culture is a commonplace, but the connection may not be so constant and obvious that we are lead to suppose. One of the most obvious question marks that hang over the theory of Zeitgeist is that of nineteenth century Britain itself, ruler of so much of the world. Its position was due to Britain’s leadership in industrialisation, yet such an expression did not dominate the architecture of Victoria when British power was greatest. Nor did classicism, which could embody desired values of antique wisdom and superiority. No, it was the revived Gothic style that found favour, from the great Palace of Westminster on the Thames that ruled the Empire, to the many police stations in various types of more relaxed picturesque exercises. The assurance of the ability to express the Zeitgeist is one of the most unexamined beliefs of modernism and is indeed part of the problem that our two young architects faced in their different ways as described above. Part of the methodology of this enquiry into contemporary attitudes is to examine the most prominent tenets of modernity and see where they lead us: with the notion of the Zeitgeist, we confront one of the most central – that the modern artist has a grasp of time itself, or rather that aspect of time that is most relevant to the current circumstances.
If it were true, then Britain should have been the forge of the ‘new’ architecture; instead, after ‘promising’ starts such as the Crystal Palace – icon of industrial architecture – the British distained revolutionary turns in taste for an English-based Gothic revival as noted, already established in Britain since the mid-eighteenth century, followed by a staid official Classicism until after Lutyens’ death. It was with effort that the members of Stirling’s generation pulled out exemplars of British industrial architecture to justify a revisionary version of modernism – regionalism. Our generation of architects has lived through a great cascade of such alterations of dizzying alternatives, so that today a young architect is confronted by a continual turnover of ‘ideas’, fashions and challenges from all over the globe. Great expectations raised by such universal concepts as ‘sustainability’ and ‘good design’ that some might wonder – is it all necessary? – and where is it all leading?
Modern Images
To give a comprehensive answer to these questions is the goal of this paper. In order to do so we must examine many of the central intellectual territories of our civilisation. In doing so requires a metaphorical voyage probing into the future based on recent and more distant experiences – the only relevant basis we have to work upon. This journey is a sea-voyage in the noble tradition of adventure and exploration, like the Odyssey, an exploration of the soul as much as of space, still attractive today in an age of goal-setting endurance trips and even popular ocean cruises. It is not an idle metaphor as the threat of disaster always looms – a modern Czech philosopher likened living in modern times as being on a ship destined for destruction – le naufrage. In the Middle Ages such an image had its dimension of social satire and personal examination as in the Ship of Fools, subject of a film. And looming over the twentieth century towers the image of the great ship, the Titanic. The unsinkability of such a huge vessel – a floating city – was linked to the efficacy of the nation state, particularly the English-speaking Empire and the US, both wedded to the rise of technology. The great ship was an outcome of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, the foundations of which had been laid during the Italian Renaissance, when modern politics also emerged.
The tale of the Titanic has never failed to fascinate since its sinking. It was a product of Ireland’s industrial city Belfast, capital of a region with periodic social conflict for the rest of the century. The modern world seems to embrace impudent daring as much as illusion, just as the fourth funnel of the Titanic was false – put there to balance the profile. The unity of the British Empire was shattered by the ‘disloyalty’ of most Irishmen in seeking independence, leading to the Empire’s dissolution after WWII. The Titanic flew the Red Ensign, but was owned by the American J. Pierpoint Morgan who turned up at the enquiry. In an age of certitude and technical triumph the spectre of duplicity and disillusion, defeat and betrayal still lurked in the wings of civilised society, or emerged full stage to dominate the scene, as it did with the Nazi takeover of Germany. In 1990 the other progressive experiment in society bit the dust with the fall of the Soviet Union. We have since come to learn that the turmoil and the betrayal continues, in the struggle for justice against the forces of unregulated capitalism disguised of ‘free trade’.
In the face of such
great forces of change, one attitude to all of it is parody. The origins of science was parodied by Jonathan
Swift, and the literary consciousness of the time was parodied in Ullyses by James Joyce, the mocker of British
pretensions as much as Irish patriotism. Prophet of the new architecture, Walter Gropius, was wickedly portrayed
in an novel by Evelyn Waugh, and
the self regard of ‘modern design’ as been punctured at different levels
by Tom Wolfe and David Watkin. Another
response is that of journalists’ accounts of the conflicts and shortcomings
of such cities as Los Angeles by Mike Davies and Dublin by Frank McDonald. Special interest groups concerned with historicist preservation and
environmental protection wage never-ending campaigns to achieve various
goals with varying success. Yet it remains difficult to penetrate to a
more lucid plane of consideration and reflection, only achievable through
careful thematisation and reflection, however enjoyable parody and instant
attack might be. With lutyens and
Stirling I have already indicated one of these themes –that of the artists’
life-story, already indicated by Ernest Gombrich when he stated that after
the High Renaissance the history of art would be the life of the artist. But this is only one indicator of parallel
forces of change that have transformed our society since the Renaissance
changing many intellectual structures for ever.
Cultural Crisis
The dissolution of these intellectual structures has been recognised
in different ways by commentators such as ‘the disenchantment of the world’
by Max Weber, the ‘Great Secularisation’ by the English historian Christopher
Dawson, and ‘divided representation of symbol and instrument’ by Dalibor
Vesely. The rise of rationalism
and the notion of progress claims to have conquered religion and superstition,
whereas the destruction of traditional metaphysics has obliterated the givenness of the cosmos and the expression
of the transcendent. In such conditions
of scientific accomplishment our sense of the suprahuman has gone as well.
Thus careful patterns of identity have been deformed and then questioned
in the rush to create a ‘new world’, the demand of utopia fostered by the
now common notion of ‘progress’ and the ‘perfectibility of mankind’, both
gross deformations of Christian doctrine as a little reflection will demonstrate.
And where are we going now?
It is the habit of architectural commentators to celebrate the last
battle, namely the victory of the International Style and ‘modern design’
in the post-war period. Today we
are swiftly passing from the Industrial
Society to what Manuel Castells calls the Network Society, where the economy
is based on electronic communications and information, constituting a ‘new
social morphology’ (p. 469). More
power will be gathered by the leaders of media than ever before, yet ‘work
process is increasingly individualized, labor is disaggregated in its performance,
and reintegrated in its outcome through a multiplicity of interconnected
tasks in different sites, ushering in a new division of labor . . .’ (p.
471). In such turmoil, the need for stability seems
to be the most precious commodity that will not be provided by the Network Society.
In all these processes, past and ongoing, the unspoken dimensions
of architecture either became occluded or outspokenly transformed into different
modadities following various motives, such as the search for charactère and patterns of rationality,
either tectonic or in planning terms. One
of the key territories in which to examine such changes is in the matter
of ‘the centre’, which many have observed, was under threat and subject
to extinction even, from the verse of John Dunne in the seventeenth century,
to the artistic critique of Hans Seidlmayer sixty years ago.
The remarkable feature of the centre – political, urban, social
- in Western culture has been fairly consistent in form and content from
prehistoric times until the eighteenth century. The main constituents of palace and temple united the sacred to
the profane sometimes in a separate citadel, or later in city-centres organised
around piazzas with a plethora of other forms such as wells, rostra, statues
and minor foci such as memorials and such monuments. The great church of the Middle Ages was in itself a sufficient centre
for any major city, combining splendid landmarks of towers and spires with
a concentrated interior space with clear boundaries and intense transcendental
references. The success of such
centre-making can be seen in its most developed form during the Baroque,
from the new royal centre of Nancy for the ex-king of Poland, to the little
parish churches, town-halls and almshouses of Vittone and others in the
expanding province of Piedmont. At
a more intimate level, such facility can be encountered in the Baroque church
itself, where the formal intensity of the main altar is repeated grosso modo in the external façade, using
the most plastic means and even illusionistic techniques of perspective,
and other effects of sculpture and imagery.
With the rise of the nation-state as the focus of democratic
hopes during and after the French Revolution, the dissolution of the successful
urban centre-making was the cost for the search for new forms and styles
for the new order. Thus the triumph
of reason was at the expense of traditional geometrical meaning, very well
attested in the case of the Parisian Corn Exchange built just before the
Revolution. Before, the circle was
reserved for holy places or high social focus, but now it had shed this
identity and was now deployed as a practical planning device in the form
of an annular vault, with certain structural innovations – a demarche echoing the circular workshops to the Salines de Chaux by
Ledoux. Another form of such dissolution
was the application of the temple-front, restricted to churches and royal
palaces, to other buildings, first in Palladian practice, and then in France,
when Ledoux petitioned the King to allow a pediment to be attached to the
house of the Director at Chaux. During
the eclecticism of the nineteenth century this process of dissolution was
masked for a time; the dimension of the loss marked by the theory of Camillo
Sitte, who pointed out the deficiencies of academic responses to urban planning
in most graphic terms. Very few
new images found favour; the Tour d’Eiffel became the successful symbol
of Paris and even France, but it did not mean much else. It is composed of a spire sitting on an arch, safely drawing upon
ancient forms but never remarked upon by engineering enthusiasts when praising
its other attributes.
The dissolution of centre-making is seen most painfully in
the loss of human scale in so much of our attempts at urban space and form,
where vast parade-grounds are fringed by puny buildings from Chandighar
to Brasilia. The Haussmanisation
of Paris was tolerable because there was the fabric of the medieval city
that could not be totally cleared, and still survives in many streets off
the boulevards. But now Haussmanisation using larger slab blocks
and towers is the planning response in the new cities of the Pacific Rim,
particularly in China and Singapore, where the boulevard has no natural
starting point or termination – it is merely the excuse to congregate a
number of imposing developments with little higher sense of order. Manhattan provides the model, but at least
New York’s downtown skyscrapers grew over a century, and is replete with
diverse supports at the immediate level of support and supply – indeed many
skyscrapers are full of tiny businesses and services not envisaged by the
up-market rental policies of current developers. The currency of modern formalism renders the consideration of other
issues very difficult, be they ‘aesthetic’, or even the politics of local
support and propriety, as the development of Canary Wharf in London abundantly
testifies. Whatever the supremacy
of Pelli’s lonely tower at Canary Wharf might have meant with its intriguing
response to different meteorological conditions, the grouping of more towers
seems to share the vacuity of thinking that has informed the overall project
from the beginning. The erection
of one tower is the guarantee for others to follow, as demanded by fair
play and commercial interests, so that once one exemplar is allowed, the
conditions of isolated splendour are then eroded by invidious competition. The powerful image of Manhattan is due to its visibility and demarcation
due to the three sides of the island, a coherency lost when one views a
forest of towers from street level, or even from inside a park. In more detailed symbolic terms, the survival
of older forms such as the spire accounts for the popularity of the Pacific
Tower in San Fransisco, rather than the stump form that became the stock-in-trade
image of the high-rise block world-wide.
The fight against modern formalism has yet to be written, but
surrealism had a part to play, in underlining the loss of the object in
terms of cosmic relation that was undermined by the grosser aspects of modernity.
Few surrealists espoused architecture, except Salvator Dali and Georges
Batailles. The later’s critique of the Place de Concorde
celebrated in the most memorable terms the memory of ritual and civic gesture
bound up with royal sacrifice, and Dali made many references to Renaissance
architecture in his work.
Some architects have vented their protests against the disappearance
of the centre – Aldo Rossi’s dependence on memory through form may perhaps
the most coherent, yet the relevance of persistent memory of form in a pluralist
society is still problematic. The
survival of ancient exemplars has been marked in the output of Aalto, with
his mini-citadels and other clever exploitations of site and landscape.
At
this point I wish to take stock of current varieties of praxis and architectural
technique. The first and most prevalent
is that of hi-tech, partly stimulated by rationalism, partly modelled on
the paradigms of Mies van der Rohë and a general ethos of functionalism,
translated into tectonic morality. The second is Romantic, tending to primitive forms, the understanding
of exemplars and context, and ready to explore various answers in conformity
with general cultural values. The
third is what I call ‘secular antinominianist’ in reference to theological
antinomianism, referring to a refusal to believe in the normal dispensation
of grace, and therefore the need to adhere to common norms. Modern artistic antinominianism is fairly cynical
in terms of self-advancement and cultural exploitation, in that it is modelled
on the 200-yearold model of the avant-garde. The demand for political reform and national liberation impinged
on literature very deeply after the French Revolution, and gained a slow
purchase on the practice of the visual arts.
Only in the post –war period with the victory of the International
Style has it become noticeable in architecture, the way being paved by le
Corbusier’s constant propaganda and self-promotion.
Peter Eisenman is surely the father of antinomians today, building
a building in Ohio that doesn’t work either in plan or in construction,
designing a memorial to the Holocaust which symbolises the Nazi state which
ruined not just the totality of German Jewry, but a generation of Europeans
in so many different ways. Antinomianism
is possible in the wish to believe in the ‘new’, whatever its outcome, as
it is promoted by the priesthood caste of curators and cultural managers
who have no responsibility for downstream results – they will have moved
on to other jobs, projects or even countries.
Another
feature of modern technique is the emergence of the museum as a centre,
or at least a signature building for a city needing a fresh image. Perhaps the Guggenheim Museum by FLW in New
York is the exemplar here, as the American master wished to contrast as
violently as possible with the cosmopolitanism of Manhattan, to the extent
of designing a building unsuitable to hang or even to view pictures at all
– an antinomian building if ever there was one.
But now the emphasis is totally on the exterior, and we are all familiar
with the images of rupture, and implosion, of sinking (the Titanic again)
and of collision that mark the Jewish Museum of Libeskind and the Bilbao
Guggenheim of Gehry. The Bilbao
Museum seems ill-considered internally, but then the interior of a museum
is surely the most intractable of all architectural challenges that might
exist. The reason for this is that the museum represents
the full programme of modern consciousness – ‘come here to learn what is
valuable in the past, in order to live well in the future’. But all that was valuable in the past has been
ripped out of any context and displayed as trophies in a ‘temple’ of spoils,
the result of cultural as well as political conquest in different lands,
just as Napoleon conquered Italy and then the Louvre opened its doors as
a modern museum of art. It is surely
significant that the most successful museum displays are radical and even
emancipated programmes of exhibition in freely interpreted settings with
some respect to the actual exhibits, such as those achieved by Albini and
Scarpi in Italy, a country fortunate with plenty of scope in both art holdings
and settings, as Napoleon realised.
Whatever
the design technique –hi tech, Romantic, or antinomian, that I have referred
to above, the one underlying factor in modern architecture is the underlying
tendency to create formalistic landscapes, the creation of nature as a landscape
where all the elements are equivocal and interchangeable. The remedy to this almost universal dumbing-down
in spatial terms is to treat each building as a centre, inasmuch as its
programme will allow – obviously not all that viable for a warehouse or
a shopping centre, lost in a car park.
Yet the paradigm of the little Baroque parish church is still there,
with its incomparable intensity that was shared by its public neighbours
in lesser degree.
The
techniques of centre-making can be taught and learned, the need for boundary
and focus, the control of movement and light, the imagination towards identifiable
image and material, and so on. The
solecisms of open stairs and flimsy railings, even made of glass, must be
resisted in favour of visual security and opacity where required. The attention to doors, their overall visibility
and their role as markers of transition from one realm of experience to
another, must be recognised. The
confusion between inside and out, sometimes possible in good weather conditions
in a tropical climate, is due to a belief of its universal appeal as a desideratum,
and leading to unsustainable demands on the building envelope in cold climates.
Another modern model, that of the glasshouse, is a weapon of similar
wishful thinking, and can only be a gardener’s forcing house –try sitting
beside a glass wall for over an hour. Many
of the solecisms of modernity can be easily demonstrated but even the most
anti-modern of critics never call upon them, probably due to the visual
prejudice that blind them to overall issues of physical comfort and thermal
well-being.
It
is truly remarkable that the twentieth century made only one powerful innovation
to making a façade for all its acclaimed inventiveness. The curtain wall with lightweight cladding
was a development of the nineteenth century, and mainly referred to established
results in terms of architectural surface, depth, etc., long explored by
masters such as Borromini. However,
without any fanfare in terms of theory or propaganda, Mies’ application
of the I-beam to the façade to the Seagram Building in New York was certainly
innovative and convincing, uniting the spandrel and the glass in contrast
to the exposed flanges of the I-beams, thus creating a dual façade from
certain points of view. In a way,
Mies legitimised the later experiments that have been favoured by minimalists
ever since, and in an understated way, he initiated the relativist character
of the curtain wall, consonant with the overall relativism that marks our
culture. Just as he re-interpreted
the centre as a palace in the ambiguities of the Barcelona Pavilion, he
provided another ambiguous answer for the large façade.
Perhaps the enduring triumphs of modern architecture will rely on
such ambiguities, less crude than the large gestures of the Romantics such
as le Corbusier, more relevant than the meaningless gestures of the antinomians.
Habitational Colonisation
My
last recommendation for modern praxis is that of habitational colonisation.
Indeed this practise has been going on all the time, but in the utopian-charged
chambers of our schools of architecture, staffed by some who have never
practised, the tabula rasa is the only challenge – conservation
is a sidelined specialism for later practice after graduation.
Yet the continual reorganisation of all types of buildings into different
configurations of use, is a factor of civil and architectural reality –
think of most surviving public buildings from the Middle Ages, the common
large terrace house of Georgian Britain, Ireland and the USA, and the need
to regenerate slighted parts of our cities, too innumerable to quantify
here. The demand for continuity
has never been higher, while the urge to make signature statements has never
been greater. At the same time very
restrictive legislation to maintain ‘conservation areas’ with concomitant
bureaucratic control imposed in an era of weak overall planning machinery,
tends to impose a sterile gentrification on whole tracts of our cities.
Well-intentioned though they may be, the need to revise planning
legislation at every level, and introduce stronger local control, is now
necessary. Maybe the policy of subsidiarity might find its paramount legitimacy
in terms of planning law, and lead to a revival of local identity that other
forces in our society have inevitably weakened.
Conclusion
Since
it is obvious that the practice of architecture is political, the emphasis
on praxis must be shifted from the restricted instrumentality of the process
to the wider prospects of cultural engagement that the search for ‘centre-making’
should engender. The antinomians
are legitimate in that they instinctively recognise the need for such cultural
engagement, however inchoate they appear to the rest of us, and even to
themselves. The romantic exponents
are close to a range of positive values and experiments but tend to attack
problems that are no longer relevant. The
hi-tech exponents lack sufficient self-awareness and critical reflection
to engender much appeal outside professional commentators – Forster, for
example, is loved by most British architects.
As I have indicated above, the recovery of meaning is the only programme
worthy of attention, and the search for meaning has no boundaries in space
and time under modern conditions. However
the products of such a search are in turn highly prescriptive of space and
time, as we cannot escape the human condition.
The Ship of Fools must have had a crew, including a navigator. Foolish or not, the architectural profession
must guide and find a landfall, in a sea full of shipwrecks. Such shipwrecks are victims of the culture
wars that surround us, so a steady hand, and mind, is needed. Architecture today requires such hands and
minds