Thirty-Five: Architecture Actuality (10-13-2022)
Architecture is widely known and accepted as a multidisciplinary and highly professionalized field. The work of constructing any building beyond a makeshift lean-to involves a months-long process of design, redesign, specification, value-engineering, and construction management that cannot be undertaken by a single person. As such, in the past few decades, the industry has begun to phase out the "starchitect", and while highly sought after firms and holdout rock-star architects still satisfy the upper-crust's need for prestige and pretension, the vast majority of architecture is now an exercise in thrift and efficiency. Architecture's industrialization, its technical simplification, exists in stark contrast to the still modernist (with sustainable characteristics) methodology handed to architecture students. While structural capability, technological awareness, and economic considerations are still encouraged, the push to create a yearly graduating class eager to impose a formally perfect and functionally seamless architecture leaves too many incapable of handling the bureaucratic and paperwork-laden world that is construction.
Ellul's technical collapse seems further away than ever, and the engineering and construction world has rapidly adopted the latest wave of technique, with parametrics, digital modeling, and work management software reinvigorating the industry's ability to extract value from its workers at the expense of wellbeing in pursuit of the easiest, quickest, cheapest, and most advanced end product. Lost in this fray is the freedom for any and every architect and designer to pursue their own ideal, or to even employ their understanding of their predecessors' and professors' ideal. There is no direct answer for reconstructing the artistic freedom of the built environment designer, although economic difficulties in the present and near future have revived labor consciousness in such a way that many may avoid total exploitation through collective bargaining. The end of the latest wave of labor mistreatment is not guaranteed, but efforts to achieve it are advancing. Fair labor practices will not return freedom of artistic thought to architects, however, as the cost-benefit structure to the industry is likely to be maintained, especially when the worker has less fiscal motivation to dedicate themselves unwaveringly to production. Work-leisure balance is not the threat that artistic freedom is most hampered by, however, as the unshakable dogma of modernism, unbroken by off-shoot post-modernism, restricts the designer and architect to serving functionalism and simplified beauty ahead of actual artistic endeavor.
There are films that make us happy, films that make us cry, and films that make us scared. There are buildings that supposedly make us happy, and little else.
Presupposing architecture's status as art is an easy task. Anyone can see the craftsmanship and grandeur in a towering basilica, anyone can see the careful simplicity in a modern tower, anyone can feel the warmth and invitation of a log cabin. Looking at any building, the effort to generate a comfortable space, that serves its function efficiently, assuming the building is doing so (see Louis Kahn's Richards Research Laboratory for a failed effort at functionalism, but a visually and diagrammatically pleasing space), is apparent to even a layman. Limiting architecture only to this realm of pleasure and functional servitude, limits the architect's freedom considerably. The obvious counterargument is that architecture is an art only existent to serve positive activity, that an architect has no role in the prison system, an obligation to design even penal spaces for comfort rather than punishment. Limiting architecture to only the pursuit of beauty and comfort is an unnecessary limitation. Before arguing that there is a balance between fear and comfort, that an equilibrium exists as a forceful, controlling architecture that induces upon the inhabitant both limitation and distortion of activity while still achieving a functional purpose, it must be clearly debunked that architecture cannot induce the extreme- fear.
Currently on display at MAXXI in Rome is an exhibition of works by various artists from various periods of the twenty-first century that combine space, light (or lack thereof), sound, and in one case smell to engage the audience with their surroundings. Through superfluous and extensive explanations, the audience can then connect these bizarre installations to some sort of social message, a seemingly necessary element to entering any exhibition in the contemporary art world. One such installation, the name of which is unimportant, uses a totally dark room and alien recordings of the ocean's depths to disorient and bewilder its audience. The social message of this installation was something related to veganism, so its intellectual depth does not reach far, but the spatial experience of being totally incapable of registering one's positioning in the room is undeniably powerful. Without giving this work's hippy mastermind too much credit, it achieves something that few architects, even those generating pavilion and installation spaces, shy away from: the cultivation of fear. On the highest gallery of MAXXI, there is a stripe of glass flooring that allows the inhabitant to see down through the museum's main atrium to its lower level, which could arguably be a similar effort, but a glass floor of such small size, with such a touristic purpose, is only a generator of fear for the most simple-minded of users. A glass walkway over the Grand Canyon is not architecture in the same way Disney's Tower of Terror's interior is not- they are both tourist experiences. Additionally, portions of MAXXI, like many of Zaha Hadid's buildings, have walls canted inwards and outwards in disorienting ways, inducing slight vertigo and unease. These elements do not equate to generators of fear, as they are likely the result of poor design or misattributed genius.
While contemporary buildings' disregard for their surroundings and cultural precedent, in the minds of traditionalists, might be a generator of existential and generational fear, they are the result of a studied and practiced effort in controlling conditions to produce comfort. Looking back through history, there are examples of buildings attempting to cultivate a fearful response, with statues of demons and gargoyles on Gothic cathedrals or depictions of hell on Renaissance churches playing into a past era of religious dominance's fear of the unknown and immorality. Religion, in this case, is the driver of fear. While depictions of fire and grotesque animalia might evoke a natural and primal fear, they are not impositions of the space, but ornament and applique. The tower heights of these same cathedrals could be misconstrued to fear in the same way Hadid's detest of vertical wall could be. Ultimately, through all of history, the only rough examples of fear-cultivating architecture is limited to installation spaces in museums that seem to encourage the audience to malnourish themselves. The social message, which very well may be a post-rationalization or curator appeasement, is scarier than the actual space.
If an architect cannot design a single room of a home to be scary, to invoke a fear response in its inhabitant, do they truly have artistic license over their work? Film is a pervasive medium for artistic expression, and there are films that invoke fear. Again, discount films like Saw, The Conjuring, or The Babadook, which play into campy elements and use cheap tricks like jump-scares and suspenseful music cues, as these are similarly devoid of complete artistic consideration as neighborhood haunted houses on Halloween. Better examples of films with careful consideration of every element that pursue a fearful response from the audience include the Shining, Hereditary, or even an otherwise hopeful film like Interstellar, which has a grand vision of man's technical prowess but plays into the horror of vast space and its relative physics. The comparison could be made that The Shining is as much a masterpiece as Mies Van der Rohe's Farnsworth House, but Mies is not granted the freedom to terrify his client. Without the freedom to invoke negative emotional responses in their audience, aside from a negative response from critics, the architects is not a free artist.
It is evidently passe to proscribe a methodology to attain a desired end result when describing a yet nonexistent state of a field or social structure. Marx did not describe how to achieve communist utopia, and likely could not besides conceding a socialist intermediary condition. The factors and climate of politics and economy are ever-shifting in such a way that no single path to Marx's utopia could be described. Similarly, there is no definitive way for the architect to reestablish artistic dominance within the built environment, especially considering the aforementioned permanent limitation into the realm of pleasure. The current shift in architecture towards a more equitable labor balance is certainly positive, but as stated, will not necessarily return to the architect any creative freedom. To borrow from Marx, it may be possible to describe the equilibrium state, which balances the architect's need to be given the freedom to terrify with the industrial necessity for pleasant and functional buildings. This state is a place where the architect must actively and ecstatically fight with client, financier, and contractor to be given the freedom to violate the dogma of functionalism, and to generate spaces that have a less proscribed purpose, or a less obvious purpose, at the expense of efficient function. A space that is not programmed beyond itself, that justifies itself as an imposition onto the other programming, and forces the audience and occupant to engage with the architecture itself.
To bring this concept into clarity is much more difficult than exemplify the extreme, fear, and requires some concessions and simplifications. Imagine a section of a building, with two floors of three rooms each. The circulation between rooms is unimportant, as well as the circulation between floors. The programming of each room is also unimportant, but assume they are all private spaces, with interaction between them being undesired by their inhabitants. If the rooms are laid out in a perfect grid, with one perfectly above the one below, the construction of the building is simple and obvious, and the rooms are kept as private from one another as possible. However, if just one room's width is stretched, such that it is now below two of the above rooms, then the structural considerations are less obvious, and the room now borders four rooms rather than three. Such simple considerations are often used to diversify space in a building, and rooms of varying size are certainly necessary when varying program is present. However- the program here is completely private. If such a movement is made, the architect must then justify the reduced privacy to the occupant. Rhetorical capability would need to be employed to convince an occupant that the reduced privacy benefits them, even if it is specifically not what they asked for. The financiers would need to be convinced that the increased construction complexity is worth the additional expense to achieve this effect, the contractor likewise. Presently, this creates a hostile relationship between architect and the others, and such a violation of program is only reserved for the most renowned designers.
Another example is that of a corridor. A straight line is always the fastest route between two points, and is almost always the first choice of any designer. Curving a corridor such that it reaches out from the mass above would let a sliver of light in, and could easily be argued as a better choice than a straight corridor because of its additional light-catching effects. Even better would be curving the corridor so far that it is uncomfortable or inconvenient to walk through, thus forcing the occupant to observe its shape and the effects thereof. Yet better would be curved the corridor so far it no longer connects its corresponding spaces, and becomes a space unto itself, its purpose no longer the connection of and travel between two spaces but instead solely the act of motion through its curve, and the observation of the effects of the relationship between its curve and the other masses of the building. This understanding of relationships, especially in such simplified terms, should come easy to any architect. Actually implementing these concepts in a building is exceedingly rare. Why then, is so much energy devoted to learning the possibilities of spatial design and organization in architectural education?
Architects must accelerate.
The final step for any architect can actually be undertaken before achieving licensure, or before even attending graduate school. This step is simply adopting an understanding of the present futility in artistic expression within the built environment, the stagnation of artistic flotsam that is the current "style" of architecture, and the necessity to pursue alternate forms of expression such that the banality of the wider built environment becomes a force that alienates all of its inhabitants. Fighting for freedom, even in the simplest of executions, is the equilibrium before the architect is returned to the role of master over domain. The architect as master over domain is in full control of the design and construction process, is entrusted with the ability to define every aspect of inhabitance, and is free economically to not consider efficiency ahead of spatial effect. If, in unison, every single of the millions of professionals in the built environment, adopts this attitude, the malaise and inadequacy in the industry will disappear. Unfortunately, due to the lack of effective mind control or mass-hysteria techniques in the built environment professions, the only option to this end is an incremental push towards more adventurous and unprecedented architecture. The strict lines of education and industry slow this incremental approach, however.
How then, should an architect, a designer, impose themselves onto their work? Masturbatory pavilions and museum exhibitions seem to be the current zeitgeist towards this effect, but rarely translate into the actual built world. Manifestos (like this) hardly have a lasting effect, see Venturi and Scott Brown's written body as a fantastic failure in generating interest in the now kitsch post modern movement, and Corbusier's written body seems to be powerless in permitting architects the freedom to ignore site and context and design in utero. Most contemporary manifestos fail to venture beyond verbose restatements of obvious spatial arguments, or never exist the realm of social justice pondering with elements of architectural consideration. These manifestos are more so pat-yourself-on-the-back exercises for established or up-and-coming architects to brag that their work is the best, even if it does nothing to challenge or advance the present condition.
So- the industry is neutered, the education is outdated, and the intellectual exercises nonexistent. Architecture is, at present, incapable of and uninterested in reclaiming its creative freedom, much less pursuing a further permission to pursue the artistic effects every other creative field is permitted and encouraged to pursue. If fervent argument and persuasion is not a viable option, and boundless pondering is both ineffective and nonexistent, then the budding architect accelerationist is left but one option- to unplug, and abandon hopes of creative freedom. Many do.
I'll talk more about the futility of social change to repair larger communities in Thirty-Six. Remember that any pessimism I express is my own, but deriving these conclusions from current conditions is common. It's important to remember that while I enjoy discussing and complaining about the problems of the built environment industry and the kingdom of design, I place little personal importance on my own performance professionally beyond what it can do to serve my personal goals and lifestyle. These pieces are practice, see?