The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Architectural History 9781138940178, 9780367760427, 9781315674469

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Contributors
1 Architecture in the Age of Playfulness: Mapping a Framework for Global Historiography
Part I: Practices: Introduction
2 What is Modern Architecture?
3 Architecture and Image
4 Cold War Modernism
5 After Deconstructivist Architecture
6 Postmodern Utopianism
7 Metabolism and Beyond
8 Professional Agency and Architectural Discourse in Postcolonial India
9 Architectural Production in Dubai
10 The Afterlives of Modern Housing
11 Social-Interest Architecture in Brazil: The Seed of Something New
Part II: Interrogations: Introduction
12 Autonomy, Criticality, and the Avant-Garde
13 Crafting Architecture Criticism
14 Domesticity, Gender, and Architecture
15 Architecture and Preemptive Spectacles
16 Architecture and Phenomenology
17 Critical Regionalism: From Critical Theory to Postcolonial and Local Awareness
18 Vernacular Architecture
19 Heritage Conservation: The Rise and Fall of a "Grand Narrative"
20 Power, Empire, and Nation
21 Architecture and Globalization
Part III: Innovations: Introduction
22 Architectural and Medical Innovation in Hospital Design
23 Electric City Land: Architecture and Media
24 Divergent Matter: The Problematic Search for Material Suitability in Architecture
25 Building Mass Customised Housing Through Innovation in the Production System: Lessons From Japan
26 The Programmable Architect
27 Biomimicry for Sustainable and Regenerative Architecture
28 Design for Ageing Buildings: An Applied Research of Poikilohydric Living Walls
29 Nature, Infrastructure, and Cities
Index

Citation preview

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY

The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Architectural History offers a comprehensive and up-­to-date knowledge report on recent developments in architectural production and research. D ­ ivided into three parts – Practices, Interrogations, and Innovations – this book charts diversity, ­criticality, and creativity in architectural interventions to meet challenges and enact changes in different parts of the world through featured exemplars and fresh theoretical orientations. The collection features 29 chapters written by leading architectural scholars and highlights the reciprocity between the historical and the contemporary, research and practice, and disciplinary and professional knowledge. Providing an essential map for navigating the complex currents of contemporary architecture, the Companion will interest students, academics, and practitioners who wish to bolster their understanding of built environments. Duanfang Lu is Professor of Architecture and Urbanism and Associate Dean (Research Education) in the School of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Sydney. She is ranked as the world’s 16th most influential researcher in Architecture in 1996–2018 by PLOS. Her widely read books Remaking Chinese Urban Form (2006, 2011) and Third World Modernism (2011) were also published by Routledge.

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY

Edited by Duanfang Lu

First published 2024 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Taylor & Francis The right of Duanfang Lu to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.v All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Lu, Duanfang, editor. Title: The Routledge companion to contemporary architectural history / edited by Duanfang Lu. Description: New York : Routledge, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2021016062 (print) | LCCN 2021016063 (ebook) | ISBN 9781138940178 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367760427 (paperback) | ISBN 9781315674469 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Architecture, Modern. | Architecture and society. Classification: LCC NA500 .R68 2021 (print) | LCC NA500 (ebook) | DDC 720.1/03—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021016062 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021016063 ISBN: 9781138940178 (hbk) ISBN: 9780367760427 (pbk) ISBN: 9781315674469 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781315674469 Typeset in Bembo by codeMantra

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ix List of Contributors x 1 Architecture in the Age of Playfulness: Mapping a Framework for Global Historiography

1

Duanfang Lu PA RT I

Practices: Introduction 81 86

2 What Is Modern Architecture?

Mark Crinson 100

3 Architecture and Image

Hal Foster 111

4 Cold War Modernism

Greg Castillo 127

5 After Deconstructivist Architecture

Jennifer Ferng 140

6 Postmodern Utopianism

Simon Sadler 150

7 Metabolism and Beyond

Hajime Yatsuka 8 Professional Agency and Architectural Discourse in Postcolonial India

Peter Scriver and Amit Srivastava v

163

Contents

181

9 Architectural Production in Dubai

Kevin Mitchell 195

10 The Afterlives of Modern Housing

Cecilia L. Chu 11 Social-Interest Architecture in Brazil: The Seed of Something New

212

Daniela Sandler PA RT I I

Interrogations: Introduction 225 12 Autonomy, Criticality, and the Avant-Garde

230

Tahl Kaminer 241

13 Crafting Architecture Criticism

David Leatherbarrow 14 Domesticity, Gender, and Architecture

253

Lilian Chee 15 Architecture and Preemptive Spectacles

270

Andrzej Piotrowski 286

16 Architecture and Phenomenology

David Seamon 17 Critical Regionalism: From Critical Theory to Postcolonial and Local Awareness

298

Vincent B. Canizaro 313

18 Vernacular Architecture

Marcel Vellinga 19 Heritage Conservation: The Rise and Fall of a “Grand Narrative”

328

Miles Glendinning 339

20 Power, Empire, and Nation

Anoma Pieris 351

21 Architecture and Globalization

Anthony D. King

vi

Contents PA RT I I I

Innovations: Introduction 361 22 Architectural and Medical Innovation in Hospital Design

365

Annmarie Adams 23 Electric City Land: Architecture and Media

377

Mitchell Schwarzer 24 Divergent Matter: The Problematic Search for Material Suitability in Architecture

392

Blaine Brownell 25 Building Mass Customised Housing through Innovation in the Production System: Lessons from Japan

408

James Barlow and Ritsuko Ozaki 419

26 The Programmable Architect

Rizal Muslimin 27 Biomimicry for Sustainable and Regenerative Architecture

439

Maibritt Pedersen Zari 28 Design for Ageing Buildings: An Applied Research of Poikilohydric Living Walls

452

Marcos Cruz 469

29 Nature, Infrastructure, and Cities

Antoine Picon Index 477

vii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful to the many individuals and institutions that have provided support along the journey of producing this book. Profound thanks go to contributors to this volume for the intellectual energy they have invested in this project. I owe a great thank you to Dana Buntrock, Jassen Callender, Isabelle Doucet, Farhan Karim, Laurence Kimmel, Andrew Leach, Matthew Mindrup, Lukasz Stanek, Dell Upton, Florian Urban, Anthony Vidler, Tim Winter, Julian Worrall, Gyu Hyong Yi, Xiaohuan Zhao, and anonymous reviewers who read and commented on part of the book. A special debt of gratitude is owed to Sebastian Tsang for test-reading most chapters and offering constructive feedback from the perspective of an architect, and Cassi Plate and Wing Sze Lau for their valuable copy editing. I am thankful to my wonderful colleagues at the University of Sydney for their support for my research, in particular, Jennifer Ryan and JohnPaul Cenzato for the essential assistance they have provided me for this project, and Violeta Birks for being a warm supporter in my navigation between the demands of administration, research, and teaching as Associate Dean (Research Education). I wish to express my sincere appreciation for the kind help offered by Dana Buntrock, Jie Chen, Dapeng Cheng, Zhi Cheng, Miles Glendinning, Jialin Hu, Véronique Hours,  Weijie Hu, Laurence Kimmel, Kelu Li, Yushu Liang, Hai Lin, Tingyu Liu, Yijie Betty Liu, Deying Luo, Fabien Mauduit, Chanxin Peng, Ke Song, Feng Tang, James Jixian Wang, Yuning Wang, Zigeng Wang, Jiang Xu, Leiqing Xu, Shu-Yan Yew, Feng Zang, and Yumeng Zhu in providing or seeking visual material for this book. Part of research time at the early stage of conceptualizing the book was supported by the Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (FT110101119), and my research trips to Guangzhou were supported by the Guangzhou Urban Planning and Design Survey Research Institute (201807010034). My thinking has benefited from the stimulating discussion with the participants of the “Spaces of ­Un-Nationalism” workshop Farhan Karim and I co-organized at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin (2019), and from the collaboration with the Central Academy of Fine Arts on the project “Theory and Practice of the Art of Chinese Architecture, 1949–2019” (20ZD11). Aspects of the issues discussed in my chapter were presented at (in the reverse chronological order): the University of Queensland, the Central Academy of Fine Arts, the Southern University of Science and Technology, the University of Brighton, TU Delft, the University of Adelaide, the University of Melbourne, the University of Hong Kong, Tsinghua University, the University of Tasmania, Singapore Management University, and the Berlage Institute Rotterdam. I would like to thank the hosts and audiences for their engagement and feedback. I am very grateful to the editors and editorial assistants at Routledge for supporting and guiding the volume through its various stages. Special thanks to Lydia Kessell, Nick Craggs, Assunta Petrone, and Christine Bondira for their sensible handling of the book’s production. Finally, I would like to dedicate this book to those in love with architecture and all the buildings that have helped humans get through tough times.

Duanfang Lu Sydney ix

CONTRIBUTORS

Annmarie Adams holds the Stevenson Chair in the Philosophy and History of Science, including Medicine, at McGill University, Canada. Educated as an architect and architectural historian, she is jointly appointed in the School of Architecture and Department of Social Studies of Medicine (SSoM), where she also served as department chair. Adams is the author of Architecture in the Family Way: Doctors, Houses, and Women, 1870–1900 (1996) and Medicine by Design: The Architect and the Modern Hospital, 1893–1943 (2008), and co-author of Designing Women: Gender and the Architectural Profession (2000). James Barlow  is Professor of Technology and Innovation Management at Imperial College Business School. For over thirty years, he has worked on a range of innovation issues in complex industries, notably healthcare and construction. He is particularly interested in the relationship between innovation in technologies, services, and infrastructure. Barlow has led or been involved in many research projects and has extensive experience in advising and consulting for government and industry. Blaine Brownell  is Professor and Director of the School of Architecture at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and an architect and researcher of emergent materials and applications. A former Fulbright scholar to Japan, he has authored eight books on advanced and sustainable materials for architecture and design, including Matter in the Floating World, Material Strategies, and the four-volume Transmaterial series. He has written the Mind & Matter column for Architect magazine and published in over 70 architecture, design, science, and news journals including Nature. Brownell was elevated to the American Institute of Architects’ College of Fellows in 2020. Vincent B. Canizaro is Associate Professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio and a registered architect. His teaching and scholarship focus on sustainability, regionalism, site specificity, design media, and community-oriented design as these relate to how to design for the specificity of place via direct experience. His publications include Architectural Regionalism (2007), articles in Journal of Architectural Education, chapters in Pragmatic Sustainability (2010, 2016), and architectural criticism in Texas Architect. Greg Castillo  is Professor in the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley and Honorary Associate Professor in the School of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Sydney. His publications on cold war design politics and practices x

Contributors

include Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design (2010) and essays in journals, anthologies, and museum catalogs. Castillo was the guest curator of Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and a contributor to the exhibition catalog. Lilian Chee  is Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore, where she also co-leads the Research by Design Cluster. Her research connects embodied experience and affective evidence with architectural representation. Her award-winning film collaboration 03-FLATS (2014) has been screened in 16 major cities. Her current book projects are Architecture and Affect (Routledge) and Art in Public Space. Cecilia L. Chu is Associate Professor in the Division of Landscape Architecture at the University of Hong Kong. She is the author of Building Colonial Hong Kong: Speculative Development and Segregation in the City (2022) and co-editor of The Speculative City: Emergent Forms and Norms of the Built Environment (2022). She is a co-founder of Docomomo Hong Kong and an editorial board member of Journal of Urban History and Journal for the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong. Mark Crinson is Professor of Architectural History at Birkbeck (University of London) where he directs the Architecture, Space and Society Centre. Among his books are Empire Building: Orientalism and Victorian Architecture (1996), Modern Architecture and the End of Empire (2003), Stirling and Gowan: Architecture from Austerity to Affluence (2012), Rebuilding Babel: Modern Architecture and Internationalism (2017), and Alison and Peter Smithson (2018). Marcos Cruz  is an Architect and Professor of Innovative Environments at the Bartlett, UCL, where he is also Co-Director of Bio-ID. His research focuses on design driven by advances in computation, biotechnology, and the environment, most importantly on the development of bioreceptive materials and poikilohydric living walls. Cruz co-founded the atelier marcosandmarjan and has built numerous installations and buildings, which were featured in Digital Architecture Now; Chernikhov Prize; Futuristic: Visions of Future Living; and ArchiLab – Naturalizing Architecture. Jennifer Ferng  is Senior Lecturer and Postgraduate Director in the School of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Sydney. Her research addresses environmental and humanitarian issues from the 18th century to the present day across Europe, Asia, and Oceania. Her articles have appeared in Architectural Histories, Architectural Theory Review, Change Over Time, Fabrications, and Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. Her first book Crafting Enlightenment: Artisanal Histories and Transnational Networks (with Lauren R. Cannady) was recently published by the Voltaire Foundation and Liverpool University Press (2021). Hal Foster is the author of numerous books, including, mostly recently, What Comes After Farce? Art and Criticism at a Time of Debacle (2020), and Brutal Aesthetics (2020) based on his 2018 Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery in Washington. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he teaches at Princeton University, co-edits the journal October, and contributes regularly to the London Review of Books and Artforum. Miles Glendinning is Professor of Architectural Conservation at the University of Edinburgh and Director of the Scottish Centre for Conservation Studies. He has published extensively on modernist and contemporary architecture and housing: books include the award-winning Tower Block (with Stefan Muthesius); Modern Architect, on the life and times of Sir Robert Matthew; and The Conservation Movement: a History of Architectural Preservation (2013). His current research is xi

Contributors

focused on an international investigation of the history of 20th-century mass housing, especially in key hotspots such as Hong Kong. He has recently published an overview monograph, Mass Housing: Modern Architecture and State Power, A Global History (2021). Tahl Kaminer is Reader in Architectural History and Theory at the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University. Previously, he held positions at the University of Edinburgh and TU Delft. Tahl is the author of the monographs The Efficacy of Architecture: Political Contestation and Agency (Routledge, 2017) and Architecture, Crisis and Resuscitation (Routledge, 2011), and co-edited the volumes Urban Asymmetries (2011), Critical Tools (2011), and Houses in Transformation (2008). He co-founded the academic journal Footprint and was its managing editor 2007–12. Anthony D King is Emeritus Professor of Art History and of Sociology, Binghamton University, State University of New York, USA, and now lives in the UK. He has been Visiting Professor of Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, USA, and was, for five years, Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, India. His most recent book is Writing the Global City: Globalisation, Postcolonialism and the Urban (2016). With Thomas A Markus, he is Co-Editor of the Routledge Architext series. David Leatherbarrow is Professor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. Previously, he taught theory and design at Cambridge University and the Polytechnic of Central London. He has lectured throughout the world and has held guest professorships in Britain, Denmark, and China. Among Leatherbarrow’s ten books are Building Time, Twentieth-Century Architecture (with A. Eisenschmidt), Three Cultural Ecologies (with R. Wesley), Architecture Oriented Otherwise, Topographical Stories, Uncommon Ground, Surface Architecture (with M. Mostafavi), On Weathering (with Mostafavi), and The Roots of Architectural Invention. He is the recipient of the 2020 Topaz Medallion, the highest award given by the AIA and ASCA for excellence in architectural education. Duanfang Lu is Professor of Architecture and Urbanism and Associate Dean (Research Education) in the Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Sydney. Ranked as the world’s 16th most influential researcher in Architecture in 1996–2018 by PLOS, she has published widely on modern architectural and planning history. Her key publications include Remaking Chinese Urban Form (2006, 2011) and Third World Modernism (2011). Lu has been an Australian Research Council Future Fellow, Board Director of the US Society of Architectural Historians (2012–2015) and its inaugural Chair of International Committee, and co-founder of Society of Architectural and Urban Historians – Asia. Kevin Mitchell is Professor of Architecture at the American University of Sharjah (AUS) in the United Arab Emirates. His recent work focused on the built environment in the Gulf appears in Economy and Architecture (Routledge), Contemporary Urban Landscapes of the Middle East (Routledge), and a co-edited volume of Architectural Design entitled “UAE and the Gulf: Architecture and Urbanism Now.” He is a founding Editorial Board member for the International Journal of Islamic Architecture. Rizal Muslimin is Senior Lecturer and Director of Construction and Computation in Architecture Lab in the School of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Sydney. His computational design research centers at the intersection of craft, culture, and architecture. He has published in Nexus Network Journal: Architecture and Mathematics, Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis, and Manufacturing, International Journal of Architectural Computing, and Leonardo, and received the CAAD Futures best paper award for his research on EthnoComputation.

xii

Contributors

Ritsuko Ozaki is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Winchester, UK, and is also Research Fellow at the University of Tokyo, Japan. Her research centers on housing, urban built environments, transport and mobility, and social and environmental sustainability. Her current research project investigates how new and innovative infrastructures in urban areas can help change people’s lifestyles to more socially and environmentally sustainable ones, in collaboration with the National Institute for Environmental Studies, Japan. Maibritt Pedersen Zari is Senior Lecturer in the Wellington School of Architecture, Victoria University of Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand. Her research on regenerative design redefines sustainable architecture and urban design through emulating ecosystems, working with ecologies and nature, and integrating complex social factors into design. Pedersen Zari is the author of Regenerative Urban Design and Ecosystem Biomimicry (2018) and co-editor of Ecologies Design: Transforming Architecture, Landscape, and Urbanism (2020). Antoine Picon is Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He is also chairman of the Fondation Le Corbusier and a member of the French Academy of Technology. His research revolves around the relations between architecture and the city on the one hand and science, technology, and society on the other. Picon is the author of French Architects and Engineers in the Age of Enlightenment (1992), L’Invention de l’ingénieur moderne (1992), La Ville territoire des cyborgs (1998), Les Saint-simoniens (2002), Digital Culture in Architecture (2010), Ornament: The Politics of Architecture and Subjectivity (2013), Smart Cities: A Spatialised Intelligence (2015), and La Matérialité de l’architecture (2018), among other works. Anoma Pieris is Professor in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne. Her interdisciplinary approach draws on history, anthropology, and geography. Her publications include Architecture on the Borderline: Boundary Politics and Built Space (2019), Sovereignty Space and Civil War in Sri Lanka: Porous Nation (2018), Architecture and Nationalism in Sri Lanka: The Trouser under the Cloth (Routledge 2012) and Hidden Hands and Divided Landscapes: A Penal History of Singapore’s Plural Society (2009). Pieris is co-author with Janet McGaw of Assembling the Centre: Architecture for Indigenous Cultures. Australia and Beyond (2015). Andrzej Piotrowski  is Professor at the University of Minnesota and an architect educated in Poland. Author of Architecture of Thought and co-editor (with N. Temple and J. Heredia) of The Routledge Handbook on the Reception of Classical Architecture and (with J. Williams Robinson) The Discipline of Architecture, he has also published in many anthologies and journals. Focusing on the epistemology of design, his scholarship includes architecture in Byzantium, Mesoamerica, Europe of the Reformation time, Victorian England, and Modernism, as well as contemporary design practices. Currently, he works on A Heretical History of Architecture. Simon Sadler  is Professor in the Department of Design at the University of California, Davis. His publications include Archigram: Architecture without Architecture (2005); Non-Plan: Essays on Freedom, Participation and Change in Modern Architecture and Urbanism (2000, co-editor, Jonathan Hughes); The Situationist City (1998); and numerous articles, chapters, and essays about American and European counterculture. Daniela Sandler is Associate Professor of Architectural History at the University of Minnesota. Her work explores social inequalities in the built environment, paying particular attention to the ways in which groups and individuals resist injustices and fight for more inclusive ­buildings and

xiii

Contributors

cities. Her book Counterpreservation: Architectural Decay in Berlin since 1989 (2016), which deals with alternative approaches to preservation, memory, and anti-gentrification in the German capital, received the 2019 Antoinette Forrester Downing Book Award from the Society of ­A rchitectural Historians. She also received the 2019 Special Award from the Minnesota Chapter of the ­A merican Institute of Architects. Mitchell Schwarzer is Professor of architectural and urban history at California College of the Arts, San Francisco. His writings on media include the book Zoomscape: Architecture in Motion and Media (2004) and the articles “Computation and the Impact of New Technologies on the Photography of Architecture and Urbanism” in Architecture Media Politics Society 11 (April 2017); “Landscape Navigator: The Experience of Place on YouTube and Google Maps,” Harvard Design Magazine 36 (Spring 2013); and “A Sense of Place, a World of Augmented Reality,” Places 22 (2010). His latest book is Hella Town: Oakland’s History of Development and Disruption (University of California Press, 2021). Peter Scriver  is Associate Professor and Director (South and Southeast Asia) in the Centre for Asian and Middle-Eastern Architecture (CAMEA) at the University of Adelaide,­ Australia. His publications on the colonial and contemporary architectures of modern India and South Asia include After the Masters: Contemporary Indian Architecture (1990) with Vikram Bhatt, Colonial Modernities: Building, Dwelling and Architecture in British India and Ceylon (Routledge 2007) with Vikramaditya Prakash, and India: Modern Architectures in History (2015) with Amit Srivastava. David Seamon  is a Professor of Environment-Behavior and Place Studies in the Department of Architecture at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas, USA. His writings focus on a phenomenological approach to place, architecture, and environmental design as place making. He serves on the editorial boards of Phenomenology & Practice, Environmental Philosophy, Journal of Environmental Psychology, and Journal of Architectural and Planning Research. He is the editor of Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology. His seminal book A Geography of the Lifeworld was reprinted in the Routledge “Revival” series in 2015. His latest book is Life Takes Place: Phenomenology, Lifeworlds, and Place Making (Routledge, 2018). Amit Srivastava is Director (India) for the Centre for Asian and Middle Eastern Architecture (CAMEA) at the University of Adelaide, Australia. Having trained and practiced as an architect in India, his primary research focuses on the architectural and construction histories of colonial and postcolonial India. His other works engage the theme of South-South Cooperation to understand transnational exchange of materials, skills, and construction processes across the Global South. His books include India: Modern Architectures in History (2015) and The Elements of Modern Architecture (2020). Marcel Vellinga is Professor of Anthropology of Architecture at Oxford Brookes University, UK. Holding a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Leiden University in the Netherlands, Marcel has extensive research and teaching experience in the fields of cultural anthropology and international vernacular architecture studies. Over the years, he has taught and ­published on a variety of topics including vernacular architecture, the anthropology of architecture, ­r ural ­a rchitectural regeneration, and tradition and sustainable development. Marcel is the ­Editor-in-Chief of the second edition of the Encyclopedia of Vernacular Architecture of the World, to be published in 2022.

xiv

Contributors

Hajime Yatsuka is Emeritus Professor at Shibaura Institute of Technology and an architect and critic in Japan. A graduate from Tokyo University, he worked for Atelier Arata Isozaki in 1978–82 and established his own office Urban Projects Machine (UPM) in 1983. His main built projects include Information Center, Shiroishi City (1998); Folly, “Heaven, Earth, Human,” Nagaoka (1998); and Cultural Exchange Center, Misato (2002). His recent books (in Japanese) include Metabolism Nexus (2012) and Le Corbusier Urbanism as Bio-politics (2013).

xv

1 Architecture in the Age of Playfulness Mapping a Framework for Global Historiography Duanfang Lu

In the realm of construction, a myriad of creatures boast innate building prowess: bees, termites, hamerkops, and beavers, to name just a handful. These industrious beings erect magnificent structures without the aid of blueprints, as if guided by an instinctual wisdom (Hansell 2005). In stark contrast, human beings embarked on their architectural journey as bumbling builders. The defining characteristic of human architecture lies in the absence of a fixed ontology. Early human shelters paled in comparison to the intricate delicacy of beehives, serving as a testament to our humble origins. Throughout different regions and epochs, human communities faced a steep learning curve, striving to develop suitable construction methods capable of accommodating their vertical lifestyle, addressing burgeoning storage needs born from enhanced food production, and fulfilling the demands of communal living and religious rites. The relentless pursuit of height in human construction projects echoes our enduring struggle with gravity, spanning the annals of history: from the towering Buddhist pagodas of Asia and the grandiose Great Hypostyle Hall of Egypt, to the resplendent Gothic cathedrals of Europe and soaring modern skyscrapers worldwide. A transformative shift, however, has occurred in recent decades. The advent of algorithmic form-making, robotics, 3D printing, building information modelling (BIM), sensory and haptic media, smart systems integration, artificial intelligence (AI), and other digital technologies has propelled human builders into an era of newfound prowess. We have finally caught up with our nimble animal counterparts, equipped with elastic and interactive means of space-making (Kolarevic 2003; Picon 2010; Marble 2012; Carpo 2017; Leach 2021; Chaillou 2022; Chapter 26 in this book). We find ourselves at a unique juncture in history, facing challenges that bear striking resemblance to those tackled by Le Corbusier ([1923]1986) a century ago in his seminal work Towards a New Architecture. Urban dysfunction, class conflicts, housing scarcity, adaptation to technological advancements, and the urgent need for fresh architectural visions are among the shared concerns. Certainly, the contrasts between our era and Le Corbusier’s are vast. Our epoch has been marked by, for example, ecological and health crises, exacerbated economic polarization and social fragmentation, the escalating financialization of housing in major cities, transformative strides in communication and automation technologies, and a profound reevaluation of modernity. Above all, what sets our time apart from Le Corbusier’s, I suggest, is the growing emphasis on playfulness. In its nascent stages, modernism grappled with the challenges posed by industrial capitalism. Whether it was the design of office buildings, factories, or worker housing, architectural imagination was primarily focused on structures associated with work. Conversely, our current era has increasingly directed its attention towards structures that exude and inspire innate DOI: 10.4324/9781315674469-1

1

Duanfang Lu

playfulness. This encompasses spaces explicitly designed for play, such as kindergartens and stadiums, as well as settings traditionally unrelated to play, including museums and libraries (Figures 1.1 and 1.2). The infrastructure of play has become the cornerstone of global cities, supplanting the dominion of work. Constructional ingenuity, aesthetic whimsy, and programmatic inventiveness now reign as the defining qualities in buildings that ignite disciplinary enthusiasm and garner widespread acclaim. While Le Corbusier famously proclaimed, “A house is a machine for living in,” architecture is a game for play in our time. As our contemporary cultural landscape has evolved into a realm of playful engagement, architecture has transcended mere functionality and formal stiffness to become a captivating game of creativity and enjoyment. The recent emphasis on play is intricately linked to the processes of digitalization, globalization, post-industrial capitalism, the thriving tourism industry, increased leisure time, the rapid advancement of automation technologies, the emergence of virtual worlds and virtual wealth, and numerous other transformative shifts that have shaped human conditions in recent decades. While Ludwig Mies van der Rohe ([1923]1947) emphasized the principle of “maximum effect with minimum means” in office building design, our current age is predominantly driven by the pursuit of presenting positive images of innovation to attract maximum speculative capital (Strange and Watson 2016). Shaped by the epistemology of industrial capitalism, the traditional discourse on human identity revolved around work, with ceasing work equated to a loss of humanity (Riesman [1950]1954; Arendt 1958; Bell 1960). However, in today’s world, an increasing number of individuals perceive themselves as player-subjects, regularly sharing their leisure activities through social media platforms. Even esteemed architect Norman Foster showcases many Instagram posts featuring his active lifestyle as “a man swimming, biking, rowing, and helicoptering his way into his eighth decade” (AD Editorial Team 2017). Numerous studies have delved into the nature of play in response to shifting social dynamics (e.g., Brown 2010; Bateson, Gordon and Martin 2013; Ryall, Russell and MacLean 2013). The concept of homo ludens coined by Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga ([1938] 1949), denoting “man the player,” has been widely adopted as a framework for discussing these changes. Although

Figure 1.1 The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Bizkaia, Spain (1997), by Frank Gehry. Its whimsical exterior, cloaked in shimmering titanium panels, offers a playful antidote to the city’s industrial past. Photo by Duanfang Lu.

2

Architecture in the Age of Playfulness

Figure 1.2 Binhai New Area Library in Tianjin, China (2017), by MVRDV. Boasting floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that cascade in curves around a spherical atrium, the library is designed as a social hub for learning, interaction, and leisure. Photo courtesy of Yuning Wang.

the prominence of play dwindled in Huizinga’s time, he rightly reminded us of its enduring significance in shaping culture throughout human history. In the present era, human experiences are increasingly entwined with digital devices, offering diverse playful applications that extend beyond leisure activities. Playfulness now permeates realms previously considered serious, such as education and politics, as our contemporary landscape blurs the boundaries between work and play (Rif kin 1995; Butler et al. 2011; Frissen et al. 2015; Deranty 2022). The expansive realm of digital play has sparked a transformation in play preferences, with the video game industry surpassing the combined revenue of movies and North American sports (Witkowski 2020). Furthermore, as firms and cities strive for innovation in the post-industrial age, there is a growing 3

Duanfang Lu

demand for a creative workforce, “whose economic function is to create new ideas, new technology and/or creative content” (Florida 2002, 8). Stimulating and playful work environments have been cultivated by companies such as Google and Amazon to unleash the creative potential and enhance the performance of their employees. Against the backdrop of this ludification of culture, economy, and human life, I argue, yielding projects that respond playfully to contemporary cultures or foster ludic activities has become a prevailing trend in 21st-century architecture. To be contemporary is to be playful. The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Architectural History aims to provide an essential map for navigating the complex currents of contemporary architecture. Architecture is defined here as the work and practices associated with buildings beyond mere buildings due to their aesthetic, historical, social, and technical significance. In recent decades, the field of architecture has undergone radical transformations, propelled by diverse actors across the globe. Urban aspirations, innovative initiatives, and technological advancements have played out on a grand scale, reshaping the architectural landscape. The expertise in fabrication-oriented and sustainable design is on the rise, blurring the boundaries between design and manufacturing, as well as the realms of art and science (McDonough and Braungart 2002; Picon 2010; Lee 2011; Marble 2012; Cucuzzella and Goubran 2020; Bañón and Raspall 2021). Attention has increasingly turned towards understanding architecture as an industry, delving into the organization of collaboration, labor practices, pay structures within firms, the evolving roles and self-branding of architects, and the utilization of digital tools in a globalized context (e.g., McNeil 2009; Deamer and Bernstein 2010; Tombesi 2012; Arantes 2019; Deamer 2020; Stephenson 2020). Architectural awards, including the prestigious Pritzker Prize, have come to celebrate locally grounded practices that unite artistic creativity with social and environmental sensitivity, signifying a significant shift in the values of architectural culture (Harper 2021). The study of architecture has become a highly diverse field, with intellectual trajectories intersecting with parallel debates across a wide range of disciplines (Crysler, Cairns, and Heynen 2012). History-writing in architecture has evolved, embracing a more inclusive approach that incorporates diverse voices and representative viewpoints. There has been an increasing recognition of the significance of social distinctions, including culture, gender, race, ethnicity, and class (e.g., Upton 1991; Bozdogan 1999; Borden and Rendell 2000; Arnold 2002; Arnold, Ergut and Özkaya 2006; Lu 2012; Cheng, Davis, and Wilson 2020). This Companion ventures into the contested territories of the discipline, offering an updated knowledge report of contemporary architectural practices, humanities, and technologies. Divided into three parts – “Practices,” “Interrogations,” and “Innovations” – it emphasizes the responsive, the critical, and the creative in architectural interventions to meet challenges and enact changes in different parts of the world. The volume aims to foster the connectivity and reciprocity between the historical and the contemporary, research and practice, and disciplinary and professional knowledge. Rather than patching over differences, the book embraces diverse perspectives from authors occupying varied positions, exemplifying the multitude of critical voices, evolving methodologies, and the expanded scope of the field. It offers a rich tapestry of insights that reflect the multifaceted nature of contemporary architectural culture. Through a sober evaluation of current and emerging approaches to architecture, the intention here is to provoke open-ended investigations into the future trajectory of the discipline. Readers are encouraged to explore the historical roots of unresolved tensions and to contemplate the stakes involved in the field today. This introductory chapter serves as an extended opening treatise, providing readers with a comprehensive understanding of where architecture has been, where it stands today, and where it is headed. The world around us is undergoing rapid change, urging us to continuously recalibrate our perspectives. To date, the question of what constitutes the contemporary in architecture remains largely unexplored, despite the abundance of publications with the term “contemporary” in their titles. In the realm of contemporary art, art historians have taken a more proactive role in 4

Architecture in the age of playfulness

defining the parameters of contemporaneity in response to the growing appeal of contemporary art among consumers. For instance, Terry Smith (2002) proposes three approaches to defining contemporary art: its institutionalized network, the diverse modes of contemporaneity it encompasses, and the stylistic internalities discerned by art historians. However, Smith acknowledges in later publications that consensus regarding the common forms, characteristics, and stakes of contemporary art remains elusive among researchers in the field (Smith 2006, 2010). This chapter delves into contemporary architecture as a subject of historical inquiry, exploring what Anthony Vidler (2008) refers to as the “histories of the immediate present.” Going beyond architectural criticism, it examines the increasing emphasis on playfulness as a defining characteristic of contemporary architecture. While recent developments indicate a playful turn in architectural practice, there has been a lack of comprehensive historical explication and theoretical articulation of this change. This chapter represents an early attempt to grasp the shifts in global architectural production occurring during a transitional moment in human history, when the concept of play emerges as a primary driving force behind processes of capital accumulation, social activity, and human life. The aim is to transform playfulness into a lively subject of critical inquiry within the study of modern architecture. Huizinga’s definition of play ([1938]1949, 28) remains relevant here: a voluntary activity or occupation executed within certain fixed limits of time and place, according to rules freely accepted but absolutely binding, having its aim in itself and accompanied by a feeling of tension, joy, and the consciousness that it is ‘different’ from ‘ordinary life’. Building upon Quentin Stevens (2006, 198), this study defines playfulness as the quality of actions that are exploratory, whimsical, unsystematic, and characterized by a willingness to expend energy without seeking narrow instrumental efficiency. Throughout this chapter, the terms “playful” and “ludic” are used interchangeably. In the following, I will first venture to outline a methodological roadmap for architectural historiography, addressing the challenge of mapping the evolution of global architecture and its elusive contemporaneity. This is achieved by presenting an upgraded version of the Vitruvian Triad (Vitruvius [1521] 1914), with the existential replacing utilitatis (utility), the constructional replacing firmitatis (stability), and the interactive replacing venustatis (beauty). The chapter will then historicize the shifting tactics and state of playfulness in modern architecture, from the murmurs of spatial playfulness in the shadow of functionalism to intellectual playfulness in the era of the plural. This is followed by a discussion on the playful turn in contemporary architecture, covering three overlapping dimensions: constructional, aesthetic, and programmatic playfulness. The chapter concludes with reflections on the future trajectories of architecture and humanity. Given the scope of this mapping exercise, the discussion necessarily adopts a broad brushstroke approach. It is important to acknowledge the risk of condensing perspectives, as generalizations inevitably overshadow local nuances. Furthermore, it should be noted that knowledge gaps, errors, myths, and distortions persist in both existing architectural history and global history. Despite drawing upon recent scholarship, the panorama presented here remains an incomplete picture, raising more questions than it answers. The intention is for this exploratory exercise to challenge long-held assumptions and to pave the way for further exploration through future papers and books.

A Conceptual Framework for Global Architectural Historiography Architectural history was once intertwined with art history, but over time it has emerged as an independent discipline separate from its artistic counterpart (Payne 1999; Crinson and Williams 5

Duanfang Lu

2018). Despite ongoing debates surrounding architectural historiography in recent decades (Bozdogan 1999; Borden and Rendell 2000; Arnold 2002; Arnold, Ergut, and Özkaya 2006; James-Chakraborty 2014; Levin 2015; Hyde 2017; Marri 2022), architectural historians find themselves at a crossroads. Some remain confined to the methods and techniques of art history, while others gravitate toward approaches and frameworks derived from semantic analysis and social history in the humanities and social sciences. Mainstream survey texts are still heavily influence by art historiography, adopting a formalist approach centered on objects. This approach codifies aesthetically exemplary buildings into stylistic categories and arranges diverse design practices into linear progressive movements (Lu 2012). This poses challenges when attempting to write global histories of architecture, as these conventional categories of styles and movements do not encompass regions beyond the Euro-American context, or capture the multiple trajectories of architectural development and the diverse range of agents involved. Notably, non-Western architects are often relegated to the category of “regional,” reflecting an othering mechanism within architectural historiography (ibid., 241–245). Similar frameworks permeate many academic articles and monographs, resulting in fragmented narratives lacking interpretive clarity (Hyde 2017). Conversely, frameworks rooted in semantic analysis and social history have led to two polarized positions within specialist academic studies. On one hand, the formalist approach emphasizes the autonomy of architecture as a spontaneous and internalized operations, neglecting “the way in which a building as a cultural object in time is possessed, rejected, or achieved is not addressed” (Hays 1984, 16). On the other hand, contextual studies drawing from other disciplines treat architecture as discursive or social space, often disregarding its physical dimension (Aragüez 2016). To further establish architecture’s independence from art history and recenter it within historical analysis, I highlight three essential attributes that differentiate architecture from other aesthetic objects (such as painting and sculpture) and design products (such as cars and furniture). These attributes assert architecture’s historically situated materiality: 1 Architecture orders bodily activities and conditions human existence; 2 Architecture necessitates the integration of tectonics, technology, material, and labor in construction; and 3 Architecture serves as a collective expressive medium, influenced by and contributing to the interaction between various social forces. Based on these propositions, I propose three dimensions that should be addressed in the writing of architectural history: the existential, the constructional, and the interactive. These dimensions mirror but go beyond the traditional ideals of utilitas (efficient spatial arrangement), firmitas (structural integrity), and venustas (visual beauty) identified by Vitruvius ([1521]1914). In the following, I will discuss each dimension in detail, shedding light on their implications for architectural history.

The Existential: Ordering and Reordering Human Existence through Architecture Architecture, like sculpture and painting, is a making of substance into art. Unlike the latter, however, architecture transforms substance into massive objects in whose voids human activities unfold. As Lao Tzu (Laozi) (1961, Chapter 11) expressed in his Tao Teh King (Daodejing) 2,600 years ago: Thirty spokes converge upon a single hub; It is on the hole in the center that the use of the car hinges. We make a vessel from a lump of clay; It is the empty space within the vessel that makes it useful. We make doors and windows for a room;

6

Architecture in the age of playfulness But it is these empty spaces that make the room livable. Thus while the tangible has advantages; It is the intangible that makes it useful.

Architectural space is “worlded”: it is inscribed with meanings and norms of a society. Within a given community and time, shared social aspirations and systems of signification influence design decisions. Both the patron and the architect are embedded in this already-existing-networkof-­relations in time – what Martin Heidegger (1962) referred to as “care.” While the desires of patrons and the innovations of architects may seem idiosyncratic, they are inherently informed by a collective understanding of human existence of their time. Different societies may “world” their built environment differently, and that worldhood is nonessential and subjected to changes over time. Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, Turkey, for instance, has undergone multiple re-worldings throughout history. Initially, it was a cathedral for the Eastern Orthodox Church before being transformed into a mosque following the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453. It was repurposed by the Turkish government into a museum in 1935, but it has resumed its function as a mosque since 2020 (Figure 1.3). Architectural space organizes bodily activities and conditions the ways individuals experience their existence. It is structured into a hierarchy of zones, guiding and pre-determining specific activities. Some areas hold greater importance, while others serve as preparatory spaces. Thresholds, pathways, stopping points, turns, and entrances shape the progression through these zones. Different sensuous experiences and aesthetic responses are evoked through architectural elements such as form, size, height, light, shade, materiality, texture, decoration, and tectonics. Architecture is not limited to visual stimuli but encompasses the body’s olfactory, tactile, auditory, haptic, and proprioceptive systems. This multi-sensory engagement influences individuals’ emotions and

Figure 1.3 Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, Turkey was initially a cathedral for the Eastern Orthodox Church. When the Ottomans conquered Constantinople in 1453, it was converted into a mosque. The transition involved the addition of Islamic architectural features such as minarets, a mihrab, and a minbar. Photo by Duanfang Lu.

7

Duanfang Lu

perceptions as they navigate through architectural spaces (Pallasmaa 2005). Sensations and sentiments continue to evolve during these movements, suggesting what is valued and exalted. Buildings, such as Gothic cathedrals or neoclassical town halls, are programmed not only to support specific activities but also to embody distinct understandings of what humans are and should be. Architecture is embedded in a system of tangible elements such as surrounding buildings, landscape, infrastructure, urban fabric, and ecology, as well as intangible forces such as cultural beliefs, aesthetic preferences, ideologies, and political systems. Buildings hold varying degrees of symbolic significance within this system, where things are classified based on relative importance or inclusiveness. For instance, in ancient China, courtyard houses exemplified the hierarchical Confucian ethics, while scholars created gardens as temporary retreats influenced by Daoist philosophy on the relationship between humans and nature. Buddhist monasteries were often set away and high up in mountains, constituting heterotopias for worship, reflection, and transformation. By differentiating what were near and far, this spatial system conditioned the workings of various worldly forces, forming the unique existential constitution of ancient Han Chinese society. Individuals interact with architectural spaces in an unreflective manner, guided by shared understandings of being. Heidegger (1962) characterizes this as “ready-to-hand” existence, emphasizing everyday coping without conscious self-referential awareness. Growing up in a particular society, individuals internalize norms and practices, allowing them to engage with architectural elements intuitively. Climbing a staircase, for example, does not require conscious deliberation on each step; the body instinctively knows how to proceed. Within the realm of politics, architecture simultaneously presents a twofold nature: it harbors inherent risks while also holding great potential. On the one hand, architecture inscribes power relations within its spatial configurations, often rendering them naturalized rather than contested constructs. Pierre Bourdieu’s (1977) analysis of the Kabyle house in Algeria illustrates this point. The main door of the Kabyle house, located on the east side, represents the male entrance, while the smaller door on the opposite side is associated with females. The west wall is where women’s looms are placed. The attached stable, a dark space associated with sex, death, and birth, is designated as a female domain, while the higher, brighter living space symbolizes the nobility and honor of the patrilineal head of the household (ibid., 133–153). Although the architectural space of the Kabyle house reinforces unequal gender roles, it is experienced by the locals as a natural way of being-in-the-world rather than a consciously enforced patriarchal system. On the other hand, architecture’s materiality enables socio-spatial innovations to solidify within a concrete space. The invention of the corridor in the 17th century serves as a good example. Modern building configurations emerged as a result of the corridor, replacing the need to navigate “through a rat’s nest of other rooms and [step] over sleeping bodies” ( Jameson 1997, 262). This innovation not only influenced the architectural layout of rooms but also generated new social relationships, such as the notions of privacy and the nuclear family. Unlike a mere piece of bread that requires deliberate inspection before consumption, architecture can be lived in, moved around, while being ignored. Through shared, unreflective interactions with architecture, social innovations become entrenched within durable apparatuses, shaping new subjectivities and reordering human activities without constant contestation.

The Constructional: Tectonics, Technology, Material, and Labor Construction lies at the ontological core of architecture, through which individual parts are joined together to frame spaces. The fear of gravity, a universal and deeply ingrained concern of humanity, has perpetuated a widespread desire for architecture to visibly demonstrate the strength and stability of its structural connections and the ability to withstand the forces of weight. Architects have sought to not only assemble parts into a coherent whole but also craft an aesthetic order out 8

Architecture in the age of playfulness

of it (Ford 1990). Tectonics is defined here as the art and craft of construction, involving the intelligent application of skills and creativity in building practices. The term is etymologically related to the Greek words tekton, translated as carpenter, and techne, denoting skill, art, expertise, or craft (Angier 2010, vii). According to Demetri Porphyrios (2002), techne was used as a concept opposite to nature (physis). Its execution transforms raw material into crafted products in such a way that the latter’s appearance reveals the way in which they are made in contrast to natural things. Gevork Hartoonian (1994, 29) traces the use of the term by Vitruvius and Palladio, stressing “the ontological bond between art and science.” The classical concept of techne, however, gave way to technique or technology, as Cartesian logic and tools for measuring the natural world gained prominence in the late 17th century (ibid.). Construction, however, is not solely governed by rationality but is also infused with aesthetic sensitivities and cultural meanings. A prime example is dougong, the interlocking wooden bracket set used on top of a column or beam in traditional Chinese architecture, which not only provides structural support but also embodies symbolism and animation (Figures 1.4 and 1.5). It mainly acts as a cantilever to support the extended eaves, but instead of being a fixed articulation, the assemblage of small bracket pieces forms an elastic joinery (Pan and Pan 2011). Much like a joint of the human body where bones meet to allow movement, dougong helps buildings to withstand earthquakes by resisting not just vertical but lateral force (Wu et al. 2020). With wooden blocks (dou) and short beam-arms (gong) skilfully fitted together through precise craftsmanship without the use of nails, the interlocking design of dougong could be inspired by ancient knotting practices. When knotting was used as a method of recording historical events in remote antiquity, a large knot signified a major event. Similarly, the larger and more complicated dougong was used in more significant buildings. The design of dougong reflects flexibility, movement, and soft connection, evoking the delicacy and resilience of life. In contrast, the Ionic volute and torus express

Figure 1.4 The dougong detailing of the Sakyamuni Pagoda (Shijia ta), commonly known as the Wooden Pagoda of Ying County (Yingxian muta). The pagoda is housed within the Fogong Monastery, Shanxi Province, China and dates to 1056.  Photo by Duanfang Lu.

9

Duanfang Lu

Figure 1.5 In addition to their role in supporting the extended eaves, the dougong sets of the Hall of Great Strength (Daxiongbaodian) in the Lingyan Monastery serve to brace the upper wall. Located near the Yungang Grottoes in Shanxi Province, China, the Hall was built in 2008, taking inspiration from the Buddhist Monastery architecture of the Northern Wei dynasty (386–535). Photo by Duanfang Lu.

the transfer of vertical loads, emphasizing the timeless permanence of architecture (Figure 1.6). For Louis Kahn, the Ionic volutes symbolize the movement of loads from the entablature to the column (Ford 2011, 298), while for Andrea Palladio, the torus at the base of an Ionic column represents being “crushed by the weight of the column above” (ibid., 296). Through tectonic details, stone acquires an organic vitality, amplifying the figurative weight of monuments. The significance of construction has been conceptualized differently throughout history. In Yingzao fashi, a treatise on construction methods published in 1103 during the Northern Song dynasty (960–1127), refined and poetic language was employed to describe various tectonic elements, highlighting the deep entanglement of technical understanding with cultural values (Feng, 2012, 11). In Europe during the mid-1800s, tectonic theory emerged as architects responded to transformative shifts in architectural practices. Augustus Pugin, an English architect ([1841] 1973), ardently advocated for Gothic construction techniques over those employed in classical architecture, which he deemed “pagan.” He passionately promoted the use of exposed structural frames and connections as a testament to integrity in the realm of building design. His arguments set a 10

Architecture in the age of playfulness

Figure 1.6 The Ionic columns at the lower level of the Library of Celsus in the ancient Roman city of Ephesus, located near the town of Selçukin in modern-day Turkey. This façade was reconstructed in the 1970s. Photo by Duanfang Lu.

model for Gothic Revival architects, equating rational construction with unadorned and monolithic structures. In response to “a fanatic and fallacious Hellenomania” among his contemporaries (Herrmann 1984, 147), German architect Gottfried Semper ([1851]1989) examined primitive vernacular buildings to understand the fundamental origins of the built environment. Stressing that architecture arose from the need for enclosed space, he identified four essential elements of space framing – the hearth, the earthwork, the framework and roof, and the enclosing membrane or cladding – and associated them with different building materials. Semper’s classification led to the identification of two constructional typologies: the tectonic, associated with lightweight framing components, and the stereotomic, associated with earthwork construction using heavy-weight units. These typologies were further connected to the technical skills of masonry and carpentry, representing different construction methods and materials. Semper also established a link between craft making and architecture, asserting that “the beginning of building coincides with the beginning of textiles” (Semper [1861]2004, 247; cited in Schwartz 2016, xxxvii). The renewed interest in tectonics in the late 20th century was a response to the scenographic approach of postmodernism. Kenneth Frampton (1995) redefined tectonics as the art of poetic and interpretive construction. He identifies the dual quality in the tectonic object as being simultaneously ontological and representational, which distinguishes it from the technological object that “arises directly out of meeting an instrumental need,” and the scenographic object that “may be used equally to allude to an absent or hidden element” (Frampton [1990]1996, 521). These discussions demonstrate that tectonics in architecture is shaped by the interplay of multiple material, cultural, and social forces. Thus, while recent studies focus on tectonics as the expressive art of making and detailing, it is important to consider four additional dimensions for historical research: 11

Duanfang Lu

First, the environmental dimension recognizes that the culture of construction has historically responded to nature, resulting in highly performative buildings. Considering the roles of climate, geology, and geography in shaping construction techniques and craftsmanship inspires new approaches. Second, the existential dimension acknowledges that methods of making and detailing, like architectural forms themselves, have been developed based on local knowledge, cultural customs, ways of life, and symbolic meanings. Recognizing these factors as legitimate forms of knowledge in building helps create structures that support the social, cultural, and spiritual well-being of communities. Third, the transmissive dimension focuses on how the culture of construction has been transmitted across generations and regions. Understanding the transmission of knowledge and skills provides valuable insights into the development of tectonics and architectural forms. Fourth, the pragmatic dimension highlights the role of economic calculations, costs, and financial patterns in design and construction decisions. Recognizing the influence of economic factors alongside aesthetic criteria enhances our understanding of the rationalities behind regional architecture and enables us to move beyond formalistic regionalism. It is widely agreed that the choice and treatment of materials play a vital role in construction (e.g., Leatherbarrow and Mostafavi 2002; Brownell 2011; Forty 2012). Material articulation has profoundly shaped architectural developments and become an increasing concern for architects since the 1990s (Chapter 24 in this book). What I would like to highlight here is that the relationship between material and tectonics has been dynamic and sometimes incompatible; changes in materials and tectonics do not always occur simultaneously. For example, the transformation of pagodas in China demonstrates how the introduction of new materials, such as bricks, led to a transition from timber pagodas to hybrid forms (Zhai 1955, 55). The brick pagodas would keep certain features of the timber ones, and the formal incongruity persisted for generations before proper stereotomic forms were invented (Figure 1.7). This exemplifies the non-simultaneous nature of changes in materials and tectonics, often necessitating numerous experiments and giving rise to hybrid architectural forms during transitional periods. Labor is an often overlooked but crucial dimension in architectural development, and recent years have seen an increased focus on its effects. Factors such as labor availability, mobility, costs, organization, workflow, and collaboration can have significant and sometimes decisive impacts on architectural practice (Deamer and Bernstein 2010; Wall 2013; Arantes 2019; Deamer 2020; Stephenson 2020). A good example is the presence of Muslim craftsmen who remained in Iberia after the conquest of the Muslim states by the Catholic Kingdoms of northern Spain. Transmitting Mudéjar construction methods to Christian builders, these craftsmen played a vital role in architectural development in late-medieval Europe (Whitehill 1941; Watson 1989; Raizman 1999; Ruggles 2004; Crites 2010). With the advent of the Industrial Revolution and the emergence of new building materials, traditional handicraft workers faced significant challenges, and the craft of stonemasonry began to decline. Thus, when John Ruskin (1960) exalted the exquisiteness of sculptures in the stones of Venice to his 19th-century audience, he understood well the disparity between his recommendations and the realities of his time. During the mid-20th century, the demands of consumer society for a more vibrant built environment clashed with the increasing costs of ornamental craftsmanship (Glazer 2007). This played a role in the transition towards irony and parody in architectural postmodernism, and the emergence of kitschy and pseudo-historical designs in many postmodern projects. Signaling a deep dissatisfaction with this scenographic effect, the tectonic discourse in the 1990s introduced a new education of desire for craft-like detailing in architecture. The new Arabian Nights phantasm that tectonics theorists presented is no longer the one created by delicate stone reliefs bustling in the Venetian sun under Ruskin’s pen. Instead, students of architecture are instilled with a new 12

Architecture in the age of playfulness

Figure 1.7 Left: Standing tall at 67.31  meters, the Wooden Pagoda of Ying County holds the distinction of being the tallest wooden pagoda in the world. Photo by Duanfang Lu. Right: The Lingxiao Pagoda, located in Zhengding, Hebei Province, China, exhibits a unique combination of building materials. The first four levels, dating to 1045 during the Song dynasty (960–1279), primarily consist of brick, with the exception of the eaves. The remaining construction was accomplished during the Jin dynasty (1115–1234), integrating both brick and wood. Beneath the first three tiers of wooden eaves is the brick sculpture of dougong. Photo courtesy of Luke Li.

desire for, e.g., the sensuous effect of “a mass dematerialized by light” in Tadao Ando’s concrete, whose materiality is “denied by the apparent lightness of its slightly undulating tactile surface” ­(Frampton 1987, 21). This renewed emphasis on the craft of making transformed architects into contemporary craftsmen, which necessitates the investment of significant time in the creation of intricate detailing design. Architects like Peter Zumthor, renowned for his delicate and m ­ eticulous work, may spend years on a single project. 13

Duanfang Lu

Since the late 1990s, there has been a growing focus on technology as a key aspect of architectural practice. The emergence of digital architecture has brought about significant changes in the relationship between design and construction. Algorithmic design allows architects to generate architectural outputs based on numerical inputs, enabling new possibilities for design exploration. Digital fabrication has revolutionized the manufacturing process, connecting architects directly to the production of architectural components and allowing for innovative engagement with materials. Artificial intelligence and machine learning have also found their way into the design process, facilitating more efficient and intelligent design solutions. Furthermore, automation has started to impact labor-intensive tasks in construction, leading to new opportunities for streamlining and improving efficiency (Spiller and Clear 1995; Marble 2012). These technological advancements bring us closer to realizing the Bauhaus dream of integrating mass production methods with artistic vision. By considering tectonics, technology, materials, and labor as integral dimensions of architectural history, we can lay the foundation for a muchneeded rethinking and restructuring of the architectural industry. Embracing these dimensions allows us to better understand the evolving nature of architectural practice and provides a basis for exploring new possibilities and pushing the boundaries of design and construction.

The Interactive: Aesthetic Characters vs. Styles, Assemblages vs. Movements, and Entanglements vs. Roots A building, as a collective expressive medium situated in a specific place, is subject to judgments from various individuals. Even a private house possesses a public face, inviting aesthetic responses from all walks of life. While not everyone possesses specialized knowledge of architectural styles and forms, humans have an innate capacity to form their own aesthetic judgments. Throughout history, good architecture has been appreciated for the sensuous pleasure it evokes, and certain aesthetic qualities are recognized as more agreeable than others by the general public at any given time. For instance, the CCTV Headquarters in Beijing (2013), designed by OMA, is disliked by many Chinese people and humorously referred to as “Large Boxer Shorts” (da kucha) due to its resemblance to oversized shorts. While CCTV Headquarters was designed as a closed loop, its lower section is often obscured from street views, which contributes to this interpretation. Due to its immense size and weight, the composition of the structure appears to lack a credible structural logic. Anthropologists widely concur that naming serves as a significant method through which individuals organize their experiences into a systematic framework of categorization. While architectural critics may acclaim the design, the public’s nickname captures their encounter with the building, evoking feelings of working-class masculinity, absurdity, and oppressiveness associated with a bygone era. Conversely, the Guangzhou Tower in Guangzhou (2010) by IBA in collaboration with Arup receives widespread admiration from the public and is endearingly referred to as “The Slender Waist of a Dancing Beauty” (xiaoman yao). This nickname reflects the delicate silhouette, dynamic twist form, and elegant texture of the tower, which resonate with contemporary aspirations for lightness, playfulness, and sophistication in the digital age. These aesthetic preferences heavily influence the architectural decisions made, resulting in the perpetuation of designs that align with these preferences. This helps to explain why Zaha Hadid was selected for significant public projects in China over the past decade. The decision was not solely based on individual virtuosity but rather on the organic dynamism showcased in her later work, which was deemed to epitomize the desirable attributes of contemporary cities and their aesthetic character. Thus, her death has not changed the tendency of the continuous proliferation of similar products, provided by Zaha Hadid Architects, MAD, and other firms.

14

Architecture in the age of playfulness

By using this example I would like to highlight the importance of aesthetic character in historical explanations, defined as the disposition of architecture as perceived by individuals. According to David Hume (1896, 586), the beauty or ugliness of objects lies in the feelings they evoke in human subjects rather than inherent qualities within the objects themselves. Aesthetic responses emerge when architectural objects are perceived as a whole, with an understanding of their individual parts, often embodying the Gestalt notion that “the whole is more than the sum of its parts” (Hamlyn 1957). This collective discretion, formed through societal interactions and sharing of architectural feelings, plays a more crucial role for society than specific stylistic details or physical properties manipulated by architects (Hyde 2019). As societal values and preferences shift, desirable aesthetic characters may undergo radical changes, rendering certain architectural objects aesthetically unappealing to the general public or specific social groups. Gothic architecture, for instance, faced a severe onslaught during the peak of the Enlightenment era. It was perceived as entailing a “shockingly bizarre” and “depraved idea to the point that in its invention it almost presupposes the deliriousness of the human spirit” (Hermann 1962, 236; cited in de Jong 2019). Reflecting the prevalent negative opinions of its architectural character during that period, the renowned German writer Johann Wolfgang Goethe ([1772]1980, 107) succinctly captured these sentiments: Under the term Gothic, like the article in a dictionary, I threw together all the synonymous misunderstandings, such as undefined, disorganized, unnatural, patched-together, tacked-on, overloaded…so I shuddered as I went, as if at the prospect of some misshapen, curly-bristled monster. During the 17th century and the first half of the 18th century, numerous Gothic churches in England fell victim to acts of vandalism, abandonment, or demolition. Shifts in aesthetic preferences may be explained by the theory of empathy. According to German philosopher Robert Vischer ([1873] 1994), empathy (Einfühlung) can be defined as the process of projecting one’s human mind and bodily experiences onto an external object. What follows is that when human subjectivity evolves, I suggest, it is expected that the physical forms of architecture should embody a new aesthetic character capable of inciting empathetic reactions among the new generation. It becomes the architects’ responsibility to discern these changes and respond to the diverse needs of different social groups by developing new formal and spatial repertoires. Only forms that align with the aspirations of the time find widespread adoption, and similar forms may reappear under favorable circumstances. To provide accurate historical explanations for the preferences or rejections of certain architectural choices, I argue, it is crucial to look beyond mere referential materiality and examine how architectural forms were perceived and experienced in their respective eras. The concept of aesthetic character highlights the interaction between social members and architectural objects. In contrast, the notion of style addresses the consistent physical elements and expressions found in art or architectural objects of a particular historical period, region, or architect. While style is useful for categorization, it alone does not explain the transitions from one style to another. With its focus on style, mainstream architectural history often reads like an incomplete post-mortem report of the dead bodies of styles, depicting a linear progression of stylistic developments without thoroughly analyzing the factors leading to their demise. Architecture communicates not only through its physicality but also through its ability to generate discourses. Significant architectural works can spark lively discussions, with these discourses being disseminated, consumed, and transformed through various channels: “with weekly if not daily coverage in the printed media, documentary films on television, and a consistent presence as

15

Duanfang Lu

background in advertisements for style-of-life consumer items” (Boyer 1996, 33). Architecture is shaped by and contributes to the interaction between different social forces, thereby acquiring its collective value. Unlike style, which primarily concerns visual aspects, the concept of movement places emphasis on avant-gardists’ role as thought leaders propelling boundaries-pushing changes. It highlights the discursive, critical, and intellectual dimensions of architectural development, often using the -ism suffix in their naming. This shift from style to movement in modern architectural historiography reflects an attempt to move beyond mere aesthetics and emphasize the “space of critical potential” (Macarthur and Stead 2012, 125), underscoring the agency and autonomy of architects. This approach aligns with the perspective on modern art, where “an interest in beauty and pleasure was understood as anti-intellectual, and aesthetics as the attempt by reactionaries to normalize an uncritical account of art” (ibid., 129). The development of modern architecture has been portrayed as a progression of movements from modernism and postmodernism to deconstructivism in mainstream architectural history. The concept of movement, however, is inadequate to capture the complexity, fluidity, and multiplicity of global architectural development. In the past few decades, for example, a new generation of architectural historians have shown how modern architecture was developed, interpreted, transformed, and contested in different cultural, national, regional and local contexts (e.g., Kusno 2000; Bozdogan 2001; Prakash 2002; Rowe and Kuan 2002; Crinson, 2003; Noobanjong 2003; Andreoli and Forty 2004; Lu 2010; Isenstadt and Rizvi 2008; Hyde 2012; Karim 2019). These processes involve the complex interaction between diverse social forces, which cannot be fully grasped within the style or movement paradigms. To address this analytical challenge, I consider that an alternative conceptualization based on assemblage can offer a more accurate understanding of the ontological nature of architectural development. Assemblage has emerged as a concept that addresses issues of instability, complexity, and indeterminacy in both natural and social phenomena (e.g., Deleuze and Guattari 1987; DeLanda 2006; Healey 2006; McFarlane 2011). Many of them originated from developments in natural sciences and mathematics: emergence and becoming in ontogeny and phylogeny, adaptation and autopoiesis in biology, and chaos and complexity in mathematics, to name just a few (Prigogine and Stengers 1984; DeLanda 2002; Venn 2006). In humanities and social sciences, the discussion of assemblage is often associated with the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in particular their co-authored book A Thousand Plateaus (1987). It recognizes the multiplicity of determinations and emphasizes the relational, nonlinear, and contingent nature of the interrelationships between heterogeneous elements (Venn 2006). Despite ongoing discussions in various disciplines, the concept of assemblage and its applications remain suggestive and experimental. Rather than delving deep into these debates, I will briefly illustrate the differences between movement and assemblage by drawing parallels with anthropologist Benedict Anderson’s (1983) comparison of the novel and the newspaper, two essential textual genres in shaping national subjectivity. The novel has a consistent plot, through which characters are linked and recognized by the omniscient reader as existing in the same construed world. Contrastingly, Anderson suggests, without a linear plot, newspaper links disparate events together purely due to their coincidence on a calendar date; it is the experience of reading the identical day-by-day clocked history that connects anonymous people together. Like in a novel, narratives on an architectural movement follow a coherent storyline with identifiable composition of characters, in which the avant-garde are given a prominent role. Inhabiting in different national spaces, avant-gardists may have different agenda, but they are nonetheless described as actors contributing to the rise of a new paradigm. In contrast, assemblage, like a newspaper, does not assume a consistent plot. It emphasizes multiplicity and fluidity, as architectural discourses and practices are shaped by the contingent co-­ presence of heterogeneous elements in temporarily fixed configurations. A comprehensive review of 16

Architecture in the age of playfulness

world histories reveals that value systems diverge widely from each other, resulting in a diverse range of life-spheres, social formations, and aesthetic preferences. While striving to acquire material interests through rational actions is recognized as a universal trait of Homo sapiens, humans also tend to orient their actions on the basis of the specific values they adopt (Weber [1905]2012). With various social forces at play, the next movement in architectural development cannot be certain. Instead, temporary configurations continually dissolve and mutate into new forms. Emphasizing an expanded perspective beyond anthropocentrism, the concept of assemblage recognizes the important roles of environmental and material factors alongside human agency. Comprehensive historical accounts must consider a multitude of rationalities, sociocultural processes, and human and nonhuman agents involved in architectural development. These may include economic factors, power dynamics, desires, religious beliefs, political changes, wars, trade, finance, design talents, artistic tastes, cultural exchanges, knowledge transfer, history-making, subject-making, regional building materials, construction methods, technological advancements, intellectual development, race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality. It is important to note that these factors do not operate in a static manner. Certain elements may assume a more prominent role at specific times, while new elements emerge, and existing ones may fade away only to reemerge later in time. Finally, entanglements vs. roots. While it is commonly assumed that there was one modernity originating in Europe which was subsequently inflected with different national/cultural variations, in “Entangled Modernities in Architecture” (Lu 2012, 232), I highlight the intrinsic paradoxes within modernity itself and the entanglements of modernities from a global perspective. Local building traditions should not be overlooked or reduced to mere sources for stylistic borrowings but recognized as legitimate knowledge systems with their own epistemological claims, offering great potential for co-creating improved built environments. I suggest that this proposition can be applied to the study of historical architecture. Recent research has uncovered evidence of transregional movements of people, goods, animals, capital, and knowledge that have been occurring since ancient times. An accurate understanding of cultures and built environments requires attention to transregional flows, entanglements, and fusions. For instance, the early monuments in the Indian territories under the Ghurids in the 13th century resulted from entanglements between Persianate brick architecture and north Indian masonry developed for Hindu patrons (Crane and Korn 2017). Concurrently, Indian artisans migrating to eastern Iran disseminated the technique of inlaid metalwork, shaping the development of Islamic metalwork in regions like Iraq, Syria, and Egypt (ibid.). The establishment of the Mongol Empire in the mid-13th century greatly accelerated exchange and interaction across vast territories, with fluid land and maritime trade routes. The transmission of building technologies, design concepts, and architectural plans was also facilitated through the availability of affordable paper (Prazniak 2019). Skilled craftsmen and architects were deported from conquered regions to form multiethnic workshops in Mongol capitals (Kadoi 2017). This global scale of artistic exchange allowed for the combination of chinoiserie motifs with geometric-vegetal arabesques, greater aesthetic unity across different media, and innovative fusions of nomadic and sedentary elements in architecture, particularly in the Mongol Ilkhanids based in Iran and Iraq (O’Kane 2017; Kadoi 2022). The movement and connectivity of people, objects, technologies, and ideas across permeable cultural and territorial boundaries have given rise to diverse Islamic built environments across different parts of the world (Flood and Necipoğlu 2017). Recent scholarship has challenged the conventional view of civilizations as unified and self-contained entities, which was prominent in Western historiography since the 18th century when European powers rose to global prominence through colonial expansion. Sir Banister Fletcher’s book, A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method ([1896] 1995), written during the height of the civilization discourse, played a role in reinforcing its key postulates. It constructed European uniqueness as a civilization rooted in the classical world of ancient Greece and Rome, 17

Duanfang Lu

while asserting Western superiority by portraying Europe as the most civilized among all cultures. The book’s frontispiece, depicting the “tree of architecture,” presented European architecture as a ­linear progression of stylistic developments, starting from ancient Greece and Rome, followed by the Romanesque, Gothic, and subsequent styles after the introduction of classicism in the Renaissance (Figure 1.9). In contrast, the architecture of other cultures was depicted as non-­h istorical, static, and having no significant impact on the development of European architecture.

Figure 1.8 The Guangzhou Tower in Guangzhou (2010), by IBA in collaboration with Arup. Photo courtesy of Jie Chen.

18

Architecture in the age of playfulness

Figure 1.9 “The Tree of Architecture”, frontispiece of Banister Fletcher’s book A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method ([1896]1095). Public domain image by Banister Fletcher, .

19

Duanfang Lu

However, studies now suggest that Gothic architecture, far from being purely a European creation, was a hybrid form influenced by Persian, Byzantine, and Islamic precedents for its key features (Darke 2020), including the pointed arch, the flying buttress, ribbed vaulting, the stainedglass window, and the recursive order (Figure 1.10). For example, the pointed arch, often attributed to European masons as an innovation to overcome issues in Romanesque vaulting, can be traced back to earlier examples such as the Tarikhaneh Temple in pre-Islamic Persia, the Chytroi-­ Constantia Aqueduct in Byzantine Cyprus, and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem (688–692). This form was widely adopted in Islamic architecture before being employed in Gothic churches,

Figure 1.10 Dating to 1250 and largely completed by 1400, Lorenzkirche, also known as St. Lorenz Church, in Nuremberg, Germany, exhibits characteristic features of Gothic architecture, such as a traditional basilica layout, high rib-vaulted ceilings, and a strong emphasis on verticality. Photo courtesy of Miles Glendinning.

20

Architecture in the age of playfulness

during a time when most buildings north of the Alps were still constructed with wood (Khodakovsky 2015). How did the skills and stylistic elements find their way to Europe from vibrant cultural centers of the time such as Córdoba, Constantinople, Damascus, Aleppo, and Cairo? What contributions did agents such as Mudéjar craftsmen, free masons, Normans, merchants, and returning Crusaders make to the technical transmission? A more accurate understanding of the development of historical architecture in Europe can be achieved by placing it within a broader Eurasian historical framework. The concept of entanglement, however, does not solely emphasize exchange, mobility, circulation, and hybridity. It also acknowledges that specific patterns of reception, adaptation, sedimentation, and innovation are deeply rooted in long-established regional material cultures and building traditions (Steinhardt 2022). Wilhelm Worringer (1957), for example, noted that Gothic architecture embodied the expression of the timber skeleton system in stone, but he did not offer an explanation for this observation. With exposed thin ribs, clustered shafts, and diagonal rib vaults forming a weightless fabric-like structure, it is evident that the material logic of Gothic churches is characterized by lightness and verticality. I consider that this could be the result of the interplay between regional carpentry traditions and imported masonry techniques and design ideas. Like the formal incongruity observed in the shift from timber to brick pagodas in China, the construction of stonework in Gothic churches followed the material logic of the carpentry system. In this system, the skeletal structure takes precedence, and walls are less prominent. This differs from the material logic of the masonry system, which emphasizes planar walls. Furthermore, I consider it useful to compare the Northern and Southern (Italian) Gothic, with the former featuring tectonic clarity and tattooed ornamentation, while the latter known for volumetric clarity and detached sculpture. It is clear that their dissimilarities can be attributed to distinct building techniques, materials, and craftsmanship deeply rooted in the regional constructional systems of their respective areas. These regional variations shaped the architectural characters and resulted in noticeable divergences between the two. Instead of being the accurate reproduction of Gothic forms, for example, many buildings labelled as “Gothic” in the Italian peninsula have certain Gothic elements grafted to the southern constructive system merely in decorative ways. This provides further evidence that the interaction between different construction traditions may have contributed to the unique characteristics and aesthetic qualities found in Gothic architecture.

Historicizing Playfulness in Modern Architecture I start this chapter by highlighting the growing importance of playfulness as a defining characteristic of contemporary architecture. This section will trace and contextualize the shifting state and tactics of playfulness in modern architecture. The constant presence of playfulness in architecture is acknowledged, and the periodization of its development is proposed. The aim of the section is to set up the context for the subsequent discussion of the transition from modern to contemporary. Instead of providing an exhaustive survey, the discussion will be summative and selective, focusing on specific episodes.

The Murmurs of Spatial Playfulness in the Shadow of Functionalism, 1851–1945 The Industrial Revolution dramatically transformed the power dynamics between the Western world and the rest of the globe in the 19th century. Industrial manufacturing and technological advancements coincided with the enhanced military capabilities of European nations following the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815). This period witnessed the mass production of weapons such as rifles, the utilization of steamship technology in naval warfare, and the implementation of 21

Duanfang Lu

logistical tactics in military operations (Black 2006). Industrialists supplanted merchants as the key actors in the new system of industrial capitalism, continuously seeking cheaper raw resources and new markets for their goods. In 1851, the Crystal Palace was unveiled in Hyde Park, London, hosting the “Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations.” The colossal prefab glass and cast-iron structure, spanning 92,000 square meters with an interior height of 39 meters, symbolized the pinnacle of British global hegemony achieved through technical innovation and organisational efficiency during the Industrial Revolution, preceding the rest of Europe. With a formidable navy and military prowess, Britain exerted control over trade routes and established colonies across the world. As European colonial expansion gained momentum, neoclassical architecture spread to an increasing number of colonies (Temple, Piotrowski, and Heredia 2019). Guided by the myth of the “civilizing mission” and the pseudo-scientific principles of social Darwinism, the 19th-century approach to colonial rule aimed to maintain the subordination of indigenous populations through a combination of military and symbolic violence. Recognizing that the built environment was the most visible manifestation of culture, colonial administrators often demolished indigenous architectural masterpieces and towns, replacing them with new European-style districts. This practice gave rise to the concept of the “dual city,” as exemplified by the destruction of parts of the Ottoman city and the subsequent construction of Beaux-Arts buildings in Algiers under French colonialism in the 1830s (Djiar 2009). However, as various forms of anti-colonial resistance exposed the social and economic unviability of this approach, more pragmatic policies were adopted in the early 20th century to make colonial presence more tolerable. For instance, following the Philippine-American War (1899–1902), which claimed over 200,000 lives, American architect Daniel Burnham was commissioned to develop a master plan for Manila in 1904. He envisioned transforming the city into “an expression of the destiny of the Filipino people” and a testament to America’s efficient services in the Philippine Islands, drawing inspiration from the principles of the City Beautiful movement (Burnham 1906, 635; cited in Shatkin 2005, 583). Eclectic architectural forms became increasingly prevalent, incorporating indigenous elements to adapt to local conditions and creating hybrid designs that facilitated the integration of colonial power in colonized territories (King, 1990; AlSayyad 1992; Shatkin 2005). The emphasis on historical approaches to architecture and urbanism in colonial contexts, encompassing traditions and heritage preservation, predated the articulation of design methods more responsive to local history and culture in postwar discourses (Wright 1987). From the 1870s onward, Britain began to experience a decline in its competitive advantage as it focused on the industrial technologies of the steam era. This shift caused the country to fall behind the United States and the newly unified Germany in the emerging electrical and chemical industries (Agnew and Stuart 1995). The rise of nationalism fuelled intense interstate rivalry and territorial disputes, ultimately leading to the outbreak of two world wars. During this period, the existing world order was challenged by emerging regional powers, and many people faced dire circumstances, including violent subjugation, exploitative labor practices, and abysmal living conditions. Utopian ideals and practices gained traction, working-class and anti-colonial movements surged worldwide, and socialism appeared both desirable and attainable. Rationality, efficiency, mass production, and technological advancement became the key societal convictions against this backdrop of intensive industrialization, colonization, militarization, and social reforms. The primary spatial concern revolved around reshaping architecture and urban environments to facilitate efficient industrial production and labor reproduction. Crucial construction techniques, such as the steel skeleton, steel-reinforced concrete, electric lighting, and elevators, matured during the late 19th century. As a result, skyscrapers emerged in cities like Chicago and New York (Willis 1995; Landau and Condit 1996; Moudry 2005; Merwood-Salisbury 2014), 22

Architecture in the age of playfulness

serving as modern “cathedrals of work” and establishing a new spatial typology (Figure 1.11). The towering heights of these buildings were driven by high land values rather than evoking transcendent emotions like Gothic churches. Grand central spaces were replaced by stacked floors, maximizing habitable and profitable space. Elevators, originally used for transporting freight, now efficiently and safely transported human bodies between levels using electric motors and automatic doors. While the separation of administrative functions from factory floors allowed workers to keep their clothes clean, earning them the moniker “white-collar workers,” their activities in individual cubicles mirrored the regimentation of factory labor. The homogeneity and seriality of these cubicles reflected the interchangeable nature of workers, who were valued solely for their labor. Against this new existential reality of the industrial age, serialized abstraction emerged as the new aesthetic character of architecture in the workplace.

Figure 1.11  Skyscrapers in Chicago, USA. Photo by Duanfang Lu.

23

Duanfang Lu

Throughout history, decorations played a vital role in architecture, enhancing its visual appeal and symbolic significance. However, in the industrial age, these adornments were deemed not only useless but also detrimental to the principles of economy and functionality. As a result, architecture became stripped of its embellishments, with naked walls, plain columns, and purified building exteriors becoming the norm. Driven by the impact of World War I (1914–1918) and its aftermath, the spontaneous practices of architectural rationalism were solidified into a more articulated modernist design philosophy and approach. World War I marked a significant turning point in European history. Prior to the war, advanced military tactics and technologies were utilized in the conquest and control of colonies, bolstering the economies of European nations at the expense of indigenous peoples. However, when European societies used these to fight against each other during World War I, these destructive effects were experienced on European soil, resulting in the loss of millions of lives, widespread destruction, inflation, and scarcity (Gerwarth and Manela 2014). The economic hardships faced during and after the war led to sweeping political changes, such as the rise of the Bolsheviks and the overthrow of the Tsarist government in the Russian Revolution of 1917. In 1915, Russian constructivists emerged as powerful pioneers, catalyzing a radical transformation in architecture and art to support the revolutionary socialist movement (Figure 1.12). Their bold artistic expressions and innovative programs had a lasting impact on avant-garde architecture, reflecting the modern industrial society while challenging existing conventions (Lodder 1983; Gough 2005; Cohen 2012; Walworth 2017). For example, in a proposal for the dom-kommuna, a housing commune project initiated by Soviet constructivists in 1919, architect Ivan Kuzmin conceptualized all life functions as forms of work, proposing a strict division of daily routines into precise “time frames” to be followed by workers (Kreis 1980). Assuming a clockwise form, Kuzmin’s speculative

Figure 1.12 A group of Russian Constructivists  exhibited their work at an ambitious Moscow exhibition in 1921, under the umbrella of OBMOKhU (the Russian abbreviation of the Society of Young Artists). Public domain image by unknown author, CC-BY-SA, .

24

Architecture in the age of playfulness

design portrayed humans not only as producers of standardized goods but also as standardized components within the industrial system. Similar functionalist perspectives on human existence can be found in Le Corbusier’s writings ([1925]1987), where he likened the human body to a machine, with limbs as standard parts and objects serving as prosthetic additions to enhance functionality. The notion of a standardized, logically functioning body was further supported by the functionalist concept of the House-­ Machine, described as “beautiful in the same way that the working tools and instruments which accompany our existence are beautiful” (Le Corbusier [1923]1986, 7). In contrast to 19th-century homes filled with distracting decorations, Le Corbusier advocated for purified House-Machines that provided uninterrupted spaces for rest and rejuvenation after a day of work (ibid.). The functionalist principles were extended to urban planning as well, exemplified by Tony Garnier’s Une Cité Industrielle (The Industrial City) and Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse (The Radiant City). While these ideal city plans faced limited support in metropolitan areas at the time, some colonies became experimental grounds for ambitious master plans under authoritarian colonial rule, such as Henri Prost’s plans for Morocco and Turkey, Le Corbusier’s plan for Algiers, and Japanese colonial planners’ master plans for Changchun in northeast China. The interwar period, characterized by economic austerity and political instability, provided aesthetic and moral validation for functionalism (Schuldenfrei 2014). Yet there was a seemingly paradoxical move. Despite the fierce argument on “Ornament and Crime” made by Austrian architect Adolf Loos ([1908]1997), for example, it was a mistake to assume that his work was solely driven by functionality. His Raumplan (spatial plan) method employed three-dimensional space as the primary design generator, allowing for dynamic and playful alterations in the size, height, adjacency, privacy, and visual connectivity of domestic spaces ( Jara 1995). This user-centered approach treated individuals as both actors on a play stage and spectators in a theater hall, as seen in projects such as the Villa Moller in Vienna (1928) and Villa Müller in Prague (1930). The design of these spaces carefully orchestrated how users could be staged and seated, while revealing layers of interconnected spaces (Colomina 1990). The façade was merely the natural consequence of this tactical spatial design (Figure 1.14). Different from Loos’s emphasis on vertical connectivity, Frank Lloyd Wright’s house design stressed horizontal flowing space. In his book The Natural House, Wright (1954, 221) mentioned that his concept of “the destruction of the box” was influenced by Lao Tzu’s concept of void: “The reality of the building does not consist in the four walls and the roof but in the space within to be lived in.” One of his key novelties was the open floor plan, where rooms seamlessly blended into one another, eliminating the rigid division of spaces found in traditional architecture and allowing for a continuous flow of movement. Both the Raumplan and open floor plan idea embraced a shift from façade-centered classical architecture to space-centered modernist design, highlighting the importance of spatial innovation. Spatial playfulness in modern architecture was not limited to the idiosyncratic maneuvers of architects like Loos and Wright; it was a persistent dimension made possible by various influences. One influential factor was the impact of modernist abstract art, which liberated architecture from classical regularity. The playful spirit in modern art emerged in the 1850s, when the advent of photography rendered the need for seamless technique in depicting reality unnecessary. Inspired by abstract art from diverse cultures, modern artists began to play with colors, layers, illusions, geometric shapes, dots, lines, and different mediums and techniques. The Rietveld Schröder House in Utrecht (1924), designed by Dutch architect Gerrit Rietveld, exemplified the newfound flexibility enabled by De Stijl aesthetics. Movable panels created open interior spaces, offering a rich variety of spatial experiences, while exterior walls danced with slender planes and lines intersecting each other (Figure 1.15).

25

Duanfang Lu

Figure 1.13 Villa Müller in Prague, Czech Republic (1930), by Adolf Loos. Photo courtesy of Miaow Miaow, CC-BY-SA, .

Figure 1.14 Interior of the Frederick C. Robie House in Chicago, USA (1909), by Frank Lloyd Wright. Photo by Duanfang Lu.

26

Architecture in the age of playfulness

Figure 1.15 The Rietveld Schröder House in Utrecht, Netherlands (1924), by Gerrit Rietveld. Photo courtesy of Weijie Wu.

In contrast, the Soviet Pavilion for the 1925 Paris Exposition, designed by Russian architect Konstantin Melnikov, adopted a radical Constructivist approach. A diagonal staircase sliced the plan in half, with diagonals crossing above it. Ascending the steps, visitors could glimpse exhibitions inside the two triangular volumes through glass windows. The structure, topped with an openwork truss tower and a projecting flagpole, reached upward. Unlike the soaring Gothic cathedrals that aimed to connect humans with the divine, Russian Constructivism sought a forceful escape from the gravity of existing social reality, and a connection to a new world that remained unknown, embodying a transcendent, revolutionary, and futuristic spirit (Figure 1.16). The new formal logic established by both Russian Constructivism and De Stijl dissolved the dominance of rooms and the solidity of masonry facades in historicist architecture, opening up boundless possibilities for spatial and formal exploration. The use of the reinforced concrete frame system brought a heightened level of playfulness to architecture, as exemplified by Le Corbusier’s Maison Dom-Ino (1915). This modular structure showcased the freedom of an open plan made possible by the new constructional system, with columns replacing load-bearing walls. However, Le Corbusier’s drawing diverged from the

27

Duanfang Lu

Figure 1.16 Model of Tatlin’s Tower at the  Centre Pompidou, Paris, France. Tatlinʼs Tower (1920), also known as the project for the Monument to the Third International, was designed by the Russian artist and architect Vladimir Tatlin. Photo courtesy of Weijie Wu.

structural reality of a concrete skeletal frame. It depicted six free-standing columns supporting a flat slab, omitting the beams and girders that would typically be present in the roof. If the true construction were revealed, wall partitions would need to align with the grid of the beams to maintain the visual order. By presenting Maison Dom-Ino as an abstract beamless construction, Le Corbusier emphasized the possibilities for the unrestricted play of walls. The naming of Maison Dom-Ino added intrigue, as it evoked the idea of a domino game, where endless results could be generated by playing with different arrangements. The charm of Villa Savoye (1931) lay in its exploration of both formal austerity and spatial playability (Figure 1.17). In contrast to Loos’s house design imbued with dense relations of domesticity, Le Corbusier achieved a new level of abstraction. Distancing himself from realism, he minimized external forces, allowing for a modernist aesthetic order characterized by limited constructional and structural expression of both weight and material (Figure 1.18). Going beyond the functionalist circulation, carefully orchestrated vertical and horizontal connections enriched the spatial experience, which Le Corbusier theorized as an “architectural promenade” (Samuel and Jones 2012). 28

Figure 1.17  The Villa Savoye in Poissy, France (1931), by Le Corbusier. Photo courtesy of Yijie Betty Liu.

Figure 1.18  Interior of the Villa Savoye. Photo courtesy of Yijie Betty Liu.

Duanfang Lu

Eileen Gray, the Irish architect and furniture designer, expressed strong criticism towards the mechanistic approach to architecture. In her statements, she highlighted the perceived shortcomings of modern architecture, attributing its poverty to the lack of sensual qualities: “The dominance of reason, order and math leaves a house cold and inhumane” (cited in Adam 2000, 216). According to Gray, architects were too fixated on the machine and its influence on design, neglecting the importance of incorporating living references from the world around us (Constant 1996, 70). Her design of E-1027 in Casteller, built between 1926 and 1929 as a coastal holiday home for herself and Jean Badovici, exemplifies her commitment to engaging the body’s awareness through intelligible architectural spaces and furnishings (Frampton 2021, 21; ­Figure 1.19). The main entrance, situated within an extended semi-outdoor space, faced a large

Figure 1.19 Interior of E-1027 in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France (1929), Eileen Gray. Photo courtesy of Fabien Mauduit and Véronique Hours.

30

Architecture in the age of playfulness

Figure 1.20 Balcony of E-1027 in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France (1929), Eileen Gray. Photo courtesy of Fabien Mauduit and Véronique Hours.

blank wall that conveyed the idea of resistance (Constant 2000, 241). Gray’s intention was to create a sense of suspense and mystery upon entering the house, comparing it to “the sensation of entering a mouth which will close behind you” (cited in Adam 2000, 217). A similar strategy was employed inside, with partition screens impeding full views into the main room (Rault 2005). These design choices demonstrated her empathetic approach, aligning with historian Heinrich Wölfflin’s emphasis on the significance of the human body’s experience in empathizing with the physical world. Gray designed E-1027 specifically for “a person who likes work, sports and entertaining friends” (cited in Espegel 2018, 108). She meticulously positioned waterfront openings based on her own height to optimize the views, exemplifying her use of living references in design. 31

Duanfang Lu

The villa also featured flexible furnishings, including chairs with multiple backrest positions, an adjustable table for breakfast in bed, and strategically placed mirrors to enable viewing the back of one’s head. Unlike Le Corbusier’s architectural promenade concept, which primarily relied on visual means, E-1027 actively engaged users in phenomenological experiences, allowing them to empathize with the environment rather than being passive observers. Gray’s design aimed to accommodate the sensually active human body, providing pleasure in the material world and creating objects for enjoyment. This conceptualization stood in contrast to the dominant functionalist assumption. Therefore, despite its minimalist aesthetics, her work evoked uneasiness even among its admirers. As De Stijl architect A. Boeken remarked about Gray’s designs, there was an ambivalence regarding their modernity and artistic nature: “Those wondrous lamps with their mysterious lighting; every analysis of the lamps comes to a halt. Are they modern works of art? Are they of this time?” (cited in Adam 2000, 146). Sadly, Gray’s time had not arrived yet. The dominant functionalist paradigm, which prioritized instrumental rationality, marginalized the playful, excessive, and sensual aspects in architectural discourse. While playful explorations with the free plan allowed for creative expression and individual identities of architects, these attempts were often rationalized as mere efforts to discover innovative spatial techniques. Gray’s voices, along with Le Corbusier’s architectural promenade concept, were not taken seriously until recent decades. In contrast, functionalist mottos such as Louis Sullivan’s “Form follows function,” Mies van der Rohe’s “Less is more,” and Le Corbusier’s “A house is a machine for living in” gained widespread circulation among architects and the general public, owing to the extensive interaction between architects and larger social forces of the time. Similarly, the 1933 Athens Charter of the International Congress of Modern Architecture (Congrès internationaux d’architecture moderne, CIAM) divided the city into four basic functions – dwelling, work, recreation, and transportation. Aiming to create efficient and productive urban environments, however, play remained an insignificant element in the Charter’s functionalist city scheme. Spatial playfulness in the shadow of functionalism fostered an intriguing mixture of formal austerity and spatial richness in interwar modernist architecture. A combination of egalitarian social ideals and design innovations helped garner support for modernism worldwide. Keming Lin (1900–1999), for instance, was educated at the Lyon School of Architecture under the guidance of Tony Garnier. After returning to China, Lin (1933) introduced the concepts of modern architecture to the Chinese audience through his article titled “What Is Modern Architecture?”, emphasizing how the dynamic spatiality of circulation shaped the new configuration of architecture. Lin went on to establish the Department of Architecture at Soengken University of Canton (Xiangqin daxue), which played a pivotal role in promoting the principles of modernist design through education and publications. In 1935, a public exhibition showcasing student works celebrated the theory of modernist architecture, and in the following year, students founded the journal New Architecture (Xin jianzhu) to disseminate modernism (Xiao 2008). These endeavors laid the groundwork for the development of modern architecture in the Lingnan region (e.g., Xiao 2008; Peng 2010; Ding 2021; Figure 1.21).

Intellectual Playfulness in the Era of the Plural, 1945–1991 Following the end of World War II in 1945, a Cold War geopolitical order emerged, characterized by the dismantling of colonial empires through decolonization, the rise of the United States and the Soviet Union as superpowers, and the division of nation-states into three worlds (Chaliand 1977). Architectural modernism gained international institutionalization and exerted significant cultural influence, coinciding with a period of postwar reconstruction in Europe and the aspirations for national development in the Second and Third Worlds. The functionalist principles of architectural 32

Architecture in the age of playfulness

Figure 1.21 A bird’s-eye  view of the South China Specialty Exchange (Huanan tutechan jiaoliu dahui), Guangzhou, China (1952), designed by Boqi Chen et al. It was an early example of modernist architecture in socialist China. Photo courtesy of Changxin Peng.

design and urban planning became the prevailing epistemological framework, guiding urban development globally through diverse institutional and discursive practices (Lu, 2011). Initially, the modernist agenda aimed to transform architecture and cities to provide decent housing, access to light, air, parks, and a clean urban environment for all. However, as the era of postwar austerity came to an end in the mid-1950s, modernism became more diverse, with explorations branching out in various directions influenced by political, civic, corporate, and aesthetic demands. Developing nations in the Third World sought to navigate their national development between the capitalism of the First World and the socialism of the Second World through the non-aligned movement. However, they were still tangled in the neocolonial political economy, which hindered their progress (Kusno 2000; Coslett 2019; Chapter 20 in this book). The discourse of developmentalism, established during the late-colonial era, remained dominant, presupposing that sustained economic progress would legitimize political leadership (Berger 2001). In this context, modernist architecture and master planning became powerful tools for nation-building and development in many newly independent countries, such as Brazil, Morocco, Ghana, Nigeria, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Singapore (Lu, 2011). Modernist architecture, perceived as neutral and universal, helped postcolonial societies consolidate their sense of nationhood and manage the complex relationships between the state and civil society in the face of social, cultural, political, and religious tensions (ibid.). For instance, the adoption of modernism in the construction of Chandigarh’s capital buildings demonstrated the Nehruvian regime’s commitment to encapsulating the Indian constitution within an explicitly secular framework (Prakash 2010). However, while modernist monuments aimed to capture the aspirations of political regimes and symbolize national unity, their meanings were often contested in the face of ongoing underdevelopment and socio-economic disparity. Despite efforts to provide housing, services, and infrastructure, the provision often fell short of meeting the needs of the growing population in many Third World cities. As a result, alternative urban forms emerged, including shantytowns, illegal housing, unregulated workplaces, and informal markets, which stood in stark contrast to the carefully planned, regulated, and sanitized spaces of affluent sectors within cities. While late-colonial architects had developed tropical modernism to create exclusive enclaves for the colonial elite, the same strategies for sun-shading, ventilation, and heat insulation were employed in the postcolonial era to create idyllic settings for local elites, leading to a new form of thermal segregation (Liscombe, 2006; Figure 1.22). This growing polarization was also evident in Brasilia, a city planned as an ambitious political utopian project aimed at achieving social equality, designed by committed left-wing architects such as Oscar Niemeyer and Lucio Costa (Figure 1.23). In addition to 33

Duanfang Lu

Figure 1.22 Planned and built between 1948 and 1958 to house Nigeria’s first university, the University of Ibadan features Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew’s tropical modern architecture. Photo courtesy of L.A. van Es, CC-BY-SA, .

Figure 1.23 Planned and designed as the new capital of Brazil in 1957, Brasilia was the first city that fully implemented the CIAM principles, with traffic circulation separated from pedestrian activity, functions such as work, residence, and leisure separated into different zones, and open expanses of green spaces. Photo courtesy of Arturdiasr, CC-BY-SA, .

implementing the CIAM’s Athens Charter, they sought to instill a new sense of communal and egalitarian culture through design strategies, including the superquadra (residential superblock) that aimed to collectivize various aspects of domestic life, streets devoid of storefronts to replace densely packed traditional Brazilian streets, and domestic interiors that enforced equal access for residents and their servants (Holston 1989). The resource-rich country, however, was caught up in persistent social inequality, with its natural resources and agriculture largely controlled by foreign 34

Architecture in the age of playfulness

capital. With the emergence of slums known as “favelas” as its population grew, Brasilia became similar to other major Brazilian cities. In the Second World, the Soviet Union sought to embody socialism in order to maintain its position as the dominant player in the tightly controlled Cold War competition (Chapter 4 in this book). In the aftermath of World War II, Soviet advisors aimed to transplant a form of neoclassicism known as “Socialist Realism” to Eastern Europe and other socialist countries like China and Mongolia (e.g., Lahusen and Dobrenko 1997; Lu 2007; Hudson 2015; Miljački 2017). Consisting of a form of neoclassicism, this architectural style promoted the expression of local identity and national unity, and spatial elements that demonstrated “concern for mankind”. However, as the process of de-Stalinization began under Nikita Khrushchev in 1954, construction efforts increasingly prioritized rapid industrialization. With the exception of a few grand public projects characterized by historicist monumentality, most structures were built according to ultra-economic standards. Following the appeal for standardized design at the fourth International Union of Architects (UIA) conference in The Hague, Netherlands, in July 1955, many socialist societies embarked on the exploration and adoption of typification, standardization, and industrialization in housing construction (Yang 1955; Meuser and Zadorin 2015; Lu 2018; Figure 1.24). Prefabricated architecture emerged as the prevailing paradigm representing modernization and technological progress (Zarecor 2011; Urban 2012; Lu 2018). The resulting socialist architectural artifacts do not easily fit within the mainstream narrative of modernism, as Peter Lizon (1996, 109) describes: “Large-scale standardization, the limited variety of available elements, and their poor quality resulted in monotonous rows of concrete panel apartment blocks.”

Figure 1.24 Small apartment designed by Song Rong and Liu Kaiji represented the effort to localize standard housing design imported from the Soviet Union and adapt it to the local conditions in China. Images from Jianzhu xuebao [Architectural Journal] 1957, no. 9, 95, 102 and 105.

35

Duanfang Lu

Earlier scholarship often portrayed architectural modernism in socialist nations as a passive response to a centralized and uniform architectural culture imposed through top-down manipulation and dominated by planned economies. However, recent studies have revealed the distinct characteristics of different locations, highlighting some degree of individual agency and complex dynamics within these contexts (Lu 2006; Pence and Betts 2008; Urban 2016; Swope 2017; Maxim 2019). My book Remaking Chinese Urban Form (Lu 2006), for instance, sheds light on the everyday textures and tensions under Maoist socialism by examining how the work unit (danwei) emerged as a primary urban form integrating work, housing, and social services, and how its unique spatiality presented an alternative modernity to both the West and the Soviet Union. Łukasz Stanek’s recent book Architecture in Global Socialism (2020) offers a fresh perspective on how architects, planners, and construction companies from socialist Eastern Europe provided diverse alternative visions for modernization and urbanization in cities of the Global South. The consolidation of the West as a coherent bloc led by the United States, known as the capitalist, liberal democratic First World, resulted in a shift in the ideals of modernism from European socialism to a commitment to democracy. Modernist architecture was Americanized and exported to former colonial countries (Loeffler 1998; Cody 2003). With the economic boom and unprecedented prosperity that followed World War II, the heroic interwar modernism gave way to a revised post-war modernism. Architects pursued their individual interests, leading to a diverse range of work characterized by what Sarah Goldhagen and Réjean Legault (2000) aptly described as “anxious modernisms.” Experiments with new construction techniques were quiet yet fruitful. Concepts like the “skin and bone” idea, curtain-wall systems, four-sided glazing, and undivided interior spaces refined the aesthetic of high-rise office buildings, culminating in the global success of Miesian glass skyscrapers (Kim 2009). Frei Otto’s (2017) tensile system, utilizing suspended membranes on lightweight steel networks, emerged as a popular construction method for economically spanning large distances. New theories and aesthetics emerged to transcend the limitations of modern architecture and critically examine capitalist modernity in its evolving state. For instance, Robert Venturi ([1966]1977) called for “complexity and contradiction” to address modernism’s preoccupation with function and indifference to other layers that could contribute to rich architecture. Colin Rowe (1975) justified the inward focus on form-making of the New York Five (also referred to as “the Whites”) – Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey, John Hejduk, and Richard Meier – by arguing that architecture as an endless moral experiment had been replaced by a new emphasis on establishing order. Charles Jencks (1977, 9) famously proclaimed the death of modern architecture with the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe public housing project in St. Louis on March 16, 1972. I consider that the root cause of the crisis of architectural modernism was the intensified contradiction between the functionalist paradigm and the societal demand to stimulate mass consumption in postwar advanced capitalist societies. Consumption, the final stage in the production and exchange process where individuals purchase and utilize goods and services, is crucial for the functioning of a capitalist economy. Insufficient demand for goods and services could halt the production cycle, as witnessed during the Great Depression of the 1930s. As the postwar era shifted from military production to consumer goods, the growth of consumer society became the driving force behind advanced capitalism, leading to a need to reshape the city from a center of production to a center of consumption in developed countries. While functional zoning and large-scale urban renewal initially made sense in the early postwar period, their limitations soon became apparent. Jane Jacobs’s book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities ([1961] 1984), emphasized that modernist urban development tended to stifle community life on the streets. Many of Jacobs’s suggestions, such as the importance of vibrant street life, mixed-use urban neighborhoods, and the informal use of public spaces, pointed towards making cities and streets more socially and commercially viable. Different from Jacobs’s original humanistic intentions, these ideas resonated

36

Architecture in the age of playfulness

with the demands of consumer society for urban environments. Consequently, a new discipline of Urban Design emerged in subsequent decades to address this demand. Architects responded to consumer capitalism with two opposing impulses, I suggest, leading to two distinct genres of intellectual playfulness: postmodernist and avant-garde architecture. The postmodernist impulse was articulated by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour (1972) in their book Learning from Las Vegas. They proposed engaging with the commercial-­ populist vernacular to address the shortcomings of modernist architecture in a consumer society. Postmodernist design rejected the functionalist purism of modernism and its prohibition against historical references. Transmutting the Miesian motto from “less is more” into “less is a bore” (ibid., 193), postmodernists reintroduced the façade priority of historicist architecture to enhance buildings and neighborhoods through the playful use of historical elements (Figure 1.25). This often reflected a Western middle-class nostalgia for traditional urban life. Postmodernists abandoned modernism’s utopian drive; instead of working towards an idealized vision of what architecture should be, their focus shifted to working with the existing reality (Stern [1976] 1998). Informed by postmodern cultural theories, they drew on symbolic cues from the repository of past architectural and urban forms to achieve meaningful communication and cultural legibility ( Jencks 1977). Operating in a context where commercial practices led to the rapid proliferation of themed environments, postmodernism’s search for meaning oscillated between erasing the distinction between high and low culture to expand the cultural realm and surpassing degraded commercial and popular tastes to maintain architectural authenticity and high-style credentials. To strike a delicate balance, postmodernists embraced an ironic historicism that treated past allusions and forms as material for double coding or pure play ( Jencks 1987). This intellectual playfulness not only

Figure 1.25 The Vanna Venturi House in Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia, USA (1964), by Robert Venturi. Photo ­courtesy of Carol M. Highsmith, CC-BY-SA, .

37

Duanfang Lu

established the ontological distinction between postmodern architecture and mass culture but also constructed an epistemological aura that allowed postmodernism to spread to other societies as the latest architectural knowledge from the West. Integrating postmodern concerns into local discourse enabled architects from different parts of the world to rethink strategies beyond strict modernism and address previously neglected issues such as cultural identity, sense of place, and human scale (e.g., Bhatt 2001; Kulić 2019; Urban 2020). However, the scenographic execution of postmodernist tactics often resulted in an indulgence in kitsch and banality. Instead of embracing the new conditions of consumer capitalism, postwar avant-garde architecture in affluent societies took a different approach. They aimed to develop autonomous and critical design experiments, influenced by ethical-political orientations which stemmed from the Enlightenment, continued in the Frankfurt School tradition, and in recent decades decentered with poststructuralist theories. An early example of such experiments was the New Babylon project (1956–1974) by Constant Nieuwenhuys, a Dutch painter turned architect (Figure 1.26). This visionary project sought to liberate a world trapped in commodity culture and alienation by creating new spaces for play that would stimulate resistance to capitalism and nurture a more fulfilling human existence (Sadler 1998). New Babylon envisioned a covered city suspended above the ground, consisting of a global network of mega-structures with collective land ownership. Informed by Huizinga’s concept of play as the foundation of life, Constant imagined a future where work is automated, and the city is inhabited by homo ludens – individuals free from work who lead nomadic lives of creative play (Wigley 1998). Mobility was emphasized at all levels in this “worldwide city for the future,” including atmospheric elements, structures, and the city itself, which would constantly adapt to the desires of its inhabitants and the opportunities presented by new inventions like television and high-speed travel (Bryant 2006). Constant, a member of the Situationist International until 1960, shared with other Situationists a belief in the possibility of “radically remaking the world in the image of the poet rather than the industrialist” (ibid.), despite the overshadowing power of capitalist society to reduce social life to spectacle, as Guy Debord

Figure 1.26 The “New Babylon” project (1956–1974) developed by Constant Nieuwenhuys. Photo courtesy of Fotopersbureau De Boer, CC-BY-SA, .

38

Architecture in the age of playfulness

(1994) eloquently argued. For them, play, with its spirit of creativity, mobility, and fluidity, offered infinite revolutionary possibilities to transcend the spectacle of capitalist society, rather than simply aiming to escape boredom. In addition to the Situationists, other avant-garde works from the 1960s and early 1970s – by groups such as Archigram, Superstudio, Metabolism, Archizoom, Haus-Rucker-Co, and architects like Hans Hollein and Walter Pichler, among others – were founded on a strong belief in technology’s liberating potential and the transformative possibilities of the built environment (e.g., Kurokawa 1977; Cook [1972] 1999; Lang and Menking 2003; Sadler 2005; Aureli 2014; Gardner 2020; Chapter 7 in this book). Unlike the Situationists, many of these radical architects were less concerned with subverting capitalism politically and more focused on unleashing the architectural potential of technological advancements for individualistic expression. As Archigram member David Greene expressed in a 1969 poem (cited in Hejduk 2006, 237): I have a desire for The built environment To allow me to do My own thing

Unlike the Situationists, the members of Archigram did not oppose popular culture; instead, they embraced the iconic imagery of Pop art, incorporating figures like spaceman and robotman into their work ( Jencks 1973; Chapter 3 in this book). Their playful techno-utopian projects, which could move, expand, and adapt, captured public interest during a time when science and technology were seen as vehicles of liberation, a central concern of the 1960s. However, as Herbert Marcuse ([1964]2003) powerfully argued in his influential book One-Dimensional Man, society’s fascination with technology, which often reduced social issues to technical problems, could be exploited by consumer capitalism to create false needs and maximize corporate profits. Since the early 1970s, intellectual energy shifted from utopianism to criticality, as the widespread implementation of modernism under corporate capitalism had led to disillusionment with any “subversive proposition about a possible Utopian future” (Rowe 1972). The ideas put forth by the Italian Marxist architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri ([1973] 1976) in his seminal work Architecture and Utopia were well received. Tafuri, along with his colleagues Massimo Cacciari and Francesco Dal Co, emphasized the direct connection between architecture and material relations, viewing architecture as pure ideology and a reflection of class interests (McLeod 1985). Tafuri ([1973] 1976) argued that all utopian architecture since the Enlightenment had attempted to rationalize a chaotic world but ultimately failed, as these humanistic projects were entangled with the inhumane realities of the capitalist system. While 20th-century modernist designers appeared to have achieved their goals of implementing utopian plans, Tafuri contended that the adoption of their ideas by capitalist society was primarily driven by the need to recover from wars and economic crises, rather than a genuine reconfiguration of society based on utopian ideals. Tafuri’s (ibid.) argument reaches its peak in his critique of design utopias, which he claims ultimately became not only harmless acts of aesthetic play but also rationalizations of capitalism’s crises. The work of Tafuri and other scholars from the “Venice School,” including Aldo Rossi, gained prominence among architectural academics and professionals in the United States. Rossi’s ([1966] 1982) book The Architecture of the City emphasizes the enduring spatial patterns within cities, which are deeply intertwined with architectural typologies. In his design of the San Cataldo Cemetery in Modena, Italy (1971), Rossi exemplifies his approach of designing buildings analogously to the city (Figure 1.27). Each individual tomb represents a “house of the dead” within the urban fabric, while the conical tower of the common grave serves as the city’s monument. The repetitive neatness of the visual order and the cold rationality of the masterplan reflect the bureaucratic aspect of death, a manifestation of the city’s “pathological permanences.” Rossi’s bare ontological design compels contemplation about human existence and the responsibility to give meaning to death. 39

Duanfang Lu

Figure 1.27 The San Cataldo Cemetery in Modena, Italy (1971), by Aldo Rossi. Photo courtesy of Maria Lucia Lusetti Paolo Tedeschi, CC-BY-SA, .

Peter Eisenman, in his introduction to the 1982 English translation of Rossi’s The Architecture of the City, underscores the significance of Rossi’s ontological approach by quoting Jacques Derrida, who suggests that the structures of an uninhabited or deserted city become clearer when structures are reduced to their skeleton “by some catastrophe of nature or art” (cited in Hays 2010, 51). Unlike Rossi, whose bare city is nonetheless still “haunted by meaning and culture” (ibid.), Eisenman seeks to escape the presuppositional constraints of the latter by removing all circumscribing determinants of architectural form. Informed by structuralism, Eisenman conducted a series of design experiments from House I to House VI (1969–1972) that sought to return architecture to its syntactical essence through purified operations, challenging the functionalist paradigm of modernism. While the “Whites” were known for their adherence to modernist purism, Eisenman injected unprecedented architectural autonomy into his formal explorations by severing ties with the practical, contextual, phenomenological, and semantic realms. Termed “postfunctionalism” by Eisenman, this approach resonated with his contemporaries, given the shrinking American market for architectural services during the economic stagnation of the 1970s (Deamer 2001). By establishing a “virtual reality lab” – without technology – Eisenman created a space for rigorous conceptual processes unhindered by external constraints, allowing full control over the reasoning of form. The act was liberating. This eventually led to the realization of House VI (1975) as a surrealistic reality, appreciated for its intellectual playfulness by the clients despite the inconveniences caused by multiple dysfunctions within the house (Frank 1994; Figure 1.28). The journal Oppositions (1973–1984), produced by Peter Eisenman’s Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, played a significant role as a platform for theoretical debates and speculative experiments in architectural theory, often drawing heavily from continental theories (Crysler 2003, Chapter 3). Starting in the 1980s, post-structuralist theories increasingly shaped architectural thinking. In an era marked by waning revolutionary consciousness and the global triumph of neoliberalism, the concept of criticality in architecture diverged significantly from the formulations of Frankfurt School theorists. For instance, Max Horkheimer (1982, 244) defined critical 40

Architecture in the age of playfulness

Figure 1.28 House VI, Cornwall, USA (1975), by Peter David Eisenman. Photo courtesy of Gerrit Oorthuys, CC-BY-SA, .

theory as seeking to “liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them.” Informed by Derrida’s argument on establishing a critical relationship with art to transform a painting into a work of art, Eisenman developed architectural deconstruction as a subversive operation that questioned the conventions specific to architecture (Crysler 2003, 54). In an interview with Mark Wigley conducted by K. Michael Hays (1988) and published in the journal Assemblage (1986– 2000), Eisenman’s design of a science laboratory complex in Frankfurt was described as a reversal of the traditional relationship between structure and ornament (ibid.). Architecture itself became the subject of critical maneuvers, with the critical work loaded into the architectural object, whose “formal moves call the theoretical moves into question” (ibid.). Conversely, John Hejduk’s wall house variants since the mid-1960s do not attempt to resist the wall as a loaded element entrenched with past values and disciplinary ideologies. Instead, the wall serves as a productive apparatus to dramatize the sense of passage and liminality by physically separating domestic spaces from circulation systems in his Wall House 2 (Figure 1.29). Hejduk drew inspiration from Georges Braque’s cubist painting Studio III (1949), which depicts a bird flying through a wall (Hays 2010, 94). Hejduk’s work sought to capture that uncanny moment of passing through a wall where the usual rules of the physical world are suspended, inciting a moment of freedom. Looking back, the evolving concept of criticality in architecture was entangled with broader historical forces. While the functionalist paradigm, as presented in Towards a New Architecture (Le Corbusier [1923] 1986), stood out among competing interwar modernist discourses due to its recognition of the need to apply methods from industrial mass production to create organized urban environments and decent housing for workers to avoid social unrest, its aesthetic superiority and moral obligation lost prominence under the pressures of postwar consumerism. Simultaneously, with the growth of societal wealth and the rise of the welfare state and its associated political regulations in developed societies, the working class ceased to be a subversive force capable of bringing about revolutionary change (Marcuse [1964]2003). Instead, workers became integrated into consumer capitalism through a commodified way of life (ibid.). Consequently, while the radical intellectual legacy did not entirely succumb to the new state of capitalist modernity, political utopias that thrived in the 19th and early 20th centuries lost their ground. Similar to the Japanese folk stories of ubume, where the spirit of a woman who died tragically during childbirth lingers to offer her baby to passersby, who discover only a bundle of leaves when they hold the child in their arms, postwar architectural experiments continued to produce utopian visions, but the revolutionary 41

Duanfang Lu

Figure 1.29 Wall House 2, Groningen, the Netherlands (2001), by John Hejduk. Photo courtesy of Wutsje, CC-BY-SA, .

impulse was largely lost, with many endeavors seeking to achieve liberal individualism instead of radically reconfiguring society. As Slavoj Žižek (1989, 44) astutely proclaims, “ideological fantasy structures reality itself,” highlighting the profound impact of ideology on our perception of the world. The egalitarian ideals that once animated early modern architecture have gradually waned, overshadowed by the influx of structuralist and post-structuralist theories. The proliferation of architectural theories has led to a flourishing of criticality within the field since the 1970s, wherein architectural discourse has become increasingly shaped by the discipline’s unique specificity. Despite the sophistication of these theories and the innovative techniques they have spawned, the subversive endeavors of 42

Architecture in the age of playfulness

avant-garde architects have largely remained self-referential and detached from the lived world. While these internal explorations have propelled conceptual and design advancements, they have failed to generate genuine social resistance or empowerment. Instead, they merely exist “as if they were real,” devoid of tangible real-world consequences. Consequently, critical architecture has been relegated to the realm of intellectual play within the confines of the discipline, rather than functioning as a transformative political act. To comprehend the essence of this phenomenon, it is helpful to draw upon the fort-da game described by Sigmund Freud ([1920] 2014) in his book Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In this game, a boy repeatedly throws an object out of the cot, transforming an unhappy situation – one in which he has no control – into a happier one, where he exerts some semblance of control. Through this play, the child fulfills the pleasure principle and attains a sense of instinctive autonomy. Similarly, critical architecture becomes an escape from the real problems of the world, allowing architects to achieve some sorts of control over the artistry of their craft. As Greig Crysler (2003, 63–64) eloquently puts it, critical architecture has become a form of “epistemological interior renovation” that tinkers with the boundaries of the discipline but leaves them largely intact. It has failed to transcend its self-imposed confines and effect meaningful change in the wider social and political spheres. By introspectively pursuing its own intellectual pursuits, critical architecture has inadvertently neglected its potential to engage with and transform the world beyond its disciplinary borders. Similar to the spatial playfulness of the past, intellectual playfulness in critical architecture has served as a means to channel creative energy and facilitate the development of innovative design techniques by individual architects. However, unlike its predecessor, which was marginalized in the shadow of the dominant functionalist paradigm, intellectual playfulness has emerged as a prominent cultural aspect within the discipline, establishing a realm of serious play governed by its own evaluative rules that remain relevant to this day. The metamorphosis of architectural criticality has unfurled fresh boundaries for intellectual pursuits within the discipline, leaving an indelible imprint on professional praxis and the nurturing grounds of design studio education. Contemporary architectural work is no longer solely assessed based on aesthetic qualities; the presence of a robust design concept has become crucial for a project to stand out. Axonometric drawings, frequently utilized in paper architecture, facilitate abstract reasoning and provide students with opportunities to observe, reflect upon, and learn from the intricate processes involved in architectural form-making (Luscombe 2014; Lucas 2019). Based on earlier practices, speculative architecture has emerged as a significant pedagogical practice in leading architectural schools, encouraging students to imagine alternative futures with a critical and open mindset ( Jasper 2014; Cutieru 2020). This has resulted in a proliferation of endeavors aiming to challenge perceived architectural and social norms by combining utopianism and criticality with a subversive spirit.

The Playful Turn in Contemporary Architecture The processes of globalization have significantly intensified in the late 20th century, although global exchange and interaction have existed since ancient times. The end of the Cold War in 1991 played a crucial role in integrating new markets and resources from former socialist countries into global capitalism. Additionally, the rapid advancement and widespread use of digital technologies have greatly facilitated the sharing of knowledge and information across borders, as well as the expansion of global trade and investment (Castells 2000). These changes have brought about a range of transformations under the new global conditions. Advanced capitalist countries have undergone a transition from manufacturing and industry-­ based economies to service and knowledge-based economies (Neef 1998). Financial and elite service sectors have concentrated in a network of global cities, accelerating the flow of capital 43

Duanfang Lu

(Sassen 1991). Labor-intensive manufacturing has relocated to developing countries with lower wages and environmental standards, aiming to maximize profits. In line with the neoliberal doctrine that promotes entrepreneurialism, the private sector has gained more power in urban development, while local governments have become facilitators of public-private partnerships. Place-making has increasingly catered to the interests of multinational corporations, tourists, and the middle- and upper-class consumers. Investment has focused on signature architecture and megaprojects to enhance the city’s international image and readiness for globalization (Chapter 21 in this book). Major cities in developing countries are now competing with their counterparts in developed nations to become centers of economic growth and innovation, attracting design talents and techniques to improve their international profile through iconic architecture and skyscrapers (Roy and Ong 2011). According to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat’s data from 2022, the top 10 cities with completed skyscrapers of 150 meters or taller are Hong Kong (553), Shenzhen (360), New York (309), Dubai (250), Guangzhou (187), Shanghai (183), Tokyo (167), Kuala Lumpur (153), Chongqing (142), and Chicago (135). In parallel with the profound changes brought by globalization and digitalization, there has been a noticeable “ludification” of culture, the economy, human life, and the built environment, as briefly discussed earlier in this chapter. This section will delve deeper into the playful turn as a fundamental characteristic of contemporary architecture, examining three interconnected dimensions: constructional, aesthetic, and programmatic playfulness.

Constructional Playfulness: The Sensuous, the Tectonic, and the Digital Despite their different stances on consumer capitalism, both postmodernist and avant-garde architecture had a tendency to reduce architecture to representation and discourse. This occurred as commercial built environments increasingly relied on symbolic references for place marketing and brand development (Gottdiener 1997; Isenstadt 2001). In response to the crisis of authenticity caused by this flattening and theming of architecture, two interconnected approaches emerged: the phenomenological and the tectonic. Explorations of phenomenology in architecture began in the 1950s, drawing inspiration from the works of philosophers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger, and Gaston Bachelard (Chapter 16 in this book). However, it was not until the late 1970s that phenomenology gained wider attention. Influential books like Junichiro Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows (1977), Christian Norberg-Schulz’s Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture (1980), and Juhani Pallasmaa’s The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses (1996) inspired generations of architects to focus on sensory and perceptual experiences in architecture. Architect Steven Holl (2000, 346), for example, has consciously embraced phenomenology as a framework for his designs, viewing sensations in space and time as a pre-theoretical and pre-logical foundation for architecture. Holl advocates for limited concepts that are site-specific and adaptable, granting architects the freedom to work within contingent and uncertain conditions. Watercolor, with its vibrant hues and fluidity, serves as a medium for Holl to not only express formal aspects but also the sensuous dimensions of his architectural resolutions, setting it apart from the rigorous Euclidean geometries emphasized in the axonometric drawings of Eisenman (Luscombe 2014). The concept of tectonics has been extensively explored by scholars and practitioners since the early 1980s, culminating in a significant tectonic moment in architecture by the 1990s. While historical arguments on tectonics were primarily rooted in structural rationalism, recent discussions have incorporated phenomenology to account for the complex interaction between humans and the sensory world (Schwartz 2016). Frampton (1983), for instance, draws on phenomenology in his exploration of critical regionalism. He invokes rich sensory perceptions, such as the intensity of light, darkness, heat and cold, and the tactile presence of materials, to illustrate the limitations 44

Architecture in the age of playfulness

of an architectural culture that reduced human experience to information, representation, or simulacrum. Written in the heyday of architectural criticality, Frampton conceptualizes the tactile as a crucial dimension in resisting the scenographic tendencies of postmodernism and the homogenizing processes of global modernism. For him, the tactile is critical in countering the Western inclination to interpret the environment solely from a perspectival standpoint, which leads to a conscious suppression of other senses and a “loss of nearness” (ibid., 29). It is through the tactile’s “capacity to arouse the impulse to touch” that Frampton introduces the importance of tectonics and proclaims that architectural autonomy is primarily derived from the tectonic rather than the scenographic (ibid.). Pallasmaa (2007, 64) shares a similar view regarding the sensory dimension of construction, stating that the authenticity of architectural experience is rooted in “the tectonic language of building and the comprehensibility of the act of construction to the senses”. Pallasmaa highlights how we engage with the world through our entire bodily existence by beholding, touching, listening, and measuring, with the experiential world “organized and articulated around the center of the body” (ibid.). While phenomenological exploration remained somewhat independent within the discipline, it aligned with the broader trend of consumer preferences shifting towards more meaningful and authentic experiences, fuelled by overall societal prosperity. The term “experience economy,” coined by Joseph Pine and James Gilmore (1999), captures this new economic paradigm that goes beyond traditional products, emphasizing the need for businesses to offer engaging experiences that resonate with customers at a deeper level. Central to this shift is the emergence of the neoliberal consumer, who seeks immersive experiences that reflect their inner desires and personal values. Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir Eat, Pray, Love (2006) serves as an example of this quest for meaning in life. The book, depicting a woman’s journey through Italy, India, and Bali, gained widespread popularity as a story of self-rescue and empowerment. This success led to over 400 product tie-ins on the Home Shopping Network, including yoga gear and prayer beads, while tour companies used the brand to entice women into spending money on vacations in pursuit of spiritual enlightenment (Williams 2014). This consumer culture not only fosters conditions that encourage consumption but also shapes the neoliberal subject, who seeks freedom through spending while often disregarding the social realities that contribute to their underlying anxieties. The rise of the neoliberal consumer necessitates a shift from functional and standardized artifacts to subjective branded experiences and customization. As Anna Klingmann (2007, 14) suggests, whereas Le Corbusier once presented industrial products like ocean liners, air liners, and motor cars as models for modernism, the 21st-century “cruise liners have changed from transportation vehicles motivated by efficiency to carefully constructed leisure platforms.” Architects like Geoffrey Bawa, Donald Friend, Kerry Hill, and Peter Muller have long been involved in crafting the ambiance of spaces, utilizing a combination of elements such as light, colors, tectonics, materials, sound, and scent. The result is a charming Asian tropical hospitality architecture that seamlessly blends with the lush natural environment, local building materials, open-air courtyards, pools, gardens, as well as local culture and traditions. As the experience economy continues to develop, the concept of atmosphere has gained increasing importance not only in academic research but also in design and branding practices (Löfgren 2014). German philosopher Gernot Böhme (2017, 33), for instance, defines atmosphere as “the felt presence of something or someone in space.” Seeking to establish atmosphere as the fundamental concept of a new aesthetics, Böhme explores it as a phenomenon that oscillates between the subject and the object (Böhme 1993). On one hand, atmospheres possess thing-like qualities, as they articulate their presence through qualities or ecstasies. On the other hand, they have subject-like qualities, as they are sensed by human beings in a bodily state of being in space (ibid.). 45

Duanfang Lu

These insights have prompted a more conscious pursuit of sensory richness in architecture. Peter Zumthor (2006), for instance, reflects on the idea of atmosphere in his book Atmosphere and applies it to his design approach. He likens his orchestration of multisensory experiences to tune and create an atmosphere, much like the tempering of pianos (ibid., 33). His Saint Benedict Chapel in Sumvitg, Switzerland (1989) serves as a poignant example in this regard. Rooted in the regional building tradition, the chapel’s exterior is adorned with naturally weathered wooden shingles. The dark tones evoke the transience of life and the workings of nature. Upon entering through a small door with a delicate handle, one finds themselves in a gently curved space defined by a unified and finely articulated wooden structure. Exposed columns and beams are clearly visible, while both the roof and the floor appear separable from the structure (Figure 1.30).

Figure 1.30 Interior of the Saint Benedict Chapel in Sumvitg, Switzerland (1989), by Peter Zumthor. Photo courtesy of Yijie Betty Liu.

46

Architecture in the age of playfulness

The design draws inspiration from the historical precedent of the clerestory, where a continuous opening separates the roof from the top of the wall, creating the impression that the roof hovers above. Natural light filters through the vertical frame and slats, imbuing the space with a sense of sacredness. The timber floor, slightly detached from the edge of the columns, which are in turn detached from the wall, gives the illusion of floating above the ground, anchored only by the columns (Figure 1.31). Its slight springiness underfoot enhances the sensuous experience of being in a floating vessel. Zumthor’s work should be viewed within the unique building culture of Europe. Building upon the legacy of Nordic modernist pioneers like Gunnar Asplund (Sweden), Alvar Aalto (­Finland), Kay Fisker (Denmark), and Bruno Matsson (Sweden), who carefully adapted modernism to the

Figure 1.31  Detailing of the Saint Benedict Chapel. Photo courtesy of Yijie Betty Liu.

47

Duanfang Lu

Figure 1.32 The Pfaffenholz Sports Centre in Saint-Louis, France (1993), by Herzog & de Meuron. Photo courtesy of Weijie Hu.

human scale and regional construction traditions, architectural education has consistently emphasized craftsmanship and the structural understanding of detailing. As a result, the level of craft skills and construction quality remains exceptionally high. In late 20th-century Switzerland, a new generation of architects embraced a design strategy that distinguished their work and earned them the moniker of the “Swiss Box” school (Roos 2017). This approach sought to create heightened sensory experiences through construction and materials, while simplifying forms by suppressing elements like windows and doors on facades, which gives buildings an object-like quality (Davidovici 2017). While Zumthor has elevated this approach to a refined art of construction, Herzog & de Meuron have taken it a step further by adding a critical dimension that challenges the norms of tectonics and materiality. For instance, in their design of the Stone House in Tavole, Italy (1988), they deliberately wrap the corners of the building with a continuous layer of rugged stone, defying the conventional structural articulation that would typically mark these points of strength. Similarly, their design for the Pfaffenholz Sports Centre in Saint-Louis, France (1993), features longitudinal facades wrapped in prefabricated concrete slabs with screen-printed patterns. This distinctive choice resulted in a captivating tattooed skin that challenged the usual restrictions on ornamentation in modern architecture (Figure 1.32). In both cases, constructional playfulness is achieved through a radical departure from disciplinary design conventions. In Japan, a close collaboration between architects, builders, craftspeople, and engineers has played a crucial role in achieving a remarkable level of construction and detailing quality (Buntrock 1997, 2001). Terunobu Fujimori, an architectural historian and architect, distinguishes between two categories of constructive exploration within Japanese architecture: the “Red School” and the “White School” (Buntrock 2010). The Reds prioritize sensuousness, craftsmanship, and wabi-sabi aesthetics by employing raw materials like wood, earth, and stone. Fujimori himself and Kengo Kuma represent opposite ends of the Reds’ spectrum, with Fujimori exploring vernacular materials and crafts in eccentric and playful structures as an autonomous outlier (Figure 1.33), while Kuma engages in a wide range of tectonic and material explorations as the director of a

48

Architecture in the age of playfulness

Figure 1.33 The Jinchokan Moriya Historical Museum in Chino, Nagano, Japan (1992), by Terunobu Fujimori. The building honors traditional craftsmanship, engaging the expertise of top-notch local plasterers and carpenters. The quartet of tree trunks embellishing the entrance pays homage to the onbashira pillars that denote Suwa shrines. Photo courtesy of Dana Buntrock.

large multinational firm (ibid., Figure 1.34). Both architects demonstrate a strong commitment to history and culture. In contrast, the Whites focus on lightness, abstraction, and precision, utilizing refined and predictable materials such as aluminum, steel, and glass. Toyo Ito and SANAA serve as representatives of the White School. In Ito’s Sendai Mediatheque (2001), horizontal steel-ribbed slabs are supported by 13 vertical steel tubular structures that span from the ground to the roof (Figure 1.35). The thin floor slabs, with a thickness of only 80 cm, consist of two metal plates welded to a grid of metal beams. The tubes defy conventional columns with their varying inclination, shape, and size. In the Koga Park Café, Ibaraki (1998) designed by SANAA (Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa), a flat, thin roof made of Keystone-steel plate, with a thickness of only 25 mm, is supported by 100 steel pipe-columns with a diameter of 60.5 mm (Figure 1.36). Despite their different scales, both projects achieve a weightless and immaterial structure through well-conceived technological solutions. The landscape of prefab architecture is undergoing a significant transformation, with a growing emphasis on lightweight and tectonic materials that can be efficiently manufactured in factories, quickly assembled on-site, and offer design flexibility in terms of function and aesthetics. Throughout the 20th century, societies faced challenges in implementing prefabrication techniques for mass housing production (Aitchison 2017). The architectural discipline’s fascination with prefabricated construction stemmed from early modernist ideals, which sought to utilize modern factory methods of mechanization, modulation, and standardization to create affordable mass housing (Herbert 1984; Zarecor 2011; Smith and Quale 2017). Architects from different regions adopted prefabricated concrete-panel systems for large-scale, low-cost housing projects, often sponsored by governments (Urban 2012). These systems were known by various names such as Large Panel System (LPS) in the UK, Khrushchyovka in Russia, plattenbau in Germany, danchi in Japan, dabanfang in China, panelház in Hungary, and Panelák in the former Czechoslovakia.

49

Duanfang Lu

Figure 1.34 Designed by Kengo Kuma & Associates in 2013, SunnyHills at Minami-Aoyama in Minato, Tokyo, Japan, exhibits a complex wooden lattice structure. This intricate network of interlocking timber, known as “ jigoku-gumi,” is a nod to the traditional techniques of Japanese wood joinery. Photo courtesy of Weijie Hu.

50

Architecture in the age of playfulness

Figure 1.35 Sendai Mediatheque in Sendai-shi, Japan (2001), by Toyo Ito & Associates. Photo courtesy of Jialin Hu.

Figure 1.36 Koga Park Café, Ibaraki, Japan (1998), by SANAA (Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa). Photo courtesy of Wiiii, CC-BY-SA, .

51

Duanfang Lu

While LPS offered a quick and relatively inexpensive solution to address housing shortages, it also garnered a negative reputation due to issues associated with the built projects, such as low quality, monotony, thermal bridging, water leaks, and poor structural integrity (Lu 2018). Some of these problems stem from the inherent contradiction between the use of stereotomic materials and off-site construction methods. Although improvements have been made in LPS over the years, greater success in prefab architecture has been achieved when both the tectonic material and tectonic construction method are used. Sweden, for instance, has embraced prefabricated timber components in approximately 84% of detached houses (Sweet 2015). The introduction of cross-laminated timber (CLT) since the 1990s has further expanded the possibilities of prefabrication. With its lightweight nature, enhanced structural properties, and suitability for off-site manufacturing, CLT has not only been utilized in panelized timber homes but has also opened up new opportunities for prefab high-rise buildings. One notable example is the Mjøstårnet building in Brumunddal (2019) by studio Voll Arkitekter (Norway), which stands at 85.4 meters and ranks among the tallest timber-frame structures globally. Architects like Shigeru Ban ( Japan) have been exploring the use of light recyclable materials, particularly paper and cardboard, for emergency architecture. Ban’s prefab paper structures, constructed with recycled cardboard tubes, tenting fabric, and local materials, have provided affordable shelters to many disaster victims. Beijing-based People’s Architecture Office (Zhe He, James Shen, and Feng Zang) has also employed prefab elements to create playful temporary structures such as mobile canopies and plug-in learning boxes (Figure 1.37). Additionally, there is a growing trend of utilizing shipping containers for modular construction. Over the past two decades, a new expertise focused on fabrication has emerged in architectural practice, fundamentally reshaping the way architects work, what they work on, and what they can achieve. In the past, the process from conceptualization to execution was lengthy and reliant on

Figure 1.37 The People’s Canopy (2017) by the Chinese firm People’s Architecture Office (PAO), represents an innovative feat in mobile architecture. This unique design features an extendable rooftop structure mounted on bicycle wheels, with the capacity to accommodate up to ten cyclists. Its versatility allows it to serve as a flexible architectural solution for events such as communal gatherings and performances. Photo courtesy of PAO.

52

Architecture in the age of playfulness

visual and verbal communication between designers, clients, builders, and manufacturers. Recent advancements in integrated and automated digital technologies have blurred the boundaries between design and fabrication (Bañón and Raspall 2020; Chaillou 2022; Chapter 26 in this book). Digital fabrication, initially developed in industrial manufacturing, has revolutionized workflows by directly translating digital data from computer-aided design (CAD) into computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) software, which then drives manufacturing machines like 3D printers or computer numerical control (CNC) tools (Hovestadt, Hirschberg, and Fritz 2020). Leading architectural institutions have established fabrication laboratories to explore the application of these techniques in construction, transforming the relationship between research and industry, as well as education and practice (Shi et al. 2020). A new generation of digital-savvy architects chooses to become hands-on makers, actively participating in the fabrication process rather than remaining distant designers (Kolarevic 2003; Picon 2010). This direct control over fabrication procedures has expanded the scope and possibilities of constructive explorations. The gap between experimental prototyping and manufacturing has been shortened, traditional materials have been reimagined, and novel materials have been developed (Marble 2012). Grey Lynn (USA) stands out as a pioneer in exploring the use of manufacturing technologies from aerospace and automobile industries in building design and construction. Additionally, he has contributed significantly to the theoretical development of computational design paradigms. Feng Yuan (China) has created a diverse body of work that integrates robotic fabrication, vernacular forms, and local building materials. Other architects, such as Marcos Cruz at UCL (Chapter 28 in this book) and Neri Oxman at MIT, have been exploring innovative building materials inspired by biological and natural principles. Drawing inspiration from animal architecture and building behavior, Oxman uses co-fabrication systems to build hybrid structures such as Silk Pavilion with silkworms and Synthetic Apiary with bees. In his book Animal Architecture and Building Behaviour, Michael Hansell (1984) lists seven different methods employed by animals: sculpting, piling up, molding, rolling and folding, sticking together, weaving, and sewing. While our construction methods have historically involved combining simple geometric solids in stiff compositions for the past 10,000 years, developments in new digital techniques have started to diversify how buildings can be constructed. Drawing inspiration from animal building behaviors and employing the principles of biomimicry can not only broaden the realm of constructional playfulness but also enable us to tap into nature’s solutions for creating structures that are more sustainable, efficient, and resilient.

Aesthetic and Programmatic Playfulness: Towards Weightless Humanity While the modern conception of the human subject emphasized autonomy and freedom, the burdens of social hierarchy, repression, inequality, and relentless work persisted. Ilya Repin’s painting Barge Haulers on the Volga (1870–1873) depicts exhausted workers laboring under a heavy load, symbolizing the unbearable weight of toil and suffering in modern times. However, the postwar era witnessed significant social and political changes, including the rise of the welfare state and movements advocating for civil rights, women’s rights, peace, and environmentalism. More individuals began to experience personal freedom and enjoy various rights and privileges that were once exclusive to a select few. Since the 1990s, the integration of digital technology into every aspect of our lives has further alleviated the burdens imposed on humanity. Hierarchical structures have given way to functionally differentiated networks, where numerous autonomous assemblages thrive (Castells 2000). Ordinary people now have access to powerful tools and vast resources, leading to exciting innovations often emerging from informal networks of enthusiasts (Frissen et al. 2015). Instead of relying on limited traditional media channels, a new digital democracy has emerged, where users 53

Duanfang Lu

contribute their everyday content through social media, fostering greater societal complexity and the formation of diverse subjectivities (Contucci et al. 2019). Michel Foucault (1982, 777–778) once observed that his research focused on “the different ways in which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects.” By highlighting the power dynamics among institutions and actors that shape and transform human subjects, Foucault’s concepts of governmentality, power/knowledge, and biopower have had a profound impact on cultural studies. Building upon Foucault’s understanding of subject formation, I will examine the transformation, creation, and self-making of three new types of human subjects in the pursuit of weightless humanity: the innovator, the environmental subject, and the player. I suggest that these subjectivities have significant implications for the design of built environments. Subsequently, I will delve into the exploration of aesthetic and programmatic playfulness in contemporary architecture. I The Innovator. In the realm of production, the worker subject, once seen as interchangeable labor in industrial society, has been redefined as the autonomous innovator in post-­industrial society. The rapid advancement of technology, coupled with ever-evolving consumer preferences and trends, has shortened the lifecycle of products and services. To remain relevant, companies must engage in frequent innovation. In the digital age, the internet enables wide-reaching and fast network effects, leading to a self-reinforcing cycle where competitive products or services gain market share quickly, leaving non-innovative companies far behind. Consequently, innovation has become more vital for companies than ever before. In the past, wealth accumulation relied on amassing land in agricultural societies, and increasing productivity while reducing costs in industrial societies. However, in the post-­ industrial knowledge economy, innovation has taken center stage, driving the demand for a creative workforce (Figure 1.38). Richard Florida’s influential book, The Rise of the Creative Class (2002), theorized the creative class as a central force propelling economic growth. Various spatial strategies have emerged to cultivate and support innovators, including planning innovation complexes and creating stimulating work environments. The incorporation of playful office environments to enhance employee creativity and engagement has become a popular trend among high-tech companies. For instance, the Amazon Headquarters in Seattle (2018), designed by NBBJ, features three glass domes housing a diverse collection of exotic plants. In addition to multiple office buildings and gathering spaces, the campus includes

Figure 1.38 The master plan for the Shenzhen Bao’an Central Area “Green Axis” Complex Design Competition, China (2000), by Gang Gang and Duanfang Lu. Anticipating the needs of its creative workforce, the plan incorporated various cultural facilities when the city was still known as “the world’s factory.” This proposal, which won the first prize of the competition, remains the official master plan for this significant precinct in Shenzhen, a city that has since transformed into China’s innovation hub. Digital render by Gang Gang and Duanfang Lu.

54

Architecture in the age of playfulness

unique amenities such as a dog park, fitness center, retail spaces, and public parks. These playful office environments not only contribute to supporting the innovator subject but also serve as branding strategies for these companies, positioning themselves as industry innovators. II The environmental subject. The emergence of the environmental subject can be attributed to the rise of environmentalist movements, policies, and programs, where the environment is recognized as a critical domain of concern and action (Agrawal 2005, 16). Buckminster Fuller’s book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969) was an early expression of this environmentally-­oriented mindset. By envisioning Earth as a spaceship traversing through space, Fuller urged individuals to adopt a more conscientious approach towards its management, preservation, and sustainability, akin to how astronauts would care for their weightless vessel. He proposed that social systems should be guided by designers, engineers, and artists rather than “ghostly prerogatives” such as politicians and financiers. While his political vision remains unrealized, the sense of acute peril aboard spaceship Earth, as presented by Fuller, has become increasingly palpable in the ensuing decades due to environmental crises such as deforestation, pollution, energy crises in the 1970s, the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, and climate change. Environmental movements around the world have played a significant role in raising awareness of environmental issues. Governments at various levels have developed reports, policies, and programs to promote renewable energy, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and protect ecosystems and natural habitats. The Brundtland Report “Our Common Future” (United Nations 1987) advocated for development within environmental limits and defined sustainable development as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. These efforts have prompted a profound shift in people’s relationship with the planet. More individuals recognize the necessity of minimizing humanity’s impact on Earth by using resources wisely, reducing waste, and living in harmony with nature. Different environmental subject positions, such as green consumerism, feminist environmentalism, and environmental radicalism, have emerged as a result of the interplay between cultural and community values, regulatory norms and institutions, calculations of social and economic interests, and self-conceptions. As buildings constitute the largest energy-­consuming and greenhouse-gas-emitting sector – accounting for 48% in the US, for ­example – ­a rchitecture is regarded as a pivotal factor in shaping a more sustainable future ( Janda 2011). Sustainability has increasingly become an integral part of architecture school curricula in recent years, and the motto “touch the earth lightly” by Australian architect Glenn Marcus Murcutt has resonated deeply with many individuals in the profession. III The player. Scientists report that play, a voluntary activity having its aim in itself and accompanied by a feeling of joy and tension, is ubiquitous throughout the animal kingdom (Fagen 1981). Researchers have observed that animals engage in playful behavior for a significant portion of their waking hours, when they are not occupied with activities essential for their survival, such as searching for food or responding to threats (Pellegrini and Smith 2005). For animals, play can simply be a pure expression of movement and motion without any apparent purpose. In contrast, an updated version of Homo luden, the 21st-century player subject, has emerged as a result of a wide range of far more complex pleasures offered by digital media (de Lange et al. 2015, 25). This development has been closely tied to the evolution of the internet, transitioning from static web pages to a more interactive and collaborative platform known as Web 2.0. Its multimedia capabilities, interactivity, and connectivity have brought humanity closer than ever to the realm of play, while also subjecting individuals to the growing demand for instant gratification.

55

Duanfang Lu

Social media platforms provide users with a vast playground to participate in the production and distribution of cultural content on their own terms ( Jenkins 2006, 133). This has given rise to a new cultural ecology that blurs the lines between producers and consumers, facilitated by the rapid streams of social media, the prevalence of self-referential short videos and selfies, and the abundance of advertisements masquerading as authentic stories. The popularity of video games has surged in recent years, both as a leisure activity and a thriving industry, with approximately three billion people regularly engaging in gaming and the computer gaming sector becoming a significant driver of the economy (Hart et al. 2017). These immersive (and often addictive) virtual playgrounds offer gamers new opportunities for experiential enhancement, individual identity formation, and social interaction both online and offline (Arbeau et al. 2020). With smartphones serving as functional extensions of human bodies and intimately connected to our existence (Park and Kaye 2019), individuals can easily escape their everyday lives and enter the magical realm of play. As play permeates various aspects of contemporary human life, no serious domain is exempt from its ludic influence (de Lange et al. 2015, 21). Consequently, there is a growing recognition of the ludic economy, an economic system centered around play and games (Giddings and Harvey 2018). Within this process of ludification, spatial professionals have increasingly acknowledged the innate human need for play, which prompt them to think and act in new ways. Increasing attention is paid to the parallels between the theory and practice of game design and those of architecture, urban design, and city planning (e.g., Stevens, 2007; Walz 2010; Dodig and Groat 2020). A growing body of literature on ludic urban interventions explores the potential for built environments to stimulate playful activities and inspire social interaction (e.g., Lonsway 2009; Donoff and Bridgman 2017; Mews 2022). Liane Lefaivre and Döll (2007, 28), for instance, advocate for “an inspiring alternative that cultivates the potential of homo ludens in an urban context.” *** Considering these emerging new subjectivities, I propose a threefold comprehension of weightless humanity as our new existential constitution, encapsulating: the gradual and hard-fought liberation from oppressive forces, the perpetual pursuit of minimizing environmental impact, and the increasing sense of freedom experienced within digital realms. Architects inhabit and contribute to this novel existential condition, leveraging their unique skills, knowledge, and expertise in creating new spaces and forms. Their endeavors reflect and sometimes amplify the transformed values and aspirations of the community. Notably, a few architects have gained sudden popularity due to an accidental alignment between their individual styles and the newly desired aesthetic qualities, such as the cases of Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid. Conversely, certain architectural works from the previous era no longer captivate the general public aesthetically within this shifted existential framework. For instance, the Netherlands Dance Theater (1987), Rem Koolhaas’s seminal project, was demolished in 2015 with minimal public protest: “The few objections raised against the demolition or emotional tributes mostly emanated from OMA employees or close associates of the firm” (Kats 2016). Many architects have taken an active role in adapting to changes, discerning emerging needs, and developing new formal and spatial approaches in response. In contrast to Mies’s famous adage “less is more” and Venturi’s play on it with “less is bore,” Bjarke Ingels proclaims “yes is more,” viewing the architect’s task as the ability to integrate differences, “not through compromise or by choosing sides”, but by intertwining them into a knot of innovative ideas (Møller 2013). Through their idiosyncratic formal, constructional, sustainable, and programmatic innovations, architects

56

Architecture in the age of playfulness

continuously respond to social, cultural, environmental, and technological shifts with a subversive spirit. Meanwhile, architectural criticism has transcended the realm of professional critics (Brisbin and Thiessen 2018). The Instagramized architectural discourse connects amateur photographers and commentators, creating an “imagined community” of likers and dislikers on global online platforms. This fosters an ongoing reimagining of what constitutes a desirable building in our time, propelling the perpetual metamorphosis of contemporary architecture in accordance with evolving societal aspirations. It is the interplay between professional and public responses, I argue, that drives the transition from the modern to the contemporary in architecture. To gain insight into the transition, it is instructive to compare two iconic buildings: the Sydney Opera House (1973) designed by John Utzon and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao by Gehry (1997). Both structures have become beloved landmarks in their respective cities and exemplify significant advancements in constructional innovation well ahead of their time. While both feature curvaceous, abstract, and sculptural forms situated on waterfront locations, they possess distinct aesthetic characteristics. The Sydney Opera House embodies a sense of harmony and order, thoughtfully relating its components and adopting a classical expression of weight (Figure 1.39). Three clusters of shellshaped roofs are meticulously balanced to create a dynamic yet orderly composition. Although they soar upward and cantilever outward, evoking the sensation of sailing on the sea using the wind, they remain grounded on a raised monumental podium, which folds to form a grand staircase on the street side. Inspired by historical precedents, Utzon (2002, 9) emphasized minimizing the number and size of openings on the plateau to avoid “the appearance of an office building with an unbalanced white structure on top.” The shells are adorned with white and cream mate tiles that reflect light in a unique manner, imparting a luminous and ethereal quality that contrasts with the solid, dark-stone base. With both its formal organization and weight accommodation articulated through a clear structural understanding, the animated upper portion is held in equilibrium, resulting in an elegant, harmonious, and timeless aesthetic character. In contrast, the Bilbao Museum showcases playfulness, subversion, and transience. Its curvilinear, titanium-clad elements appear to collide and merge in an improvisational manner, forming a dynamic and fluid composition instead of a stable and permanent one (Figure 1.1). Traditional notions of load-bearing and construction logic seem to be defied, giving the building the appearance of a spaceship floating in a weightless universe where the laws of gravity no longer apply.

Figure 1.39  The Sydney Opera House, Sydney, Australia (1973), by John Utzon. Photo by Duanfang Lu.

57

Duanfang Lu

This sense of weightlessness is further enhanced by the thin titanium plates that comprise the undulating facade, creating a shimmering effect that changes with the passage of time. Inside, fragmented volumes are connected in a serendipitous and non-linear manner, following the irregular lines of the external structure (Figure 1.40). Gehry’s architecture exudes an improvisational, playful, and subversive aesthetic character, even earning him a guest appearance on an episode

Figure 1.40 The interior of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao brings about a journey of surprise and discovery through a maze of interconnected curvaceous spaces. Photo by Duanfang Lu.

58

Architecture in the age of playfulness

of The Simpsons where he crumples up a letter from Marge and uses it as the model for his design of a concert hall, which is later transformed into a playground by skateboarding youths. Notably, when asked about the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles (2003) also designed by Gehry, a ten-year-old girl expressed her appreciation but suggested that it would be even better if she could slide on it. ­Gehry’s work thus exemplifies how architecture can both respond to and inspire the innate playfulness of humanity. Contrary to the playful interpretation depicted in The Simpsons, the seemingly effortless and ludic form of the Bilbao Museum was meticulously planned, designed, and executed at the cusp of the analog-to-digital transition. Like the building of the Sydney Opera House, it pushed the boundaries of engineering and construction technologies of its time. While the Bilbao Museum employed cutting-edge Computer Aided Three-Dimensional Interactive Application (CATIA) software and Computer Numerical Control (CNC) routers to shape its titanium panels, other construction techniques remained relatively conventional during its development in the early 1990s (Mendelsohn 2017). The advent of parametric design software has revolutionized the architectural field since then, enabling architects to create complex, non-linear, and adaptable forms more efficiently by using mathematical algorithms and virtual testing before physical construction. The emergence of these digital tools has not only improved the cost-effectiveness and precision of design and construction processes but has also transformed the way architects work and the forms they produce. The influence of parametric design is particularly evident in the works of Zaha Hadid. Drawing inspiration from Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematist paintings, Hadid initially explored fragmented, sharp, and angular forms. Unlike Malevich’s work where elements adrift with no discernible trajectory or destination, however, Hadid introduced the horizontal force, directionality, motion, and speed. Her works such as the Vitra Fire Station (1993) and MAXXI Museum (2009) feature a dynamic flow of planes both externally and internally as if propelled by a lateral force (Figure 1.41). Hadid’s firm began to employ parametric design in the late 1990s, utilizing critical parameters such as form, light, color, and urban context to generate emergent configurations. Compared to manually manipulated forms, these parametric modulations result in highly relational designs that encompass the overall urban direction, building massing, interior spaces, and tectonic expression (Lee 2015). Hadid’s early works reflected sentiments of aggression, subversion, and anti-establishment akin to the emergence of the punk subculture in the 1970s. However, her later works have seamlessly assimilated into mainstream consumer culture. Rather than being unpredictable and fleeting debris, her buildings now exhibit a softly emergent and fluid character. While her earlier works encapsulated the tension and anxiety associated with navigating a fast-paced and ever-changing social landscape of modernity, her later works reflect the new liquid subjectivity of the digital age’s player, equipped with enhanced adaptability and confidence in managing an increasingly complex and flexible environment. I argues that it is through this profound empathetic connection to the player subject that the public resonate with malleable parametric figurations in our time. The rise of parametric design has led Patrik Schumacher, Zaha Hadid’s practice partner, to propose Parametricism as a new design paradigm, emphasizing the symbiotic relationship between buildings and the urban fabric. However, in many parametric design projects, this symbiosis remains a formalistic exercise in aesthetic playfulness. For instance, the Guangzhou Opera House by Zaha Hadid Architects lacks a strong connection to the river despite its waterfront location, while the vast square in front of the Harbin Grand Theatre by MAD falls short in creating a comfortable and inviting environment for people to interact, lacking outdoor seating, public toilets, and accessibility to toilets and other facilities inside the theatre for visitors who are not ticket holders for performances. In contrast, the Sydney Opera House exemplifies a more contemporary approach 59

Duanfang Lu

Figure 1.41 The MAXXI Museum in Rome, Italy (2009), officially known as the National Museum of 21st Century Arts, by Zaha Hadid. It showcases an array of fluid spaces in a complex, intertwining layout. Photo courtesy of Yijie Betty Liu.

by carefully considering urban engagement. Unlike the historical precedents used, Utzon democratized the stepped plateau, transforming it into a gathering place and outdoor auditorium. The inclusion of waterfront restaurants and bars at reasonable prices allows the public to enjoy the building even if they cannot afford to attend performances. Utzon commented in a 2002 interview: “Sometimes in architecture it happens that a daring step into the unknown gives us great gifts for the future” (Murray 2003). Conceptualized in 1956 and still in tune with contemporary urbanity, his building exemplifies such visionary endeavors.

60

Architecture in the age of playfulness

Similarly, high-tech architecture continues to thrive in the digital age and serve society effectively. This trend, known for its technologically driven aesthetics and construction methods, began with a modest factory project, Reliance Controls in Swindon (1967), by Team 4 (Su Brumwell, Richard Rogers, Wendy Cheesman, and Norman Foster). It showcased delicate mechanical tectonics through the use of prefabricated cast steel parts, offering maximum flexibility within a columnless space. Over time, high-tech architecture became more playful and expressive, reaching its peak with iconic works such as the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (1971) by Renzo Piano and Rogers, the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich (1978) and the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) Headquarters (1985) by Foster, and the Lloyd’s building in London (1986) by Rogers. Similar to the initial negative reception of the Eiffel Tower, the Pompidou faced outrage from Parisians due to its unconventional design with architecture being turned inside-out, but over time it has become one of the world’s most visited buildings. The exposure of structural steel and mechanical services, popularized through the Pompidou, has since become widely accepted as a design strategy. Reflecting contemporary societal aspirations for innovation and a culture of cool (Frank 1997), the industrial aesthetics showcased in high-tech architecture demonstrate no indications of waning. Transitioning from theatrical expressions back to delicate structural design since the 1990s, the pioneers of high-tech architecture have continuously pushed the boundaries by incorporating latest constructional, digital, and sustainable concepts and technologies. Renzo Piano’s Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Center in Nouméa, New Caledonia (1998) draws inspiration from the indigenous Kanak culture, utilizing natural materials like wood and bamboo to create an exquisite skyline along the Pacific shore. The Millennium Dome in London (2000) by ­Rogers, one of the largest tensile structures with a diameter of 365 meters, boasts a roof structure that weighs less than the air contained within the building itself, achieving a remarkable feat of engineering (Degori n.d). 30 St Mary Axe in London (2003) by Foster + Partners, known as “the Gherkin,” showcases a unique tapering form made possible through the application of parametric design (Figure 1. 42). The triangulated steel perimeter structure supports the glass skyscraper without the need for extra reinforcements. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) technology was employed to model the building’s ventilation system and analyze its energy performance, making the Gherkin a prime example of sustainable design in skyscrapers. It incorporates features such as a double-skin facade for insulation, a ventilation system utilizing outside air for cooling, rainwater harvesting and greywater systems, as well as the use of recycled steel and glass. Driven by a global demand for technological innovation and sustainable design, the superb expertise and sober style of Foster + Partners have garnered commissions for a wide range of building types. The firm has found a particularly fitting client base in high-tech companies. For example, Foster + Partners has designed Apple Park, a ring-shaped Apple Headquarters in Cupertino (2018), as well as various Apple Stores worldwide. The latest addition to their portfolio of works commissioned by tech giants is the DJI Sky City in Shenzhen (2022). The design of DJI’s headquarters embodies a sense of lightness, which stands in striking contrast to the imposing steel mega-trusses seen on the facade of Foster’s earlier project, the HSBC Headquarters (1985), located in the neighboring city of Hong Kong (Figure 1.43). DJI Sky City showcases a series of steel truss-encased, column-free glass volumes cantilevered at varying heights from the vertical cores of the twin towers. The illusion of glass volumes floating in the sky is created by leaving some lower levels empty. A slim and delicate suspension skybridge, spanning 90 meters, connects the twin towers, appearing ephemeral and weightless. In contrast to the HSBC Headquarters’ mighty exoskeleton and large central atrium, which impose a diminishing effect on workers, the design of DJI Sky City aligns with the contemporary concept of a workplace environment

61

Duanfang Lu

Figure 1.42  30 St Mary Axe in London, UK (2003), by Foster + Partners. Photo by Duanfang Lu.

that “embodies the spirit of invention and innovation” (Mairs 2018). The headquarters features programmatic innovations catering to the needs of innovators, including exhibition halls, drone flight testing labs, a gym, rooftop gardens, a community healthcare center, lobbies with indoor zen gardens, as well as bicycle storage facilities and easy access to public transportation to support sustainable lifestyles. Diverse environmental movements have given rise to the demand for sustainable design (Lee  2011). Architect Ken Yeang from Malaysia has been at the forefront of developing green architecture and urban design since the 1970s. His concepts such as “bioclimatic architecture” integrates ecological principles and natural processes into building and city design, while the

62

Architecture in the age of playfulness

Figure 1.43 Left: DJI Sky City in Shenzhen (2022), by Foster + Partners. Photo courtesy of Ke Song. Right: The HSBC headquarters in Hong Kong (1985), by Norman Foster. Photo courtesy of James Jixian Wang.

notion of “eco-skyscrapers” aims to create self-contained ecosystems within tall buildings using natural light, ventilation, solar shading, and greenery. Working from a different context, Pakistani architect Yasmeen Lari adopts a low-tech, low-cost approach to sustainable housing for the poor, particularly for those affected by earthquakes and flooding (Figure 1.44). Following the footsteps of Hassan Fathy, she promotes an architecture that respects humanity, culture, tradition, and nature: “shaping the houses to the measure of people’s songs, weaving the pattern of a village as if

63

Duanfang Lu

Figure 1.44 Designed by Yasmeen Lari, the Lari Octa Green shelter in Makli, Pakistan, was a response to the extensive housing damage caused by the earthquake in October 2015.  The design embraced a zero-carbon approach, utilizing local materials like mud, lime, and bamboo. Photo courtesy of GRuban,  CC-BY-SA, .

on the village looms, mindful of the trees and the crafts that grow there, respectful of the skylines and humble before the seasons” (Somaya 2000). German architect Rolf Disch is another visionary in sustainable architecture and communities. His Heliotrope (1994) was the world’s first house to generate more energy than it consumed, based on his PlusEnergy concept. The house rotates to face the sun during winter, maximizing solar gain, and turns its highly insulated back to the sun when heating is not needed. The rooftop solar panels also rotate independently to optimize sun exposure. Disch has also designed several sustainable communities, such as the Vauban neighborhood in Freiburg, Germany, which prioritizes walking and cycling with crescent-shaped streets and an extensive network of pedestrian and bike paths. It is also the first neighborhood where all houses can produce a surplus of solar energy. The environmentally conscious public increasingly seeks architectural aesthetics that embody sustainability in a more legible and delightful way than simply the implementation of evaluation standards such as BREEAM (Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method) and LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification in buildings. A new generation of architects has emerged, offering fresh green aesthetics that inspire and captivate. Vietnamese architect Vo Trong Nghia uses ecologically sensitive methods and materials, particularly bamboo, to create memorable and playful tropical buildings. Likewise, Indian architect Anupama Kundoo grounds her sustainable designs in the specific context. In her design of Wall House in Auroville, India (2000), Kundoo creates a unique architectural character by using a variety of age-old local building techniques and elements (e.g., terracotta filler slabs, jack arches, and interlocking tubes) and engaging both skilled craftsmen and lower-skilled workers. Diébédo Francis Kéré, the first African laureate of the Pritzker Prize, also takes a locally, environmentally, and aesthetically sensitive approach in designing schools, homes, and healthcare clinics across Africa (Figure 1.46). His design for the Opera Village in Laongo, Burkina Faso (2013), for example, is an integrated complex that houses a school, residential areas, and a medical center, all centered around an open-air theatre. The buildings, predominantly constructed from local clay, employ natural ventilation as a vital aspect of the design given the region’s warm 64

Architecture in the age of playfulness

Figure 1.45 Heliotrope in Freiburg, Germany (1994), by Rolf Disch. Photo courtesy of Andrewglaser, CCBY-SA, .

climate. With its bold geometric forms and a intimate connection to the landscape, the Opera Village has become an architectural landmark. Providing education, healthcare, and cultural facilities, the project has also significantly enhanced community development and social upliftment. Kéré’s work thus demonstrates that architecture can bring care, joy, and hope to communities with limited resources. 65

Duanfang Lu

Figure 1.46 Buildings in Opera village, Laongo, Burkina Faso (2013) designed by Diébédo Francis Kéré feature slanted double-skin roofs supported by a lightweight steel frame over clay brick walls. Photo courtesy of Francis Kéré Architecture, CC-BY-SA, .

In line with the concept of “cradle-to-cradle” waste-free design (McDonough and Braungart 2002), adaptive reuse of existing buildings has become essential for sustainable development. This approach avoids the wasteful process of demolition and reactivates cultural and industrial heritage for contemporary use. One outstanding example is the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town (2017) by Heatherwick Studio. The museum repurposes the historic Grain Silo Complex, carving out new functional spaces within its dense cellular structure of multiple tubes by using 3D organic shapes. The result is a stunning and playful transformation that breathes new life into the building. Creating ludic spaces has become a global trend, where projects incorporate unconventional programmatic innovations to promote playfulness. The Amager Bakke Powerplant in Copenhagen (2017) by BIG, also known as “CopenHill,” stands out as it combines a waste-processing factory with recreational facilities like hiking trails, climbing walls, a fitness center, and even an artificial ski slope on its slanted roof. Similarly, the Helsinki Central Library Oodi in Finland (2018) by ALA Architects redefines the traditional concept of a library by introducing additional amenities such as a café, restaurant, makerspace, and movie theater to create a fun and interactive social space. Oodi’s ground floor seamlessly integrates with the city’s public square, encouraging people to gather and relax. The upper floor, known as “book heaven,” offers both quiet reading zones and noisy play areas for families, providing a distinct departure from the solemn atmosphere of libraries in the past (Figure 1. 47). As an instance, Exeter Library (1972) designed by Louis Khan encapsulates a profound quest for knowledge, symbolized by the progression from lower to upper levels, from darkness to light. In contrast, Oodi, by integrating spaces for learning and leisure, resonates with the concept of the Fun Palace proposed by the late British architect Cedric Price in 1964, envisioning a socially interactive machine (Mathews 2005). China, a nation with a long history of books, has also witnessed the increasing ludification of libraries and bookstores, with designs that evoke a sense of liberation and joy. Examples include Liyuan Library in Beijing (2011) by Li Xiaodong Atelier, the seashore library in Qinhuangdao (2015) 66

Architecture in the age of playfulness

Figure 1.47 The  Helsinki Central Library Oodi, Finland  (2018), by ALA Architects. Photo courtesy of Ninara, CC-BY-SA, .

Figure 1.48  West Village Grand Yard in Chengdu, China (2015), by Jiakun Architects. Photo by Duanfang Lu.

by Vector Architects, and Binhai New Area Library in Tianjin (2017) by MVRDV (­Figure 1.2), among others. These spaces aim to create a unique experience for visitors, allowing them to escape from the routine of daily life. West Village Grand Yard (Xicun dayuan) in Chengdu (2015) by Jiakun Architects is another example of creating a diverse range of ludic spaces through the unusual combination of commercial establishments and sports facilities (Figure 1.48). Japan, renowned for its ludic economy, has witnessed the extension of the concept of playfulness to residential architecture. 67

Duanfang Lu

The trend has made possible the actualization of unconventional and imaginative domestic spaces such as those provided by Sou Fujimoto’s House N (2008) and House NA (2012). Dubai has emerged as a global capital of play in the 21st century, embracing the ludic economy with an array of imaginative recreational facilities and programs. It boasts an impressive lineup of attractions, including Atlantis Palm (Figure 1.49), IMG Worlds of Adventure, Miracle Garden,

Figure 1.49 Entrance Hall of Atlantis, The Palm (2008), a hotel and resort situated on the artificial Palm Jumeirah Island in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The design combines imaginative design elements inspired by the lost city of Atlantis rising from the sea. Photo by Duanfang Lu.

68

Architecture in the age of playfulness

Global Village, Motiongate, Bollywood, and Legoland theme parks. The Dubai Mall (2008), a collaborative project between Emaar, DP Architects, WSP, and Kinnersley Kent Design, goes beyond being a conventional shopping mall. It offers a diverse range of ludic experiences, such as a large aquarium, an underwater zoo, an ice-skating rink, a haunted house, a mini-city for children to engage in role-playing activities, an indoor amusement park dedicated to virtual reality, and various gaming arcades. Located adjacent to the iconic Burj Khalifa skyscraper, the mall is part of the vibrant Downtown Dubai complex, which also includes the Dubai Fountain, Dubai Opera, and Burj Park. This integrated ludic environment provides visitors with numerous opportunities to play, interact, and immerse themselves in a joyous urban experience. Dubai has further solidified its position as a center of playfulness by breaking a world record with the unveiling of Deep Dive Dubai in 2021. This extraordinary pool, reaching a depth of 60 meters, resembles an abandoned underwater city, inviting divers to explore its sunken ruins and even play chess underwater. The pool is enhanced by lighting and sound systems that create a mysterious atmosphere, adding vibrancy to the immersive playscape. The city also hosts a range of annual events, including the Dubai World Game Summit, esports tournaments, gaming competitions, and game showcases, highlighting its dedication to the game industry and celebrating gaming culture. The Dubai Expo 2020 featured a dedicated “Future of Entertainment” pavilion that showcased the latest advancements in ludic and gaming technology. Dubai’s significant investments in the ludic economy have not only diversified its economic landscape but also positioned the city as a leader in the development of innovative forms of play. Recognizing the importance of imagination in driving productivity within the ludic economy, Dubai’s city planners and designers have successfully harnessed this element to create a captivating and vibrant built environment.

Concluding Remarks: Connecting the Responsive, the Critical, and the Innovative Humans (Homo sapiens), the only hairless primate among the 193 known species of monkeys and apes (Morris 1967), is the only primate with the remarkable ability to construct shelters. Through their building behavior, humans were able to evolve and adapt, shedding most of their body hair while mitigating the challenges posed by the environment. If shelters provide care for fragile naked bodies, architecture allows humans to stay connected as social beings. Through symbolic communication of the presence of higher being(s) or values that society seeks to exalt, architecture forges bonds among unrelated individuals and forms hierarchical communities (Upton 2015). An exemplary illustration of this can be found in the ancient stepwells of India. These architectural marvels were conceptualized based on the idea of water as the boundary (tirtha) between heaven and earth in Hindu cosmology. In contrast to regular wells, stepwells were specifically designed with descending stairs that formed intricate geometric patterns, symbolizing the transformative journey towards the spiritual realm. Along the path, sculptures, platforms, and pavilions were incorporated, accentuating the architectural significance of these structures (Livingston 2002). Beyond their practical purpose of facilitating access to groundwater and offering a naturally cool atmosphere, stepwells evolved into vibrant communal spaces for gatherings and religious rituals. While architecture like stepwells used to be regarded as “books of stone,” imbued with profound religious, cultural, and social meanings, Victor Hugo, in his 1831 novel Notre-Dame de Paris, expressed concern that the advent of the printing industry and widespread availability of knowledge would delegitimize religious orders and lead to the demise of architecture. Hugo famously wrote, “This will kill that. The book will kill the edifice… The press will kill the church” (Hugo [1831] 2017, Chapter 2 of Book 5). However, history has proven Hugo’s prediction wrong. As demonstrated in the preceding discussion, architecture has found ways to adapt and thrive. 69

Duanfang Lu

Through the efforts of generations of architects and builders, architecture continues to evolve and remain relevant by embracing changing needs, values, and technologies, showing its resilience and enduring vitality throughout human history. The Vessel, located in Hudson Yards, New York (2019) and designed by Thomas Heatherwick, illustrates how far we have come both with regard to architecture and humanity. Drawing inspiration from ancient Indian stepwells, the Vessel is an open network of staircases and platforms arranged in repetitive patterns, showcasing constructional, aesthetic, and programmatic innovations (Figure 1.50). Featuring a self-supporting honeycomb-like structure composed of pre-fabricated bronzed steel components, the building exudes an appearance of weightlessness akin to the expandable foam mesh. As it ascends, the bowl-shaped structure gradually widens, yet its purpose remains solely to provide visitors with staircases to climb and revel in panoramic views of the Hudson River and the city skyline. Some may question the significance of a building

Figure 1.50 The Vessel in Hudson Yards, New York (2019), by Thomas Heatherwick. Photo courtesy of Weijie Hu.

70

Architecture in the age of playfulness

solely dedicated to playful exploration, but its intricate design has made it an Instagram-worthy landmark, generating countless social media posts. At first glance, the Vessel appears to embody the playful ideals of Constant’s New Babylon project, resonating with the contemporary desire for lightheartedness and enjoyment. It serves as a compelling symbol of a weightless humanity in our time by emphasizing playfulness over work. However, unlike Constant’s vision of transcending the spectacle of capitalist society, the Vessel becomes a living testament to Debord’s (1967, 34) thesis that “[the] spectacle is capital accumulated to the point that it becomes an image”. And not just that: in the digital age, the Vessel’s visibility and popularity are amplified through the proliferation of selfies and other user-generated content, which in turn contributes to the accumulation of capital. As part of the extensive $25 billion Hudson Yards project, this visually striking amenity serves to attract potential investors, renters, and consumers to its exclusive high-end condominiums, corporate offices, and luxury retail spaces catering primarily to the wealthy elite. Notably, the pricing of apartment units in the vicinity reaches staggering figures, with some duplex reaching up to $32 million (Dobnik, 2019). Consequently, despite its outward appearance of inclusivity and openness, the Vessel falls short in truly embodying inclusiveness. Far from being an actualized utopia embodying homo ludens with maximum freedom for creative play, the Vessel unveils itself as a dark reflection of it. Tragically, it has been marred by suicides and indefinitely closed to the public since the summer of 2021. This closure casts a sombre shadow over its initial promise, revealing the bleak realities behind the captivating façade of capitalism. There is only a thin line between weightless and meaningless humanity, and we find ourselves delicately dancing on that line. The year 2022 marked a significant milestone as AI image generators made their way into the creative industries. Powerful AI tools like MidJourney, DALL-E, and Stable Diffusion have showcased their extraordinary potential to automate creative tasks that were traditionally performed by humans. In the age of AI, what does it truly mean to be human? What implications does increasing automation have for the field of architecture? How do architects define their roles in the present day? Is critical architecture still relevant in this context? Moreover, how should the architecture industry and educational institutions adapt and evolve to embrace the radical changes brought about by new social forces and digital technologies? These questions call for a deeper exploration of the transformative path that architecture must traverse in this new era. Technologies may activate both the creative and destructive aspects of human potential. This becomes particularly apparent when the increase in productivity fails to be aligned with the necessary restructuring of political economy. At this critical juncture, we find ourselves equipped with more powerful exoskeletons than ever before, but both human life and the health of our planet grow increasingly fragile. Automation, while capable of intensifying competition within the capitalist machine, also holds the potential to enhance our care for life. So does architecture. The ludification of human experiences and built environments, as explored in this chapter, represents a peaceful approach to restructuring social relations in response to one of the most profound changes in history: the diminishing value of human labor in the digital age. By connecting the responsive, the critical, and the innovative, each with its multiplicity, this Companion serves as a guiding compass for architects to locate their futures within the ongoing unfolding of humanity.

Acknowledgements This chapter is based on my ongoing research on “A New Global History through Architecture.” An earlier and much shorter version of the conceptual framework section was presented at the Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia & New Zealand, November 2021 (Adelaide, Australia) and published in its proceedings. I am grateful for feedback from Dana Buntrock, Laurence Kimmel, Xiaohuan Zhao, and two anonymous reviewers. 71

Duanfang Lu

References AD Editorial Team (2017) “Norman Foster Is 84 and He Instagrams Better Than You Do,” Archdaily, accessed 10 July 2017, . Adam, Peter (1987) Eileen Gray: Architect/Designer: A Biography. London: Thames and Hudson. Agrawal, Arun (2005) Environmentality: Technologies of Government and the Making of Subjects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Aitchison, Mathew (2017) “A House Is Not a Car (Yet),” Journal of Architectural Education 71, no. 1: 1–21. AlSayyad, Nezar (ed.) (1992) Forms of Dominance: On the Architecture and Urbanism of the Colonial Enterprise. Aldershot: Avebury. Anderson, Benedict (1983) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of. Nationalism. London: Verso. Andreoli, Elisabetta and Adrian Forty (2004) Brazil’s Modern Architecture. Amsterdam: Phaidon. Angier, Tom P. S. (2010) Technē in Aristotle’s Ethics: Crafting the Moral Life. London: Continuum. Agnew, John A. and Stuart Corbridge (1995) Mastering Space: Hegemony, Territory and International Political Economy. London: Routledge. Aragüez, José (2016) “Introduction: The Building’s Discursive Building,” in José Aragüez (ed.) The Building. Zürich: Lars Muller Publishers, pp. 10–23. Arantes, Pedro Fiori (2019) The Rent of Form: Architecture and Labor in the Digital Age. Trans. Adriana Kauffmann. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Arbeau, Kelly, et al. (2020) “The Meaning of the Experience of Being an Online Video Game Player,” Computers in Human Behavior Reports 2 (2020): 100013–. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chbr.2020.100013. Arendt, Hannah (1958) The Human Condition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Arnold, Dana (2002) Reading Architectural History. London: Routledge. Arnold, Dana, Elvan Altan Ergut and Belgin Turan Özkaya (eds.) (2006) Rethinking Architectural Historiography. New York: Routledge. Aureli, Pier Vittorio (2014) “Manfredo Tafuri, Archizoom, Superstudio and the Critique of Architectural Ideology,” in Peggy Deamer (ed.) Architecture and Capitalism: 1845 to the Present. New York: Routledge, pp. 132–149. Bañón, Carlos and Félix Raspall (2021) 3D Printing Architecture: Workflows, Applications, and Trends. Gateway East, Singapore: Springer. Bateson, Paul, Patrick Gordon, and Paul Martin (2013) Play, Playfulness, Creativity and Innovation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bell, Daniel (1960) The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Berger, Peter L. (2001) Le Reenchantement de monde. Paris: Bayard. Bernard, Seth (2018) Building Mid-Republican Rome: Labor, Architecture, and the Urban Economy. New York: Oxford University Press. Bhatt, Ritu (2001) “Indianizing Indian Architecture: A Postmodern Tradition,” Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review 13, no. 1: 43–51. Black, Jeremy (2006) A Military History of Britain from 1775 to the Present. Westport, CT: Praeger Security International. Böhme, Gernot (1993) “Atmosphere as the Fundamental Concept of a New Aesthetics,” Thesis Eleven 36, no. 1: 113–126. ——— (2017) The Aesthetics of Atmospheres. London: Routledge. Borden, Iain and Jane Rendell (eds.) (2000) Intersections: Architectural Histories and Critical Theories. London: Routledge. Bourdieu, Pierre (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boyer, M. Christine (1996) CyberCities: Visual Perception in the Age of Electronic Communication. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Bozdogan, Sibel (1999) “Architectural History in Professional Education: Reflections on Postcolonial Challenges to The Modern Survey,” Journal of Architectural Education 52, no. 4 (May): 207–216. Brisbin, Chris and Myra Thiessen (2018) “Criticality; or Woe Is Me, What Is It Good for!” in Chris Brisbin and Myra Thiessen (eds.) The Routledge Companion to Criticality in Art, Architecture, and Design, Boca Raton, FL: Routledge, pp. 3–8. Brown, Stuart (2010) Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul. Carlton North, VIC: Scribe Publications. Brownell, Blaine (2011) Matter in the Floating World. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Buntrock, Dana (1997) “Collaborative Production: Building Opportunities in Japan,” Journal of Architectural Education 50, no. 4: 219–229.

72

Architecture in the age of playfulness ——— (2001) Japanese Architecture as A Collaborative Process: Opportunities in A Flexible Construction Culture. London: Spon Press. ——— (2010). Materials and Meaning in Contemporary Japanese Architecture: Tradition and Today. London: Routledge. Burnham, Daniel (1906) “Report on Improvement of Manila,” in Bureau of Insular Affairs, Sixth Annual Report of the Philippine Commission, 1905: Part 1, Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Butler, Nick et al. (2011) “Work, Play and Boredom,” Ephemera 11, no. 4: 329–335. Bryant, Jan (2006) “Play and Transformation: Constant Nieuwenhuys and the Situationists,” Drain: A Journal of Contemporary Art and Culture, accessed 12 March 2021, . Carpo, Mario (2017) The Second Digital Turn: Design Beyond Intelligence. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Castells, Manuel (2000) The Rise of the Network Society. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Chaillou, Stanislas (2022) Artificial Intelligence and Architecture: From Research to Practice. Basel: Birkhäuser. Chaliand, Gerard (1977) Revolution in the Third World: Myths and Prospect. New York: Viking. Cheng, Irene, Charles L Davis, and Mabel O Wilson (2020) Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Cody, Jeffery W. (2003) Exporting American Architecture, 1870–2000. London: Routledge. Cohen, Jean-Louis (2012) The Future of Architecture, since 1889. London: Phaidon. Colomina, Beatriz (1990) “Intimacy and Spectacle: The Interiors of Adolf Loo,” AA Files 20: 5–15. Constant (1996) “Great Game to Come,” in Andreotti, Libero and Xavier Costa (eds.) Theory of the Derive and Other Situationist Writings on the City. New York: Actar, pp. 62–63. Constant, Caroline (2000) Eileen Gray. London: Phaidon. Contucci, Pierluigi et al. (eds.) (2019) The Future of Digital Democracy: An Interdisciplinary Approach. Cham: Springer International Publishing. Cook, Peter ([1972] 1999) Archigram. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Coslett, Daniel E. (ed.) (2019) Neocolonialism and Built Heritage: Echoes of Empire in Africa, Asia, and Europe. New York: Routledge. Crane, Howard and Lorenz Korn (2017) “Turko-Persian Empires between Anatolia and India,” in Finbarr Barry Flood and Gülru Necipoğlu (eds.) A Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons Inc., pp. 327–355. Crinson, Mark (2003) Modern Architecture and the End of Empire. London: Ashgate. Crinson, Mark and Richard J. Williams (2018) The Architecture of Art History: A Historiography. London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts. Crites, Danya Alexandra (2010) From Mosque to Cathedral: The Social and Political Significations of Mudejar Architecture in Late Medieval Seville. [Doctoral dissertation, University of Iowa]. < https://doi.org/10.17077/ etd.h3zzcdpp> Crysler, Greig (2003) Writing Spaces: Discourses of Architecture, Urbanism, and the Built Environment, 1960–2000. New York: Routledge. Crysler, Greg, Stephen Cairns, and Hilde Heynen (eds.) (2012) The Sage Handbook of Architectural Theory. London: Sage. Cucuzzella, Carmela and Sherif Goubran (eds.) (2020) Sustainable Architecture: Between Measurement and Meaning. Wilmington, Delaware: Vernon Press. Cutieru, Andreea (2020) “Speculative Architecture: Where are the Contemporary Equivalents of the 60s and 70s Radical Visions?” Archdaily, accessed 19 January 2021, . Darke, Diana (2020) Stealing from the Saracens: How Islamic Architecture Shaped Europe. London: Hurst & Co. de Jong, Sigrid (2019) “Experiencing the Gothic Style,” Architectural Histories 7, no. 1: 25, 1–12. Davidovici, Irina (2017) “Tafuri on Housing: Housing History as City-Making Praxis,” Journal of Architectural Culture 8: 36–51. Deamer, Peggy (2001) “Structuring Surfaces: The Legacy of the Whites,” Perspecta 32: 90–99. ——— (ed.) (2014) Architecture and Capitalism: 1845 to the Present. New York: Routledge. ——— (2020) Architecture and Labor. New York: Routledge. Deamer, Peggy and Phillip G. Bernstein (eds.) (2010) Building (in) the Future: Recasting Labor in Architecture. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Debord, Guy (1994) The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books. Degori, Rosella (n.d) “Exploring Richard Roger’s Built Legacy,” The Spaces, accessed 22 December 2022, . Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schitsphrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. DeLanda, Manuel (2002) Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. London: Continuum.

73

Duanfang Lu ——— (2006) A New Philosophy of Society. Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. London: Continuum. De Lange, A.H., Kooij, D.T.A.M. and Van der Heijden, B.I.J.M. (2015) “Human resource management and sustainability at work across the lifespan: an integrative perspective”, in Finkelstein, L.M., Truxillo, D., Fraccaroli, F. and Kaner, R. (eds) Facing the Challenges of a Multi-Age Workforce. A Use-Inspired Approach. London: Routledge, pp. 50–79. Deranty, Jean-Philippe (2022) “Post-Work Society as an Oxymoron: Why We Cannot, and Should Not, Wish Work Away,” European Journal of Social Theory 25, no. 3: 422–439. Ding, Guanghui (2021) “Embodied Emancipation: Architects, Technocrats, and the Shaping of Canton Fair in 1970s China,” The Journal of Architecture 26, no. 7: 1–31. Djiar, Kahina Amal (2009) “Locating Architecture, Post-Colonialism and Culture: Contextualisation in Algiers,” The Journal of Architecture 14, no. 2: 161–183. Dobnik, Verena (2019) “New York’s $25 Billion Hudson Yards Development Opens,” AP News, accessed 28 March 2020, . Dodig, Marta Brković, and Linda N. Groat (2020) The Routledge Companion to Games in Architecture and Urban Planning: Tools for Design, Teaching, and Research. New York, NY: Routledge. Donoff, Gabrielle and Rae Bridgman (2017) “The Playful City: Constructing a Typology for Urban Design Interventions,” International Journal of Play 6, no. 3: 294–307. Espegel, Carmen (2018) Women Architects in the Modern Movement. Trans. Angela Giral. London: Routledge. Fagen, Robert M. (1981) Animal Play Behavior. New York: Oxford University Press. Feng, Jiren (2012) Chinese Architecture and Metaphor: Song Culture in the Yingzao Fashi Building Manual. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Fischer, Ole W. (2012) “Architecture, Capitalism and Criticality,” in Greg Crysler, Stephen Cairns and Hilde Heynen (eds.) The Sage Handbook of Architectural Theory, London: Sage, 56–69. Fletcher, Banister ([1896]1095) A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method. London: Bradbury, Agnew, & Co. Flood, Finbarr Barry and Gülru Necipoğlu (eds.) (2017) A Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons Inc. Florida, Richard (2002) The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life. New York: Basic Books. Ford, Edward R. (1990) The Details of Modern Architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ——— (2011) The Architectural Detail. Hudson, NY: Princeton Architectural Press. Forty, Adrian (1990) “Industrial Design and Prosthesis,” Ottagono 96: 114–129. ——— (2012) Concrete and Culture: A Material History. London: Reaktion Books. Foucault, Michel (1982) “The Subject and Power,” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 4: 777–795. Frampton, Kenneth (1983) ‘Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance’, in Hal Foster (ed.) Postmodern Culture. London: Pluto Press, pp. 16–29. ——— (1987) “The Work of Tadao Ando,” in Yukio Futagawa (ed.) GA Architect: Tadao Ando. Tokyo: A.D.A. Edita. ——— (1995) Studies in Tectonic Culture: The Poetics of Construction in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. ——— ([1990]1996) “Rappel à L’ordre, the Case for the Tectonic,” republished in Kate Nesbitt (ed.) Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture. New York: Princeton Architecture Press, pp. 516–528. ——— (2021) The Other Modern Movement: Architecture, 1920–1970. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Frank, Suzanne (1994) Peter Eisenman’s House VI: The Client’s Response. New York: Watson-Guptil Publications. Frank, Thomas (1997) The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Freud, Sigmund ([1920] 2014) Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Newburyport: Dover Publications. Frissen, Valerie et al. (2015) Playful Identities: The Ludification of Digital Media Cultures. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Fuller, R. Buckminster (1969) Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Gardner, Howard (2020) A Synthesizing Mind: A Memoir from the Creator of Multiple Intelligences Theory. Cambridge: MIT Press. Gerwarth, Robert and Erez Manela (2014) Empires at War: 1911–1923. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Giddings, Seth and Alison Harvey (2018) “Introduction to Special Issue Ludic Economies: Ludic Economics 101,” Games and Culture 13, no. 7: 647–651. Gilbert, Elizabeth (2006) Eat, Pray, Love. New York: Penguin. Glazer, Nathan (2007) From a Cause to a Style: Modernist Architecture’s Encounter with the American City. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

74

Architecture in the age of playfulness Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von ([1772]1980) “On German Architecture [1772],” in John Gage (ed.) Goethe on Art. London: Scolar Press, pp. 103–112. Goldhagen, Sarah Williams and Réjean Legault (eds.) (2000) Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture. Montréal: Canadian Centre for Architecture. Gottdiener, Mark (1997) The Theming of America: Dreams, Visions, and Commercial Spaces. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Gough, Maria (2005) The Artist as Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hamlyn, D. W. (1957) The Psychology of Perception: A Philosophical Examination of Gestalt Theory and Derivative Theories of Perception. Vol. 13. London: Routledge. Hansell, Michael H. (2005) Animal Architecture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harper, Phineas (2021) “Awarding the Pritzker to a Team Synonymous with Refurbs Marks an Important Shift in Architectural Values,” dezeen, accessed 19 November 2022, . Hart, Casey B., et al. (2017) The Evolution and Social Impact of Video Game Economics. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Hartoonian, Gevork (1994) Ontology of Construction: On Nihilism of Technology in Theories of Modern Architecture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hays, K. Michael (1984) “Critical Architecture: Between Culture and Form,” Perspecta 21: 16. ——— (1988) “The Frankfurt Projects: The Displacement of Structure and Ornament,” Assemblage 5: 55. ——— (2010) Architecture’s Desire: Reading the Late Avant-Garde. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Healey, Patsy (2006) Urban Complexity and Spatial Strategies: Towards a Relational Planning for Our Times. ­L ondon: Routledge. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. New York: Harper & Row. Hejduk, Renata (2006) “Beyond Architecture: Technology, Freedom, and Play,” in Renee Cheng and ­Patrick J. Tripeny (eds.) 94th Annual Meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture. Washington, DC: Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, pp. 227–239. Herbert, Gilbert (1984) The Dream of the Factory-Made House: Walter Gropius and Konrad Wachsmann. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Herrmann, Wolfgang (1984) Gottfried Semper: In Search of Architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Holl, Steven (2000) Parallax. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Holston, James (1989) The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasilia. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Horkheimer, Max (1982) Critical Theory Selected Essays. New York: Continuum. Hovestadt, Ludger, Urs Hirschberg, and Oliver Fritz (2020) Atlas of Digital Architecture: Terminology, Concepts, Methods, Tools, Examples, Phenomena. Basel: Birkhäuser. Hudson, Hugh D. (2015) Blueprints and Blood: The Stalinization of Soviet Architecture, 1917–1937. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hugo, Victor ([1831]2017) The Hunchback of Notre Dame. New York, NY: Open Road Integrated Media. Huizinga, Johan ([1938] 1949) Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. London: Routledge. Hume, David (1896) A Treatise of Human Nature. Oxford: Clarendon. Hyde, Timothy (2012) Constitutional Modernism Architecture and Civil Society in Cuba, 1933–1959. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ——— (2017) “Is Architectural History Getting Any Bigger?” Architectural Research Quarterly 21, no. 4: 347–350. ——— (2019) Ugliness and Judgment: On Architecture in the Public Eye. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Isenstadt, Sandy (2001) “Recurring Surfaces: Architecture in the Experience Economy,” Perspecta 32: 109–119. Isenstadt, Sandy and Kishwar Rizvi (2008) Modern Architecture and the Middle East: Architecture and Politics in the Twentieth Century. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Jacobs, Jane ([1961] 1984) The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Harmondsworth: Penguin in assoc. with Cape. James-Chakraborty, Kathleen (2014) Architecture since 1400. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Jameson, Fredric (1997) “Is Space Political?” in Neil Leach (ed.) Rethinking Architecture. New York: Routledge, pp. 266–267. Janda, Kathryn B. (2011) “Buildings Don’t Use Energy: People Do,” Architectural Science Review 54, no. 1: 15–22. Jara, Cynthia (1995) “Adolf Loos’s Raumplan Theory,” Journal of Architectural Education 48, no. 3: 185–201. Jasper, Michael (2014) “Thinking through the Architecture Studio: Two Models of Research,” Artifact 3, no. 2: 3.1–3.11. Jencks, Charles (1973) Modern Movements in Architecture. New York: Anchor Books.

75

Duanfang Lu ——— (1977) The Language of Postmodern Architecture. New York: Rizzoli. ——— (1987) Post-Modernism: The New Classicism in Art and Architecture. New York: Rizzoli. Jenkins, Henry (2006) Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: NYU Press. Kadoi, Yuka (2017) “Chinese and Turko-Mongol Elements in Ilkhanid and Timurid Arts,” in Finbarr Barry Flood and Gülru Necipoğlu (eds.) A Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons Inc., 636–651. ——— (2022) Islamic Chinoiserie: The Art of Mongol Iran. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Kant, Immanuel ([1790]2000) The Critique of Judgment. Trans. J. H. Bernard. New York: Prometheus Books. Karim, Farhan (2019) Modernism of Austerity: Designing an Ideal Home for the Poor. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Kats, Anna (2016) “Amid Zero Protest, OMA’s Netherlands Dance Theater Meets Its End,” Metropolis, accessed 17 February 2021, . Khodakovsky, Evgeny (2015) “Wood in the Architecture of Europe and Russia,” in Evgeny Khodakovsky and Siri Skjold Lexau (eds.) Historic Wooden Architecture in Europe and Russia. Basel: Birkhäuser, pp. 6–17. Kim, Ransoo (2009) “The Tectonically Defining Space of Mies van Der Rohe,” Architectural Research ­Q uarterly 13, no. 3–4: 251–260. King, Anthony D. (1990) Urbanism, Colonialism, and the World-Economy: Cultural and Spatial Foundations of the World Urban System. London: Routledge. Klingmann, Anna (2007) Brandscapes: Architecture in the Experience Economy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kolarevic, Branko (ed.) (2003) Architecture in the Digital Age: Design and Manufacturing. New York: Taylor & Francis. Kreis, Barbara (1980) “The Idea of the Dom-Kommuna and the Dilemma of the Soviet Avant-Garde,” ­O ppositions 21: 52–77. Kulić, Vladimir (2019) Second World Postmodernisms: Architecture and Society Under Late Socialism. London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts. Kurokawa, Kishō (1977) Metabolism in Architecture. London: Studio Vista. Kusno, Abidin (2000) Behind the Postcolonial: Architecture, Urban Space, and Political Cultures in Indonesia. ­L ondon: Routledge. Lahusen, Thomas and Evgeny Dobrenko (1997) Socialist Realism Without Shores. Durham, NC: Duke ­University Press. Landau, Sarah and Carl W. Condit (1996) Rise of the New York Skyscraper, 1865–1913. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Lang, Jon, Madhavi Desai, and Miki Desai (1997) Architecture and Independence: The Search for Identity–India 1880 to 1980. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Lao Tzu (1961) Tao Teh Ching. Trans. John C.H. Wu. New York: St. John University. Le Corbusier ([1923]1986) Towards a New Architecture. Trans. Frederick Etchells. New York: Dover. ———. ([1925] 1987) The Decorative Art of Today. Trans. and intro. James I. Dunnett, London: Architectural Press. Leach, Neil (2021) Architecture in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: An Introduction to AI for Architects. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Leatherbarrow, David and Mohsen Mostafavi (2002) Surface Architecture. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Lee, Sang (2011) Aesthetics of Sustainable Architecture. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers. Lee, Youngjin (2015) “The Parametric Design Genealogy of Zaha Hadid,” Journal of Asian Architecture and Building Engineering 14, no. 2: 403–410. Lefaivre, Liane and Döll (2007) “Ground-up City. The Place of Play”, in Lefaivre, Liane and George Hall (eds.) Ground-up City. Play Design Tool. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, pp. 36–79. Levin, Ayala (2015) “Beyond Global vs. Local: Tipping the Scales of Architectural Historiography,” ABE Journal 8, accessed 5 May 2021, . Lin, Keming (1933) “Shenme shi moden jianzhu” [What Is Modern Architecture], Guangdong shengli gongzhuan xiaokan [Guangdong Province Engineering College Newsletter] 7. Liscombe, Rhodri Windsor (2006) “Modernism in Late Imperial British West Africa: The Work of ­Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, 1946–56,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 65, no. 2: 188–215. Livingston, Morna (2002) Steps to Water: The Ancient Stepwells of India. Hudson, NY: Princeton Architectural Press. Lizon, Peter (1996) “East Central Europe: The Unhappy Heritage of Communist Mass Housing,” Journal of Architectural Education 50, no. 2: 104–114. Lodder, Christina (1983) Russian Constructivism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Loeffler, Jane C. (1998) The Architecture of Diplomacy: Building America’s Embassies. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Lofgren, Orvar (2014) “Urban Atmospheres as Brandscapes and Lived Experiences,” Place Branding and Public Diplomacy 10, no. 4: 255–266.

76

Architecture in the age of playfulness Lonsway, Brian (2009) Making Leisure Work: Architecture and the Experience Economy. London: Routledge. Loos, Adolf ([1908]1997). Ornament and Crime: Selected Essays. Trans. Michael Mitchell and ed. Adolf Opel. Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press. Lu, Duanfang (2006) Remaking Chinese Urban Form: Modernity, Scarcity and Space, 1949–2005. London: Routledge. ——— (2007) “Architecture and Global Imaginations in China,” Journal of Architecture 12, no. 2: 1–23. ——— (ed.) (2010) Third World Modernism: Architecture, Development and Identity. London: Routledge. ——— (2011) Third World Modernism: Architecture, Development and Identity. Oxford: Routledge ——— (2012) “Entangled Modernities in Architecture,” in Greg Crysler, Stephen Cairns and Hilde Heynen (eds.) The Sage Handbook of Architectural Theory. London: Sage, pp. 233–248. ——— (2018) “The Early Development of Housing Industrialization in China: A historical Survey and Reflections” [Zhongguo zhuzhai gongyehua de zaoqi fazhan: lishi huigu yu fansi], Architectural Journal [ Jianzhu xuebao] 603, no. 12: 50–55. Lucas, Ray (2019) Drawing Parallels: Knowledge Production in Axonometric, Isometric and Oblique Drawings. ­L ondon: Routledge. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1947[1923]) “The Office Building,” in Mies van der Rohe. Trans. Philip Johnson. New York: Museum of Modern Art. Luscombe, Desley (2014) “Architectural Concepts in Peter Eisenman’s axonometric drawings of House VI,” The Journal of Architecture 19, no. 4: 560–611. Maclean, Malcolm, Wendy Russell, and Emily Ryall (2013) The Philosophy of Play. London: Routledge. Mairs, Jessica (2018) “DJI’s Headquarters Designed by Foster + Partners Will Feature Skybridge to Showcase Drones,” dezeen, accessed 20 March 2021, . Marble, Scott (2012) Digital Workflows in Architecture: Design, Assembly, Industry. Basel: Birkhäuser. Marcuse, Herbert ([1964]2003) One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. London: Routledge. Marri, Sohrab Ahmed et al. (2022) “Architecture for ‘Other’? Building a Critical Account on Architecture “Othering” from Colonial to Post-Colonial Time (19th Century – Present Time),” Webology 19, no. 2: 7923–7935, . Macarthur, John and Naomi Stead (2012) “Introduction: Architecture and Aesthetics,” in Greg Crysler, Stephen Cairns and Hilde Heynen (eds.) The Sage Handbook of Architectural Theory. London: Sage, pp. 56–69. Mathews, Stanley (2005) “The Fun Palace: Cedric Price’s Experiment in Architecture and Technology,” Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research 3, no. 2: 73–92. McDonough, William and Michael Braungart (2002) Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. New York: North Point Press. McFarlane, Colin (2011) Learning the City. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. McLeod, Mary (1985) “Introduction,” in Joan Ockman (ed.) Architecture, Criticism, Ideology, Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, pp. 10–11. McNeil, Donald (2009) The Global Architect: Firms, Fame and Urban Form. New York: Routledge. Maxim, Juliana (2019) The Socialist Life of Modern Architecture, Bucharest, 1949–1964. New York: Routledge. Mendelsohn, Ashley (2017) “How Analog and Digital Came Together in the 1990s Creation of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao,” Guggenheim, accessed 21 February 2020, . Merwood-Salisbury, Joanna (2014) “The First Chicago School and the Ideology of the Skyscraper,” in Peggy Deamer (ed.) Architecture and Capitalism: 1845 to the Present. New York: Routledge, pp. 25–49. Meuser, Philipp and Dimitrij Zadorin (2015) Towards a Typology of Soviet Mass Housing: Prefabrication in the USSR 1955–1991. Trans. Clarice Knowles. Berlin: DOM Publishers. Mews, Gregor H (2022) Transforming Public Space Through Play. London: Routledge. Miljački, Ana (2017) The Optimum Imperative: Czech Architecture for the Socialist Lifestyle, 1938–1968. London: Routledge. Møller, Anders (2013) “Yes Is More: The BIG Philosophy,” Archdaily, accessed 17 February 2021, . Morris, Desmond (1967) The Naked Ape: A Zoologist’s Study of the Human Animal. London: Jonathan Cape Publishing. Moudry, Roberta (ed.) (2005) The American Skyscraper: Cultural Histories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Murray, Peter (2003) The Saga of Sydney Opera House: The Dramatic Story of the Design and Construction of the Icon of Modern Australia. Oxford: Taylor & Francis. Neef, Dale (1998) The Knowledge Economy. Boston: Butterworth-Heinemann. Noobanjong, Koompong (2003) Power, Identity, and the Rise of Modern Architecture: From Siam to Thailand. Florida: Universal Publishers.

77

Duanfang Lu Norberg-Schulz, Christian (1980) Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture. London: Academy Editions. O’Kane, Bernard (2017) “Architecture and Court Cultures of the Fourteenth Century,” in Finbarr Barry Flood and Gülru Necipoğlu (eds.) A Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture, Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons Inc., pp. 585–615. Otto, Frei (2017) Frei Otto: Thinking by Modeling. Eds. George Vrachliotis et al. and trans. Simon Cowper and Ariane Kossack. Leipzig: Spector Books. Pallasmaa, Juhani (2005) The Eyes of the Skin. London: Wiley. Pan, Dehua and Yexiang Pan (2011) Dougong [in Chinese]. 2 vols. Nanjing: Southeast University Press. Panofsky, Erwin (1974[1951]) Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism: An Inquiry into the Analogy of the Arts, Philosophy, and Religion in the Middle Ages. New York: Plume. Park, Chang Sup and Barbara K. Kaye (2019) “Smartphone and Self-Extension: Functionally, Anthropomorphically, and Ontologically Extending Self via the Smartphone,” Mobile Media & Communication 7, no. 2: 215–231. Parsons, Glenn (2008) “Nature, Aesthetic Values, and Urban Design: Building the Natural City,” in Pieter E. Vermaas, Peter Kroes Andrew Light and Steven A. Moore (eds.) Philosophy and Design: From Engineering to Architecture. Berlin: Springer, pp. 341–354. Payne, Alina (1999) “Architectural History and the History of Art: A Suspended Dialogue,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Special Millennium Issue 59/60: 292–299. Pellegrini, Anthony D. and Peter K. Smith (eds.) (2005) The Nature of Play: Great Apes and Humans. New York: Guilford Press. Pence, Katherine and Paul Betts (eds.) (2008) Socialist Modern: East German Everyday Culture and Politics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Peng, Changxin (2010) “Diyi zhuyi yu xianshi zhuyi: Xia Changshi de xiandai jianzhu gouxiang” [Regionalism and Realism: Xia Changshi’s Ideas on Modern Architecture], Nanfang jianzhu [South Architecture] 2: 36–41. Picon, Antoine (2010) Digital Culture in Architecture. Basel: Birkhauser. Pine, Joseph and James Gilmore (1999) The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre & Every Business is a Stage. Harvard: Harvard Business School Press. Porphyrios, Demetri (2002) “From Techne to Tectonics,” in Andrew Ballantyne (ed.) What Is Architecture? London: Routledge, pp. 129–137. Prakash, Vikramaditya (2002) Chandigarh’s Le Corbusier: The Struggle for Modernity in Postcolonial India. Seattle: University of Washington Press. ——— (2010) “Third World Modernism or Just Modernism?” in Duanfang Lu (ed.) Third World Modernism: Architecture, Development and Identity. London: Routledge, pp. 255–270. Prazniak, Roxann (2019) Sudden Appearances: The Mongol Turn in Commerce, Belief, and Art. Honolulu: ­University of Hawaii Press. Prigogine, Ilya and Isabelle Stengers (1984) Order out of Chaos. New York: Bantam Books. Pugin, Augustus Welby Northmore ([1841] 1973) Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture. New York: Academy Editions. Raizman, David (1999) “The Church of Santa Cruz and the Beginning of Mudejar Architecture in Toledo,” Gesta 38: 128–141. Rault, Jasmine (2005) “Occupying E.1027: Reconsidering Le Corbusier’s ‘Gift’ to Eileen Gray,” Space and Culture 8, no. 2: 160–179. Riesman, David ([1950]1954) “The Themes of Work and Play in the Structure of Freud’s Thought,” in David Riesman (ed.) Individualism Reconsidered, and Other Essays, Glencoe, IL: Free Press, pp. 326–331. Rif kin, Jeremy (1995) The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era. New York: G.P. Putnam and Sons. Roos, Anna (2017) Swiss Sensibility: The Culture of Architecture in Switzerland. Basel, Switzerland: Birkhauser. Rossi, Aldo ([1966] 1982) The Architecture of the City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rowe, Colin (1975) “Introduction,” in Five Architects. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 3–8. Rowe, Peter G. and Seng Kuan (2002) Architectural Encounters with Essence and Form in Modern China. Cambridge: MIT Press. Roy, Ananya and Aihwa Ong (2011) Worlding Cities Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Ruggles, D. Fairchild (2004) “The Alcazar of Seville and Mudejar Architecture,” Gesta 43: 87–98. Ruskin, John (1960) The Stones of Venice. New York: Da Capo. ——— ([1854]1985) “The Nature of Gothic,” in Clive Wilmer (ed.) John Ruskin: Unto This Last and Other Writings. London: Penguin, pp. 77–110. Ryall, Emily, Wendy Russell, and Malcolm MacLean (2013) The Philosophy of Play. London: Routledge.

78

Architecture in the age of playfulness Sadler, Simon (1998) The Situationist City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. (2005) Archigram: Architecture without Architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Samuel, Flora and Peter Blundell Jones (2012) “The Making of Architectural Promenade: Villa Savoye and Schminke House,” Architectural Research Quarterly 16, no. 2: 108–124. Sassen, Saskia (1991) The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Schuldenfrei, Robin (2014) “Capital Dwelling: Industrial Capitalism, Financial Crisis, and the Bauhaus’s Haus am Horn,” in Peggy Deamer (ed.) Architecture and Capitalism: 1845 to the Present. New York: Routledge, pp. 71–97. Schwartz, Chad (2016) Introducing Architectural Tectonics: Exploring the Intersection of Design and Construction. London: Routledge. Sekler, Eduard F. (1965) “Structure, Construction, and Tectonics,” in Gyorgy Kepes (ed.) Structure in Art and in Science. New York: George Braziller, pp. 89–95. Semper, Gottfried ([1851]1989) The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings. Trans. Harry F. M ­ allgrave. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— ([1861]2004) Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts, or, Practical Aesthetics. Trans. Harry Francis ­M allgrave and Michael Robinson. Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute. Shatkin, Gavin (2005) “Colonial Capital, Modernist Capital, Global Capital: The Changing Political Symbolism of Urban Space in Metro Manila, the Philippines,” Pacific Affairs 78, no. 4: 577–600. Shi, Xinyu, et al. (2020) “A Didactic Pedagogical Approach Toward Sustainable Architectural Education through Robotic Tectonics,” Sustainability 12, no. 5: 1757, 1–14. Shumacher, Patrik (2009) “Parametricism,” Architectural Design 79, no. 4: 14–23. Smith, Ryan E., and John D. Quale (2017) Offsite Architecture Constructing the Future. London: Routledge. Smith, Terry (2002) “What is Contemporary Art? Contemporaneity and Art to Come,” Konsthistorisk ­Tidskrift, 71:1–2, 3–15, https://doi.org/10.1080/002336002320273313 ———. (2006) “Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity,” Critical Inquiry 32, no. 4, 681–707. ———. (2010). “The State of Art History: Contemporary Art,” The Art Bulletin 92, no. 4: 366–383. Song, Rong and Liu Kaiji (1957) “Guanyu xiao mianji zhuzhai de tantao (xia)” [Discussion on Small Apartments (Part II)], Jianzhu xuebao [Architectural Journal] 9: 93–108. Spiller, Neil and Nic Clear (1995) Educating Architects: How Tomorrow’s Practitioners Will Learn Today. London: Thames & Hudson. Stanek, Łukasz (2020) Architecture in Global Socialism: Eastern Europe, West Africa, and the Middle East in the Cold War. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Steinhardt, Nancy Shatzman (2022) The Borders of Chinese Architecture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Stephenson, Judy Z. (2020) Contracts and Pay Work in London Construction 1660–1785. Cham: Springer. Stern, Robert A. M. ([1976] 1998) “Gray Architecture as Post-Modernism, or, Up and Down from Orthodoxy,” in K. Michael Hays (eds.) Architecture Theory Since 1968. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, pp. 240–245. Stevens, Quentin (2007) The Ludic City: Exploring the Potential of Public Spaces. London: Routledge. Strange, Susan, and Matthew Watson (2016) Casino Capitalism. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Sweet, Rod (2015) “Why Sweden Beats The World Hands Down on Prefab Housing,” Global Construction Review, accessed 24 May 2021, . Swope, Curtis (2017) Building Socialism: Architecture and Urbanism in East German Literature, 1955–1973. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Tafuri, Manfredo ([1973] 1976) Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Tanizaki, Jun’ichirō (1977) In Praise of Shadows. New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island Books. Temple, Nicholas, Andrzej Piotrowski, and Juan Manuel Heredia (2019) “Introduction: A ‘World’ Reception of Classical Architecture,” in Nicholas Temple, Andrzej Piotrowski, Juan Manuel Heredia (eds.) The Routledge Handbook on the Reception of Classical Architecture, London: Routledge, pp. 1–14. Tombesi, Paolo (2012) “Prometheus Unchained: The Multiple Itineraries of Contemporary Professional Freedom,” in Greg Crysler, Stephen Cairns and Hilde Heynen (eds.) The Sage Handbook of Architectural Theory, London: Sage, pp. 393–409. United Nations (1987) “Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development: Our Common Future” [Brundtland report]. New York: United Nations. Upton, Dell (1991) “Architectural History or Landscape History?” Journal of Architectural Education 44, no. 4: 195–199. ——— (2015) What Can and Can’t Be Said: Race, Uplift, and Monument Building in the Contemporary South. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Urban, Florian (2012) Tower and Slab: Histories of Global Mass Housing. London: Routledge.

79

Duanfang Lu ——— (2016) Neo-Historical East Berlin: Architecture and Urban Design in the German Democratic Republic 1970–1990. London: Routledge. ——— (2020) Postmodern Architecture in Socialist Poland: Transformation, Symbolic Form and National Identity. London: Routledge. Utzon, John (2002) Sydney Opera House Utzon Design Principles, Sydney Opera House, accessed 12 May 2021, . Venn, Couze (2006) “A Note on Assemblage,” Theory, Culture and Society 23, no. 2–3: 107–108. Venturi, Robert ([1966]1977) Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. New York: Museum of Modern Art. Venturi, Robert, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour (1977 [1972]) Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. Vidler, Anthony (2008) Histories of the Immediate Present: Inventing Architectural Modernism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Vischer, Robert ([1873] 1994) “On the Optical Sense of Form: A Contribution to Aesthetics,” in Harry Francis Mallgrave (ed.) Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–1893. Santa ­Monica: The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities. Vitruvius ([1521]1914) The Ten Books on Architecture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wall, Christine (2013) An Architecture of Parts: Architects, Building Workers and Industrialization in Britain 1940–1970. New York: Routledge. Walworth, Catherine (2017) Soviet Salvage: Imperial Debris, Revolutionary Reuse, and Russian Constructivism. University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Walz, Steffen (2010) Toward a Ludic Architecture. Morrisville, NC: Lulu Press, Inc. Watson, Katherine (1989) French Romanesque and Islam: Andalusian Elements in French Architectural Decoration c. 1030–1180. 2 vols. Oxford: BAR. Weber, Max ([1905]2012) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Newburyport: Dover Publications. Whitehill, Walter Muir (1941) Spanish Romanesque Architecture in the Eleventh Century. Oxford: Oxford ­University Press. Wigley, Mark (1998) Constant’s New Babylon: The Hyper-Architecture of Desire. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers. Williams, Ruth (2014) “Eat, Pray, Love: Producing the Female Neoliberal Spiritual Subject: Eat, Pray, Love,” Journal of Popular Culture 47, no. 3: 613–633. Willis, Carol (1995) Form Follows Finance: Skyscrapers and Skylines in New York and Chicago. New York: ­Princeton Architectural Press. Witkowski, Wallace (2020) “Videogames are a bigger industry than movies and North American sports combined, thanks to the pandemic,” Market Watch, accessed 3 February 2021, . Wölfflin, Heinrich ([1886] 1994) Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–1893. Eds. Robert Vischer, Harry Francis Mallgrave, and Eleftherios Ikonomou, Santa Monica, CA: The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities. Wong, Maggie Huifu (2021) “World’s Deepest Pool Opens in Dubai, Part of Huge Underwater City,” CNN News, 30 September 2021, accessed 20 March 2020, https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/deep-divedubai-worlds-deepest-dive-pool/index.html. Worringer, Wilhelm (1957) Form in Gothic. London: Tiranti. Wright, Frank Lloyd (1954) The Natural House. New York: Horizon Press Inc. Wright, Gwendolyn (1987) “Tradition in the Service of Modernity: Architecture and Urbanism in French Colonial Policy, 1900–1930,” The Journal of Modern History 59, no. 2: 291–316. Wu, Yajie, et al. (2020) “Modeling Hysteretic Behavior of Lateral Load-Resisting Elements in Traditional Chinese Timber Structures,” Journal of Structural Engineering 146, no. 5. https://doi.org/10.1061/(ASCE) ST.1943-541X.0002613. Xiao, Yiqiang (2008) “Lingnan xiandai jianzhu chuangzuo de ‘xiandaixing’ sikao” [Reflections on the ­Modernity of Modern Lingnan Architectural Design], Xin jianzhu [New Architecture] 5: 8–11. Yang, Tingbao (1955) “Disijie guoji jianzhushi xiehui huiyi qingkuang baogao” [Report on the Fourth ­International Union of Architects Conference], Jianzhu xuebao [Architectural Journal] 2: 69–82. Zarecor, Kimberly Elman (2011) Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity: Housing in Czechoslovakia, 1945–1960. Namur: University of Pittsburgh Press. Zhai, Lilin (1955) “Lun jianzhu yishu yu mei ji minzu xingshi” [On the Art of Architecture, Beauty, and ­National Forms], Jianzhu xuebao [The Architectural Journal] 1: 46–68. Žižek, Slavoj (1989) The Sublime Object of Ideology, New York: Verso. Zumthor, Peter (2006) Atmospheres: Architectural Environments, Surrounding Objects. Basel: Boston.

80

PART I

Practices Introduction

Part I, “Practices”, investigates professional practices in different cultural, regional, national, and local contexts, showing architects’ responses to complex issues related to colonialism, the Cold War, consumption, modernization, nation-building, globalization, and housing development. Mark Crinson’s chapter suggests that while the question “what is modern architecture?” was answered in an assertive and galvanizing way in the 1920s, it has become increasingly difficult to find consensus in recent decades. In his chapter, some of the frameworks and concepts that critics and historians have used since the 1920s are laid out, explained, and critiqued. He argues that being both panoramic and exclusive in its assertion of what is modern, modernism’s world-making is crucial. He provides three short case studies to explore foundational problems with this world-making. The first looks at a moment during the International Congresses of Modern Architecture (CIAM) IV (1933) when Otto Neurath addressed the assembled modernists about appropriate visual languages of communication and whether modern architecture could really engage with its users in its design rather than impose what its architects and clients wanted to regard as a scientific and objective method. The second and third case studies both involve the transplantation or “export” of modern architecture, but each raises different issues. The second looks at the Crown Law Offices in Nairobi (1960), raising the issue of the presence or absence of the ornamental. Crinson examines how this definitional issue was related to political violence and the conditions of “bare modernity”, as contemporaneously enacted in Kenya by colonial power. The third case study examines “Maison Tropicale” (2007) by the contemporary artist Angela Ferreira. The work relates to sites in Niamey and Brazzaville, where two prototype prefabricated Maisons Tropicales, designed by Jean Prouvé, were erected in the late 1940s. While the houses’ evident absence from Ferreira’s photographs might be taken as nostalgia for the abandonment of an enlightenment project, Crinson argues that the artwork provokes a different and more fundamentally disturbing set of reflections: not so much “what is modernism?” as “what is demotic modernity?”; not so much “what is modern architecture?” as “does it matter?” The idea of Pop was first floated in the early 1950s by the Independent Group (IG) in London, a motley collection of young artists and art critics such as Richard Hamilton and Lawrence Alloway, guided by young architects and architectural historians such as Alison and Peter Smithson and Reyner Banham. A direct engagement with mass culture, Pop has been associated with music, fashion, art, and many other things, but not architecture. In his chapter “Architecture and Image”, art historian Hal Foster contests that Pop was bound up with architectural debates from DOI: 10.4324/9781315674469-2

Practices

first to last. He shows that, transformed by consumer capitalism after World War II and elaborated by American artists, the Pop idea was brought into architectural discussion a decade later, especially by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. It came to serve as a discursive support for the postmodern design of the Venturis, Michael Graves, Charles Moore, Robert Stern, and others in the 1980s. Reflecting on Pop’s residence in Architecture, Foster suggests that the primary precondition of Pop was a gradual reconfiguration of cultural space, demanded by consumer capitalism, in which structure, surface, and symbol were combined in new ways. As that mixed space is still with us, he argues, a Pop dimension persists in contemporary architecture, too. Cold War architecture located human subjects within a tripartite geopolitical order consisting of a capitalist “First World” (comprised of the US and its allies), a socialist “Second World” (the USSR and its affiliates), and a “Third World” in which global superpowers vied for influence. Greg Castillo’s chapter “Cold War Modernism” provides an account of how politically driven readings of modernism equipped it for Cold War use. The competition between capitalist/socialist modernity began in the 1930s. Just as a Stalinist cultural revolution in the USSR was repudiating aesthetic modernity as bourgeois, two exhibitions staged by New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) proclaimed American roots and prospects for “International Style” modernism. A decade later, with the Allied powers’ defeat of the Third Reich, International Style modernism was deployed by West German design talents as a mode of “visual denazification” and enlisted by the US State Department for its new postwar diplomatic facilities in Western Europe and East Asia. Meanwhile, Khrushchev’s ascent to Soviet leadership in the mid-1950s prompted a selective retrieval of architectural modernity as a symbol of socialist progress. A crash program of mass-­produced housing appropriated Western precast concrete systems to produce standardized apartment slabs to address a pervasive housing crisis. This generic housing type proliferated across the Second World, generating a signature urbanism and everyday lifeworld. In contrast, bespoke monuments celebrated the grander achievements of state socialism. International expositions served as a laboratory for the architectural arsenals of First and Second World modernism. Castillo also shows how the superpowers approached the so-called Third World as an arena of competition and architecture as a mark of inclusion in their respective global orders. Third World nations that accepted aid from both superpowers, however, defied their induction program by creating zones of contact and transculturation that instead eroded cold war binaries. Jennifer Ferng’s chapter “After Deconstructivist Architecture” begins by locating the contested origins of deconstructivist architecture in Russian constructivism and French critical theory, specifically through the philosophy of Jacques Derrida. The origins of deconstructivism and their transfer into the realm of architecture are made apparent by examining some of the precepts behind the Choral Works proposal created by Peter Eisenman and Derrida. In returning to the 1988 Museum of Modern Art show on deconstructivist architecture, the chapter establishes how curators Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley set the stage for an understanding of deconstructivist architecture that transcended the rigors of poststructuralist philosophy. Eisenman’s Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio, is examined as a case study of how deconstructivist architects were able to tackle pragmatic challenges brought upon by real world constraints of context, site, and program. At the same time, Ferng argues, the Wexner Center also highlighted the polarizing debates around built works of architecture that relied heavily on Derridean ideas. She then looks into how deconstructivist architecture has served as a historical touchstone for the parametric and computational designs begun in the 1990s and influenced the creation of abstracted, self-­ referential projects that seem to fetishize complex geometries. Beyond initial affiliations with Derridean notions of deconstruction, many contemporary buildings represent persuasive instances of neo-modernist thinking that attempt to reverse the traditional precepts associated with function, skin, and structure. The organic silhouettes of research centers, skyscrapers, and stadiums, coupled with advancements in materials, Ferng argues, helped to push deconstructivist thinking into the 82

Practices

contemporary sphere of design computation and digital fabrication, creating new conduits for the conventions of form and ornament. Over the last half century, the grand visions of the Enlightenment, or the fusion of socialism and mechanization that marked the peak of utopian architecture in inter-war modernism, have been largely succeeded by a more granular postmodern and contemporary architecture. As belief in perfectibility and equilibrium has become so scarce, it seems that utopianism should have no role left to play in architecture and the spaces it designs. Mass housing schemes, for example, were widely discredited by the 1970s, and popular culture has made it easier to picture dystopia rather than utopia. Yet what if utopianism is a repressed facet of contemporary architecture? Simon Sadler’s chapter “Postmodern Utopianism” holds that architects continually reimagine the order which is generally sacrificed for a postmodern condition. For Sadler, a long-term observer of architectural utopias, architecture is after all inherently utopian to the degree that it resists cultural and social entropy and tries to extract aesthetic and social value from building production. Digital rendering, moreover, creates detailed, convincing illusions of ideal worlds, even in the most routine practices of architecture. Sadler examines three tendencies of a postmodern utopianism: restorative utopias, utopias of high-tech globalization, and utopias of disruption. He concludes by suggesting that utopian desires might yet eclipse postmodern caution, through, for instance, the very housing crisis which helped usher in the postmodern era. Going beyond the stereotyped images of Metabolism, Japanese architect and critic Hajime Yatsuka’s chapter “Metabolism and Beyond” provides an insider’s view on how it was developed, transformed, and contested by resetting it against the concrete situations of national development in Japan from the mid-century to the present. He argues that the common view of Metabolism as optimistic and techno-utopian has ignored how architects responded to a very particular socioeconomic context. He suggests, for example, how the rural background of three founding Metabolist architects has shaped their mentality. Megastructures, widely regarded as Metabolism’s visual trademark, were indeed an outcome of their realistic pursuit of construction techniques that could potentially offset the poor conditions of the time. During its early years, Metabolism also expressed intense uneasiness weighted by fear of another war. The image of post-nuclear war ruins haunted the work of Isozaki and early Metabolists. The 1970 expo marked the end of the previous era. For Arata Isozaki and Kazuo Shinohara, Yatsuka suggests, architecture was not a vehicle for transforming the city and the society, but a private critical statement. In contrast, the generation that followed, some of whom were under the strong influence of Shinohara were devoid of philosophical insights of the society and seemed to dance exquisitely around the “endless everyday.” Peter Scriver and Amit Srivastava’s “Professional Agency and Architectural Discourse in ­Postcolonial India” offers a critical reading of the often complicated and occasionally dissonant counterpoint between the dominant narrative of India’s contemporary architectural history and the discourses of professional development. They discussed two moments in the second half of the 20th century when architectural developments in India enjoyed broader recognition and critical resonance in international architectural discourse. The first moment was in the 1950s when India’s nation-building project was a seminal test-case, in the eyes of many external observers, for the instrumental role that modern architecture and town-planning were playing in the push to modernize economies and societies worldwide in the era of post-war decolonization. The ­second moment was a quarter century later when the gaze of international architectural discourse was again attracted to the subcontinent by the evidence of a distinctively “Indian” contemporary architecture that appeared to be emerging from its modernist pedigree and precepts. Scriver and Srivastava argue that this narrative of a search for formal independence and external critical recognition, however, occludes as much as it contributes to a substantively different narrative of struggle for autonomy internal to this particular post-colonial context. Whilst there 83

Practices

were multiple occasions when architectural and political agency aligned, few after the celebrated nation-­building projects of the 1950s and 1960s would be as transparent and empowering for the profession. Indirectly, eventual success in securing legislative recognition of the architect as an autonomous professional would effectively enable and align the later identity works of some of India’s most acclaimed contemporary architects with the evolving identity politics of the state. It is no coincidence that the critical mass of discourse about contemporary Indian Architecture, on which current ­understanding of that history substantially relies only began to be published in the 1980s. This was the moment when the return to culture and context in architectural aesthetics was mirrored in a cultural turn in politics away from the emancipatory agenda of previous development policies. Scriver and Srivastava’s chapter argues convincingly about the nature and contribution of that discourse to the evolving forms and foci of subsequent architectural production. Comments on Dubai’s urban development often focus on the “strangest forms” of its speculative real estate projects. In his chapter “Architectural Production in Dubai”, Kevin Mitchell, Professor and Chancellor at the American University of Sharjah in UAE, offers an insightful dissection of the forces behind the city’s spectacular development from the desert to a center of trade, logistics, finance and tourism. Dubai’s emphasis on infrastructural improvements and the initiatives taken to shift the center of Gulf-based entrepôt trade to the Emirate in the mid-20th century charted a trajectory that stands in rather stark contrast to other oil-dependent economies in the region. While its neighbors continue to struggle with the effects of decades of reliance on rents derived from natural resources, Dubai has pursued a strategy that has fundamentally transformed the built environment. The story of Dubai’s 21st-century transformation, however, is much more complex than a speculation-driven building boom, as many have assumed. Mitchell argues that competing government-related entities (GREs) played a major role as property developers, which is part of a state-sponsored strategy of supporting market liberalization and actively participating in the market. The role of GREs, along with factors that include adopting a neoliberal approach to economic development, have both enabled and conditioned the expansion of the city’s built environment. High-rise mass housing has long held a paradoxical place in modern architectural history. Despite the widespread celebration of canonical works by avant-garde architects, the reputation of these buildings as a type is very mixed in practice. The negative views toward standardized high-rise dwellings intensified in Europe and America in the 1970s, when it became clear that many social housing projects initiated in the postwar period fell short of fulfilling their social agendas in enabling greater equity and human progress. In recent years, however, the ­environmental-determinist narratives associated with social housing took on a new turn with growing calls to conserve some of these projects and turn them into mixed-tenure ­communities through privatization. While such arrangements follow global trends favoring market solutions for the delivery of housing and have often perpetuated social disparities, the ways in which these ­initiatives were implemented and the extent to which they were challenged were shaped by ­specific historical experiences and existing discourses about the role of the state and market in social provision. Cecilia Chu’s chapter explores these trajectories through the “afterlives” of three modern social housing projects: the Park Hill in Sheffield, the Columbia Point in Boston, and the Hunghom Peninsula Estate in Hong Kong. By situating each case within the discourse of ­modern architecture while linking their development to emergent global narratives of housing, her ­examination of each project prompts reflections on the presumed linkages between the social and aesthetic ideals of modern architecture. In the middle of the 20th century, Brazil was heralded triumphantly as an example both of mainstream modernist aspirations and also of a unique and formally expressive current. But in the last quarter of the century, this prominence waned, despite the recognition of a few individuals (e.g., Oscar Niemeyer and Paulo Mendes da Rocha through the Pritzker Prize; and Lina Bo Bardi 84

Practices

through a series of exhibitions and publications on her centenary in 2014). While some may think that this is related to some kind of downturn in creativity, as if Brazil were past its architectural prime, In her chapter “Brazilian Modernism Today: The Seed of Something New”, Daniela Sandler argues that a lively young generation continues to innovate in unique ways, just as the mid-century moderns had done, producing an architecture that is indebted to modernism, but distinct from it. This can be seen, for instance, in the minimalist but humorous sensibility of architects and offices such as Marcio Kogan, Isay Weinfeld, and Brasil Arquitetura. Sandler focuses on the meaningful but overlooked production of a segment of Brazilian architecture known as assessorias técnicas – non-profit technical consultancies formed by “architects, planners, engineers, social workers”, who work with communities on affordable housing and respond to contexts with many needs beyond dwelling such as unemployment and lack of access to health and education. Despite the chronic lack of funds and the challenges of collaborative design, these organizations have managed to build the impossible: they achieve high-quality design with minimum resources; they create not just buildings, but urbanity; and they provide not only homes, but tools for political and socio-economic inclusion. Sandler suggests that the relevance of contemporary Brazilian architecture comes from practices that engage the (as yet unfulfilled) social promises of modernism, especially access to housing and to a more just city. Like its predecessor mid-century modernism, it is precisely from these margins that this architecture will provide the seed of something new.

85

2 What Is Modern Architecture? Mark Crinson

In February 1928, the Swiss architect Le Corbusier published a protest against the decision to award the commission for the Palace of the League of Nations to a group of academic architects (Figure 2.1). While Le Corbusier felt his own design was entitled to win, the academics’ leader, Henri-Paul Nénot, declared that the barbarians had been defeated (Le Corbusier 1928: 172–3). Le Corbusier’s pamphlet, Appel à l’Élite mondiale à l’occasion de la construction du Palais des nations à Genève, was signed by James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, André Gide, Marie Curie, Louis Blériot, Gabriele d’Annunzio, Benedetto Croce, Paul Otlet, Marshal Hubert Lyautey, Igor Stravinsky, Paul Valéry, and H. G. Wells.1 These signatories included members of the established artistic avant-garde and leading intellectuals, as well as reformers and innovators in medicine, colonial administration, aviation, and information science. None were architects, and few engaged with contemporary architecture in any substantial way, 2 yet their names alone suggest a definition of modern architecture: they summon up the breaking of natural and national barriers, the pursuit of new forms of cultural expression and the dispelling of the inauthentic, even the imagining of new worlds of knowledge.3 Le Corbusier turned his failure into a rallying cry, a catalytic moment in which the answer to the question “what is modern architecture?” was made to seem self-evident.4 What and who modern architecture was associated with – “la bataille ‘pour le moderne’” Le ­Corbusier called it 5 – was as important to its definition in the 1920s, then, as any formulas, ­theories, and descriptive inventories, and the international element in particular will be emphasized in

Figure 2.1  L  e Corbusier – Palace of the League of Nations, elevations seen from Lake Geneva (1926–27). FLC/ADAGP, Paris, and DACS, London.

86

DOI: 10.4324/9781315674469-3

What Is Modern Architecture?

what follows. The idea of a blockage on les temps nouveaux or the evocation of old conflicts between the Ancients and the Moderns,6 of civilization or barbarism, were useful not just because they identified the enemy but because they marginalized other, dissonant ideas of the modern, and even of architecture itself. This forged consensus, a movement of movements, led directly to the formation of a new body, the Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM),7 and continuing concern to defend a certain understanding of what modern architecture meant to this broader, no doubt vaguer, but no less significant understanding beyond architectural culture. And the emphasis in CIAM’s name should, therefore, be as much on the “international” as on “architecture” or “modern.” The question “what is modern architecture?” had been asked many times before, of course: in Barcelona in 1878 as much as in London in 1857 or Karlsruhe in 1828.8 What was different was the assertion that this was not a style merely conjured up for the age or a form of distinct cultural identity but an intimate bond with the new forces and character of modernity itself. This is why its transcultural, transmedial, and transnational aspects were emphasized, and this, too, is why the self-mythologization of this “high” or even “classical” modern architecture was so significant and so alluring. “Modernism” as a term to describe this would come later; in the 1920s and 1930s, it was known as the Internationale Neue Baukunst, International Style, the Modern Movement, Neues Bauen, or Nieuwe Bouwen (McLeod 2014).9 And there were two sides to this pugnacious self-certainty: one was the architecture’s identification with ideas like the Baudelairean dialect of the contingent and the changeless; the other was its opposition to old political and cultural elites, whose attitudes were cast as inimical to modern technologies. The first is seen in the associations made with some earlier and purer past (the vernacular, the prehistorical, the classical before classicism) degraded by history’s use as tradition and precedent. The second is summed up in Le Corbusier’s pamphlet, when he emphasized the incongruity of treating modern spaces (offices, committee rooms, assembly rooms) and modern technologies (the telegraph, telephone, radio, typewriters) as if they could be housed within arrangements devised for renaissance chateaus or baroque churches.10 The writing of contemporaneous histories and theories of modern architecture was essential in making the phenomenon coherent and recognizable. These are not accounts that pretend to any detachment; indeed, they are written from within the movement, and their purpose is usually to proselytize.11 Adolf Behne, writing in 1923, asserted that architecture’s return to purpose (Zweck) was bound in itself to be revolutionary. By following the lessons of unpretentious functional buildings and seeing buildings as tools (Werkzeug), modern architecture would inevitably arrive at qualities of airiness, concision, and clarity (Behne 1926: 9–11). Answering the question “what is modern architecture?” in 1929, for what he saw as a distinctively backward British architectural culture, Bruno Taut explained that it was an attempt to find harmony between architectural form and new technologies and in opposition to what he deemed “exaggerated Romanticism and sentimentality” (Taut 1928: 5). The architect must devote his materials and construction to the “fulfillment of purpose,” which in itself would lead to elegance and beauty. As architecture is a product of social ideas, so house design should embrace the repetition necessary to the creation of collectivity. The modern architect is thus a “creator of an ethical and social character” whose buildings encourage “better behaviour in [people’s] mutual dealings and relationships with each other” (Taut 1928: 9). This mixture of determinism (technical and social) and form-making agency, and this concern with the lessons of the immanent expression of function (or Zweck or Sachlichkeit), would typify other definitions by modern architects and theorists. “Function” was as significant for its didactic compulsion (replacing didactic content, taboo to modernism) as for its ambiguity (Anderson 1986; Bletter 1996; Forty 2000). And the political implications of modern architecture – the “revolutionary” and the “collective” charge, the utopianism, the theology of new beginnings, the progressive and the future-minded – ramify and insinuate, never quite definitional because 87

Mark Crinson

of their usefulness to many forms of politics (where the felicities of modernism might accompany atavist spectacle as much as corporate identity). Certain concepts nevertheless become central to modern architecture’s definition, their use a clear indication of what is being talked about (Forty 2000: 19). Abstraction, function, modern technology, space, and form are all essential to the lexicon. The values attached to these – of honesty, transparency, and morality – were already hackneyed by their bourgeois usage (this is, after all, a profession that is speaking) (Moretti 2013:173). Around the concepts certain axioms were repeated: “form follows function,” “engineer’s aesthetic,” “truth to materials,” “l’esprit nouveau,” and “ornament and crime.” Modern architecture’s claim to have a unique affinity with modernity was bolstered by arguments that linked it with the various buzz-words of contemporary science and social science: associations were made with the “space-time” of Einstein’s relativity, with the idea that modernity involved the bombardment of the senses and an emptied-out form of experience (described by Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin), or that modern society was the highpoint of the economic rationalization of space and time (as Frederick Taylor had advocated in business management). The exemplification of modern architecture through the reproduction of its appearance is even more essential to its definition than the now-classic early histories.12 The architectural treatise of the academic tradition is replaced by a hybrid genre, those manuals of formulas – training books in modernist recognition and emulation – that proliferate around modern architecture: Walter Gropius’s Internationale Architektur (1925), Bruno Taut’s Bauen der neue Wohnbau (1927), Ludwig Hilberseimer’s Internationale neue Baukunst (1927), the three volumes of Neues Bauen in der Welt (1930) put together by El Lissitzky, Richard Neutra, and Robert Ginsburger, Alberto Sartoris’s Gli elementi dell’architettura razionale (1932), and Alfred Roth’s The New Architecture (1940). Wrongly dismissed as picture books, their significance lies in their repetition of images and their very illusion of comprehensiveness. They effectively define modern architecture as a formal world, hermetic and consistent to itself, making evident the movement’s claim to be universal in application and international in its spreading influence. It is because of its 687 illustrations and a geographic coverage of 29 countries across four continents that the subtitle to Sartoris’s 1935 edition – Sintesi panoramica dell’architettura moderna – achieves credibility. Sartoris, “The First Classicist of the Avant-Garde” (Bohigas 1979) creates a parallel universe in which modern architecture is everything; it reigns over all: black and white buildings dominate the middle ground of every photograph; roofs are everywhere flat; landscape and plants are tamely subsidiary; chairs, tables, operating theatres, restaurants, classrooms, factory floors and changing rooms all await their human users. The point here goes beyond the issue of Sartoris’s photographic conventions. We might, like Sartoris, think of it as a “panorama,” because there is nothing else in this scoping, world-making survey than the modern and what can be glimpsed through the modern. A rule-making has become naturalized; its reiterations limit what can be allowed. Contemporary with Sartoris, there was that other panorama of modern architecture, “Modern Architecture: International Exhibition” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (and the book published simultaneously, The International Style). Here, modern architecture claimed its place in the world because of its ubiquity – functional and implicitly anthropological – and this is what bestowed authority on the curators’ more formalist interests. A global commonality of form was conjured up, with its own innate and serial logic, betraying mere variations as it was encountered across human societies. This architectural consensus had the compelling authority of a natural process, the dissemination of a genus. In this International Style, every architectural thing testified to border-less transnational ideals free of specific historic or geographic constraints. Everything was thus defined as volume and space; everything was light-filled, reflective, and smooth; everything was flat-roofed, white, cubic, and asymmetrical. The place-less, history-less materials of steel, concrete, and glass abounded. And this phenomenon was only reinforced as this limited 88

What Is Modern Architecture?

set of qualities was repeated. Uniformity of style equaled the rationality that brooked no borders: “The contemporary style,” wrote Hitchcock and Johnson, “which exists throughout the world, is unified and inclusive, not fragmentary and contradictory” (Hitchcock and Johnson 1932: 19). The photographs used in the exhibition, catalog, and book adhered rigidly to a conception of the modern building as a singular and separate entity, abstracted and independent of its setting whether urban or rural. Viewers were not to consider the specificity of a site, the qualities of a climate, or the effects of a terrain. The architecture of the International Style was not to be in dialogue with these matters because they were simply too specific, too conditional, or too local. Instead of dialogue, there was a serial, monologic iteration. All such modern buildings exemplified the genus “International Style,” all were symptoms or expressions of a universal aesthetics of contemporary form, of a world-view without apparent politics. Its imagined world may be unified, but one of the things that modern architecture depends on is an implicitly adversarial relation, an estrangement, a radical otherness. Manifestos adjure readers in imperative terms, affirming ruptures with the “sentimental” approaches of a despised past and providing formulas or commandments by which the modern must be produced (Conrads 1971). There are gestures of erasure: Sartoris reproduces a photograph of a drawing of Nénot and his team’s Palace of the League of Nations, then being built, and “deletes” it with a broad red diagonal as “false modern architecture” (Sartoris 1935: 11); Le Corbusier clears Paris’s historic Marais and Les Halles districts to make way for his intended Plan Voisin (1925); and so on. What cannot be deleted is rejected or ignored: Adolf Loos attacks the “Potemkin city” of fake historicist facades around Vienna’s Ringstrasse as much as the invented, “degenerative” ornament of Art Nouveau which had “no past and no future” (Loos 2002: 26–8; Loos 1987: 102); Mies van der Rohe’s 1920s glass skyscrapers refuse any similarity with the dark, lowrise Berlin montaged around them; Gropius’s Bauhaus building defies Dessau’s desultory suburbs. What is being expunged or spurned is not something merely of the past but rival, alternative, or actually existing forms of modernity. Too much history may be the problem, or too little evident will to order; even, too much effort to make anew. You are required to enter modern architecture’s world, learn its codes, recognize its formal language, and take on its phenomenological universe. There is a threshold for membership: we see this literally as a double set of checks in CIAM: first to have the right buildings to pass into a national CIAM-affiliated body,13 and then for that body to be accepted into CIAM itself. And we see this in Alfred Barr’s direction to his visitors at MOMA’s 1932 exhibition that “in order to appreciate [architects’] achievements [they] must make parallel adjustments to what seems new and strange”; like the modern architect visitors must “[think] in terms of volume – or space enclosed by planes or surfaces – as opposed to mass and solidity” (Barr 1932: 14–15). Equally, there are the policing operations that architects or their close advocates carried out in terms of their own work. To ask “what is modern architecture?” when collating a monograph or exhibition meant editing out what could not conform: the pitch-roofed neoclassical villas that Mies was building well into the 1920s and that Philip Johnson was compelled to leave out of his 1947 exhibition and monograph on Mies, for example, as much as the early forays into developer’s vernacular that James Stirling left out of his own Oeuvre complète ( Johnson 1947; Crinson 2012: 161–7). And “what is modern architecture?” is a question asked with urgency again as architects question what has been produced under its name and as modernist novelty is absorbed by post–Second World War capitalism. Posed by the young architect members of Team Ten in the 1950s, the question could seem like either a renewed fundamentalism or a species of apostasy. The tactic is to ask the first generation of modernists whether they were really true to their word. Was their functionalism rhetorical? Were their uses of modern technology as open-minded, as progressive and experimental as claimed, or were they superficial, even a substitute for modernization? And here, the dread term “academicism” might be deployed again: Reyner Banham, for instance, 89

Mark Crinson

accuses Le Corbusier of a cosmetic abstraction that disguises an underlying academicism (Banham 1960: 247–63); Archigram proclaim their desire “TO BY-PASS THE DECAYING BAUHAUS IMAGE WHICH IS AN INSULT TO FUNCTIONALISM” (Archigram 1961). If the 1920s first-generation or high modernists are being held to account, some condemned the intervening second generation as having diluted and softened anything that it inherited, while others reappraised them as part of an “other tradition” of modern architecture (Wilson 1995). Since that time, and especially after the certainties of anti-modernism in the 1970s and 1980s, “what is modern architecture?” appears increasingly difficult to answer. On the one hand, there has been a tendency to multiply defining concepts and to ever-complicate the phenomenon in search of more complete definitions; on the other hand, definition is treated as inherently inadequate, if necessarily indispensable (Rowe 1994: 15–20). Some encompass the subject in a baggy way while treating modernist theory with skepticism or disdain, judging it internally inconsistent or more useful in understanding the historical confluence of ideas out of which modernism emerged than as definitive tenets of the new architecture (Colquhoun 2002: 9–12; Cohen 2012: 13–15). Some return to founding critiques of the modern and modernity as if modern architecture might be defined by how far it understood them (Heynen 1999). Others attempt to meld high modernist theory into an encompassing set of precepts while avoiding the slipperiness of “function” and “form”: for Panayotis Tournikiotis, these precepts would include a philosophy of history, a vision linking architecture and social change, and a reduction of architecture into “exemplary components,” which then guide future architecture (Tournikiotis 1999: 3–4); Sarah Williams Goldhagen offers the not-quite-similar framing “dimensions” of anti-tradition, a commitment to social progress and a dynamic relation to new technology (Goldhagen 2000: 301–23). Others avoid descriptions of totality and treat one thematic aspect of modern architecture, such as its conceptual apparatus, its concern with health and hygiene, or with transparency, its manifestos, its interest in materials, its intimate relation to visual media, or its relation to themes of gender and sexuality (Colomina 1992, 1994; Forty 2000, 2012; Friedman 2007; Overy 2007; Mertins 2011; Williams 2013; Buckley 2014; Zimmerman 2014). In a sense, whatever the nuances and revisions brought by historians to the question of modern architecture, they still accept the claim that only in this way is modernity to be responded to by architecture. This is modern, the architecture says, these are its forms, its protocols, its proper concerns, its horizon of understanding; deviations away from these are non-modern, insignificant, and illegitimate in their claims on the modern, or simply invisible.14 But, that primary act of colonialism – taking over the modern as a land only fit for modern architecture – has received increasing attention from historians primarily concerned with non-Euro-American contexts and with colonial architecture. These accounts bear upon the question “what is modern architecture?” by both attempting to usurp the term “modern” (if usually neglecting “architecture”), and creating a different geography of its evolution and alternative, non-western claims for its universalism (Wright 2002; Lu 2011). The modernity of new spaces and technologies identified by Le Corbusier is now appraised not for its universal inevitability but for its ethnocentric and heterochronic specificity. In the three brief cases that follow, the aim is different from these forms of decentering. Instead, each points to foundational problems in the answers commonly given to the question, problematizing the idea of modern architecture from within.

Architecture’s World CIAM’s fourth congress in 1933 is a celebrated moment in modern architecture’s history, as much for the utopian episode of international modernist architects and planners working in harmony on board the SS Patris II, as for the crystallization of the Athens Charter and its protocols for

90

What Is Modern Architecture?

modernist urbanism (Mumford 2000; van Es 2014). But there was at least one dissenting figure on board. Otto Neurath was a Vienna Circle philosopher, a museum director, and a social reformer, and these interests came together in his development of a system of visual statistics known as the Vienna Method or isotype. It was on this that he was invited to lecture by the CIAM modernists (Faludi 1989; Chapel 1996; Faludi 1996; Vossoughian 2006). The congress theme was intended to present a comparative international perspective on the “Functional City,” seeking a unified approach that would reveal the contemporary city as an organism composed of four simple functions. Much was made of the need to find a shared language, most especially a uniform set of visual symbols, as well as an agreed coloring and scale (Giedion 1949: 37). Le Corbusier had already spoken on the need for better means to represent town plans according to “rules specific to our discipline… [using] means of honest expression” (Chapel 1996: 167). Neurath’s lecture, on “Town Planning and Lot-Division in Terms of Optical Representation Following the Vienna Method,” proposed a solution. His talk followed one on expansion plans for Amsterdam by Cornelius van Eesteren, who had developed a system of representation using some 72 largely abstract symbols to stand for elements in the city. His imagery, in fact, his very conception of urban design, was derived from the avant-garde De Stijl group, and the formalist abstraction of their approach had seeped over into his cartographic language. Neurath was already critical of contemporary architects’ use of graphic symbols (Faludi 1996: 205), and his shipboard paper proposed isotype as the best means to represent statistics and functions pictorially in town plans. If the method was applied consistently, using a “visual dictionary, a visual grammar and a visual style,” simplifying, condensing, and eliminating the unnecessary, then understanding of its signs would be reinforced, circumventing any need for explanatory legends (as used by van Eesteren) and creating a truly international comprehensibility, a “figurative Esperanto” bypassing problems of language and illiteracy.15 Neurath’s use of isotype to compare international cities is summed up in a later image. Showing “Men Living in One Unit of Area,” it demonstrated population densities by the numbers of men on square brick backgrounds, each of which was topped by distinctive images of specific cities. (Figure 2.2) Learning was thus supported by stereotype – an image omnipresent in modernity and already associated with a meaning – so that the new highly simplified information on comparative densities was less stark, leaving space for the viewer to make the connections and comparisons, and to draw conclusions. (In one such stereotype, the Eiffel Tower represents Paris, in stark contrast to how modernists like Siegfried Giedion, present at the congress, had acclaimed the tower’s engineering achievements or its visual effects of penetrability.) The advantage of isotype, furthermore, was its ability to communicate with a wider public as well as other professionals, politicians, and planners. Here, Neurath was explicitly criticizing van Eesteren’s system for its obscurity and complexity, as well as making a more general point against autonomous disciplinary languages developed to serve intradisciplinary purposes and in favor of placing the reader (whether another professional or a member of the public) as central to the consideration of visual language. Modern architecture’s definitive functionalism and its concern for the modern collective, it was implied, would be as abstract as its formal language if it was limited to an internal conversation between architects. The argument was too radical for CIAM, or simply unrecognizable as a contribution to architectural debate. It was certainly neither the imprimatur of objective scientific method nor the simple means to communicate its aims that CIAM wanted from Neurath. Neurath was not just, by dint of his logical positivism, hostile to any system of thought and incapable of regarding science as anything but uncertain, he was effectively suggesting that the professional protocols of architects, including the hard-won modernist protocols of CIAM, be treated as subsidiary to the public understanding of architecture and planning. Neurath conceived communication as a discursive two-way process, while for CIAM modernists, communication was the conveyance of an

91

Mark Crinson

Figure 2.2  O  tto Neurath – “Men Living in One Unit of Area” (1937). From Otto Neurath, “Visual Representation of Architectural Problems”, Architectural Record, July 1937.

already achieved design concept. Isotype was a propositional method; it was a means to the end of public education and an actively democratic society, understood as a continuous process of making hypotheses and revisions. Most CIAM architects felt their end was achieved once their buildings were erected; they misunderstood Neurath’s method as a way of giving their work objective technocratic credibility so that the public could be educated to see the rightness of modernist solutions and modernism’s rationale, and so that the idea of its aesthetic inevitability could better penetrate into the various bodies of public instrumentation. As Neurath wrote four years later: “[isotype was] intended to bridge the gap between more or less purely conventional symbols for the orientation of specialists, and more or less self-explanatory symbols destined for general enlightenment” (Neurath 1937: 58). Collective consideration, not science or preconceived aesthetic formulas, would provide decisions. This divergence between Neurath’s views and those of modernist architects meant that isotype never entered the workings of CIAM, though it certainly influenced the aesthetics of its visual communication as well as that of other modernists.16 Neurath’s challenge was not just about appropriate visual languages of communication and their use as propaganda for modernism. Much more, it was about whether modern architecture could really engage with its users in its design process rather than impose what its architects and its clients wanted to regard as a scientific and objective method. Definition is preempted by dialogue; the question “what is modern architecture?” could never be a closed one for Neurath. 92

What Is Modern Architecture?

Compartmentalized World Designed in the late 1950s, the Crown Law Offices was part of a refurbishment of Nairobi’s government buildings at the tail end of colonial rule (Figure 2.3). Its architect Amyas Connell had been a member of Connell, Ward and Lucas, one of the first architectural practices in Britain to adopt continental modernism. His move to Kenya in 1941 was part of a wave of modern architects seeking work in the colonies just as colonial policy became more sympathetic to their work (Sharp 1983). The Crown Law Offices is in some ways a generic modernist office building: a slab block lifted above a plinth, with a concrete screen hung over its two long sides, and an external spiral staircase offering sculptural contrast. The catch here, however, is that it is very obviously an ornamented building, with motifs from Indian and Timurid sources on its screens, clearly breaching the modernist prohibition on ornament that Connell had respected in his British buildings. This breach or “crime” seems licensed outside European architecture culture and in the context of an “undeveloped” African colony (in a more famous instance, ornament was allowed by Adolf Loos in designing a house for the African-American dancer, Josephine Baker). And, it is also clearly calculated to resonate symbolically with another feature of the screen; its sudden irregular spacing of windows at one end and the insertion of a large and unmistakably Venetian Gothic window. This is a clear invocation of another imperial architectural tradition, that stemming from what John Ruskin called the “central building of the world,” the Ducal Palace in Venice. The point here is not to illustrate a mildly eccentric modernism, or to yet again “explain” it as some form of proto-postmodernism on Connell’s part (Sharp 1983: 323), but to indicate what it implies and exposes about modern architecture’s relation to race and violence, issues usually excluded from the question “what is modern architecture?” If modernist abstraction was a definitional statement of its separation from previous architectural styles and their replacement by “honesty” or “truth to materials” or “functionalism,” then the Crown Law Offices may be strategically associating this kind of semantics with, perhaps, the loyal Muslim population in east Kenya. It is important this symbolically ornamental work is done in the skin of the building while the universalist source of functional authority, the structure and overall spatial form of the building, is unaffected. Departing from its previous adherence in Nairobi to Graeco-Roman expressions of permanence and unilinear tradition,17 the colonial state now allows high colonial architecture to

Figure 2.3  Amyas Connell – Crown Law Offices, Nairobi (1960).

93

Mark Crinson

create a scenography of affiliation and difference. In addition, Connell’s building is at some level meant to make its British colonial users think of Ruskin’s famous invocation of a hybrid mixture of racial elements, brought together under the paternalist authority of the British empire (much as they had been prefigured by Britain’s typological precedent, the Venetian empire). The dynamics of cultural form and racial subordination are complex here, entangled and interdependent, but the issue of ornament is still superficial in its signaling of associations obscure or insignificant to many. The more fundamental issue is to do with political violence and the relation of modern architecture to the conditions of modernity as contemporaneously enacted in Kenya by colonial power. A system of forced villagization and detention camps, to deter colonial revolt, was as much a part of colonial modernity as Connell’s architecture. While in Nairobi, flamboyant, structurally, and ornamentally expressive forms of modernism, like the Crown Law Offices, were aligning modernism with the benefits of new policies of welfare and development, just outside the city, large numbers of Kenyans were effectively having their homes and land redefined by the state’s coercive interventions. These equally modern forms of environment are put under the condition of “emergency,” and deemed to be more about policing, land appropriation, and native or vernacular housing – they are the modern’s nomos, or hidden matrix; the variants of “bare life” they create are the absolute form of the biopolitical paradigm deployed to control colonial crisis (Agamben 1998: 166–80). Architecture’s very existence as a “high” professional discipline, reinforced by modern architects, is thus an effective part of the strategic compartmentalization of the colonial world that helps it to function in times of crisis in its cultural legitimacy (Mbembe 2003).18

Everyday World For her work “Maison Tropicale,” made for the Portuguese Pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale, the Mozambique-born artist Angela Ferreira reworked prototype prefabricated houses designed for tropical Africa by the French engineer-craftsman Jean Prouvé. In the 1930s, Prouvé developed techniques of fabricating light metal structures influenced in part by aeronautical engineering, and complete buildings in folded sheet metal had followed. The African work came out of a new venture by the state-owned Aluminium Français company which invested in Prouvé’s new postwar factory. The French colonial authorities wanted to develop their African territories and bypass the problems of importing building materials. Prouvé designed two prototypes for tropical houses, one for Niamey in Niger (1949) and two for Brazzaville in the Congo (1951) (Sulzer 2002: 12–16; Guilloux 2008; Prouvé and Cinqualbre 2009; Huppatz 2010; Lemonier 2012). These houses had steel frames and aluminum panels and could be transported easily as air freight and assembled on site by unskilled labor. They were intended for the European parts of their cities: the Niger house for a colonial college administrator, the Brazzaville houses as an information center for an aluminum manufacturer and a house for the manufacturer’s regional director. While there were some differences between the houses (in Brazzaville they were supported on stilts and set at right angles with a linking bridge), they shared the same features. Each had a living space of 6x12m on a 10x14m platform with a roof projecting to the platform’s dimensions, the whole resting largely on two forklike steel supports. The cella-like living space, surrounded by a “portico” of thin supports for the pitched roof, inevitably seems temple-like. The roof, separated by an air cushion from the ceiling, took hot air out of the interior via a flue along the ridge line. Natural airflow was further enhanced by louvers placed all along the upper parts and by sliding screens with grids of small porthole-like windows and circular ventilators. In one sense, the houses are merely footnotes in a history of prefabricated colonial buildings, but symbolically they stand for much more than this. As packages or bubbles of enlightenment universalism, they represent not only the extension of modernism’s techno-utopian aspect into the realm of climate control but also its failure. These houses are not really “exemplary modernist 94

What Is Modern Architecture?

artefact[s]” (Huppatz 2010: 33): the technology is a refinement and extension of 19th-century prefabricated metal structures and their factory production, rather than especially innovatory in its own right. They speak the language of modern architecture more because of their lack of historical ornament, their geometries (even if their roofs are slightly pitched), and their unashamedly metallic components. If they seem to embody the aspiration that modern architecture was the instrument to modernize society everywhere, then they also invite less wide-eyed questions. Does that modernizing imply a lack of commitment to developing a skilled workforce? Would it really extend its benefits to Africans, and would it even (pace Neurath) be perceived as beneficial? Do these buildings mean that Europeans are to be sealed off from the conditions of the place at the same time as they seek to exploit it? And were they, and the rationalization they represent, merely a justification for a proposed extension in the colonial exploitation of resources? In Ferreira’s artwork, components of the Maison Tropicale were remade in wood and formed into a corridor the visitor had to pass through (a human transit echoing the air transit of the boxed Maisons to and from Africa) (Bock 2007; Allen 2015). Photographs placed beyond the corridor showed sites of the Maisons Tropicale without their buildings (Figure 2.4). In part, these images are scenes of colonial imposition and the scarred absences caused by postcolonial repatriation of these houses. In the Brazzaville photographs, the remaining columns of the two Maisons are partly integrated into a building with a corrugated iron roof and partly freestanding with their steel cable reinforcements spilling out of their tops. In the Niamey photographs, all that is left of the Maison is its concrete platform, a plinth that supports nothing, a “tomb to minimalism” (Bock 2007: 14). The question “what is modern architecture?” seems to hover around the images, and the initial answer their evident absences provide is less about a set of concepts, formulas, and practices than about the remains of the technological rhetoric that used ideas of universalism and progress as cover for colonial exploitation, which has left ghostly presences and scars around the world, been transformed into a mythology of techno-utopia and, complementarily, been neglected and ignored for several decades. However, the photographs also provoke a different, further, and just as disturbing set of reflections. The provocation is in their nondescript scenes of apparently serene everydayness. In Niamey, where the Maison was originally assembled in an open, grassed area (Prouvé and Cinqualbre 2009: 97), the platform is shown occupied by goats and surrounded by the straw huts of Tuareg squatters. The concrete is slowly decaying and taking on the color of the surrounding red earth. A power mast is just outside the compound and concrete blocks line one wall. In Brazzaville, ordinary modern materials are even more evident. Some of the remaining columns have been

Figure 2.4  A ngela Ferreira – “Maison Tropicale (Brazzaville #1)” (2007). Collection Museion-Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Bozen. By permission of the artist.

95

Mark Crinson

filled in, providing outhouses for a paint manufacturing company. Concrete block villas look over the site; there are corrugated iron roofs and frames; a man plays the guitar. Everywhere there is evidence of work: the recycling of bottles, plastic containers for paint stuff, paints tested against walls and boards. The everyday nature of these scenes, played out on and around the concrete bases of the houses, is indisputably modern despite the fact that the houses themselves failed; there is nothing here that speaks in colonialism’s terms of a “laboratory of modernity,” or even a “heart of darkness” that the colonial project would pretend to dispel but actually maintain. The life that continues around these sites is modern yet unrecognizable to a European modernist. It is indubitably particular, evidently layered, and to some extent, necessarily opaque – all alien terms to official translations of modernism to the colonial world. The question, then, is not so much “what is modernism?” as “what is demotic modernity?”; and not so much “what is modern architecture?” as “does it matter?” Walter Gropius explained the title of his book Internationale Architektur as to do with a solidarity of interests in progress: The will to the development of a unified view of the world, which characterizes our times, presupposes the longing to free spiritual values of their individual limitations and raise them to objective validity. Then the unity of the external forms, which generates culture, follows as a matter of course. In modern architecture, the objectification of the personal and the national is clearly recognizable. Impelled by worldwide trade and technology, a unification of modern architectural characteristics is progressing in all civilized lands, across the natural borders to which peoples and individuals remain bound.19 Despite the complications of both historical context and translation, it is clear Gropius understands modern architecture’s emergence in terms of its place within overlapping and layered worlds, metaphoric and actual: a world-view, a unified form-world, an international comity of nations, and a smoothing of global difference. What is modern architecture – whether a Palace of the League of Nations-to-be, or Gropius’s images of low-cost housing, factories, offices, and other “functional” buildings – other than the positive coming-into-being, the architectural enframing, of all these forces and desires and impulsions? And we can trace elements of this nested and mutually constitutive world-making in the Maison Tropicale’s aspiration to carry enlightenment everywhere, in the Crown Law Offices’ forms of authority, and in CIAM’s disciplinary sovereignty. But, discrepant worlds open up the self-constituting ones that modernism creates and helps to reproduce, breaking into its mise en abyme. The question “what is modern architecture?” becomes less about what threshold needs to be passed in order to name something modern architecture, as whether that threshold is in fact an ever-receding horizon, a lure toward the always future-oriented.

Notes 1 Le Corbusier, Appel à l’Elite mondiale à l’occasion de la construction du Palais des nations à Genève, 1928: copy in the Paul Otlet Archive, Mundaneum, Mons, PPP0008 CM8/D6. 2 The exceptions here would be Lyautey (for his policies of extensive colonial urbanization and promotion of an architecture identified with associationist politics in Morocco) and Otlet (who had helped his father’s development of a seaside resort in Belgium, who was a supporter of Ernest Hébrard and Hendrik Christian Andersen’s unbuilt scheme for a World Centre, and who would soon collaborate with Le ­Corbusier himself on a project for a Mundaneum). Wells and Valéry certainly had architectural interests, but these were expressed in more literary ways. 3 Several had a strong interest in the League of Nations or influence on its committees: Curie and Valéry were involved with the League of Nations Committee on Intellectual Cooperation; Wells, Otlet and

96

What Is Modern Architecture? Gide had been early campaigners for the League. Cannily, Le Corbusier also included figures who were more equivocal (Croce) or outrightly critical of League of Nations internationalism (d’Annunzio). 4 That Le Corbusier’s League of Nations design was imbued with many elements of classicism (its ­evocation of a court of honour, peristyle, scala regia, “salle des pas perdus”, and so on) was not to become a serious aspect of its analysis until much later: see Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky, “Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal,” Perspecta, 8, 1963, 45–54. 5 Le Corbusier to Sigfried Giedion, 4 March 1927, Fondation Le Corbusier (FLC) 12-1-205. 6 Typescript ‘Un Ralliement – Le congrès de la Sarraz’, FLC B2-4-95. 7 On the complexity of positions within CIAM and conflicts early on regarding whether modernism should be identified with leftwing politics, see Jacques Gubler, Nationalisme et internationalisme dans l’architecture moderne de la Suisse (Lausanne: L’Âge d’Homme, 1975), 152–3; Giorgi Ciucci, “The Invention of the Modern Movement,” Oppositions, 24, Spring 1984, 69–91. 8 Lluís Domènech i Montaner, “En Busca d’una Arquitectura Nacional,” La Renaixença, VIII:4, 28 ­February 1878, 149–60; George Gilbert Scott, Remarks on Secular and Domestic Architecture, Present and Future (London: John Murray, 1857); Heinrich Hübsch, In welchem Style sollen wir bauen? (Karlsruhe: Müller, 1828). 9 For a similar argument for modernism more widely, see Raymond Williams, “When was Modernism?”, in Raymond Williams (ed.), The Politics of Modernism (London, Verso, 1989), 31–7. 10 Le Corbusier, Appel. 11 For accounts that give a more catholic sampling of contemporary architecture at this time, see Myron Malkiel-Jirmounsky, Les tendances de l’architecture contemporaine (Paris: Delagrave, 1930), and Gustav Adolf Platz, Die Baukunst der neuesten Zeit (Berlin: Im Propylaen, 1927). 12 These would include Henry-Russell Hitchcock’s Modern Architecture – Romanticism and Reintegration (New York: Payson & Clarke, 1929), Emil Kaufmann’s Von Ledoux bis Le Corbusier: Ursprung und ­Entwicklung der autonomen Architektur (Vienna: Passer, 1933), Nikolaus Pevsner’s Pioneers of the Modern Movement from William Morris to Walter Gropius (London: Faber & Faber, 1936), and Sigfried Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (London: Oxford University Press, 1941). For analysis of these early histories see Panayotis Tournikiotis, The Historiography of Modern Architecture (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1999); and Anthony Vidler, Histories of the Immediate Present – Inventing Architectural Modernism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008). 13 Members could be banned if found to be acting in ways, whether by intrigue or in their actual architecture, deemed contrary to CIAM’s core beliefs. 14 For a related argument about modernist literature, see Williams, “When was Modernism?”, 33. 15 The lecture was published in Annales Techniques, 44–6, 15 Oct–15 Nov 1933, 1036–49. 16 Andrew Shanken’s argument, that isotype was used purely aesthetically and without the principles behind it, parallels this: Andrew M. Shanken, “The Uncharted Kahn: The Visuality of Planning and Promotion in the 1930s and 1940s,” Art Bulletin, 88: 2, June 2006, 317–318. 17 The ubiquitous colonial architect Herbert Baker had several commissions in interwar Kenya. His Government House (1928) typifies the way Nairobi was seen by its colonial rulers as another place for the exercise of a permanent expression of rule through classicism. One of them extolled the country’s “sublime scenery… [as] a setting for permanent architecture” and its sites as more magnificent even than those used by the Greeks and Romans: E. A. T. Dutton, Lillibulero or the Golden Road (Zanzibar: privately published, 1944), 230. 18 I have more fully developed this argument elsewhere: Mark Crinson, “‘Compartmentalized World’: Race, Architecture, and Colonial Crisis in Kenya and London,” in Irene Cheng, Charles L. Davis II, and Mabel O. Wilson (eds.), Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), 259–276. 19 Walter Gropius, Internationale Architektur (Munich: Albert Langen Verlag, 2nd edition 1927), 6–7 as translated in Richard Pommer and Christian Otto, Weissenhof 1927 and the Modern Movement in Architecture (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 161.

References Agamben, Giorgio (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Allen, Fiona (2015) “Angela Ferreira’s Maison Tropicale: Architecture, Colonialism, and the Politics of Translation,” unpublished PhD thesis, University of Leeds. Anderson, Stanford (1986) “The Fiction of Function,” Assemblage, 2: 19–31. Archigram (1961) London: Archigram Group, 1.

97

Mark Crinson Banham, Reyner (1960) Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, London: The Architectural Press. Barr, Alfred (1932) “Foreword,” in Museum of Modern Art (ed.), Modern Architecture: International Exhibition, New York: MOMA, 14–15. Behne, Adolf (1926) Der modern Zweckbau, Munich, Berlin and Vienna: Drei Masken Verlag, 1926. Bletter, Rosemarie Haag (1996) “Introduction” in Adolf Behne (ed.), The Modern Functional Building, trans. Michael Robinson, Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and Humanities, 1–83. Bock, Jürgen (2007) “Angela Ferreira’s Modernity at Large,” in Jürgen Bock (ed.), Maison Tropicale – Angela Ferreira, Lisbon: Instituto das Artes. Bohigas, Oriol (1979) “Sartoris: The First Classicist of the Avant-Garde,” trans. Silvia Kolbowski, O ­ ppositions, 17: 76–97. Buckley, Craig (ed.) (2014) After the Manifesto, New York and Pamplona: GSAPP and T(6) Ediciones. Chapel, Enrico (1996) “Otto Neurath and the CIAM – the International Pictorial Language as a Notational System for Town Planning,” in Elisabeth Nemeth and Friedrich Stadler (eds.), Encyclopedia and Utopia: The Life and Work of Otto Neurath (1882–1945), Dordrecht: Kluwer. Cohen, Jean-Louis (2012) The Future of Architecture. Since 1889, London: Phaidon. Colomina, Beatriz (ed.) (1992) Sexuality and Space, New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Colomina, Beatriz (1994) Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Colquhoun, Alan (2002) Modern Architecture, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Conrads, Ulrich (1971) Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-Century Architecture, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Crinson, Mark (2012) Stirling and Gowan: Architecture from Austerity to Affluence, London and New ­Haven: Yale University Press. Es, Evelyn van, Harbusch, Gregor, Maurer, Bruno, Pérez, Muriel, Somer, Kees and Weiss, Daniel (eds.) (2014) Atlas of the Functional City: CIAM 4 and Comparative Urban Analysis, Zurich: Thoth and GTA Verlag. Faludi, Andreas (1989) “Planning According to the ‘Scientific Conception of the World’: The Work of Otto Neurath,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 7 (4): 397–418. Faludi, Andreas (1996) “Otto Neurath and Planning Theory,” in Elisabeth Nemeth and Friedrich Stadler (eds.), Encyclopedia and Utopia: The Life and Work of Otto Neurath (1882–1945), Dordrecht: Kluwer. Forty, Adrian (2000) Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture, London: Thames & Hudson. Forty, Adrian (2012) Concrete and Culture: A Material History, London: Reaktion. Friedman, Alice T. (2007) Women and the Making of the Modern House, New Haven and London: Yale ­University Press. Giedion, Sigfried (1949) “CIAM at Sea,” Architects’ Year Book, 3: 36–9. Goldhagen, Sarah Williams (2000) “Coda: Reconceptualizing the Modern,” in Sarah Williams Goldhagen and Réjean Legault (eds.), Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture, Montreal and Cambridge, MA: Centre Canadien d’Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture and MIT Press. Guilloux, T. (2008) “The Maison ‘Tropique’: A Modernist Icon or the Ultimate Colonial Bungalow?” Fabrications, 18 (2): 7–25. Heynen, Hilde (1999) Architecture and Modernity – A Critique, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hitchcock, Henry-Russell and Johnson, Philip (1995 [1932]) The International Style, New York: Norton. Huppatz, D. J. (2010) “Jean Prouvé’s Maison Tropicale: The Poetics of the Colonial Object,” Design Issues, 26 (4): 32–44. Johnson, Philip (1947) Mies van der Rohe, New York: MoMA. Le Corbusier, (1928) Une Maison – Un Palais, Paris: Les Éditions G. Crès et Cie. Lemonier, Aurélien (2012) “La maison tropicale – Exportation et déplacement,” in Claire Stoullig (ed.), Jean Prouvé, Paris and Nancy: Somogy and Musée des beaux arts, 343–51. Loos, Adolf (1987 [1908]) “Ornament and Crime,” in Arts Council (ed.), The Architecture of Adolf Loos, ­L ondon: Arts Council. Loos, Adolf (2002 [1898]) “Potemkin City,” in Adolf Loos (ed.), On Architecture, Riverside: Ariadne. Lu, Duanfang (ed.) (2011) Third World Modernism, London: Routledge. Mbembe, Achille (2003) “Necropolitics,” Public Culture, 15 (1): 11–40. McLeod, Mary (2014) “Modernism” in Iain Borden, Murray Fraser and Barbara Penner (eds.), Forty Ways to Think about Architecture: Architectural history and theory today, Chichester: John Wiley, 185–92. Mertins, Detlef (2011) Modernity Unbound – Other Histories of Architectural Modernity, London: AA Publications. Moretti, Franco (2013) The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature, London: Verso. Mumford, Eric (2000) The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928-1960, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. Neurath, Otto (1937) “Visual Representation of Architectural Problems,” Architectural Record, 82 (1): 57–8.

98

What Is Modern Architecture? Overy, Paul (2007) Light, Air and Openness: Modern Architecture between the Wars, London: Thames & Hudson. Prouvé, Jean and Olivier Cinqualbre (2009) Jean Prouvé: La Maison Tropicale/The Tropical House, Paris: Centre Pompidou. Rowe, Colin (1994) The Architecture of Good Intentions: Towards a Possible Retrospect, London: Academy Editions. Sartoris, Alberto (1935 [1932]) Gli elementi dell’architettura funzionale: Sintesi panoramica dell-architettura moderna, Milan: Hoepli. Sharp, Dennis (1983) “The Modern Movement in East Africa,” Habitat International, 7 (5/6): 311–26. Sulzer, Peter (2002) Jean Prouvé Highlights: 1917–1944, Berlin: Birkhäuser. Taut, Bruno (1928) Modern Architecture, London: The Studio. Tournikiotis, Panayotis (1999) The Historiography of Modern Architecture, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Vossoughian, Nader (2006) “Mapping the Modern City: Otto Neurath, the International Congress of ­Modern Architecture (CIAM), and the Politics of Information Design,” Design Issues, 22 (3): 50–4. Williams, Richard J. (2013) Sex and Buildings: Modern Architecture and the Sexual Revolution, London: Reaktion. Wilson, Colin St John (1995) The Other Tradition in Modern Architecture: The Uncompleted Project, London: Academy Editions. Wright, Gwendolyn (2002) “Building Global Modernism,” Grey Room, 7: 124–34. Zimmerman, Claire (2014) Photographic Architecture in the Twentieth Century, Minneapolis: University of ­M innesota Press.

99

3 Architecture and Image Hal Foster

We associate Pop with music, fashion, art, and many other things but not architecture, and yet, Pop was bound up with architectural debates from first to last. The very idea of Pop—that is, of a direct engagement with mass culture as it was transformed by consumer capitalism after World War II—was first floated in the early 1950s by the Independent Group (IG) in London, a motley collection of young artists and art critics such as Richard Hamilton and Lawrence Alloway, who were guided by young architects and architectural historians such as Alison and Peter Smithson and Reyner Banham. Elaborated by American artists a decade later, the Pop idea was again brought into architectural discussion, especially by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, where it came to serve as a discursive support for the postmodern design of the Venturis, Michael Graves, Charles Moore, Robert Stern, and others in the 1980s, all of whom featured images that were somehow commercial or historical in origin or both. More generally, the primary precondition of Pop was a gradual reconfiguration of cultural space, demanded by consumer capitalism, in which structure, surface, and symbol were combined in new ways.1 That mixed space is still with us, and so a Pop dimension persists in contemporary architecture, too. In the early 1950s, Britain remained in a state of economic austerity that made the consumerist world appear seductive to emergent Pop artists there, while a decade later, this landscape was already second nature for American artists. Common to both groups, however, was the sense that consumerism had changed not only the look of things but also the nature of appearance as such, and all Pop art found its principal subject here—in the heightened visuality of a display world, in the charged iconicity of personalities and products (of people as products and vice versa).2 The consumerist superficiality of signs and seriality of objects affected architecture and urbanism as well as painting and sculpture. Accordingly, in Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960), Banham imagined a Pop architecture as a radical updating of modern design under the changed conditions of a “Second Machine Age” in which “imageability” became the primary criterion. Twelve years later, in Learning from Las Vegas (1972), Venturi and Scott Brown advocated a Pop architecture that would return this imageability to the built environment from which it arose. However, for the Venturis, this imageability was more commercial than technological, and it was advanced not to update modern design but to displace it; it was here, then, that Pop began to be refashioned in terms of the postmodern.3 In some ways the first age of Pop can be framed by these two moments—between the retooling of modern architecture urged by Banham on the one hand

100

DOI: 10.4324/9781315674469-4

Architecture and Image

and the founding of postmodern architecture prepared by the Venturis on the other—but, again, it has an afterlife that extends to the present. It is this story I sketch here. * In November 1956, just a few months after the fabled “This is Tomorrow” exhibition in London first brought the Pop idea to public attention, Alison and Peter Smithson published a short essay that included this little prose-poem: “[Walter] Gropius wrote a book on grain silos, Le Corbusier one on aeroplanes, and Charlotte Perriand brought a new object to the office every morning; but today we collect ads (Smithson and Smithson, 1956: 50).”4 Modern designers like Gropius, Corb, and Perriand were hardly naïve about mass media; the point here is polemical, not historical: they, the old protagonists of modern design, were cued by functional things, while we, the new celebrants of Pop culture, look to “the throw-away object and the pop-package” for inspiration. This was done partly in delight and partly in desperation: “Today we are being edged out of our traditional role [as form-givers] by the new phenomenon of the popular arts—advertising,” the Smithsons continued. “We must somehow get the measure of this intervention if we are to match its powerful and exciting impulses with our own (Ibid.: 50).” This anxious thrill drove the entire IG, and architectural minds led the way. “We have already entered the Second Machine Age,” Banham wrote four years later in Theory and Design, “and can look back on the First as a period of the past (Banham 1960: 11).” In this landmark study, conceived as a dissertation in the heyday of the IG, he, too, insisted on a historical distance from modern masters (including architectural historians like Nikolaus Pevsner, his advisor at the Courtauld Institute, and Sigfried Giedion, author of the classic account of modern architecture, Space, Time, and Architecture [1941]). Banham challenged the functionalist and/or rationalist assumptions of these figures—that form must follow function and/or technique—and recovered other imperatives neglected by them. In doing so, he advocated a Futurist imaging of technology in Expressionist terms—that is, in forms that were often sculptural and sometimes gestural—as the prime motive of advanced design not only in the First Machine Age but in the Second Machine (or First Pop) Age as well. Far from academic, his revision of architectural priorities also reclaimed an “aesthetic of expendability,” first proposed in Futurism, for this Pop Age, where “standards hitched to permanency,” were no longer so relevant (Banham 1955: 3). More than any other figure, Banham moved design discourse away from a modernist syntax of abstract forms toward a Pop idiom of mediated images. 5 If architecture was adequately to express this world—where the dreams of the austere 1950s were about to become the products of the consumerist 1960s—it had to “match the design of expendabilia in functional and aesthetic performance”: it had to go Pop (Banham, 1960; cited in Whiteley 2002: 163). What did this mean in practice? Initially, Banham supported the Brutalist architecture represented by the Smithsons and James Stirling, who pushed given materials and exposed structures to a “bloody-minded” extreme. “Brutalism tries to face up to a mass production society,” the Smithsons wrote in 1957, “and drag a rough poetry out of the confused and powerful forces which are at work (Smithson and Smithson 1957:113).” This insistence on the “as found” sounds Pop, to be sure, but the “poetry” of Brutalism was too “rough” for it to serve for long as the signal style of the sleek Pop Age, and in fact the most Pop project by the Smithsons, the House of the Future (1955–56), is also the most alien to their work as a whole. Commissioned by The Daily Mail to suggest the suburban habitat to come, this model house was replete with gadgets devised by sponsors (e.g., a shower-blowdryer-sunlamp), but its curvy plasticity was inspired by the sci-fi movie imagery of the time as much as any imperative to translate new technologies into architectural form.

101

Hal Foster

As the Swinging 1960s unfolded in London, Banham looked to the young architects of ­ rchigram—Warren Chalk, Peter Cook, Dennis Crompton, David Greene, Ron Herron, and A Michael Webb—to carry forward the Pop project of imageability and expendability. According to Banham, Archigram (1961–76) took “the capsule, the rocket, the bathyscope, the Zipark [and] the handy-pak” as its models and celebrated technology as a “visually wild rich mess of piping and wiring and struts and cat-walks (Banham 1963: 30).”6 Influenced by Buckminster Fuller, its projects might appear functionalist—the Plug-in City (1964; Figure 3.1) proposed an immense framework in which parts might be changed according to need or desire—but, finally, with its “rounded corners, hip, gay, synthetic colours [and] pop-culture props,” Archigram was “in the image business,” and its schemes answered to fantasy above all (Banham in Cook 1971: 5).7 Like the Fun Palace (1961–67) conceived by Cedric Price for the Theatre Workshop of Joan Littlewood, Plug-in City offered “an image-starved world a new vision of the city of the future, a city of components…plugged into networks and grids (Banham 1963: 30).” Yet, unlike the Price project, almost all Archigram schemes were u ­ nrealizable—luckily so, perhaps, for these robotic mega-structures sometimes look like inhuman systems run amok. For Banham, it was imperative that Pop design not only express contemporary technologies but also elaborate them into new modes of existence. Here lies the great difference between Banham and the Venturis.8 Again, Banham sought to update the Expressionist imperative of modern form-making vis-à-vis a Futurist commitment to modern technology, while the Venturis shunned both expressive and technophilic tendencies; in fact, they opposed any prolongation of the modern movement along these lines. For Banham, contemporary architecture was not modern enough, while for the Venturis it had become disconnected from both society and history precisely through its commitment to a modernity that was abstract and amnesiac in nature. According to the Venturis, modern design lacked “inclusion and allusion”—inclusion of popular taste and allusion to architectural tradition—a failure that stemmed above all from its rejection of ornamental “symbolism” in favor of formal “expressionism” (Venturi, Brown, and Izenour 1972: 101). To right this wrong, they argued, the modern paradigm of “the duck,” in which the form expresses the building almost sculpturally, must cede to the postmodern model of “the decorated shed,” a building with “a rhetorical front and conventional behind,” where “space and structure are directly at the service of program, and ornament is applied independently of them” (Figure 3.2) (Ibid.: 87). “The duck is the special building that is a symbol,” the Venturis wrote in a famous definition; “the decorated shed is the conventional shelter that applies symbols (Ibid.: 87).”

Figure 3.1  P  eter Cook, Plug-In City, Section, Max Pressure Area, 1964.  Photo © Archigram. Courtesy of Archigram Archives.

102

Architecture and Image

Figure 3.2  I llustration from Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas (1972). Courtesy of Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, Inc.

To be sure, the Venturis also endorsed Pop imageability: We came to the automobile-oriented commercial architecture of urban sprawl as our source for a civic and residential architecture of meaning, viable now, as the turn-of-the-century industrial vocabulary was viable for a Modern architecture of space and industrial technology 40 years ago. (Ibid.: 90) Yet, in doing so, they accepted—not only as a given but as a desideratum—the identification of “the civic” with “the commercial,” and thus they took the strip and the suburb, however “ugly and ordinary,” not only as normative but also as exemplary. “Architecture in this landscape becomes symbol in space rather than form in space,” the Venturis declared. “The big sign and the little building is the rule of Route 66 (Ibid.: 13).” Given this rule, Learning from Las Vegas could then conflate corporate trademarks with public symbols: “The familiar Shell and Gulf signs stand out like friendly beacons in a foreign land (Ibid.: 52).”9 It could also conclude that only a scenographic architecture (i.e., one that foregrounds a façade of signs) might “make connections among many elements, far apart and seen fast (Ibid.: 9).” In this way, the Venturis translated important insights into this “new spatial order” into bald affirmations of “the brutal auto landscape of great distances and high speeds (Ibid.: 75).” This move naturalized a landscape that was anything but natural; more, it instrumentalized a sensorium of distraction, as they urged architects to design 103

Hal Foster

for “a captive, somewhat fearful, but partly inattentive audience, whose vision is filtered and directed forward (Ibid.: 74; cited from Appleyard, Lynch, and Myer 1964: 5).” As one result, the old Miesian motto of modernist elegance in architecture—“less is more”—became a new mandate of postmodern overload in design—“less is a bore (Ibid.: 139).”10 In the call for architecture to “enhance what is there,” the Venturis cited Pop art as a key inspiration, in particular the photo-books of Edward Ruscha such as Every Building on the Sunset Strip (Ruscha 1966).11 Yet, this is a partial understanding of Pop, one cleansed of its dark side, such as the culture of death in consumerist America exposed by Warhol in his 1963 silkscreens of car wrecks and botulism victims. Even Ruscha hardly endorsed the new autoscape: his photo-books underscore its null aspect, without human presence (let alone social interaction), or document its space as so much gridded real estate, or both.12 A more salient guide to Learning from Las Vegas was the developer Morris Lapidus, whom the Venturis quote as follows: People are looking for illusions…Where do they find this world of the illusions?…Do they study it in school? Do they go to museums? Do they travel to Europe? Only one place—the movies. They go to the movies. The hell with everything else. (Venturi, Brown, and Izenour 1972: 80).13 However ambivalently, Pop art worked to explore this new regime of social inscription, this new symbolic order of surface and screen. The postmodernism prepared by the Venturis was placed largely in its service—in effect, to update its built environment. One might find a moment of democracy in this commercialism, or even a moment of critique in this cynicism, but it is likely to be a projection. By this point, then, the Pop rejection of elitism became a postmodern manipulation of populism. While many Pop artists practiced an “ironism of affirmation”—an attitude, inspired by Marcel Duchamp, that Richard Hamilton once defined as a “peculiar mixture of reverence and cynicism”—most postmodern architects practiced an affirmation of irony: as the Venturis put it, “Irony may be the tool with which to confront and combine divergent values in architecture for a pluralist society (Hamilton 1983: 78, 233; Venturi, Brown, and Izenour 1972: 161).” In principle, this strategy sounds fitting; in practice, however, the “double-functioning” of postmodern design—“allusion” to architectural tradition for the initiated, “inclusion” of commercial iconography for everyone else—served as a double-coding of cultural cues that reaffirmed class lines even as it seemed to cross them (Figure 3.3). This deceptive populism became dominant in political culture only a decade later under Ronald Reagan, as did the neoconservative equation

Figure 3.3  V  enturi, Scott Brown and Associates, Wu Hall, Princeton University, 1983.  Courtesy of Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, Inc.

104

Architecture and Image

of political freedom and free markets also anticipated in Learning from Las Vegas. In this way, the recouping of Pop as the postmodern did constitute an avant-garde, but it was an avant-garde of most use to the Right. With commercial images thus cycled back to the built environment from which they arose, Pop became tautological in the postmodern: rather than a challenge to official culture, it was that culture, or at least its setting (as the corporate skylines of countless cities still attest). Yet, this narrative is too neat; its conclusion, too final. There were alternative elaborations of Pop design, such as the visionary proposals of the Florentine collective Superstudio (1966–78), the antic happenings of the San Francisco-Houston group Ant Farm (1968–78), and other schemes by related groups in France and elsewhere. Both Superstudio (Adolfo Natalini and Cristiano Toraldo di Francia) and Ant Farm (Chip Lord, Doug Michels, Hudson Marquez, and Curtis Schreier) were inspired by the technological dimension of Pop design, as manifest in the geodesic domes of Fuller and the inflatable forms of Archigram. Yet, changed by the political events associated with 1968, they also wanted to turn this aspect of Pop against its consumerist dimension. By this point, then, the two sides of Pop, Banhamite and Venturian, were developed enough to be played against each other. In 1968, Fuller proposed a massive dome for midtown Manhattan, a utopian project that also suggested a dystopian foreboding of cataclysmic pollution, even of nuclear holocaust, to come. Again, this dystopian shadow is sometimes sensed in the sci-fi imagery of Archigram, with its “Armageddon overtones of survival technology (Frampton 1980: 281).”14 Superstudio took this utopian-dystopian slippage to the limit: its “Continuous Monument” project (1969), an example of visionary architecture as Conceptual art, imagined the capitalist city swept clean of commodities and reconciled with nature—but at the cost of a ubiquitous grid that, however beautiful in its purity, is monstrous in its totality. Also inspired by Fuller and Archigram, the Ant Farmers were Merry Pranksters by comparison, pledged as they were to Bay Area counter-culture rather than to tabula-rasa transformation. Yet their performances and videos, which somehow combine anti-consumerist impulses with spectacular effects, also pushed Pop design back toward art. This is most evident in two famous pieces—Cadillac Ranch (1974), where Ant Farm partially buried ten old Cadillacs, nose down in a row like upside-down rockets, on a farm near Armarillo, Texas, and Media Burn (1975), where, in a perverse replay of the JFK assassination, they drove a customized Cadillac at full speed through a pyramid of televisions set ablaze at the Cow Palace in San Francisco. Today both works read in part as parodies of the teachings of Learning from Las Vegas. Pop design after the classic moment of Pop was not confined to visionary concepts and sensational happenings—that is, to paper architecture and art events. In fact, its emblematic instance might be the familiar Centre Pompidou (1972–77), designed by Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano, which is at once technological (or Banhamite) and popular (or Venturian) in effect. These two main strands of Pop design have persisted in other ways as well. Indeed, they can be detected, albeit transformed, in two of the greatest stars in the architectural firmament of the last 30 years: Rem Koolhaas and Frank Gehry. Koolhaas could not help but be influenced by Archigram, trained as he was at the Architectural Association in London at a time, the late 1960s, when Chalk, Crompton, and Herron all taught there. Certainly, his first book, Delirious New York (Koolhaas 1978), a “retrospective ­m anifesto” for the urban density of Manhattan that was also a riposte to the celebration of subu­ rban ­signage-sprawl in Learning from Las Vegas, advanced such Archigram themes as “the Technology of the Fantastic (Ibid.: 46).”15 Yet, Koolhaas played down this connection and, in a strategic swerve around Archigram, cited modernist precedents instead, Le Corbusier and Salvador Dalí above all. Critical of both figures, he nonetheless combined these opposites—Corb the Purist form-giver (and manifesto-maker), Dalí the Surrealist desire-purveyor (and media-celebrity)—in a lively compound that triggered his own success, first as a writer and then as a designer.16 Yet, the Pop imaging of new technology à la Archigram, cut with a Brutalist attention to rough materials and exposed structures, still guided Koolhaas. 105

Hal Foster

Koolhaas borrowed from Dalí his “paranoid-critical method,” a Pop strategy avant la lettre which “promises that, though conceptual recycling, the worn, consumed contents of the world can be recharged or enriched like uranium (Ibid.: 203).” In a way that echoes both Banham and the Venturis, Koolhaas turned this device of a “systematic overestimation of what exists” into his own way of working: his office has often produced its designs through an exacerbation of one architectural element or type, and does so to this day. For example, in the public library in Seattle (1999–2004) and the Central China Television (CCTV ) complex in Beijing (2004–08; Figure 3.4), Koolhaas retooled the old skyscraper, the hero-type of Delirious New York. In Seattle, the glass-and-steel grid of the Miesian tower is sliced into five large levels (four above grade), stepped into cantilevered overhangs, and faceted like a prism at its corners; as it follows these twists and turns, the light-blue metal grid is transformed into different diagonals and diamonds. The result is a powerful image, second only to the Space Needle (1962) as Pop emblem of the city, that is not a fixed image at all, for it changes at every angle and from every point of view. The image is also not arbitrary: the building uses its site, an uneven slope in downtown Seattle, to ground its forms, which renders them less sculptural and less subjective than they might otherwise appear. More importantly, the profile is motivated by the program, especially in the penultimate level that contains a great spiral of ramped bookshelves. The Cubistic skin as a whole wraps the different functions of the building, which serves as its own diagrammatic representation. The idea of building as Pop sign is problematic, yet at least in Seattle the sign is placed in the service of a civic institution. The CCTV in Beijing is a different matter. It, too, transforms the Miesian tower into a “bent skyscraper,” here an immense faceted arch, and it, too, is motivated by the program, which combines “the entire process of TV-making”—administration and offices, news and broadcasting, program production and services—into one structure of “interconnected activities (Koolhaas and OMA 2003: 489).” Moreover, like the Seattle diamond, the CCTV arch is both a technological innovation and an “instant icon,” and in this respect it is also connected to Pop, at once Banhamite and Venturian in its lineage (Koolhaas and OMA 2003: 489). Yet, unlike the Seattle library, this building-sign is overwhelming in its sense of scale and underwhelming in its sense of site, and one can hardly see it as civic (if anything, it reads as a triumphal arch dedicated to the state). Like Koolhaas, Gehry has steered mostly clear of architectural labels. Influenced by the Austrian emigré Richard Neutra (who was long active in Los Angeles), he first turned a modernist idiom into an L.A. vernacular, mostly in domestic architecture, through an innovative use of cheap materials associated with commercial building (e.g., exposed plywood, corrugated metal siding,

Figure 3.4  O  MA, Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren, CCTV Building, Beijing, 2004–08.  Photo © Yumeng Zhu.

106

Architecture and Image

chain-link fencing, and asphalt), as in his own celebrated home in Santa Monica (1977–78/91–92). However, this gritty style was soon succeeded by an imagistic one, as in his Chiat Day Building in Venice (1985–91), where, in collaboration with Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, Gehry designed giant binoculars for the entrance of this advertising agency. At stake in this stylistic shift is the difference between an inventive use of common materials, as in his house, and a manipulative use of mass signs, as in the Chiat Day Building—or indeed the Aerospace Hall (1982–84), also in L.A., where a fighter jet is attached to the façade. The first path can bring elite design back in touch with everyday culture, and renew an architectural form with a social spirit; the second tends to ingratiate architecture to a public projected as a mass consumer. For the most part, Gehry followed the second path into stardom in the 1990s, and the present status of the celebrity designer, the architect as Pop figure, is in no small measure a by-product of his fame. Along the way, Gehry seemed to transcend the Venturian opposition of modern structure and postmodern ornament, formal duck and decorated shed, architecture as monument and architecture as sign, but in fact he collapsed the two categories. This occurred first, almost programmatically, in his huge Fish Sculpture at the Olympic Village in Barcelona in 1992, a trellis hung over arched ribs that is equal parts duck and shed, both all structure and all surface, with no functional interior. The Fish also marked his initial use of computer-aided three-dimensional interactive application (CATIA). Because CATIA permits the modeling of nonrepetitive surfaces and supports, of different exterior panels and interior armatures, it allowed Gehry to privilege shape and skin, the overall configuration, above all else: hence the non-Euclidean curves, swirls, and blobs that became his signature gestures in the 1990s, most famously in the Guggenheim Bilbao (1991–97), and perhaps most egregiously in the Experience Music Project (1995–2000) in Seattle, whose six blobs clad in different metals have little apparent relation to the many interior display-stations dedicated to popular music. In Bilbao, Gehry moved to make the Guggenheim legible through an allusion to a splintered ship; in Seattle, he compensated with an allusion to a smashed guitar (a broken fret lies over two of the blobs). Yet, neither image works even as a Pop version of sited connection (Bilbao as an old port, Seattle as the home of Jimi Hendrix and Grunge music), for one cannot read them at ground level. In fact, one can see them in this way only in media reproduction, which is a primary site of such architecture in any case. On the one hand, then, Gehry buildings remain modern ducks inasmuch as they privilege formal expression above all; on the other hand, they also remain decorated sheds inasmuch as they often break down into fronts and backs, with interiors disconnected from exteriors in a way that sometimes results in dead spaces and cul-de-sacs in-between (this is especially true of his Walt Disney Concert Hall in L.A. [1987–2003; Figure 3.5]).17 But the chief effect of this combination of duck and shed is the promotion of the quasi-abstract building as Pop sign or media logo. And on this score, Gehry is hardly alone: there is a whole flock of “decorated ducks” that combine the willful monumentality of modern architecture with the faux-populist iconicity of postmodern design.

Figure 3.5  Frank Gehry, Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, 1987–2003.  Photo ©Hai Lin.

107

Hal Foster

In some cases, the duck has become the decoration: that is, the form of the building serves as the sign, and sometimes at a scale that dominates the setting, as the Guggenheim Bilbao dominates its surroundings. In other cases, the decorated shed has become the duck; that is, the surface of the building is elaborated, with the aid of high-tech materials manipulated by digital means, into idiosyncratic shapes and mediated envelopes. The first tendency exceeds the ambition of the Venturis, who wanted only to reconcile architecture to its given context via signs, not to have it become a sign that overwhelms its context (the latter is also a “Bilbao-Effect,” one not often acknowledged).18 The second tendency exceeds the ambition of Banham, who wanted only to relate architecture to contemporary technology and media, not to have it become a “mediated envelope” or “datascape” subsidiary to them.19 References: Today, decorated ducks come in a wide variety of plumage, yet even as the stylistic appearance is varied, the logic of effect is often much the same. And, despite the attacks of September 2001 and the crash of September 2008, it remains a winning formula for museums and companies, cities and states, indeed for any corporate entity that desires to be perceived, through an instant icon, as a global player.20 For them and perforce for us it is still—it is ever more--a Pop world.

Acknowledgments This chapter was originally published in my book The Art-Architecture Complex (2011a).

Notes 1 Of course, architecture as sign or advertising precedes World War II, as in the Reklame Architektur of the 1920s. For a helpful account, see Ward (2001). 2 On Pop vis-à-vis this changed semblance, see Foster (2011a). 3 See Venturi, Brown, and Izenour (1972). The book began as a studio conducted in fall 1968 at Yale and Las Vegas; its historical argument was prepared by Venturi (1966). For a recent review of the postmodern debate, see Martin (2010). 4 This paragraph and the next are adapted from Chapter 1 of The First Pop Age, where more on the ­Independent Group and “This is Tomorrow” can be found. 5 As the Smithsons suggested, this move was in keeping with a shift in influence away from the a­ rchitect as a consultant in industrial production to the ad-man as an instigator of consumerist desire. “The ­foundation stone of the previous intellectual structure of Design Theory has crumbled,” Banham wrote in 1961, “there is no longer universal acceptance of Architecture as the universal analogy of design” (Banham and Sparke 1961). On this point, see Whiteley (2002: 137). 6 John McHale, a fellow IG member, was an important advocate of Archigram as well. 7 Like Tom Wolfe, his enemy-twin in gonzo journalism, Banham developed a prose that is also a key Pop form, for it mimics linguistically the consumerist landscape of image-overload and commodity-glut; it, too, is plug-in and clip-on in character. Some artists like Richard Hamilton also developed this mimetic patois, as have some architects like Rem Koolhaas (in texts like “Junkspace”). 8 At least in part this difference stems from their formations. Venturi was trained in the Beaux Arts tradition at Princeton in the late 1940s, and spent an influential year at the American Academy in Rome, while Scott Brown, though schooled at the Architectural Association in London in the early 1950s, departed early on for the United States, where she eventually partnered with Venturi. Banham came to the States, too, in 1976, but his Pop concerns were always inflected in other ways, as a comparison of Learning from Las Vegas and his Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971) reveals. 9 One might argue that this conflation of corporate trademark and public sign was another lesson of Pop art, yet it was rarely affirmed there: for example, the “Monuments” of Claes Oldenburg—his giant baseball bats, Mickey Mouses, hamburgers, and the like—do not champion this substitution so much as they underscore its inadequacy. 10 Despite their critique of modern masters, the Venturis draw their strategy from Le Corbusier. In Vers une architecture (1923) Corb juxtaposed classical structures and industrial commodities, such as the Parthenon and a Delage sports car, in order to argue for the classical monumentality of Machine Age object-types.

108

Architecture and Image

11

12 13 14 15 16

17 18

19

20

The Venturis adjusted these ideological analogies to a commercial idiom: “Las Vegas is to the Strip what Rome is to the Piazza”; billboards punctuate Las Vegas as triumphal arches punctuated ancient Rome; signs mark the Strip as towers mark San Gimignano; and so on (Corbusier 1923: 18, 106, 107, 117). If Corb moved to classicize the machine (and vice versa) in the First Machine Age, the Venturis moved to classicize the commodity-image (and vice versa) in the First Pop Age. Sometimes the association between Las Vegas and Rome became an equation: the Strip is our version of the Piazza, and so the “agoraphobic” autoscape must be accepted (more on which below). Their studio visited Ruscha at the time, but in the end the Venturis might share less with Ruscha on Los Angeles than with Tom Wolfe on Las Vegas, especially his version of Pop language as practiced, for example, in his “Las Vegas (What?) Las Vegas (Can’t hear you! Too noisy) Las Vegas!!!” (Wolfe 1965). Previously Venturi (1965) made the connection to Pop in “A Justification for a Pop Architecture,” as did Brown (1971) in “Learning from Pop.” Vinegar (2008) touches on this. topic. On both Warhol and Ruscha, see (among many other texts) Chapters 3 and 5 of Foster (2011b). The Venturi take is only slightly different: “Americans feel uncomfortable sitting in a square…they should be working at the office or home with the family looking at television” (Venturi 1966: 131). This dystopian shadow is also present, for instance, in the New Babylon project (1958–62) of the Situationist Constant Nieuwenhuys, who reimagines select cities in Europe as liberated spaces for play—yet, such is the ambiguity of his diagrams that these spaces can sometimes be read as constrictive enclosures. This phrase can also be reversed: the Fantasy of the Technological. Koolhaas has defined his Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) in Dalíesque terms as a “machine to fabricate fantasy,” but some of the OMA “fantasies” have come true at a Corbusierian scale (Koolhaas and Mau, 1995: 644). Koolhaas also has a Corbusieran knack for catchy concepts (possessed by Banham and the Venturis, too), which, in good Pop fashion, he has presented as if copyrighted. In a sense, the Corb-Dalí combination is not as singular as it might seem: a Constructivist-Surrealist dialectic was at the heart of the historical avant-garde, and its (impossible) resolution was a partial project of several neo-avant-gardes—from the Imaginist Bauhaus and the Situationists, through Archigram and Price, to Koolhaas and OMA. Just to be clear: the critique here is not that Gehry violates the (semi-)mythical principle of structural transparency but that this disconnection often produces null spaces that deaden the architecture and disorient its subjects. Already, in his 1989 project for the Sea Terminal in Zeebrugge, Koolhaas posed this effect as an ­a rchitectural question/ambition: “How to inject a new sign into the landscape that—through scale and atmosphere alone—renders any object both arbitrary and inevitable?” (Koolhaas and Mau 1995: 582). I return to the transformation of image into “atmosphere” in Chapter 7. Michael Hays writes of this phenomenon: “It is as if the surface of the modern envelope [his example is the Seagram Building of Mies], which already traced the forces of reification and commodification in its very abstraction, has been further neutralized, reappropriated, and then attenuated and animated at a higher level…This new surface [his example is the Seattle library by Koolhaas] is not made up of semiotic material appropriated from popular culture (as with Venturi and Scott Brown) but, nevertheless, is often modulated through procedures that trace certain external programmatic, sociological, or technological facts (what designers refer to as “datascapes”) (Hays 2003: 66–67).” A further twist on Pop architecture has become apparent. If in the 1960s there was talk of “meta-forms,” and in the 1970s of “mega-structures,” today one might speak of “hyper-buildings.” Ironically, such architecture has returned the engineer, that old hero of modern architecture, to the fore. One such figure is the Sri Lankan engineer, Cecil Balmond, without whom some hyper-buildings could not have been conceived, let alone executed (he has collaborated with Koolhaas since 1985 and with other celebrated designers more recently). Another is Santiago Calatrava, the Spanish artist-designer also in great demand for his emblematic structures, and we will meet others in subsequent chapters. Such engineering-as-architecture might signal a return to tectonics, but, if so, tectonics are here transformed into Pop image-making as well. Consider the transit hub designed by Calatrava at the World Trade Center site in lower Manhattan: he intends its roof of ribbed arcs to evoke the wings of a released dove no less. If Daniel Libeskind proposed a design for “Ground Zero” that would have turned a site of personal trauma into a field of national triumphalism, Calatrava proposes a post-9/11 Prometheanism in which humanist spirit and imperial technology are also difficult to distinguish—and this phenomenon is hardly confined to Manhattan. In such (post-9/11) instances, advanced engineering is placed in the service not only of corporate logo-making but also of mass moral-uplift, and it will likely serve in this way wherever the next mega-spectacle (e.g., the 2012 Olympics in London) lands.

109

Hal Foster

References Appleyard, Donald, Kevin Lynch and John R. Myer (1964) The View from the Road, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Banham, Reyner (1955) “Vehicles of Desire,” Art, 1 (September). Banham, Reyner (1960) Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, London: Architectural Press. Banham, Reyner (1963) “A Clip-On Architecture,” Design Quarterly, 63, 2–30. Banham, Reyner (1971) Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. New York: Harper & Row. Banham, Reyner (1961) “Design by Choice,” The Architectural Review, 130, 43–48. Brown, Scott (1971) “Learning from Pop,” Casabella, 35, 359–60 (Dec). Foster, Hal (2011a) The Art-Architecture Complex, London: Verso. Foster, Hal (2011b) The First Pop Age: Painting and Subjectivity in the Art of Hamilton, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Richter, and Ruscha, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Frampton, Kenneth (1980) Modern Architecture: A Critical History, London: Thames and Hudson. Hamilton, Richard (1983) Collected Words: 1953–1982, London and New York: Thames and Hudson. Hays, K. Michael (2003) “The Envelope as Mediator,” in Tschumi, Bernard and Irene Cheng (eds.) The State of Architecture at the Beginning of the 21st Century, New York: Monacelli Press. Koolhaas, Rem (1978) Delirious New York, New York: Oxford University Press. Koolhaas, Rem and Bruce Mau (1995) S, M, L, XL, New York: Monacelli Press. Koolhaas, Rem and OMA (2003) Content, Cologne: Taschen. Le Corbusier (1923) Vers une architecture, Paris: Éditions Crés. Martin, Reinhold (2010) Utopia’s Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism, Again, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Ruscha, Edward (1966) Every Building on the Sunset Strip, Los Angeles: Edward Ruscha. Smithson, Alison and Peter Smithson (1956) “But Today We Collect Ads,” Ark, 18, 48–50. Smithson, Alison and Peter Smithson (1957) “Thoughts in Progress,” Architectural Design, 27 (4), 111–113. Venturi, Robert (1965) “A justification for a Pop architecture,” Arts and Architecture, 82 (April). Venturi, Robert (1966) Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. New York: The Museum of Modern Art. Venturi, Robert, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour (1972) Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten ­Symbolism of Architectural Form, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Vinegar, Aron (2008) I Am A Monument: On “Learning from Las Vegas”, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ward, Janet (2001) Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Whiteley, Nigel (2002) Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wolfe, Tom (1965) The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamlined Baby, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

110

4 Cold War Modernism Greg Castillo

A novel postwar application for architectural modernism was exhibited, quite literally, in the West German city of Hannover at the 1951 Constructa building exposition. Created to showcase transatlantic approaches to planning, mass housing, and state-of-the-art construction methods, Constructa also mapped a new global imaginary. In the West Berlin pavilion, side-by-side photographs compared two new structures. One showed East Berlin’s Soviet Embassy, designed by a team led by Russian architect Anatoli Strizhevsky and executed in the Stalin-era style known as Socialist Realism. The building’s inventory of neoclassical details included a rusticated masonry base, engaged fluted columns, decorative garlands, and bas-relief flags emblazoned with the Soviet hammer and sickle motif. From atop the cornice, flanking statues of stalwart proletarians looked down upon a palatial entry court. A contrasting photo showed West Berlin’s George C. Marshall Haus, a trade fair pavilion by the German architect Bruno Grimmek. Named for the American statesman and architect of the European Recovery Plan, more commonly called the Marshall Plan, the building adopted an idiom popularized as International Style modernism. Relieving the starkness of bare exterior walls, a skeletal steel porch shaded multi-story glazing. Appended to one side, a curved, elevated walkway and circular restaurant, both sheathed in glass, hovered above the ground plane on thin, tubular supports. A single sentence telegraphed the meaning of this visual pairing: Zwei Welten bauen in Berlin – “Two worlds build in Berlin” (Stadtamt Hanover 1951: 319) (Figures 4.1 and 4.2). Staged two years after Germany’s division into separate cold war nations, Constructa depicted the postwar partition of Europe as having created alternate yet adjacent worlds, each defined by a signature building style.

Figure 4.1  Soviet Embassy, East Berlin, 1947–51. Architects: Anatoli Strischewski et. al. Period postcard (collection of the author).

DOI: 10.4324/9781315674469-5

111

Greg Castillo

Figure 4.2  G  eorge Marshall-Haus ERP (European Recovery Program) Pavilion, West Berlin, 1950. ­A rchitect: Bruno Grimmek. Period postcard (collection of the author).

The cold war was not only a geopolitical contest, as anthropologist Katherine Verdery notes, but also “a form of knowledge and a cognitive organization of the world” (Verdery 1996: 7). ­A rchitecture’s competing cold war styles also made it “a struggle of representations,” as Susan Reid observes (Reid 2010: 4). As the U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. emerged from World War 2 as victors and superpower rivals, architecture gained symbolic significance. Opposing “informal empires” pitted a capitalist “First World” – the U.S.A., Western Europe, and their allies – against a socialist “Second World” – the U.S.S.R., Eastern Europe, and confederates including China, Cuba, North Korea, and North Vietnam (Gaddis 1997: 27). This binary framework also categorized countries that fell into neither camp. Uncommitted nations were described as “nonaligned.” An emergent postcolonial realm in Africa and Asia was clumped with longstanding Latin American democracies as the “Third World”: a contested arena in which the superpowers vied to expand their influence.1 American and Soviet assistance programs created to modernize “backward” economies added yet another representational task to architecture’s cold war brief. In addition to marking geopolitical turf, new buildings incorporated stylistic semaphores said to represent socialist or capitalist templates for socioeconomic development. As astute consumers of the competing modernization schemes offered by First and Second World superpowers, Third World nations could discover a source of agency within their economic dependency. By putting aid missions in “competitive coexistence” with each other, nonaligned nations, most notably Ghana and Afghanistan, created zones of contact and transculturation where, for example, American suppliers might provide electronic equipment for an airport built by engineers from the U.S.S.R. while Soviet advisors studied the quality control practices used by Western builders of local housing. (Avermaete 2012: 476; Beyer 2012: 312; Stanek 2012: 301). Although the superpowers used developmental aid to advance their hegemony, Third World nations could play them against each other to short-circuit the cold war vision of a world apportioned into two discrete camps. Marked by a struggle to advance and export competing systems of political, social, and economic modernity, cold war agendas pervaded globalization processes between 1945 and the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. in 1991. While useful as a chronological marker, the cold war presents problems when used to define architectural periods. As an analytical tool, “cold war modernism” is weakened when used as a catch-all for everything built during the 45 years following World War 2. This article limits the term’s application to buildings created with ideological intent. Rather than a period style, cold war modernism deployed specific building types and materials, approaches to design and construction labor, and modes of domesticity and consumption to locate subjects within the geopolitical imaginaries associated with either “Free World” capitalism or the socialism of the “People’s Democracies” – the two worlds said to be under simultaneous construction in divided Berlin. 112

Cold War Modernism

Conscripting Modernism The terms and tools of engagement mobilized on the cold war’s architectural front trace their origins to the Interwar era (1919–39) and can be fully understood only within this genealogical context. Following the Russian Revolution of 1917, Soviet Constructivists gave the U.S.S.R. a pioneering lead in devising an arsenal of modernist architectural forms imbued with i­deological portent. A concurrent predilection for Beaux-Arts and Art Deco decoration made the U.S.A. a provincial backwater with respect to European experiments in modernist architecture. ­Constructivism’s use as an icon of Soviet futurity ceased in the 1930s, however. Stalin’s cultural revolution repudiated modernist aesthetics as bourgeois and foreign, disorienting the Soviet design profession and unleashing vicious denunciations among architects vying for leadership within a congealing hierarchy of state-authorized neoclassical practice. At the same time and a hemisphere away, young insurgents at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) plotted to overthrow American architecture’s Beaux-arts establishment and install in its place a modernist avant-garde. These two antithetical design upheavals on opposite sides of the planet configured the terrain upon which architecture’s cold war would be waged a generation later. American hubris pervaded “Modern Architecture,” the 1932 MoMA exhibition that introduced “the International Style” as a local franchise. Curators Henry Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson advanced an ideosyncratic reading of modernism informed by study tours of European architecture, some made in the company of MoMA director Alfred H. Barr Jr. Like a previous generation of American elites who embarked upon their “Grand Tour” of Europe in pursuit of edification and social status, Hitchcock and Johnson absorbed as well as appropriated continental culture. In reinterpreting Europe’s diverse modernist practices as a unitary International Style, Johnson declared: “We saw an incredible implosion; everything started looking alike. Russell and I decided it existed and Europeans weren’t seeing it right” (Dean 1982: 9). “We have a tremendous advantage over everyone else,” Johnson insisted, “in that we have seen more than everybody and that we have no national bias whatsoever” (Howard 2016: 72). In fact, nationalist sentiment underpinned Johnson and Hitchcock’s reformulation of architectural modernism as an easily replicated set of compositional rules emphasizing volumetrics rather than mass, regularity versus symmetry, and an emphasis upon construction detailing instead of ornament. Success in marketing this design formula in the U.S.A. would fulfill the claim made by Hitchcock in 1929 that “It is already America which appears to have the greatest significance for the development of a new architecture. There, very possibly in the future, it will take the most individual and characteristic form” (Hitchcock 1929: 203). A 1932 MoMA exhibition press release went so far as to frame European modernism as a byproduct of New World technology: “It was in America and by Americans that the true modern architecture of today was given the impetus which started it on the way to its present well-advanced state of development” (Kantor 2002: 299). American exceptionalism and International Style modernism went hand in hand in Hitchcock and Johnson’s aestheticized vision of manifest destiny. Accounts of MoMA’s International Style often mischaracterize it as “a depoliticized version of the modern style beginning to appear in Germany, France, and the Netherlands.” (Merwood-­Salisbury 2013: 117). Riven by polarized approaches to modernist practice, the 1932 exhibition was, in effect, two shows in one. With Johnson in charge of the primary displays, housing activist Catherine Bauer, in collaboration with Lewis Mumford, Clarence Stein, and Henry Wright, guest-curated a secondary installation showcasing modernist Siedlungen: the German word for “housing estates.” In American usage, the term was equated specifically with modern working class residential districts built in municipalities governed by the Weimar-era Social Democratic Party. At a MoMA symposium, Mumford proclaimed that when designing such communities “you must plan them as though you were working for a communist government” (Mumford 1932: 4). Broadcasting from the other 113

Greg Castillo

end of the ideological spectrum, Hitchcock and Johnson argued in The International Style – an exhibition spin-off written, according to Johnson, “in a fury against the functionalist, German Social Democratic workers’ approach to architecture as part of social revolution” – that “in European Siedlungen, the functionalists build for some proletarian superman of the future,” an approach “not based on the actual situation in the contemporary world outside Russia” (Eisenman and Johnson 1982: 14; Hitchcock and Johnson 1995: 92, 104). Johnson’s curatorial choices emphasized the moneyed modernist villa as an essential contemporary building type, a portrayal that was anachronistic, to say the least. The 1932 “Modern Architecture” show debuted in the darkest year of the Great Depression. After viewing the exhibition, museum visitors could have strolled from MoMA to a contrasting display of recent housing construction: the muddy shantytown erected in Central Park by destitute New Yorkers evicted for non-payment of rent. While Johnson infused Social Darwinism with continental panache, Catherine Bauer applied European modernist precedents to social reform in Modern Housing (1934), a treatise informed by her work on the 1932 exhibition. Camouflaged by the white walls and ribbon windows of an all-purpose International Style, the specter of class warfare haunted MoMA’s dueling attempts to effect an American transplant of European modernism. An “America first” origin myth for modernism received full elaboration at MoMA’s 1933 exhibition “Early Modern Architecture, Chicago 1870–1910.” As curators, Hitchcock and Johnson rehabilitated Chicago’s early commercial architecture as “the most important creative period in American architecture,” according to a museum press release. Their celebration of late-19th century office blocks rendered unfashionable by the Art Deco towers of the 1920s asserted modernism’s origins in a building type native to American corporate capitalism (Merwood-Salisbury 2013: 119). This seemingly minor exhibition had an enormous influence in scripting the U.S.A.’s postwar modernist canon, which absorbed the claim that the commercial buildings of a frontier boomtown had set a vital precedent for Europe’s Interwar avant-garde. MoMA popularized the “Myth of the Chicago School” (Bruegmann 2005) through exhibitions, film, and radio broadcasts throughout the 1930s – just as Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Josef Albers, László Moholy-Nagy, and other Bauhaus masters fled Nazi Germany to establish expatriate design careers in the U.S.A. MoMA’s mythmaking efforts and German sagas of exile converged as a coterminous narrative, rendering prophetic Hitchcock’s assertion of an International Style born in America and fated to assume its “most individual and characteristic form” there. At the height of the cold war, as Socialist Realist monuments rose across the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe in a wave of Stalin-era reconstruction, Philip Johnson declared neoclassicism dead. His catalog introduction for the 1952 MoMA exhibition “Built in USA: Post-war Architecture” proclaimed: “The battle of modern architecture has long been won. […] The International Style, which Henry-Russell Hitchcock’s book of 1932 heralded, has ripened, spread, and been absorbed by the wide stream of historical progress” ( Johnson 1952: 8–9). In the U.S.A., facts on the ground supported his assertion. On Park Avenue, just blocks from MoMA, the new glass and steel office slab of Lever House established the International Style as a global signifier of corporate capitalism. Designed by Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), Lever House inspired look-alikes across the U.S.A. and as far afield as Paris, West Berlin, and Ankara. Meanwhile, Mumford’s New Deal vision of working-class communities built in the International Style and planned “as though you were working for a communist government” receded from America’s grasp like a shimmering fata morgana.

Waging a Culture War The “cultural cold war” – a term coined by Melvin J. Lasky, an American journalist in West Berlin (Saunders 2013: 25) – mobilized International Style modernism for ideological warfare. In “Architecture as a Political Weapon,” U.S. State Department consultant Hugo Leipziger-Pearce 114

Cold War Modernism

called for an overseas building program to counter communist rhetoric with evidence of prosperous democracy. “In contrast to the blaring techniques adopted by the other side, our purpose consists of demonstrating the American way of life to the Germans under the watchful eyes of Europe as a whole” (Leipziger-Pearce 1950: 204). His distinction between rhetorical indoctrination and factual demonstration was illusory. State Department officials used books, films, exhibitions and full-scale buildings as propaganda in the original sense of the term, coined by the Catholic church in the 17th century to describe efforts to “propagate the faith” (Propaganda Fide). Consistent with MoMA’s role in forging a New World narrative for architectural modernism, the Museum’s International Program of Circulating Exhibitions (I.C.E.), established in 1952, spread the gospel of American International Style architecture overseas (McCray 1977). I.C.E. organized a global tour of MoMA’s 1952 “Built in USA” exhibition, which traveled to Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Italy, Poland, England, Ireland, Denmark, Finland, and Romania from 1953 to 1958. The exhibition’s inclusion of work by European-born Bauhaus expatriates Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, and Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe demonstrated that “American architecture is not an isolated phenomenon: in architecture, as in many other things, we are the heirs of Western civilization.” The I.C.E. program showed overseas audiences that, beyond mere military prowess, American superiority extended to technology, economy, and culture – ingredients that made the International Style a calling card of the nation’s postwar foreign diplomacy. Through the 1950s, America projected its status as a modernist superpower far beyond exhibition venues. The U.S. State Department commissioned dozens of embassies, consulates, libraries, information centers, and diplomatic staff residences to support its expanding global influence. Arguing the case for what he called the “international modern” style, Leland W. King, the director of the U.S. Foreign Building Office (F.B.O.), argued that “the [State] Department should conform to this contemporary trend, in which the United States is the undisputed leader, if its buildings are to be truly representative of the progressive and characteristic way of American life” (Loeffler 1998: 114–115). “No country can exercise political world leadership without exercising a degree of cultural leadership as well,” declared the editors of Architectural Forum. The dictum had a profit-driven subtext. The magazine hoped that the diplomatic building boom would herald “a major ‘export drive’” in American architecture (Editors 1953: 102). Just as federal military spending had created a global market for American high-tech weaponry, the State Department’s building investments might do the same for cutting edge design and construction firms, or so the theory went. Synergies between federal and private building commissions were evident in Tokyo, where Antonin Raymond and Ladislav Rado designed both the new Reader’s Digest Building, a masterful work of regionally inflected corporate modernism, and the Perry House, a similarly detailed block of diplomatic staff apartments commissioned by the F.B.O. (Loeffler 84–6). Nowhere was the export of American modernist expertise more conspicuous, however, than in West Germany. Prior to assuming his post as F.B.O. director, King had made a pilgrimage to Manhattan’s Lever House. He regarded its New World version of modernism to be exceptionally appropriate for new diplomatic facilities built in the nation that had produced the Bauhaus. The State Department’s West German building program included seven consular offices, six public information centers, a headquarters for the Voice of America radio, and 19 staff apartment buildings. The F.B.O. awarded the huge design commission to SOM with Gordon Bunshaft as the lead designer; a West German, Otto Apel represented the local partner firm providing working drawings and cost estimates (Loeffler 1988: 88–9). Across West Germany, Bunshaft’s corporate variant of International Style modernism supplied the State Department with glossy monuments to American power and prestige. As the architect of record for State Department facilities in Frankfurt, Stuttgart, and Dusseldorf, Apel exploited the International Style as a professional exit strategy from his Third Reich design career. During the war, he had worked under Heinrich Tessenow and Albert Speer planning 115

Greg Castillo

Berlin’s reconstruction as a Nazi imperial capital (Kitchen 2015: 49). Egon Eiermann, whose Nazi-era practice specialized in elegantly minimalist buildings for the Third Reich military/industrial complex, did the same. Two years after Hitler’s defeat, he declared: “In that [modernism] finds its best examples in countries that have protected and defended peace and freedom, our belief is confirmed that this architecture’s roots are nourished by humanitarianism” (Eiermann 1947: 46). His declaration of allegiance grasped at the opportunity that America’s International Style offered Third Reich virtuosos of industrial modernism, namely their rehabilitation as progressive designers. Eiermann was something of a poster child for the process, successfully shedding his legacy of collaboration with the Nazi armaments industry to produce West Germany’s pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair, the West German embassy in Washington DC, and an office tower for the West German parliament in Bonn (Castillo 2011). As a form of cultural capital, International Style modernism proved transformative in post-fascist West Germany, where its effectiveness at “visual denazification,” in Paul Betts’s memorable phrase, seemed boundless (Betts 2004: 191).

Domestic Subjects On both sides of the cold war divide, new domestic environments provided an opportunity to shape human subjectivity. Residential construction lagged during World War 2, which had shifted national economies toward military needs at the expense of housing production. In both the U.S.A. and Europe, plans to retool weapons factories as assembly lines for mass-produced housing came to nothing. More successful were attempts to apply assembly line logic to construction sites. Taylorism – the “scientific management” of efficent workflow through time-motion studies, developed in the U.S.A. by Fredrick Winslow Taylor – transformed bricklaying across the Soviet Bloc. So-called “socialist competition” schemes, organized at Party behest, pitted high speed work crews against each other as rivals contending for awards and special privileges. (Nicolaus and Obeth 1997: 184–99). Across the Atlantic, speculative builders devised a mass production method for wood-frame houses that staged suburban construction as a linear process. Tradesmen moved down the “assembly line” with pallets of building supplies, from precut lumber to plumbing and electrical fittings, delivered in the order needed. (Wright 1983: 251–3) The resulting product, typically a single-family “ranch home,” was made affordable through massive government intervention in the mortgage market. Federally insured, low-cost, long-term financing and preferential loans made available to returning veterans fueled a postwar building boom that turned farmlands at the urban periphery into vast tracts of privately owned houses. Promoted overseas as “The American Way of Life,” the suburban single-family home advanced contemporary modes of capitalist production and consumption. “America at Home” (Amerika zu Hause), a 1950 Marshall Plan exhibition staged in West Berlin, established a template for deploying the tract home in overseas propaganda. Working in round-the-clock shifts for five days, West German crews turned a kit of prefabricated components imported from Minnesota into a wood-frame home in just days. The public relations stunt, according to Marshall Plan publicists, demonstrated the increased productivity made possible by American manufacturing innovations and harmonious labor relations. (Castillo 2010: 26). Two years later, a roofless, full-scale dwelling realized down to its furnishings and kitchen gadgets opened for public inspection in West Berlin’s Marshall Haus trade pavilion. Titled “We’re Building a Better Life” (Wir bauen ein besseres Leben), the installation featured a model family of actors performing rituals of daily life in a consumer wonderland (Figure 4.3). All household objects on display were modernist in design and manufactured in a Marshall Plan member nation, demonstrating that “rationally designed products from different countries in the Atlantic community can be combined harmoniously,” and “just as these items from the various countries can combine to form a homogeneous whole, so the nations themselves can combine to form a homogeneous community.” The exhibition travelled to Stuttgart, 116

Cold War Modernism

Figure 4.3  “We’re Building a Better Life” model home exhibit, West Germany, 1952. A narrator dressed in white coveralls (in crow’s nest) explains the interaction of the display’s model family with their modern household environment. US National Archives (RG286 MP GEN 1841).

Hannover, Paris, and Milan, providing future EU citizens with a preview of an affluent lifestyle stripped of trade barriers and unified by consumption à l’Américaine – the macroeconomic future augured by the Marshall Plan for a unified Western Europe (Castillo 2010: 64–78). The advent of modern mass housing in the Second World actualized visions of mechanized construction that had long haunted the Soviet building industry and, in the process, upended Stalinist socialism. In an autobiography, Russian president Boris Yeltsin recalled how his father, an amateur inventor, had toiled over drawings and calculations for a machine designed to mix mortar, lay a brick, remove any excess mortar, and move forward, tirelessly repeating the functions of its wall-building program. (Yeltsin, 1990: 24). Raising socialist productivity through drudgeryfree construction served another purpose as well. The elimination of artisans from building sites would obliterate remnants of trade union autonomy, a source of resistance to the Party’s attempts to boost production while lowering cost. Construction workers, particulary in Eastern Europe, despised “socialist competition” campaigns and their ongoing reduction of piecework wages. In East Berlin, schemes to Taylorize construction labor sparked a workers’ strike in June 1953 that spread nationally before being suppressed through Red Army intervention (Nicolaus and Obeth 1997: 199–216). As long as Soviet Bloc housing utilized conventional brick and mortar construction, the economic and labor advantages of mass production would remain a pipedream. It took a “revolution from above” to address the Soviet housing crisis and to topple the Stalin­ ethods, era design establishment associated with it. “On Wide-Scale Introduction of Industrial M Improving the Quality and Cost of Construction”, a two-hour address delivered in 1954 by ­Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, declared war on the decorative imperative of Socialist ­Realism as well as on those who practiced it. Khrushchev envisioned a socialist utopia assembled from prefabricated concrete panels, which he insisted would reduce cost and waste, turn bricklayers into skilled factory operatives, and yield better housing faster and cheaper than ever before (Forty 2012: 150–9). The campaign sparked the battle cry: “Architects, into the factories!” (Gerchuck 2000: 86). Confronted with stripped-down buildings shaped by value engineering rather than the classical canon, Soviet design theorists struggled to disentangle Khrushchev-era construction from aesthetic modernism, which remained under ideological quarantine as a symptom of capitalist cultural degeneracy. Although the adoption of Western modernism remained ideologically suspect until the 1970s, Soviet authorities encouraged the appropriation of Western technology. When invited to tour 117

Greg Castillo

suburban building sites during a visit to the U.S.A. in 1955, members of a delegation headed by the Soviet Minister of Construction collected samples as “souvenirs” and snapped photos to document every stage of home assembly. On tours of construction supply companies, they placed orders for hundreds of products (Castillo 2010: 130–4). American homebuilders had good reason to mistrust their guests’ acquisitive mania. Soviet reverse engineering – dubbed the “Western option” by historian of technology Raymond Stokes – allowed the U.S.S.R. to approach industrial parity with the West at a fraction of the cost of original research and development (Stokes 1997). East Germany exercised its “Western option” at West Berlin’s 1957 International Building Exposition (Internationale Bau-Austellung), known as Interbau. Its showcase of advanced residential prototypes, located two subway stops from the East Berlin border, featured modernist housing designed by architects from Austria, Brazil, Denmark, England, Finland, France, Israel, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland, the U.S.A., and West Germany. West Berlin’s mayor proclaimed it a display of “the free world’s technology and creative strength.” An East German newspaper responded to the provocation with a headline describing Interbau as a collection of “Berlin’s Biggest Rental Barracks.” While condemning the exposition as “a fantasy from a decaying world,” members of the East German Building Academy (Deutsche Bauakademie) scrutinized the exhibition’s model apartments. Their internal report decried the “astonishing carelessness” with which windowless kitchens were located away from exterior walls, thus requiring artificial light and mechanical ventilation. Five years later, the same features could be found in new East German mass housing (Castillo 2010: 183–8, 195). After decades of Stalinist xenophobia, Western European architectural publications began to appear in unauthorized Russian translations after 1956, providing another transmission belt conveying First World innovations across the so-called “Iron Curtain” – by this point, something more akin to an osmotic “Nylon Curtain,” as György Péteri notes (Péteri 2004; Fox 2014: 33). Russian experiments with prefabrication dated back to the Stalin era, but the results had been crude and impractical. The Soviet search for an advanced source of panelized building technology source bypassed Czechoslovakia, an East Bloc ally. In 1956, at a time when the U.S.S.R. had yet to produce a viable panel prototype, Czech housing authorities were ready to launch a national building campaign employing a locally developed precast system. (Zarecor 2011: 225–6). Nevertheless, Moscow’s Party leaders commissioned a French housing contractor, the Société Raymond Camus et Cie, to set up factories for precast concrete building components in the Soviet cities of Baku and Tashkent in 1958 (Anderson 2015: 220–1; Paskins 2016: 64). Within a decade, hundreds of Domostroitel’nye kombinaty or D.S.K. “homebuilding plants” were in operation across the USSR. Given a postwar “economic miracle” that was raising living standards in Western Europe, the Party regarded the stakes of mass housing as nothing less than the triumph or failure of the socialist project (Fehérváry 2013: 81, 84). Khrushchev’s reforms successfully reversed a long decline in Soviet housing standards. The official “sanitary norm,” adopted in 1927, had called for 9 square meters (97 square feet) of living space per resident at a time when the average citizen enjoyed under 6 square meters (63 square feet) of space. Stalin’s “great leap” into industrial development, mapped in successive Five-Year Plans beginning in 1928, triggered massive demographic growth in urban centers without a corresponding investment in housing. Scarcity prompted Party authorities to tolerate private home construction, which contributed one-fifth of all new residential space in the prewar years. The byproducts, speculative building and private rental income, were anathema to socialist ideology. Meanwhile, living space continued on a downward slide to its 1950 nadir of 4.67 square meters (50 square feet) per capita. Khrushchev-era investment in industrially manufactured housing, a means of production ideally suited to a command economy, raised the average to 7.18 square meters (77 square feet) by 1967, prompting the official suspension of all land allocations for private housing (Herman 1971). The slogan “A single system of construction for the whole country” summarized Soviet architecture’s abandonment of both craft-intensive building and a mixed economy of 118

Cold War Modernism

housing production (Forty, 2012: 156–8). In terms of political economy and productivity, the results were indeed revolutionary. In the U.S.S.R. alone, the state monopoly on assembly line housing production yielded over 2 million new apartment units every year between 1957 and 1975. So-called “dwellings on conveyor belts” (doma na konviere) assembled from factory-­m anufactured concrete panels in accordance with standardized designs (tipovye proekty) transformed housing design and labor alike. Large state bureaucracies conducted materials research, created and tested prototypes, manufactured building components, and transported them to the sites of new planned neighborhoods. Architects chafed at their profession’s marginalization within this new industrial complex. As planning and building institutes absorbed responsibilities formerly vested in state architecture bureaus, young talents increasingly opted for degrees in engineering rather than design. (Molnár 2010: 65–6; Pugh 2014: 136–8). Opportunities for design careers shrank in proportion to the growth in the fields of architectural theory and criticism: disciplines that required a total overhaul in the wake of Khrushchev’s dismemberment of a Soviet neoclassical tradition that had been in constant development since the 1930s (Pugh 2014: 139). The construction worker, deployed in propaganda as an heroic metonym for the building of socialism, underwent an equally radical mutation. Khrushchev boasted about having transformed “peasant” workers trained to “slap bricks and mortar together” into the technicians of panel factories and mechanized building assembly (Varga-Harris 2015: 29). From a managerial point of view, efficiency engineering unimpeded by artisanal labor proved wildly successful. Compared with similar industrialized building methods in the West, housing productivity per worker in the U.S.S.R. was by 1964 “much higher than is usual in British labor practice,” according to a U.K. source. (Diamant 1964: 132). Beyond providing shelter, mass-produced housing anchored socialist citizens within the logic and practices of a system founded upon “the reliability of scientific planning and the seemingly limitless possibilities afforded by modern technology, when combined with the ultimate science of society, Marxism” (Kotkin 1995: 30). Khrushchev-era novostroiki (“new buildings”) served as building blocks for an urban unit called the mikrorayon (“micro-district”), a Russian term transliterated into the languages of other Second World nations. Neighborhood ensembles included retail and recreational amenities, daycare centers and schools, and public transit nodes situated within walking distance of apartments. Echoing Le Corbusier’s archetypal “city in the park,” the mikrorayon, devised for a population capped at 20,000, became the dominant socialist settlement form. It differed from the First World’s superficially similar modern working-class districts, which remained socially and economically marginal to the urban landscapes of more privileged citizens (Smith 2010: 117). The prefix “micro” identified the mikrorayon as the smallest component of “a tightly orchestrated hierarchy of increasingly larger spatial units” of socialist planned development (Maxim 2012). Administrative institutes regulated land use and title; established the location of industry, housing, public services, retail outlets, and recreational amenities; and coordinated settlement patterns with their transport networks. Five-year planning projected socialist urban development into a future far more distant than that of the capitalism’s brief real estate cycle. This protracted timeframe could frustrate apartment residents, who endured years of delay as the infrastructure of their mikrorayon crawled to completion. Whether fully achieved or merely pledged, what Kimberly Elman Zarecor calls “the socialist scaffold” – an “integrated system of parts and the logic of how they fit together” – made the modernized East Bloc city “a synchronized instrument of economic production and social transformation in physical space,” with the mikrorayon serving as the everyday environment of this novel ideological and social order (Zarecor 2017: 5, 7). Residency in novostroiki reshaped socialist subjectivity, although not always according to plan. While space in new mass-produced apartments was tight – initially, a total of 55 square ­meters (600 square feet) for a two-and-one-half room, four-person dwelling – its provision of ­privacy heralded the end of Stalinist civilization. Before Khrushchev’s mass housing intervention, ­single-family apartments had been a perquisite of Soviet elites. More typically, families occupied 119

Greg Castillo

a room or two in a unit originally built as a single residence but made communal through adhoc subdivision. This was not the collective living of socialist theory. Shared kitchens and toilets sparked bitter feuds. Household surveillance by petty informants enforced Stalinist conformism (Fitzpatrick 1999: 46–50, 147–8). A 1955 Party decree came to the rescue with the promise that every Soviet family would receive its own housing unit within a decade. Called “separate” (rather than “private”) apartments, they were purposely designed to be too small to be subdivided into collective flats by local housing authorities (Harris 2013). Intended as artifacts of Marxist “scientific and technological progress,” the new units were plagued by poor layout and shoddy construction details as a result of rushing prototypes into production without adequate testing. Resident campaigns demanding repairs, adequate services, and maintenance of public order in shared spaces produced novel forms of grassroots community (Harris 2013; Varga-Harris 2015). Rather than monuments to the failure of state socialism or the collapse of its utopic doctrine, concrete apartment slabs are recalled in oral histories as a significant upgrade in living standards as well as settings for neighborly relations and community activities (Rubin 2017). In film, literature, and popular memory across the Soviet Bloc, the efficiency flat in a new district of housing blocks remains an icon of both the freedoms and failings of socialist life after Stalin (Figure 4.4). Construction of standardized concrete panel housing across the Second World did not yield a singular experience of socialist domestic modernity. Instead, reproduction in a variety of national contexts yielded diverse outcomes (Kuliç 2016). For example, the Afghan Ministry of Public Works cajoled Soviet advisors into adapting, at great expense, a concrete panel factory to produce not only apartment blocks but also freestanding homes with up to 12 bedrooms that were better suited to extended families (Beyer 2012: 316). In Hungary, where Soviet military suppression of a popular national uprising in 1956 generated enormous public resentment, state news services portrayed the new mass housing as “Western” rather than Russian in origin (Molnár 2010: 65–6). In embracing Soviet mass-produced construction methods, Cuban Party authorities displaced a home-grown architectural revolution based upon artisanal construction and perhaps better suited to the island’s labor economy (Loomis 1999). Concrete panel housing became a tool in the Party’s rural relocation of Cuban secondary students to new rural bording schools that added voluntary agrarian labor to their academic routine (Togores 1979). Chinese Party authorities also considered mass-produced concrete housing an instrument of rural collectivization (Lu 2006: 122). Nowhere

Figure 4.4  C  onstruction workers of the Kulikov building brigade set a prefabricated concrete wall section in place on the fifth floor of a new Moscow apartment block, June 1960. Everett Collection / Alamy EG6PT5.

120

Cold War Modernism

did cold war politics shape the fortunes of Soviet-style congregate housing more than in Chile, however. The 1970 election of President Salvador Allende launched the nation on a “Chilean Path to Socialism.” Two years later, a manufacturing plant donated by the U.S.S.R. began fabricating concrete housing components. Not content merely to portray factory-produced panel housing as a portent of Sovietization, Allende’s opponents spread rumors that the factory disguised a secret Russian weapons installation. In the wake of the C.I.A.-backed coup that overthrew Chile’s socialist government, Soviet advisors were expelled and the factory’s workers incarcerated. Some endured torture; others were murdered. When Chile’s military junta opted to restart the production line, skilled machine operators were retrieved from prison camps and employed as virtual hostages. Concrete prefabricated housing reappeared in Chile for two more years, albeit purged of socialist cultural associations through the addition of gable roofs and decorative balconies. Private building contractors ultimately eradicated all vestiges of centralized housing production by having the plant dismantled (Alonzo and Palmarola 2009). In Chile, the propagandist trope of the cultural cold war as a life-or-death struggle overstepped rhetorical hyperbole to become a law of the land.

‘Unique Constructions’ The “compare and contrast” function of national pavilions at international expositions spurred the development of a cold war building category known in the U.S.S.R. as “unique construction” (unikal’noe stroitel’stvo). Its bespoke monuments stood in flamboyant counterpoint to the typologically standardized housing called tipovoe stroitel’stvo (Anderson 2015: 260). The U.S.S.R. pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair exemplified the new genre. Designed by a team headed by Anatoly Polianski, the pavilion modernized Soviet representational architecture. Gone were the neoclassical flourishes said to embody socialist beauty during the Stalin era. Instead, a pleated glass façade rose 22 meters (72 feet) to intersect a flat roof plane supported by slender steel pylons and openwork trusses, yielding a structure as sleek as its ceiling-hung Sputnik, the world’s first orbital satellite and a proud symbol of Soviet technological achievement. Together, the pavilion and its contents conveyed the spirit of a Marxist “scientific-technical revolution”, another Khrushchevera project that redefined state socialism (Reid 2010). Adjacent to the U.S.S.R. pavilion, the American competition featured a Coliseum-like arena free of internal columns, its translucent plastic roof framing an oculus open to the sky. Inside, displays of fashion, furnishings, and household goods used domestic artifacts as cold war propaganda. Neither of the superpower showcases was judged best of show, however. First prize went instead to socialist Czechoslovakia’s pavilion and appended café, a glass box floating on steel columns. In sharing a common modernist vocabulary, West and East Bloc exhibition architecture seemed to be on a convergence course. From the late-1950s onward, state socialism embraced “the economic and technological models and standards of success prevailing in the advanced core area of the global system” – that is, exogenous measures of modernity imported from the capitalist West (Péteri 2004: 119). Second World nations increasingly predicted a date by which they would attain or outstrip First World achievements in science, technology, and the supply of consumer goods (Castillo 2010: 189). Soviet policies of “peaceful coexistence” and “peaceful competition” overturned the Stalinist belief in the inevitability of armed conflict between communist and capitalist camps. With President Dwight Eisenhower’s establishment of the U.S. Information Agency (U.S.I.A.) in 1953, expositions and trade fairs became battlegrounds in a global struggle to win hearts and minds, particularly in the developing world. The U.S.I.A. unveiled its improved architectural weaponry at the 1956 Jeshyn International Trade Fair in Kabul. Flyovers of the fairgrounds had revealed Soviet progress in building a massive pavilion. With little time left to construct a worthy competitor, U.S.I.A. advisor Jack Masey contacted Buckminster Fuller, the visionary engineer 121

Greg Castillo

who held a patent on the geodesic dome. Three days before the opening, when all that could be seen of the American pavilion was a poured concrete slab, a DC-4 cargo plane landed at the Kabul airport containing color-coded aluminum struts and hubs for a geodesic frame and its translucent nylon skin. An Afghan work crew assembled the 100-foot diameter dome in 48 hours (Wulf 2015: 70–4). The architectural ambush inaugurated a decade of American cultural diplomacy that ­mobilized Fuller’s dome for its spectacle value. At the 1958 American National Exhibition in Moscow, designer George Nelson deployed a gold-anodized geodesic dome as “a kind of information machine.” Russian visitors were welcomed to the pavilion by an IBM mainframe computer capable of answering thousands of questions about life in America. Within the faceted dome, Glimpses of America, a seven-screen slide show produced by Charles and Ray Eames, depicted everyday life in the U.S.A. through 2,200 flashed images. Released from the hypnotic barrage of light and sound, visitors entered a glassy hall stocked with consumer goods, three different model kitchens, a model apartment installation, and a prefabricated suburban home imported from Long Island, New York. Officials in Washington declared it “the most productive single psychological effort ever launched by the US in any communist country” (Castillo, 2010: 148–58). Montreal’s Expo 67 broke new ground in the cold war battle for design supremacy. (Figure 4.5). The lead architect for the Soviet pavilion, Mikhail V. Posokhin, embodied Soviet design’s post-Stalinist transformation. He abandoned neoclassicism to win a 1962 Lenin Prize for the cautiously modernist Kremlin Congress Hall of 1959–61, and put his Pauline conversion to even better use at Expo 67. Heroically scaled V-shaped pylons hoisted an upswept roof, framing panoramic views of the fairgrounds through a gently curved curtain-wall. Simultaneously delicate and muscular, the pavilion marked an apogee in the Soviet genre of “unique constructions.” Across a narrow river channel from Posokhin’s elegant vitrine rose the 20-story tall reticulated sphere of the US pavilion. Clad in transparent acrylic panels, the geodesic dome was engineered by Buckminster Fuller in collaboration with Shoji Sadao. Inside, stacked platforms designed by Cambridge Seven Associates provided floor space for exhibits curated by Jack Masey. The pavilion theme, Creative America, revolutionized the nation’s cultural diplomacy. Abandoning the U.S.I.A.’s familiar focus on consumer goods, Masey staged an epic developmental narrative in reverse chronological order. Ascending a 250 foot (40 meters) long escalator, visitors arrived at the upper platform’s high-tech spectacle: a simulated lunar surface scattered with full scale replicas of manned and unmanned spacecraft. Life size rockets, satellites, and a space capsule trailing multicolored parachutes dangled overhead from the dome’s fretwork structure. Descending one level, a display of Pop Art confirmed Manhattan’s pre-eminence as “the imperial center of Western contemporary art”. Descending further, visitors encountered an exhibit on Hollywood cinema. Installations of folkloric and Native American craft concluded the archeological exploration of national culture. Masey’s kaleidoscopic sensorium showcased advanced technology while radiating playfulness and humor. In contrast, the Soviet pavilion, laden with “every piece of hardware but the kitchen sink,” according to a Canadian journalist, exuded an “oppressive impressiveness” (McKercher 2016: 377, 382). Exactly coincident with Peter Eisenman’s first attempts to devise a design practice based on the self-referential purity of the autonomous object, Masey employed curatorial assemblage to achieve its antithesis: a vision of architecture as a deleriously expanded field. Writing a half-­century later, Sylvia Lavin coined the term “superarchitecture” for installation hybrids “that not only superimpose themselves onto architecture but that intensify architectural effects… a way to understand the seductive contact between architecture and not-architecture as a means of mingling one medium with another” (Lavin 2011: 53). Considered as a total environment, the U.S.I.A. contribution to Expo 67, in pushing architectural representation beyond its modernist limits, foreshadowed theories and practices now synonymous with aesthetic contemporaneity. Another kind of mingling, the “seductive contact” between cultures and geographies rather than artistic media, propelled cold war modernism into new territory in Ghana, the site of the 122

Cold War Modernism

Figure 4.5  E  xpo 67, Montreal, Canada. Left, US Pavilion: Buckminster Fuller with Shoji Sadao and ­Cambridge Seven Associates; right, Soviet Pavilion: Mikhail Posokhin with A. Mndoyants, B. Tkhor, A. Kondratiev, and R. Kliks. Period postcard (collection of the author).

1967 Accra International Trade Fair (I.T.F.). Unveiled two months before Montreal’s Expo 67, the I.T.F. included a U.K. Commonwealth display that implicitly recalled the colonial past, a geodesic dome sponsored by the U.S.A., contributions from socialist Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany, and, presiding over this global village, the vast cantilevered roof of the Africa Pavilion. Cosmopolitanism pervaded the design of the I.T.F. thanks to Ghana’s postcolonial strategy as a recipient of both First and Second World aid. The Fair’s Ghanian chief architect, Victor Adegbite, received an architecture degree in the U.S. as well as a U.N. Fellowship to study at the Inter-American Housing Center in Bogotá, Colombia before returning to Africa. Adegbite’s associates on the I.T.F. project were Jacek Chirosz and Stanisław Rymaszewski, resident architects from the People’s Republic of Poland (Stanek 2015: 417). Inspired by Buckminster Fuller’s visiting professorship at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Technology, its students designed the geodesic dome at the I.T.F. The exhibition landscape portrayed the Third World as a space of hybrid modernities, a creative geography that eroded superpower binaries rather than being trapped passively between them (Lu 2011). The synthesis was radical, visionary, and, from a superpower perspective, improbable. Ghana’s everyday environments of modern development ranged from a mikrorayon district of low-income housing, adapted for the tropical climate by a team of Soviet architects and engineers, to an American-style drive-in banking window at the I.T.F. (Stanek 2015: 430, 422). Despite Ghana’s suppression of “tribalism” in the interest of national unity, traditions of indigenous knowledge were said to inflect the procss of absorbing innovation and expertise from the socialist East and capitalist West. Government authorities called upon the nation’s architects “to eradicate the colonial mentality” and “project African personality in our buildings.” “We have a culture which we are proud and determined to preserve,” a local critic proclaimed. The African pavilion integrated advanced technology and traditional culture in a cantilevered roof that abstracted the form of an umbrella, a West African symbol of power and prestige (Stanek 2015: 430). While Ghana could not evade the geopolitical ­intrigues of postcolonial governance, as demonstrated by its non-democratic regime change in the mid-1960s, it briefly charted an independent course between competing superpower cultures – and in the process forged a Third World modernism that was stylistically nuanced, temporally resonant, and which challenged any mapping of architecture’s avant-garde based solely upon the bipartite axis of cold war dominance. 123

Greg Castillo

Note 1 The term “Third World,” coined in 1952 by the demographer and historian Alfred Sauvy with reference to French commoners of a “Third Estate” opposed to the clergy and aristocracy, proposed a taxonomy rejected by Mao Zedong’s formulation of the “Three Worlds,” which shifted China, as a nation historically exploited by the West, from the Second to Third World category.

References Alonzo, Pedro Ignacio, and Palmarola, Hugo. (2009). “A Panel’s Tale: The Soviet KPD System and the Politics of Assemblage”. AA Files 59: 30–41. Anderson, Richard. (2015). Russia. London: Reaktion. Avermaete, Tom. (2012). “Coda: The reflexivity of Cold War Modernism.” The Journal of Architecture 17, 3: 475–7. Bauer, Catherine. (1934). Modern Housing. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Betts, Paul. (2004). The Authority of Everyday Objects: A Cultural History of West German industrial design. Berkeley: University of California Press. Beyer, Elke. (2012). “Competitive Coexistence: Soviet Town Planning and Housing Projects in Kabul in the 1960s.” The Journal of Architecture 17, 3: 309–32. Bruegmann, Robert. (2005). “The Myth of the Chicago School.” In C. Waldheim and K. Ruedi Ray, eds., Chicago Architecture: Histories, Revisions, Alternatives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 15–29. Castillo, Greg. (2010) Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design. Minneapolis: ­University of Minnesota Press. Castillo, Greg. (2011). “Making a Spectacle of Restraint: The Deutschland Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels Exposition.” Journal of Contemporary History 47, 1: 97–119. Dean, Andrea Oppenheimer. (1982). “International Style: A Lively Dissection Fifty Years Later.” Journal of the American Institute of Archi­tects 71 ( June 1982): 9 & 11. Diamant, R. M. E. (1964). Industrialized Building: 50 International Methods. London: Iliffe Books Ltd. Editors. (1953). “U.S. Architecture Abroad” Architectural Forum 98, 3: 102–11. Eiermann, Egon. (1947). “Eigene Bemerkungen über Technik und Bauform.” Baukunst und Werkform 1, 1: 45–8. Eisenman, Peter, and Johnson, Philip. (1982). “Interview: Johnson and Eisenman.” Skyline 5, 2: 14–17. Fehérváry, Krisztina. (2013). Politics in Color and Concrete: Materialities and the Middle Class in Hungary. ­Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Fitzpatrick, Sheila. (1999). Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times. New York: Oxford ­University Press. Forty, Adrian. (2012). Concrete and Culture: A Material History. London: Reaktion Books. Fox, Michael-David. (2014). “The Iron Curtain as Semipermeable Membrane: Origins and Demise of the Stalinist Superiority Complex.” In Patryk Babiracki and Kenyon Zimmer, eds., Cold War Crossings: ­International Travel and Exchange across the Soviet Bloc. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 14–39. Gaddis, John Lewis. (1997). We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History. New York: Oxford University Press. Gerchuck, Iurii. (2000) “The Aesthetics of Everyday Life in the Khrushchev Thaw in the USSR (1954–64).” In Susan E. Reid and David Crowley, eds., Style and Socialism: Modernity and Material Culture in Eastern Europe. Oxford: Berg, 81–100. Harris, Steven E. (2013). Communism on Tomorrow Street: Mass Housing and Everyday Life after Stalin. ­Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Herman, Leon M. (1971) “Urbanization and New Housing Construction in the Soviet Union.” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 30, 2: 203–20. Hitchcock, Henry-Russell. (1929). Modern Architecture, Romanticism and Integration. New York: Payson & Clarke. Hitchcock, Henry-Russell and Johnson, Philip. (1995). The International Style. New York: W.W. Norton and Co. Howard, Hugh. (2016). Architecture’s Odd Couple: Frank Lloyd Wright and Philip Johnson. New York: Bloomsbury. Johnson, Philip. (1952). “Preface.” In H.R. Hitchcock and A. Drexler, eds., Built in USA: Post-war A ­ rchitecture. New York: MoMA. Kantor, Sybil. (2002). Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art. Cambridge: MIT Press.

124

Cold War Modernism Kitchen, Martin. (2015). Speer: Hitler’s Architect. New Haven: Yale University Press. Kotkin, Stephen. (1995). Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kuliç, Vladimir. (2016). “The Builders of Socialism: Eastern European Cities in Recent Historiography.” Contemporary European History: 1–16. Online. Available: doi:10.1017/S0960777316000497 (7 April 2017). Lavin, Sylvia. (2011). Kissing Architecture. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Leipziger-Pearce, Hugo. (1950). “Architecture as a Political Weapon.” The Journal of the American Institute of Architects 14, 5: 204–6. Loeffler, Jane C. (1988). The Architecture of Diplomacy: Building America’s Embassies. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Loomis, John A. (1999). Revolution in Forms: Cuba’s Forgotten Art Schools. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Lu, Duanfang. (2006). Remaking Chinese Urban Form: Modernity, Scarcity, and Space, 1949–2005. New York: Routledge. ——— (2011). “Introduction: Architecture, Modernity, and Identity in the Third World. In Duanfang Lu, ed., Third World Modernism: Architecture, Development, and Identity. New York: Routledge, 1–28. Maxim, Juliana. (2012). “The Microrayon: The Organization of Mass Housing Ensembles, Bucharest, 1956–1967.” In Carmen Popescu and Miles Glendinning, eds., Docomomo E-Proceedings 4, Postwar Mass Housing – East + West, Conference 7–11 September 2011. Online. Available: http://sites.ace.ed.ac.uk/ docomomoiscul/publications/e-proceedings-4/ McCray, Porter A. (1977) “Oral history interview with Porter A. McCray” Smithsonian Archives of ­A merican Art (Washington DC). Online. Available: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/ oral-history-interview-porter-mccray-12974 (30 July 2016). McKercher, Asa. (2016). “The Art of Soft Power at Expo 67: Creative America and Cultural Diplomacy in the US Pavilion.” Journal of Curatorial Studies 5, 3: 268–389. Merwood-Salisbury, Joanna. (2013). “American Modern: The Chicago School and the International Style at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.” In A. Eisenschmidt and J. Mekinda, eds., Chicagoisms: The City as Catalyst for Architectural Speculation, 1st st ed. Zurich: Park Books, 117–129. Molnár, Virág. (2010). “In Search of the Ideal Socialist Home in Post-Stalinist Hungary: Prefabricated Mass Housing or Do-It-Yourself Family Home?” Journal of Design History 23, 1: 61–81. MoMA (Museum of Modern Art). (n.d.) “Internationally Circulating Exhibitions.” Online. Available: https://www.moma.org/momaorg/shared/pdfs/docs/learn/icelist.pdf (30 July 2016). Mumford, Lewis. (1932). “Symposium ‘International Style’ Exhibition of Modern Architecture.” Shelter 2, 3: 3–4. Nicolaus, Herbert, and Obeth, Alexander. (1997). Stalinallee. Geschichte einer Deutschen Straße. Berlin: Verlag für Bauwesen. Paskins, Jacob, (2016). Paris under Construction: Building Sites and Urban Transformation in the 1960s. New York: Routledge. Péteri, György. (2004). “Nylon Curtain – a Transnational and Transsystemic Tendencies in the Cultural Life of State-Socialist Russia and East-Central Europe.” Slavonica 10, 2: 113–23. Pugh, Emily. (2014). Architecture, Politics, & Identity in Divided Berlin. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Reid, Susan. (2010). “The Soviet Pavilion at Brussels ’58: Convergence, Conversion, Critical Assimilation or Acculturation?” Cold War International History Project Working Papers Series, Working Paper # 62. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center. Online. Available: https://www.­w ilsoncenter. org/sites/default/files/WP62_Reid_web_V3sm.pdf (10 April 2017). Rubin, Eli. (2017). “Beyond Domination.” Imaginations: Journal of Cross Cultural Studies. Online. Available: http://imaginations.csj.ualberta.ca/?p=9478 (15 June 2017). Saunders, Frances Stonor. (2013). The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, 2nd ed. New York: The New Press. Smith, Mark B. (2010) Property of Communists: The Urban Housing Program from Stalin to Khrushchev. De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Stadtamt Hanover. (1951). Amtlicher Katalog der Constructa Bauaustellung. Hanover: Stadtamt. Stanek, Łukas. (2012). “Introduction: The ‘Second World’s’ Architecture and Planning in the ‘Third World.’” The Journal of Architecture 17, 3: 299–307. ——— (2015). “Architects from Socialist Countries in Ghana (1957–67): Modern Architecture and Mondialisation.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 74, 1: 416–22. Stokes, Raymond. (1997). “In Search of the Socialist Artefact: Technology and Ideology in East Germany, 1945–1962.” German History 15, 2: 221–39.

125

Greg Castillo Togores, Reinaldo N. (1979) “20 Años de Construcción en Cuba. Obras Escolares y Sociales.” Online. Available: http://www.togores.net/arquitectura-y-diseno/budapest (1 April 2017). Varga-Harris, Christine. (2015). Stories of House and Home: Soviet Apartment Life during the Khrushchev Years. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Verdery, Katherine. (1996). What Was Socialism and What Comes Next? Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wright, Gwendolyn. (1983). Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America. Cambridge: MIT Press. Wulf, Andrew James. (2015). U.S. International Exhibitions During the Cold War: Winning Hearts and Minds through Cultural Diplomacy. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Yeltsin, Boris. (1990). Against the Grain: An Autobiography. New York: Summit Books. Zarecor, Kimberly Elman. (2011). Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity: Housing in Czechoslovakia, 1945–1960. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. ——— (2017). “What Was So Socialist about the Socialist City? Second World Urbanity in Europe.” Journal of Urban History. Online. Available: https://doi.org/10.1177/0096144217710229 (10 July 2017).

126

5 After Deconstructivist Architecture Jennifer Ferng

Bernard Tschumi’s Parc de la Villette (1982–98), with its visible red enamel steel follies, is widely recognized as one of the most notable icons of deconstructivist architecture. In 1982, the ­international competition for this urban park located in Paris’ Le Jaurès district near the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie drew almost 470 entries from across the world, including the ­Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). Tschumi’s discontinuous scheme takes the form of 32 ­pavilions, spread across a 125-acre large-scale grid, dictating that the urban park of the 21st ­century would be assembled from cultural activities, not from nature – among them, Tschumi had planned a gymnasium, workshops, bath facilities, playgrounds, science experiments, games and competitions, and an open-air theatre, populating the grounds of La Villette. Compared with Frederick Olmstead who insisted that “in the park, the city is not supposed to exist,” Tschumi insisted rather on the opposite approach: he preferred the constructed character of the pavilions that provided a disseminated visitor experience at given points throughout the grounds (Tschumi Office architects website). Today, as an urban destination, La Villette attracts over 8 million visitors a year and continues to serve as a beacon that encourages design students to view its planning as an exemplar of architectural practice. Tschumi believed that architecture was able to accelerate particular characteristics associated with contemporary society. He was, in fact, preoccupied not with static structures often associated with the permanence of design but instead with the temporality of events and actions that took place inside of a building. His motto of “anti-form, anti-hierarchy, anti-structure” remained a consistent theme for many of his building designs (Tschumi 1996, p. 250). Though Tschumi’s entry was eventually selected as the winning design, the more theoretical proposal authored by Peter Eisenman and Jacques Derrida for La Villette became a far more memorable hallmark that staged important arguments against postmodernism. This intimate, longstanding collaboration between an architect and a philosopher signaled an intellectual move toward French theory and defined the 1980s as an elongated period of poststructuralist philosophy’s engagement with ­a rchitectural design. Though deconstructivist architecture lasted only for a short duration of time, many of these precedents like La Villette became historically significant for their experimental modes of v­ isual representation and their radical break with accepted conventions of function, structure, and form. Among the members of this group, Coop Himmelblau (then composed of partners Michael ­Holzer, Wolf Prix, and Helmut Swinczinsky), Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind, and Bernard Tschumi comprised a unique collective, who, among themselves, embraced varied approaches to deconstruction and its applications in architecture. DOI: 10.4324/9781315674469-6

127

Jennifer Ferng

Between the 1970s and the 1980s, what became known more informally by many architects as “decon” defined an integrated paradigm of design that realigned the rules of art, architectural geometry, and French theory. Represented by philosophers Roland Barthes, Guy Debord, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault, French theory infiltrated architectural design in the United States immediately, and at the same time, it seemed to dissipate almost as quickly. Mari Hvattum recalls deconstructivism as being a somewhat “magical mystery tour which swept us away in the 1980s and 1990s with its alluring jargon and its impenetrable figures of thought, … leaving a whole field to nurse the distaste that inevitably follows excess” (2008, p. 40). This thirst for the reality of architectural design than for the visual signs promised by French theory permeated the later built works of Coop Himmelblau, Eisenman, Gehry, and Hadid, extending well into their contemporary practices that have completed built projects around the world. Recalling earlier projects such as Zaha Hadid’s competition entry for the Peak at the Hong Kong Club during her stint at the Architectural Association, this type of architectural design sought to reinterpret the ornamental, formal characteristics of Russian constructivism, without necessarily adopting the political ideology associated with such visual techniques. In fact, a few proponents of deconstructivist architecture such as Philip Johnson traced their roots back to the realm of Russian art from the 1920s and 1930s. But, in response to other architects who were associated with the historical pastiche of postmodernism, which Tschumi once claimed derisively, involved “making Doric forms out of plywood” (Tschumi and Koolhaas in conversation, ETH Zürich, 18 May 2001), architectural journals like Assemblage edited by K. Michael Hays and Alicia Kennedy widely published examples of postmodern historicism alongside deconstructivist buildings. Within these alternative reactions to the failure of modernism, Mary McLeod has noted that these architects who embraced French theory agreed upon the “disintegration of communication and consensus” and sought what she calls “ideological justification in meaning,” not through program, function, or the structure of architecture (1989, p. 24). This decentering form of schizophrenia hailed by these designers was intended to confront present-day crises and the “current impossibility of cultural consensus” as well as acknowledging architecture’s own eventual obliteration as a medium (1989, p. 43). Deconstructivist architecture’s “formal hermiticism” only served to counteract what had been postmodernism’s conservative attitudes that rejected technological imagery, repressed the new, and retained a mode of complacent contextualism (1989, p. 43). The first part of this chapter begins by defining the contested origins of deconstructivist ­a rchitecture in Russian constructivist art and French critical theory, specifically through the ­philosophy of Jacques Derrida. The origins of deconstructivism and its transfer into the realm of architecture are made apparent through examining some of the precepts behind the Choral Works proposal created by Eisenman and Derrida. By returning to the 1988 Museum of Modern Art show on deconstructivist architecture, the second part of this chapter establishes how curators Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley set the stage for an understanding of deconstructivist architecture that transcended the rigors of poststructuralist philosophy. The third part focuses on Peter Eisenman’s Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio as a brief case study of how deconstructivist architects were able to tackle pragmatic challenges brought upon by real-world constraints of context, site, and program. At the same time, the Wexner Center also highlighted the polarizing debates around built works of architecture that relied heavily on Derridean ideas. The last section of the chapter addresses how deconstructivist architecture has served as a historical touchstone for the parametric and computational designs that began in the 1990s and have influenced the creation of abstracted, self-referential projects that seem to fetishize new materials and new forms. ­Deconstructivist architecture was not a homogenous movement by any means and even by its own definitions, included a diverse series of responses to postmodernism’s shortcomings. Even today, the computationally designed buildings that have followed in the wake of deconstructivism continue to represent highly varied approaches. 128

After Deconstructivist Architecture

This generation of architects influenced by modern leaders like Philip Johnson and Mies van der Rohe did not believe that the fundamentalist dimensions of postmodernism could define the future of architectural design. In fact, Tschumi and Eisenman perceived architects like Leon Krier to be their adversary and their enduring advocacy of techniques of “dismantlement or disappearance” were employed by their contemporaries and other deconstructivist architects to battle the problem of the whole (Koolhaas, SMLXL, 1995, p. 508) Some of Eisenman’s theoretical suppositions would later frustrate Rem Koolhaas, who commented that many of his colleagues seemed to waste energy attempting to construct “systems of impossibility” (Foster, 2003, footnote 4, p. 150). Unlike earlier surveys of deconstruction and deconstructivist architecture, this chapter seeks to trace a unique path of this group of architects from their initial work with French theory toward their contemporary models of proto-parametric design, evidenced in the recent buildings of Coop Himmelblau, Gehry, and Hadid. Beyond its initial affiliations with Derridean notions of ­deconstruction, many of these architectural buildings represented persuasive instantiations of neo-modernist thinking that attempted to reverse the traditional precepts associated with function, skin, and structure. Rather than being associated with the postmodern mandates of historicism and its visual syntax, deconstructivist architecture later became the inspiration for contemporary parametric and computational designs now employed in architectural practice. The organic silhouettes of research centers, skyscrapers, and stadiums, coupled with advancements in materials, helped push deconstructivist thinking into the contemporary sphere of design computation and digital fabrication, creating new channels for the conventions of form and ornament. Reactionary models of anti-hierarchy and parametric computation owe much of their revolutionary nature to their deconstructivist predecessors and, in fact, they have revived the polarizing rhetoric and public discussions around neo-modernist thinking. The popularity and transfiguration of parametric architecture have transformed the construction of buildings into more open-ended processes of epistemic knowledge and tool-making, and yet, its radical promises of reconfigured industrial production lie not in its political potential but in its integrated dialogue with the logic behind materials and form-making. As a product of globalized capital and starchitect celebrities, individual aesthetics tied to the functionalist ethics of design have redefined parametric architecture in terms of image-making. The reconfiguration of previously modernist ideals related to form, structure, and ornament have reappeared as translucent slick surfaces, shiny façades, and gleaming complex geometries – pervasive at digitally designed airports, factories, gymnasiums, housing blocks, museums, and office towers from China, Greece, Mexico, Russia to Palestine, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. Parametric architecture has revived modernist ideologies but cloaked these ideals in updated apparel, making mediated images far more significant than the actual substance of physical building. Despite some of the questionable rationale associated with parametric architecture, these digital images resemble pivotal moments of tension where contemporary architects are still struggling with the challenges brought forth by 21st century society and its social processes. Urban order and legibility against the context of market-driven economies cannot be solved by a single style of architecture, but perhaps parametric architecture and its methods can still be employed to re-examine the functional and structural limits of c­ ontemporary design.

Derrida’s Lyre and Sieve The interests of Zaha Hadid and Rem Koolhaas in Constructivist Russian art, including works by El Lissitzky, Kazmir Malevich, Konstantin Melinkov, and Bruno Tatlin, dated back to their joint time spent at the Architectural Association in London. These works served as the ­foundational basis for many of the deconstructivist architects who found inspiration in their use of strong geometry to create instability. Even Aleksandr Rodchenko desired to formulate an art that would summon 129

Jennifer Ferng

a new society into being, disseminating their ideas even as far as Berlin, Germany through their journal Vesch-Objekt-Gegenstand (1922). Ornamental rather than structural in nature, these Russian examples laid the foundations for irregular geometries that dismantled the character of pure form. As deconstructivist architecture gravitated away from the rules of art and toward architecture, it began to lose its direct connection to utopia and political ideology. The strong presence of overlapping diagonal lines and trapezoidal bars composed a fundamental aspect of most of these works, but as Johnson forewarned, these formal similarities were only visual semblances that were laid bare on the surface. French theory brought what Sylvère Lotringer has called “a politics in language” to the United States that refused to account for any implicit presuppositions; this discounting language, whether in Foucault’s discursive regime or Deleuze’s superproduction allowed “writing to change the very function of concepts from integrative devices to concepts that make more thoughts.” (Lotringer, 2001, p. 5) Writing, in essence, became the very tool by which architecture could be allowed to explore other derivative trajectories – those of ideas that dealt with absence/presence and solid/ void. Lotringer has aptly described these interdisciplinary crossings when he said what the French call thought, Americans call theory. Deconstruction, related by Mark Wigley, seemed to be “unproblematically architectural.” Deconstruction as a method of semiotic and linguistic analysis was more easily applied to the tenets of philosophy - “architecture, the most material of the discourses, seems the most detached from the original work, the most suspect of the applications, the last application,” he stated, “the representational ornament that cannot influence the tradition it is added to, a veneer masking as much as it reveals of the structure beneath” (Wigley, 1995, p. 8). Any main reading of a text requires classic narrative structures, and thus, any deconstructivist reading necessitates the existence of an archetypal construction that can be interpreted, manipulated, and revised. Reflecting upon Plato’s notion of khora in the Timaeus, Eisenman and Derrida envisioned their proposal for the Parc de la Villette as a tectonic manifestation of a non-place defined by a visual language of points, lines, and sequences. The khôra as defined by Plato embodied a receptacle, a space, or an interval, and in Derrida’s terms, Plato’s khora became the starting point for his dialogue with Eisenman’s sketch of this idea that later became the basis for their La Villette competition proposal. The dialectic between absence and presence, or solid and void, can be viewed in many of Eisenman’s works. According to Derrida, readings of texts were best carried out when working with classical narrative structures. Any architectural deconstruction required the existence of a particular archetype that could be resisted and adjusted. As part of their collaboration, Derrida, speaking over the phone to Eisenman, drew a sketch of a lyre and a sieve where the figure of the sieve would be inscribed on, in, or within the Choral Work, signifying the memory of a synecdoche or errant metonymy (Corbo, 58). Formed from a “multi-textual palimpsest” from the sieve itself, additional systems of cubes and twisted corridors were overlaid onto this primary diagram (Corbo, 4.2) Pairing architecture with writing was not a novel idea by any means, but within the context of poststructuralist philosophy, Tschumi, Eisenman, and Derrida opened up an intellectual avenue of inquiry that allowed the deconstruction of literary texts to influence the ways in which architectural forms were represented and manipulated. Only the Chora I L Works monograph, being the sole document of this particular association, included the drawings, models, and conversations between these three collaborators. Their joint proposition, which ultimately cost six times over budget, was not included in the final collection of designs in Chora I, but their proposition suggested that the concept of khôra is neither a void, nor absence, nor invisibility, nor the contrary from which these conditions emanate. In preparing their design for La Villette, Eisenman emphasized techniques of form, program, scaling, and choreography while Derrida had envisioned Choral Work as more of a concert than a piece of design. In a personal letter written to Eisenman, Derrida suggested that the architectural experience of memory is rooted in the future perfect condition of its own ruin; that is, architecture in 130

After Deconstructivist Architecture

the present tense carried both past and future incarnations of its particular possibilities within itself – …if all architecture is finished, if therefore it carries within itself the future traces of its future destruction, the already past future, future perfect, of its ruin, according to methods that are each time original, if it is haunted, indeed signed, by the spectral silhouette of this ruin… what would again bring the architecture of “the period” ( just yesterday, today, tomorrow: use whatever words you want, modern, postmodern, post-postmodern or amodern, etc.) back to the ruin, to the experience of its “own ruin”? (Derrida, Assemblage) The Platonic concept of khôra evoked by Eisenman and Derrida, in this sense, attempted to represent and mobilize different temporal stages of architecture into a discontinuous yet iterative design – this can be witnessed in Eisenman’s repetitive iterations and rotations of multiple gridded structures, axes, and faceted forms. The design concepts of void, absence, and negativity, in this instance, were articulated through the coordination of movement and event (it is key to note that absence acted as a binding motif in Daniel Libeskind’s design for the Jewish Museum – he was opposed to reducing the museum to a detached memorial). Derrida supplied an essay to Eisenman on the khôra or place, a space in Plato’s Timaeus. Compared with Tschumi’s image of Parc de la Villette, Eisenman and Derrida’s proposal contains some similar grid elements, but the squares where Tschumi’s pavilions were situated are instead crossed and broken by diagonal and lateral elements that cut counter to the direction of the grid. These same cubes reflect further secondary iterations that emerge as dislocated voids around these squares or solids that erupt above the ground plain (Chora I).

Dissimulation at the Museum of Modern Art In conjuring the “pleasure of unease,” former Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) director Philip Johnson collaborated with Mark Wigley to highlight the work of seven upcoming international architects including Coop Himmelblau and Daniel Libeskind among others. Johnson’s intention was not to herald deconstructivism as a new style of architecture nor was it to reinstate these projects as a new movement. Stated in the MoMA’s catalog, the exhibition only desired to highlight seven international architects whose work sought to disrupt the cubes and right angles of modernism. The traditional virtues of harmony, unity, and clarity were to be displaced by systems of disharmony, fracturing, and mystery ( Johnson, 1988, preface). Johnson drew some obvious parallels between Tatlin’s warped planes in the Third Monument and the angled geometry of Zaha Hadid; or as he wrote, the “lini-ism” of Rodchenko comes out in Coop Himmelblau and Gehry (MoMA preface). At the same time, a symposium organized by Andrea Papadakis on deconstruction at the Tate Gallery in London similarly proposed a lumping together of architects under the category of deconstructivist. Mark Wigley in his introduction to the deconstructivist exhibition declared that these projects’ ability to disturb our thinking about form is what makes them “deconstructive.” Deconstruction was simply not about dissolution, or dissimulation, as a practice, but it was able to diagnose “structural problems within stable structures” but poses more radically that flaws are inherent to structure. A deconstructive architect is therefore not one who dismantles buildings, but one who locates the inherent dilemmas within buildings. The deconstructive architect puts the pure forms of architectural tradition on the couch and identifies the symptoms of a repressed impurity. 131

Jennifer Ferng

Wigley asserted, “the impurity is drawn to the surface by a combination of gentle coaxing and violent torture: the form is interrogated” (1988, p. 2). Each of the seven projects explored the tensions between the volatility of the early Russian avant-garde and the firm stability of high modernism. Many of the projects exhibited in the MoMA show chosen by the two curators reflected a unified response to the questions posed by postmodernism, but this was certainly not the main intention of the show’s curators. “They apply the cool veneer of the International Style,” Wigley affirmed, “to the anxiously conflicting forms of the avant-garde. Locating the tension of the early work under the skin of modern architecture, they irritate modernism from within, distorting it with its genealogy.” Russian artists were credited with discovering geometric configurations that could be used to destabilize structure, and these configurations can be found repressed within high modernism (1988, p. 7). Irregular geometry was to be understood as a structural condition that possessed the ability to disturb figures from within. Several examples from the MoMA exhibition illustrated how systems of “dislocation, deflection, deviation, distortion” operated within architectural constructions. Zaha Hadid’s original painting for the Peak Leisure Club (1982–83) rendered the proposed building as part of the “man-made polished granite mountain” overlooking Hong Kong, China standing apart from the congestion of the city (Figure 5.1). As a type of geological formation, the articulated jagged forms of elongated rectangles, painted in a swath of reds and cool blues, rise into an elevated resort and are assembled into long switchback ramps that create the club/hotel/ lounge. Hadid had inserted reading platforms, dressing rooms, as well as a lap pool where these activities could collide in a compressed urban space. The motions of the cars driving through the site along with the actions of the swimmers and readers held, for her, the essence of architecture. The mountain itself is rendered in dark ochre polygons against white planar elements that seem to emerge from the dark tableau. Her proposal contained “excavated subterranean spaces, distinctive

Figure 5.1  Zaha Hadid, The Peak Club, 1983, Hong Kong, China. Credit: ZHA Architects.

132

After Deconstructivist Architecture

horizontal layers, and floating voids” that house the club’s various activities (ZHA office website description). Koolhaas envisioned constructivism more as a staged encounter between Russians and the other European modernists as viewed in his image of a swimming pool headed to Manhattan in Delirious New York (1978). He was far more interested in the social dynamics of modern cities and their contradictions and argued that these external symptoms were marginal to architectural practice (those being the formal characteristics of architecture). Contrasted with some of the more formal experiments proposed by Hadid, Gehry, and Coop Himmelblau, Rem Koolhaas’ p­ roject Netherlands Dance Hall (1987) in the Hague stands out as a unique exception since it is not formally related to many of the other works of this group (Figure 5.2). The exterior presence of the dance hall bears few symbols – with an iconic golden cone centering the composition of the building. The auditorium as a dark space was highlighted with three acoustic barriers, a special gold curtain at the front of the theater, and even the space under the auditorium with a sloped ceiling served as a public attractor when visitors were waiting or having drinks during a theatrical show. What he called “flying saucers in the void” allowed public space to be curved in both plan and section. Koolhaas perceives architecture to be an instrument of the state, in order to imagine new ways of living as the Russian constructivists once did. Recently demolished in 2016, the building was considered an extension to the circus theatre in Scheveningen. With a dance mural rising atop from a stacked slab of an anonymous office building, even the daring waveform of the roof seemed out of place with the cadre of ­deconstructivist thinking. Koolhaas has called this feature his “fairy-tale model” where the multi colored columns, terrazzo floors, and the floating sky bar collide. In Metropolis Magazine entitled “­ Postmortem ­Preservation,” certainly the civic value of this building was called into question but was not covered in the public press: the element of surprise of the building’s demolition preempted any feelings of tragedy or loss. Koolhaas seemed proficient in transforming the low budget and immateriality of the project into a set of enviable creative advantages.

Wexner Center: The Museum That Theory Built Moving from the Netherland to Columbus, Ohio, Peter Eisenman represented the most t­ heoretical perspective among this group of architects. As one of the members of the New York Five (known also as the whites), including Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey, John Hejduk, and Richard Meier, he completed his studies at Cambridge University and was quickly immersed in the ­design scene of New York. Dubbed by architecture critic Paul Goldberger of the New York Ti­mes as “the museum that theory built,” the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio became the first building for Eisenman in 1989 that brought many of his theoretical explorations in

Figure 5.2  Rem Koolhaas, Demolition of the Dance Theater, 1987, The Hague, Netherlands. Credit: Hans Werlemann/OMA Rotterdam.

133

Jennifer Ferng

poststructuralist philosophy to fruition. For many critics of design and architecture, the building also sparked vehement criticism that architecture and critical theory were potentially “compatible, but ultimately, divergent pursuits” (Goldberger, 1989). Classed as a non-building, Wexner Center is a building that attempts to deny its own center, or as Robert Somol has put it, “it is successful when it disappears, when it erases all planes of figure and ground, when its visibility is reduced to zero-zero” (Somol, 1989). Eisenman’s relative inexperience with large-scale construction was ­particularly tested with this early commission that formed part of Ohio University’s college ­campus in Columbus. The Wexner Center functioned as a multi-disciplinary space and yet, even to this degree, Eisenman specified that no artworks were to be displayed or kept in the building, furthering the perception that architecture remained the major medium of experience that the public would encounter. Eisenman declared that, in the Wexner Center, there was no need for earlier modes of art, ­including that of the 18th and 19th-century works. His desire was to create an anxious physical environment that would force visitors to turn inward psychologically, challenging the classic ­notion of form follows function, site, and structure; form instead would follow theory. Psychic shelter was to be considered internal and it was conceived as a dislocating atmosphere that displaces and moves architecture from being a psychological comfort to the public. Eisenman reasoned that his projects caused risk and his interests in the uncanny helped to extend his collaboration with Derrida. Derrida defined deconstruction as dealing with institutions, hard structures that sought to affirm, but deconstruction did not mean the negative, through the undoing of axial presuppositions by which a discourse is built (Blackwood film). Demonstrated in the axonometric drawing viewed from the southwest, the Wexner Center was constructed at the intersection of two gridded axes, one of the university campus and one of the city of Columbus, marked at the front of the building by a cylindrical volume split into two pieces (Figure 5.3). The main corridor radically diverged from the main path leading the visitor’s eye in one direction while pulling him into another route altogether. The foundations of the traced building veered off in one direction, with the solid masses of the Wexner shifting along a larger diagonal grid.

Global Proto-Parametric Design The Wexner Center designed by Eisenman forecasted how computer modeling and digital ­fabrication would become standard processes in the 21st century. The angular, twisting ­concourses and multiple axes of the Wexner Center anticipated the digital culture of parametric ­technologies authored by multiple collaborators under the leadership of a singular visionary. The fold and

Figure 5.3  E  isenman Architects, Axonometric view from the southwest, Wexner Center, 1989, Columbus, OH. Credit: Peter Eisenman Fonds, Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), Montréal, Canada.

134

After Deconstructivist Architecture

rhizome theories of Gilles Deleuze and algorithm concepts of Manuel de Landa also promoted digital architecture of the 1990s as another answer left by the legacy of deconstructivist architecture. Deleuze purported that the fold was not simply a technical device but an ontology of being and differentiation that maintains continuity. Folding-unfolding as a process served for Deleuze not as measurable change but where the outside as a condition was not a fixed limit but moving matter animated by peristaltic movements (Deleuze, 1972, p. 96). With the works of Mark Goulthrope, Greg Lynn, Lars Spuybroek, and Reiser + Umemoto, the fetishization of dynamic forms resulting in abstract structures that lacked any type of ­political ­ideology or social context was becoming ubiquitous. Even in 1993, Lynn had already ­acknowledged the growing dominance of descriptive geometries as a form of critical writing – of a ­“geometry that does not reduce matter to ideal forms,” but with the bankruptcy of geometric conflict at its height, transgressions of the geometric order were reaching new proportions (2013, p. 45). But, this trend does not condemn architectural design to a lack of meaning; rather, the unceasing search for meaning has reversed back to interrogating the conventions of form, function, and structures through digital fabrication and computational design methods. Over the past two decades, the global nature of parametric design has evolved in a n ­ umber of multiple directions: it has led to promising developments in robotic architecture, digital ­fabrication, and biological materials, not to mention the dissemination of big data and opensource digital access. The future trajectories of parametric design have been debated endlessly for at least a decade now, and much ink has been spilled over what steps come next. What Mario Carpo has called the “the style of many hands” marks parametric design as a participatory collective endeavor, flattening any traces of solo authorship (Carpo, 2011). Stuck in a mode of permanent drift, aggregate design and the law of digital notations have taken over architectural practices, and buildings now bear the imprint of collective intelligence organized with rigor and economy. Carpo insists that the rise of “digitally empowered craftsmen” has encouraged the use of digital tools to mass p­ roduce individual variations at more affordable industrial costs. In response to allegations that parametric architecture is indifferent to contexts and places, the death of critical architecture seems like an apparent answer to this conundrum. However, while the traditional sense of belonging has weakened with new digital practices, the emergence of non-places of mobility and consumerism throughout cities in Asia and the Middle East has only served to steer the agenda of criticality back into the hands of architects. That is, neomodern ideals of design have returned to focus on the evolution of architectural elements that have pushed descriptive ­geometries ever further. Globalization has lost any meaning as a critical term among the post-Fordist restructuring of economies from the United States to Asia – economies that are now defined by computation, customization, individuation and a lack of critical consciousness. Patrik Schumacher’s formal and philosophical conservative nature is still promoting an anti-hierarchical logic in parametric architecture (Gage, 2016, p. 133). What Schumacher defends as playfulness and the relaxation of rules in parametric architecture is seen by scholars of contemporary architecture as merely ludic design that misuses the computer, resulting in “parametric signature architecture.” He highlights how some of the sociopolitical aspects of parametric architecture have been gravely underestimated and how these computational systems have maintained a degree of compatible “legibility in the face of complexity” (2016, p. 10). Strategies for a more engaged type of architectural practice based around “functional principles and societal purposes,” as he states, could lead parametric architecture back to its founding purposes (2016, p. 12). Despite Schumacher’s observations, deconstructivist architecture was already well on its way to being “digital,” before digital architecture had actually been invented in the early 2000s as posited by Neil Leach. Noninstrumental forms of architecture under the guise of parametricism are often accused of being anti-political and are easily confused with cumbersome terminology like 135

Jennifer Ferng

“techno-epistemic-capitalist” interfaces (Poole, introduction). Leach maintains that there is no political architecture nor is there any form of digital architecture, digital design, or digital building as a category – the “theory of affordances” privileges how tools such as computers and software afford certain operations but it is up to the user to recognize these associations (2015). Mark Burry makes an equally convincing pitch that parametric architecture was not simply digital in terms of media: Antoní Gaudi and Frei Otto represented historical precursors who experimented with similar systems of constructed three-dimensional forms that now mimic parametric processes. The regional identity of the buildings by Philip Yuan, Archi-Union Architects, in China addresses variables of local climate, culture, and site as a “form of architectural semiology” to articulate contemporary social assemblages (2016, p. 17). Yuan also emphasizes the age-old relationship now between building performance and material properties, or how “ethical significance” is cast in terms of digital craftsmanship (2016, 99). Countered by Mark Gage, parametricism, held over from its deconstructivist beginnings, has never (perhaps, ever) been identified as a style of architecture – and for Gage, it is no longer progressive to think of interconnectivity as being the ­hallmark of parametricism. “Design research programs” of “degenerate dogmas” should be allowed to die in peace (2016, p. 133). Vittorio Gregotti, as a holdover of neo-rationalism, remains highly suspicious of the revival of these literary models and proto-parametric arguments – he praises only the timeworn attributes of measure, the integrity of form and construction, manufactured work, and the land, against the rise of a “vulgar pluralism” (1996, p. 35). His fears of a “carefree eclecticism” of contemporary architecture carry over to the production of images that exist as “functions of the market” and have lost their character as an element of the architectural object (Gregotti, 1996, p. 97). The primacy of the market image, as he claims, has contributed to the separation of the aspects of techniques, planning, contextual history, and project production that drive the “architect-creator” toward a compulsion for repetition (1996, p. 98).

Neo-Modernism and a Return to Material Logic(s) The tragic passing of Zaha Hadid in 2016 marked the tremendous loss of a talented architect and valued member of deconstructivist design whose projects possessed the strongest link back to Russian constructivism. Eisenman and Tschumi, who later participated in Barry Bergdoll’s ­“Deconstructivism: Retrospective Views and Actuality” (2013) at MOMA, admitted that the links to Russian constructivism, with the exception of Hadid, remained tenuous at best. Schumacher has labeled deconstructivist architecture the “proto-parametric” model of design demonstrated by some of Hadid’s recent buildings that have embraced high-performance materials and energy efficiency as part of their exterior facades or internal organization. The buildings designed by Hadid Architects, like many other high-powered firms, may look similar, but underneath the surface lie extreme modes of logic that guide how materials are utilized. But, in architectural practice today, there are no new terms to describe this blend of architectural digital design, high-end fabrication, and performance engineering. Some designers have termed this trend “post-formal” while others have called it “post-digital,” but the reformed emphasis is on the logic of materials and the renewed relationships between form, structure, and ornament. If anything, the roots of parametric design lie in none of these options. They are far more connected to the neo-modernism defined by Coop Himmelblau, about the modern achieving its dreams of representation. The new man centered at the heart of these parametric practices is one who is able to control, exercise, and master the operations of tools as diverse as CATIA, Rhino, Grasshopper, and Kuka robot programming. Moving away from the medium of drawing and toward digital technologies, most of Hadid’s recently completed buildings are presented as abstract structures that lack the political ideology or social context of some of her earlier projects. To offset this sense of solipsistic referencing, 136

After Deconstructivist Architecture

computational designs have empowered her office to investigate new ways of creating original frameworks for form, structure, and geometry; many of the same principles that had been cast off in the 1980s are endowed with a new sensibility. Nevertheless, this return to the detailed concentration given to materials, form, ornament, and structure initially rejected by the practitioners of the 1980s places the epistemologies of praxis back at the center of the architectural profession. Super-modernism – termed by Hans Ibelings – or buildings that evoke sensations of superficiality through the use of translucent surfaces is everywhere. Even recent commissions completed by Wolf Prix of Coop Himmelblau continue some of the formal similarities to the work evoked by their Rooftop modeling project from Vienna. Projects such as UFA Cinema Center in Dresden, Germany and the Musée des Confluences, Lyon, France share some of the same architectural forms first evoked by their groundbreaking design. Hadid’s Messner Museum in Corones, Italy (2015) and the Olympic Aquatic Centre in ­London, as well as projects like Koolhaas’ Seattle Library and CCTV tower, have demonstrated how contemporary architectural offices have begun to exploit the power behind the tools of digital fabrication and computational design. Perched at the top of Kronplatz, the Messner Museum, devoted to the science of mountaineering, displays familiar, angular geometry clad in glass-­reinforced fiber concrete, with space for visitors to explore the inner grottoes of the mountain before emerging outside to views of the Zittertal Alps. Framed as “fluid origami,” Hadid’s 3D printed Mew table, for example, fabricated from polyurethane plastic, is designed to look like two separate interlocking surfaces with curved inner edges but is actually only one piece (Sawaya and Moroni). Even Tschumi’s Alésia Museum /Archaeological Park (2012) and his museum for Athens’ New Acropolis Museum are far more sobering exemplars than Parc de la Villette. Hadid’s rejected design for the Tokyo Stadium, now erected by Kengo Kuma, signified a divisive exemplar for Japanese architects including Kuma, Sou Fujimoto, Toyo Ito, and Fumihiko Maki, who protested the oversized temperament of her proposal. They insisted that Hadid shrink the size of the design so that the stadium would fit well within its given parameters. In contrast, Tadao Ando, as a member of the competition committee, praised the dynamic, futuristic design of her stadium as a symbol of Japan’s contemporary age. Kuma’s lightweight latticed design for the National Olympic Stadium was eventually chosen to replace Hadid’s proposal seating 80,000 spectators at a cost of $1.5 billion USD. The sunken playing surface and timber structure pay homage to historical models of Japanese temples. Kuma’s endorsement of natural materials and the maintenance, flexibility, and flammability of stone, wood, and rice paper embrace technological advancements that can change the direction of architectural practice. But perhaps Kuma’s entreaties for a site-specific venue are irrelevant to parametric architecture’s future potential – in the neomodern sphere, nationalistic and even cultural differences are subsumed underneath the digitally rendered surfaces of Tokyo’s (new) national stadium. Even this stream of parametric regionalism fails to address some of the more subtle nuances presented by cultural differences that go beyond local materials, sites, and urban communities. We flourish now in an era of “global globalism” where every piece of data about a building refers to a new set of pantheistic deities such as Google, NSA, Baidu, Holcim to name a few organizations ( Jarzombek, 2016, p. 3). Yet, neomodern ideals still lurk behind some of the more complex geometries of deconstructivist architecture. In one of the most livable cities in the world, Hadid’s $300 million stacked vase tower will eventually be constructed on Collins Street in Melbourne, Australia with the collaboration of Plus Architecture. The King Abdullah Petroleum Studies and Research Centre in Saudi Arabia is ironically aiming for LEED accreditation at the platinum level (state-of-the-art campus that addresses issues of energy and environmental exploration (KAPSARC) (Figure 5.4). With a modular scheme of three-dimensional, six-sided cells, visitors are encouraged to wander under tree-like pergolas and sheltered courtyards that provide natural daylight. With high-performance glazing and energy-efficient systems, the interior views 137

Jennifer Ferng

Figure 5.4  Z  aha Hadid, King Abdullah Petroleum Studies and Research Centre, 2016, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Credit: ZHA Architects.

of the Riyadh petroleum studies and research center offer a complex variation on Hadid’s angular geometry, multiplied several times over. Cast against an open sky and endless desert, the building replicates itself unit by unit, denying any possibility of innate form, structure, or n ­ ormative function, and the ridges of each cell mimic the lines of far-off mountains that promise infinite horizons.

Bibliography Andrew Benjamin and Christopher Norris, What Is Deconstruction?, Wiley editions, 1988. Michael Blackwood film, Deconstructivist Architecture, Narrated by Joseph Giovannini, Kanopy, 2005. Mario Carpo, “Digital Style,” Log 23 (Fall 2011), pp. 41–52. François Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States, University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Stefano Corbo, From Formalism to Weak Form: The Architecture and Philosophy of Peter Eisenman, Ashgate, 2014. FRAC Centre, http://www.frac-centre.fr/collection-art-architecture/asymptote/steel-cloud-los-angeleswest-coast-gateway-64.html?authID=12&ensembleID=43 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, Zone Books, 1996. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, University of Minnesota, 1972. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Spivak, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967. Jacques Derrida, “Point de folie: maintenant l’architecture: Bernard Tschumi: La Casa Vide – La Villette,” AA Files, no. 12, summer 1986, pp. 65–75. Jacques Derrida and Hilary P. Hanel, “A Letter to Peter Eisenman,” Assemblage, no. 12, August 1990, pp. 6–13. Hal Foster, Design and Crime, Verso, 2003. Mark Foster Gage, “A Hospice for Parametricism,” in Parametricism 2.0: Rethinking Architecture’s Agenda for the 21st Century, Architectural Design, March/April 2016, vol. 86, issue 2, pp. 128–33. Paul Goldberger, “The Museum that Theory Built,” The New York Times, November 5, 1989, http://www.nytimes.com/1989/11/05/arts/architecture-view-the-museum-that-theor y-built. html?src=pm&pagewanted=2. Vittorio Gregotti, Inside Architecture, foreword by Kenneth Frampton, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996. Elie Haddad, “Deconstruction: The Project of Self-Criticism” in Elie Haddad and David Rif kind, eds, A Critical History of Contemporary Architecture, 1960–2010, Routledge, 2014, pp. 69–90. Zaha Hadid, Pritzer Prize essay by Joseph Giovannini, 2004. K. Michael Hays, Architecture’s Desire: Reading the Late Avant-Garde, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010. Coop Himmelblau, Architecture Is Now: Projects, (Un)Buildings, Actions, Statements, Sketches, Commentaries, 1968–1983, New York: Rizzoli, 1983. Coop Himmelblau, Beyond the Blue, Prestel Publishing, 2008. Mari Hvattum, “The Pleasure of Surprise,” Positions No. 0 (2008), pp. 48–51. Hans Ibelings, Supermodernism: Architecture in the Age of Globalization, Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2002.

138

After Deconstructivist Architecture Mark Jarzombek, Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age, Minneapolis: University of ­M innesota Press, 2016. Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley, Deconstructivist Architecture, New York: MoMA, 1988. Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan, New York: Monacelli Press, 1978. Rem Koolhaas, SMLXL, New York: Monacelli Press, 1995. Neil Leach, “There Is No Such Thing as Political Architecture,” in Matthew Poole and Manuel Shvartzberg, eds, Politics of Parametricism: Digital Technologies in Architecture, Bloomsbury, 2015, pp. 58–78. Hélène Lipstadt, editor, The Experimental Tradition: Essays on Competitions in Architecture, Princeton ­A rchitectural Press, 1989). Ten pivotal competitions were held in the United States (1988) at the ­A rchitectural League of New York organized by Lipstadt. Sylvère Lotringer and Sande Cohen, French Theory in America, New York: Routledge, 2001. Greg Lynn, Out of Hand: Materializing the Postdigital, ed. Ronald T. Labaco, Black Dog Publishing, 2013. Mary McLeod, “Architecture and Politics in the Reagan Era: From Postmodernism to Deconstructivism” Assemblage 8 (1989), pp. 23–59. Andrea Papadakis, C. Cook and Andrew Benjamin, editors, Deconstruction Omnibus, Wiley editions, 1989. Matthew Poole and Manuel Shvartzberg, The Politics of Parametricism: Digital Technologies in Architecture, Bloomsbury, 2015. Patrik Schumacher, “Introduction: Gearing Up to Impact the Global Built Environment,” in Parametricism 2.0: Rethinking Architecture’s Agenda for the 21st Century, Architectural Design, March 2016, pp. 8–17. Robert Somol, “Between the Sphere and the Labyrinth” Architectural Design 59, no. 11–12, 1989, pp. 41–57. Bernard Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996. Bernard Tschumi, Cinégramme La Folie: La Parc de la Villette, Princeton Architectural Press, 1987. Bernard Tschumi, Manhattan Transcripts 1976–1981, New York: St. Martins’ Press, 1981. Mark Wigley, The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt, MIT Press, 1995. Mark Wigley, “The Translation of Architecture, the Production of Babel,” Assemblage, No. 8 (February 1989), pp. 6–21. Philip Yuan, “Parametric Regionalism,” Parametricism 2.0, ed. Patrik Schumacher, Architectural Design, March 2016, pp. 92–9.

139

6 Postmodern Utopianism Simon Sadler

Introduction Belief in perfectibility and equilibrium has become so scarce over the last half century that ­utopianism should have no role left to play in architecture and the spaces it designs. And from the outset—half a millennium ago, in Thomas More’s wry Utopia (1516)—the notion of a flawless world was ambivalent. Failure is all but inherent to utopia, and the onset of Fascist and Stalinist totalitarianism, the unleashing of technological mass destruction and murder during the Second World War, and the shadow of Cold War annihilation were enough to make the very ethics of utopianism questionable, let alone any Hegelian theory of history ending with the reconciliation of all contradictions in a perfect state. “Never has mankind possessed so many instruments for abolishing slavery,” conceded a spokesman for modernist transformation, design historian Sigfried Giedion, in 1948. “But the promises of a better life have not been kept. All we have to show so far is a rather disquieting inability to organize the world, or even to organize ourselves” (Giedion, 1948, 715). Mass housing schemes—often laudable social-democratic efforts to house low-income citizens well—were widely discredited by the 1970s. High-rise public housing became a veritable symbol of utopia’s dystopian opposite, which is today surely easier to picture in the mind’s eye than utopia. Dystopianism has been fed by movies from Alphaville (1965) to Bladerunner (1982) to The Hunger Games (2012) and by fears for the future at large, threatened by terrorism, climate change, and inequality. With the 1973 publication of Manfredo Tafuri’s Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development, the very concept of order was shown to be the contradiction within a bourgeois society that really thrives on market disruption. The grand visions of the Enlightenment, or the fusion of socialism and mechanization that marked the peak of utopian architecture in inter-war modernism, have been largely succeeded by a more granular postmodern and contemporary architecture. At first sight, then, it is surprising for a volume on contemporary architecture to enquire after utopia. What though if utopianism is a repressed facet of contemporary architecture? In an era ostensibly driven by the pleasure principle (in which high ideals are sacrificed to economic growth, reason to consumption, collectivism to individualism—in which any hint of a nanny-state is set aside for the free reign of choice), some unstated sense of civilization and togetherness can still be glimpsed through the dream, so to speak, of architecture: a dream of deliberation, organization, transcendence, and purpose. Architecture is inherently utopian to the degree that it resists cultural and social entropy and tries to extract aesthetic and social value from building production. Digital rendering, moreover, creates detailed, convincing illusions of ideal worlds, even in the 140

DOI: 10.4324/9781315674469-7

Postmodern Utopianism

most routine practices of architecture. In other words, architects continually reimagine the lack of order or predictability that is generally accepted as the postmodern condition transfigured into more beneficial arrangements. Modernist utopianism imagined a unitary environment in which all people were progressing to equanimity, reason, justice, and self-fulfillment. But a postmodern utopian condition might be partial and opportunistic—rather than transforming all space and all society through universal reason for all time, it offers projects that are somewhat perfect, and for some, if not for others, according to particular logics and preferences. Better that than hopelessness; better now than later. Postmodern utopianism is then that of urban farms rather than a restored Arcadia; of ­revenue-generating apps rather than unitary systems; of historicism rather than renewed cities. This partial and opportunistic approach avoided wholesale capitulation to what architect Rem ­Koolhaas in 2001 termed “junkspace”—the ad hoc generation of space and society without heed to a larger formal, technical, or cultural ambition (Koolhaas, 2002). For the sake of concision, I will here suggest three postmodern utopian tendencies. They range from a restorative sensibility, to high-tech intervention, to disruption. By way of conclusion, I will suggest that utopian desires might yet eclipse postmodern caution.

Restorative Utopias Why are architects and scholars still interested in the post-war architectural coalition known as Team 10? Its built work, after all, can be criticized and praised in equal measure—London’s Robin Hood Gardens public housing, by Team 10 members Alison and Peter Smithson, was, for example, controversial from its opening in 1972 to its threatened demolition at the time of writing. Perhaps the spell is this: that Team 10 reconceived utopia without recourse to the grand ideals that had shaped utopian ambition from the Renaissance to inter-war modernism. The most ambitious survey of Team 10 so far published calls this Team 10’s Search of a Utopia of the Present (Risselada & van den Heuvel, 2005). Team 10 promoted the complexity of the city-as-is, rather than categorize urban functions on a grid in the way prescribed in the 1920s and 1930s by its parent organization, the International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM). Team 10’s elevation of everyday life recovered a repressed branch of the history of town ­planning. The dominant branch, from Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse through to the clear-cut of so-called urban renewal in the 1950s–1970s, had benefitted from what historian Antoine Picon reminds us was the merger between utopian perspectives and mainstream political and economical agendas. The advent of communism promised to many a golden age; others bet on fascist regimes, while some regarded capitalism as a realized utopia. Connections were established between these utopian perspectives and the new practice of large-scale planning. … As Tafuri rightly pointed out, planning was the essential link between architecture and utopia throughout the twentieth century. (Picon, 2013) Yet the Scottish biologist Patrick Geddes, whose studies form the foundation of modern town planning, argued not for the tabula rasa that came to typify planning, but for a subtle admixture of landscape, history, the vernacular, and ceremony, seeking ways in which we might better live with one another and with nature. As opposed to what Geddes termed ou-topia (the unrealizable nowhere), scholars Volker Welter and Smriti Srinivas tell us, Geddes proposed eu-topia: the city around us (Welter, 2003; Srinivas, 2015). Srinivas, an anthropologist, finds these eu-topias at large in present-day Indian cities—in the religious practices, for example, often of a novel and hybrid 141

Simon Sadler

kind, observed in pop-up temples and shrines. And architects have meanwhile become connoisseurs of the what-is, and of the what-has-been, drawing since the Second World War on adjacent interests from philosophy, history, anthropology, and sociology. To aid them in this task Alison and Peter Smithson drew on Geddes and his successor Lewis Mumford, author of The Culture of Cities (1938). Their Team 10 colleague Aldo van Eyck was familiar with situationism, a far-left avant-garde tendency that read cities as archaeology of revolutionary culture. Such sensitizing to vernacular urban culture, bordering on utopian wonder, helped fill the vacuum left by the departure from architectural training of more quantitative social sciences. Indeed, one way in which to date the start of the contemporary period of architecture is with the feted personal observations of vernacular stoops, storefronts, and sidewalks in her native Lower Manhattan by Jane Jacobs, published in her 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Jacobs rebuffed the huge redevelopment schemes planned for New York City by its planning titan, Robert Moses, and became inestimably influential in forming our “common sense” of the “livable city”—by 1969, the children’s television program Sesame Street was presenting a multicultural urban village clearly founded on a Jacobsian ideal. Uncritical idealization of the vernacular replaced the previous “bourgeois utopias” (Fishman, 2008) of the suburbs so that, ironically, gentrification has since made Jacobs’s New York unaffordable to the sorts of New Yorkers who were surely the constituents of the community life she cherished. The rediscovery of the American vernacular was central to the profoundly influential design and polemics of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown—“Main Street is almost alright,” as Robert Venturi declaimed in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966). This nascent postmodernism recovered historicist models. In 1965, architect Charles Moore shockingly drew architects’ attention to the detailing, and popularity, of Disneyland’s Main Street, before introducing his own practice’s abstraction into the housing of vernacular barn forms found on the Californian coast (Moore, 1965). This neo-vernacular housing, at a development known as The Sea Ranch, was paired in a 1995 book with Andreas Duany and Elizabeth PlatterZyberk’s neo-vernacular Seaside, Florida, development of 1991 to illustrate “parallel utopias” (Sexton, Oldenburg & Turnbull, 1995). Seaside, and other so-called New Urbanist communities, reimagined vernacular small towns, urban neighborhoods, and suburbs as lodestones for the ­a rchitectural imagination after the hubris of comprehensive modernist redevelopment. Architect Léon Krier, who contributed to Seaside, Florida, similarly developed the model village of Poundbury, ­England, at the behest of British royalty; Celebration, a Florida development by the Disney ­Corporation, included work by Disney’s sometime board member, architect Robert Stern. Posited against these simulations of found cultures has been the ardent recovery of authenticity. Traditional cities suggested an archetype of collective dwelling—cities were “The Third Typology,” as historian Anthony Vidler argued in an influential essay of 1976: the third great source of inspiration for modern architects after nature and machines. Architect Aldo Rossi was a key exponent of the restoration of this abstracted urban vernacular. Rossi’s language was less that of the architraves, gables, and porches of a fancifully revived American small town, and more the collective, European architectural idiom of arcades, apartments, and piazzas, stripped to their most elemental cubic and cylindrical forms. The ambition here was utopian in so far as Rossi and architects like him recovered not any particular place, but a “deep structure” of urban architecture, a historically evolved formation, mood, and meaning. Politically, this quest for authenticity tried to shore up a sense of collective dwelling. The ­certainties of dwelling became a grail of postmodernism, including the fitful recovery of the phenomenology of philosopher Martin Heidegger. “Place-form,” historian and architect ­Kenneth Frampton conjectured from 1983, was relatively resistant to capitalism (Frampton, 1983). ­Pondering examples like Oswald Mathias Ungers’ rudimentary gabled structure at the center of the German Architecture Museum in Frankfurt (1984), historian Reinhold Martin argues that 142

Postmodern Utopianism

utopia is the ghost that haunts postmodernism (Martin, 2010)—a friendly ghost, we might say, protecting human subjectivity against its evisceration by capitalist and technological development. Architect Pier Vittorio Aureli has recently drawn upon sources such as Ungers and Italian Rationalism to defiantly propose an “absolute” architecture, one which defends the territory of collective life within the neoliberal city (Aureli, 2011). The vision is reminiscent of Tafuri’s account of the utopian working-class housing estates of inter-war Germany as islands in a churning sea of market-rate urbanism.

Utopias of High-tech Globalization Utopia, a concept originating in a colonizing 16th-century England, was tied in large part to European modernity and its diaspora, but hope for a state of perfectibility is confined neither to the modern era, nor to the global West. The new round of seemingly utopian projects in Asia and the Middle East continue the otherworldliness of traditional Chinese and Persian gardens, just as eschatology was coded into the architecture of Christianity for a millennium before utopianism. In the new millennium, design is channeling flows of technology and capital through pristine cities. Masdar City, Abu Dhabi, which was started in 2006, might be the quintessence of a certain type of contemporary utopia of high-tech control, often garden-like, futuristic, and purportedly ecological, circulating in Asia and the Middle East. Whereas “cities in the West,” as Masdar City’s English architect Norman Foster laments, “have forgotten the power of planning” (Edelson, 2017), a sort of hyper-planning is back in these so-called smart cities of the East, purging modernization of its environmental and social chaos through the application of advanced technologies. In 1890, William Morris published a founding designer-utopian screed against the industrial despoliation of England. Morris’s News from Nowhere described a future returning to a bucolic ­England inspired by the Middle Ages: the costs of environmental and social destruction were simply not worth the benefits of mass industrialization, Morris concluded. The same apprehension about the costs of industrial civilization has globalized since the 19th century, which helps explain the utopianism present in the rapidly industrializing and urbanizing economies of contemporary Asia. A Utopian Pavilion was built at the heart of the massive Shanghai Expo in 2010, a temporary city of vanguard engineering and architectural fantasy in which it was possible to imagine, as its Chinese hosts put it, the “better city, better life.” Acknowledging the crises of modernization, ­ arxist the Utopian Pavilion included utopianism critical of technology and capitalism (that of M ­geographer David Harvey) alongside the more technologically adept 19th- and 20th-century ­utopian architecture of Charles Fourier, Robert Owen, Frank Lloyd Wright, Kisho Kurokawa, and Archigram. Morris argued that modernization is a crisis of uneven and unsustainable development (to put it in the terms we use now). In contemporary architecture, this crisis is to be solved globally, through piecemeal urban Arcadias, trade, and technology. Consider the UK Pavilion, which won the Shanghai Expo’s coveted gold medal. “Sitting on a landscape that is crumpled and folded like a sheet of paper, which suggests that the pavilion is a gift from the UK to China, still partly enclosed in wrapping paper” (Heatherwick Studio, 2010), the pavilion suggested an interchange between 19th-century British and 21st-century Chinese ­utopianism. The Shanghai Expo was another incarnation of the World Expo tradition founded with Britain’s Great Exhibition of 1851, which encapsulated in its era a version of one world linked by trade through its dominant nodes. At the center of the 1851 Great Exhibition, which was housed in Joseph Paxton’s giant glasshouse, was one of the trees native to Hyde Park, celebrating the cohabitation of nature and civilization; 160 years later, the UK Pavilion, itself like a hairy seed at an Expo whose themes were broadly ecological, cast 250,000 seeds into the glassy tips of 60,000 acrylic hairs (Figure 6.1). UK Pavilion designer Thomas Heatherwick and his team worked with Kew Gardens’ Millennium Seed Bank Partnership, which aims to collect the seeds of 25% of the 143

Simon Sadler

Figure 6.1  Thomas Heatherwick, UK Pavilion, Shanghai Expo, 2007–10.  Photo © Feng Tang.

world’s plant species by 2020 ( Jordana, 2010). Their Seed Pavilion, as the UK Pavilion became known, “started to explore the relationships between cities and nature and the significance of plants to human health, economic success, and social change” (Heatherwick Studio, 2010). The glassy openness of the Great Exhibition’s Crystal Palace gained utopian connotations in the early 20th century through the “glass architecture” of German Expressionism and R ­ ationalism, and the Seed Pavilion was in turn reminiscent of that classic example of German Expressionism and glass architecture, Bruno Taut’s Glass Pavilion at the 1914 Cologne Deutscher Werkbund Exhibition. Taut’s architecture, redolent of religious architecture, had celebrated a collective future (for Taut, that of a German people, or Volk). Again invoking some sort of metaphysics, Heatherwick further dubbed the Seed Pavilion a “cathedral”: “our pavilion could be a cathedral to seeds, which are immensely significant for the ecology of the planet and fundamental to human nutrition and medicine. For the future-gazing expo, seeds seemed an ultimate symbol of potential and promise.” Taut’s pavilion was a mini Volkhaus, a seed for the new city; Heatherwick’s pavilion offered a setting with something of the “intimacy and ambiguity of … a village green, invoking the UK’s record as a pioneer of the modern public park” (Heatherwick Studio, 2010). A global design, political, and intellectual elite advocates such spiritual and technological solutions to global challenges. For Masdar City architect Norman Foster, the convener of 2017 the “Future is Now” forum in Madrid, the solutions are not so far from those of his mentor Richard Buckminster Fuller, the “comprehensive designer” who propounded in the mid-20th century that natural and social capital can be holistically, democratically, and rationally distributed. In Foster’s work, this belief can assume poetic form: the dome atop a democratic Germany, perched upon the Reichstag reconstructed to Foster’s 1995–99 design, did multiple duties as an energy-saving means with which to illuminate the interior, as a place from which the public could surveil a political assembly earlier broken by Nazism and the Cold War, and as a beacon beaming out the light of democracy at night. And Antoine Picon recently wrote, in defense of the technological management attained by architecture, “that the main goals of utopian architecture have been achieved. One of these was to fully inhabit the earth, to equip and manage it as the ‘house of man’” (Picon, 2013, 19). Supporting his contention that “our consumer-driven, digitally equipped society functions 144

Postmodern Utopianism

through a series of short circuits between the individual and the collective” (Picon, 2013, 22), ­Picon cites The Digital Condition (1995) by architect and MIT information theorist Nicholas ­Negroponte, who joined the discussion at the Future is Now forum. The “digital ­condition” is enabled by the Internet and is promoted by the smart city concept, a legacy of post-war applied systems theory of the sort adapted at the MIT Smart Cities Lab. These are classically utopian ­m aneuvers in the way they offer not some carte blanche future unrelated to the present but depict the present modified (a little like the “utopianism of the existing” considered earlier). Picon argues that utopias idealize the architectural and urban production of their particular times to reveal alternative futures, and technologist Paul Saffo (commenting on the seeming techno-utopianism at large in Silicon Valley) explains that utopia is not science fiction, but rather the adjustment, through technology, of the present (Cali-topia, 2016). But techno-utopianism is no cure-all. In existing cities, the commissions which followed Heatherwick’s success at the Shanghai Expo would prove contentious. His c. 2013 proposal for a Garden Bridge, incongruously sprouting trees across the historic view along the River Thames in London, seemed at once a confused symbol of urban nature and an extravagant use of public money on a design of questionable public utility—the Garden Bridge was, however, potentially alluring as a space for corporate entertainment. So if contemporary utopianism is to offer a “better city for a better life,” then how, and for whom? (“cities could become social ticking time bombs” or “shortcuts to equality,” remarked the socially progressive Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena at the Future is Now forum) (Edelson, 2017). Can total technical solutions for any challenge ever be truly viable—let alone solutions to complex social and environmental problems? Since the 1960s, design theory has strongly countered the political, economic, and industrial positivism descended from Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825), cautioning against unintended consequences, or “wicked problems”—problems caused by the solutions to problems. The technologically and market-driven smart city, for example, can reduce emissions through technical efficiencies, but expensive sustainable apartment blocks potentially exclude the poor and might trade convenience for tacit surveillance and control. The sociological and political left in particular has opposed ­technical disciplinary systems, while from the right, Negroponte was challenged at the Future is Now forum by the conservative historian Niall Ferguson, who warned of a “massive backlash” from a middle class whose jobs are threatened by automation (Edelson, 2017).

Utopias of Disruption At the “Future is Now” forum, Niall Ferguson seemed almost to be relishing a moment of ­populist, Trump-era disruption sparring with technological disruption. Disruption—for want of a better word, originating in the 1990s business studies, but resonant too with avant-garde t­ radition—has become a tactic to the right and the left. To the left, in the USA, the Occupy movement was able in 2011 to take over spaces in impromptu protest, most obviously on college campuses and on Wall Street; to the right, Trump’s supporters five years later demanded in rallies to see a border wall built across the American continent. These disruptions shared a nebulous, utopian vision (or dystopian, to the other side), Occupy declining to state “one demand,” Donald Trump p­ romising to “Make America Great Again,” his chaotic campaign organized through memes and social ­media. Disruption leans into the future but without clearly planning it, delineating it, or describing it. In the absence of unitary, consensus-based inhabitation—the utopian dream that has been periodically adopted by top-down, state-based planning—territory is to be “occupied,” popping up like Occupy, shored up by Trump’s (so-far) imaginary border wall, nurtured in urban farms and gardens, generated digitally, or implied by critique and absence. “Today, we can strive for one million tiny utopias each dreamt up by a single person” (Dunne & Raby, 2013, 8). So claim designers Dunne and Raby—not strictly architects, though well-known 145

Simon Sadler

across disciplines for their practice of “critical design,” in which highly speculative design proposals (like one for a moving landscape in which an energy-rich population moves continuously to escape the envy of others) challenge assumptions and prompt questions. The very different tributaries contributing to Dunne and Raby’s approach can provide us here with an introduction to “bottom-up” utopian disruption at large. One tributary for their cultural provocation is the 1960s and 1970s counterculture (Dunne and Raby trace their lineage to the Italian radical architects), while the multiplicity demanded by Dunne and Raby suggests the long reach of the 1970s and 1980s philosophical and linguistic post-structuralism and deconstruction, which disputed the possibility or desirability of a unitary, binding culture—“We need more pluralism in design, not of style but of ideology and values,” Dunne and Raby argue (Dunne & Raby, 2013, 9). And though they regret some of the effects of contemporary neoliberal economic restructuring, Dunne and Raby nonetheless noted that “with this reduction in top-down governing, there has been a corresponding shift away from the top-down mega-utopias dreamt up by an elite” (Dunne & Raby, 2013, 8), assisted by peer-to-peer, networked social media. Perhaps the greatest modification of utopianism in the postmodern era is this dream of organizing without government, by whatever means, no longer dependent upon the resource-hunger of modernist utopias. In their introduction to Expanding Architecture: Design as Activism (2008), contributors called for the restoration of utopian thinking by explaining that Modernist utopias failed in part because of their dependence on the state and capital for their realization. The system that utopian practices were intended to transform was in fact the same one required for their construction. As a result these spatial utopias were stripped of their broader social agendas when they became real spaces or architectural objects. (Gámez & Rogers, 2008, 23) In an era of problems too amorphous to be captured by manifesto-driven party politics or conventional building (above all those of climate change, the ascent of fundamentalisms, and increasing inequality), “pop-up” utopias like urban community gardens can operate at microscale, and artsbased opposition promises what a 2016 book on creative resistance promises as “beautiful trouble” (Boyd & Mitchell, 2016), “facilitating alternative visions rather than defining them,” as Dunne and Raby put it, “of being a catalyst rather than a source of visions” (Dunne & Raby, 2013, 9). Architecture has assumed an activist role of the sort profiled in a series of shows at the New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)—“Rising Currents,” 2010; “Foreclosed,” 2011; and “Uneven Growth,” 2014. The international architectural showcase of the Venice Architecture Biennale has acted as a sort of internal critique of the discipline, for example, calling in 2000 for “Less Aesthetics, More Ethics.” Utopianism can be embedded in design seemingly without announcing its presence. “Every architect,” Rem Koolhaas admits, “carries the Utopian gene” (Zalewski, 2005), such that utopian yearning appears to “haunt” the design of Koolhaas and his office, Office for Metropolitan Architecture—the torqued shapes of the 2012 CCTV Building in Beijing apparently allude to some sort of absence in, or distress about, the remarkable opportunities of modernity, its transparency cracked by its structure, and its communicative capacity compromised by its proximity to an authoritarian state apparatus. Post-structuralism inspired architects such as Bernard Tschumi, Steven Holl and Diller, Scofidio and Renfro to scramble functions and circulation, nudging architecture’s users into novel modes of being in the world. Contemporary utopianism remains “deniable” by designers—though placed in a 2011 MoMA exhibition promising Small Scale, Big Change, Diébédo Francis Kéré’s 2001 Primary School in Gando, Burkina Faso, is in the end just a school, as well as a promise of schooling. Parametric architecture, while potentially hailing some forthcoming techno-economic singularity, is also simply a businesslike product of 146

Postmodern Utopianism

Building Information Modeling (BIM). Such is the stealth of postmodern utopianism that it can appear merely pragmatic. Disruption should be subject to criticism like than any other utopian ambition, however. A pragmatic, bottom-up outlook can be somewhat parochial and vulnerable to assimilation by more aggressively organized political and economic formations—it is hard for a nonprofit to refuse corporate sponsorship, for instance. Disruptions may even be unwittingly organized by such formations. For example, the turn against “government” noted by Dunne and Raby is potentially as dystopian as it is utopian, uncomfortably corresponding with a neoliberal turn amenable to powerful corporations. Without collective vision, coordination, principle, or justice, a million tiny utopias can aggregate into a dystopian war of all against all. Collective imagination might contract to a trust in networking technologies that sees every problem solved by an app. New means of production, like 3D printing and artificial intelligence; new means of sharing like Uber, WeWork, and Airbnb; and new means of engaging like virtual and augmented reality, are rarely reimagined outside of commercial disruption. “What is attributed to utopia,” complains Antoine Picon, often belongs to its double, ideology. As philosophers such as Karl Mannheim and Paul Ricoeur have shown, utopia and ideology are simultaneously both opposed and strangely connected one to another. Both are about society and the projects that can be formed in relation to it. But whereas utopia is about social change and the possibility of a radically different future, ideology tries to stabilize the dominant features of the present. … As a deeply social art, architecture is about both the stabilization of existing social uses and their possible mutation. It thus always relates to both ideology and utopia. (Picon, 2013) Utopian architecture should encourage new solidarities and more cooperative and sustainable economies. Ideological architecture, by contrast, accelerates present trends. Architect Eyal Weizman noticed in 2006 that Israeli security services were studying post-structuralism in their efforts to better police their state’s borders (Weizman, 2007). Architect Patrik Schumacher demanded in a 2017 speech that parametric, libertarian commercial development should be allowed free reign even in London’s public parks—a disruptive concept, for sure, but one so antipathetic to the commons that it prompted outrage even in his own office. In 2001, Rem Koolhaas and his students published images of the apparent chaos of Lagos, Nigeria, not as a warning of global entropy but as a sign of a gloriously self-organizing capacity shared by ordinary people in commercial relation to one another—surely, a most utopian presentation, as geographer Matthew Gandy patiently explained of the parlous post-colonial context of Lagos (Gandy, 2005). And 152 architects entered a 2016 competition, hosted by the Web site ArchDaily and organized by a collective called the Third Mind Foundation, to disruptively reimagine a Mexico–USA border wall as architecture— showing that a segment of the architectural discipline had such a woefully naïve understanding of geopolitics that it could conceive the wall as a joint project between cooperating neighbors, rather than as a gesture of nationalist hostility over a weaker country.

Conclusions The vestigial persistence of utopianism may seem inadequate as an aura of failure creeps up on the postmodern project, just as surely as it crept up on its modernist predecessor. Take the example of housing. Debates about public housing opened and closed modernism. The closure came when the moral and technical fallibility of modernist utopianism was proven by a series of high-profile failures, such as the 1968 collapse of the Ronan Point high-rise housing block in London. In 1972, another London high-rise housing block, Grenfell Tower, was designed to address Ronan Point’s 147

Simon Sadler

structural failure, but the disaster that eventually befell Grenfell Tower in 2017 might yet date the moral and technical fallibility of postmodernist utopianism. The deadly 2017 blaze that engulfed Grenfell Tower is being attributed to a flammable cladding that was applied in 2016 to present a more decorative aspect to the building’s surroundings, assisting in the market-driven gentrification of inner London. The selection of the low-cost cladding moreover attested to the fiscal restraint of small government, part of a long withdrawal of the state promoted by postmodern and neoliberal ideology. “Until the Grenfell tragedy,” writes architect Douglas Murphy in the Architectural Review, “the housing crisis has mostly been slower and more grinding.” In a recollection uncannily similar to the sense of crisis found in architectural magazines in the mid-1970s, during the transition from modernism to postmodernism, Murphy goes on, I recently took part in a sobering panel discussion about ‘The Future’, where nearly every question from the audience was about what architects could actually do about the housing crisis. It was a somber experience, as all the panel could say was that the answers are not likely to come from any particular design innovation, but from tectonic shifts in political attitudes, themselves driven by a variety of overlapping crises. And this is the point. The housing crisis is so far-reaching, and the solutions so challenging, that it seems there’s little that can be done. We should always celebrate great new work, but should also remember that the last time architecture was both radically innovative, of good quality—and most importantly—widely built, was in the ruins after the Second World War. It took historic crisis and destruction to make society look around for new solutions, and at this point the best architects had been rehearsing answers at the right scale. (Murphy, 2017) Perhaps the end of postmodernism is being signaled precisely by this impasse, this loss of utopian authority, as political, economic, and cultural challenges return to such universal and historic scales as those of inequality and climate change. Given the increasing pressure on new designers to work for nothing (as interns), and increasing tuition fees and costs of living in creative capitals like New York and London, and given the seeming link between all of these challenges and the neoliberal imperative of economic growth—architects might increasingly identify with other laborers, geographically dispersed, and at the lower end of an increasingly unequal pay scale, most vulnerable to the effects of a warming planet. It might become ever-harder for architects to identify with their richest clients’ private microutopias of gorgeous houses, hotels, restaurants, stores, and gentrified urban centers. The belief that capitalist growth offers our only best hope might increasingly appear to be simply the prevailing ideology of neoliberalism, not a utopian future. So it was that, at the time of writing, visitors happening by the Web site of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design—a traditional leader in architectural education—are being met by a front page of world-changing aspirations. The page leads with “Ideas” on ecology, infrastructure, climate change, Africa, and fabrication; it moves onto an exhibition “We the Publics: A manifesto to restore democracy and truth in the Republic,” then to a lecture from visiting Marxist scholar David Harvey which asks “What can the role of innovation be in creating urban environments that are not built on the basis of investment?” (Graduate School of Design, 2017) The effect conveyed is of an architectural discipline trying to meet student demand for a utopian flight from merely billable, small-scale, and tech-driven design. The concerns of the Graduate School of Design in 2017 are not identical to those of modernism, but they are certainly similar—the return of interest in “the public,” for instance; and while the solutions are not quite modernist—not quite top-down, say— they are large-scale, like infrastructure. If not quite modernist, then, not quite postmodernist, either. Maybe post-postmodern, then, or an inkling of such a thing, with the covert utopianism of postmodern architecture now becoming a more overt expression of an equitable world, by design. 148

Postmodern Utopianism

References Aureli, P. V. (2011). The possibility of an absolute architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Boyd, A. & Mitchell, D. O. (2016). Beautiful trouble: a toolbox for revolution. Cali-topia: a New Vision of Thomas More’s Utopia? (2016). [Radio programme] BBC World Service: Forum. Available at: http:// www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04knmjt [Accessed 19 Jul. 2017]. Dunne, A. & Raby, F. (2013). Speculative everything: design, fiction, and social dreaming. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Edelson, Z. (2017) Can technology and design save us? Norman Foster Foundation’s first forum ponders the challenges. The Architect’s Newspaper. Available at: https://archpaper.com/2017/06/norman-foster-­ foundation-forum/#gallery-0-slide-0 [Accessed 19 Jul. 2017]. Fishman, R. (2008). Bourgeois utopias: the rise and fall of suburbia. New York: Basic Books. Frampton, K. (1983). Towards a critical regionalism; six points for an architecture of resistance. In Foster, H. The anti-aesthetic. Washington, DC: Bay Press, 16–30. Gámez, J. L. S. & Rogers, S. (2008) An architecture of change. In Bell, B. & Wakeford, K. (eds.) Expanding architecture: design as activism. New York: Metropolis, 18–25. Gandy, M. (2005). Learning from Lagos. New Left Review, 33, 37–53. Giedion, S. (1948). Mechanization takes command: a contribution to anonymous history. New York: Oxford ­University Press. Graduate School of Design, Harvard University. (2017). Homepage. Available at: http://www.gsd.harvard. edu [Accessed 19 Jul. 2017]. Heatherwick Studio. (2010). UK Pavilion, Shanghai Expo. Heatherwick Studio. Available at: http://www. heatherwick.com/uk-pavilion/ [Accessed 19 Jul. 2017]. Jordana, S. (2010) UK Pavilion for Shanghai World Expo 2010. ArchDaily. Available at: http://www.­ archdaily.com/58591/uk-pavilion-for-shanghai-world-expo-2010-heatherwick-studio/> [Accessed 19 Jul. 2017]. Koolhaas, R. (2002). Junkspace. October, 100 (Spring), 175–90. Martin, R. (2010). Utopia’s ghost: architecture and postmodernism, again. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Moore, C. (1965) You have to pay for the public life. Perspecta, 9/10, 57–65 and 68–106. Murphy, D. (2017). Outrage: “until the Grenfell tragedy, the housing crisis has mostly been slower and more grinding”. The Architectural Review ( Jul. 6). Available at: http://www.architectural-review. com/10021425.article?utm_sourc…E4TnVMb1NxUE1QUlpiMmtmaFg4VmNJRFkzRVhIU2lTZlRlemZVa2UifQ%3D%3D [Accessed 19 Jul. 2017]. Picon, A. (2013). Learning from utopia: contemporary architecture and the quest for political and social relevance. Journal of Architectural Education 67(1): 17–23. Available at: http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL. InstRepos:10579145 [Accessed 19 Jul. 2017]. Risselada, M. & van den Heuvel, D. (2005). Team 10: 1953–8, in search of a utopia of the present. Rotterdam: NAi. Sexton, R., Oldenburg, R. & Turnbull, W. (1995) Parallel utopias: sea ranch and seaside; the quest for community. San Francisco, CA: Chronicle. Srinivas, S. (2015). A place for utopia: urban designs from South Asia. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Weizman, E. (2007). Hollow land: Israel’s architecture of occupation. London: Verso. Welter, V. (2003). Biopolis: Patrick Geddes and the city of life. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Zalewski, D. (2005). Intelligent design: Can Rem Koolhaas kill the skyscraper? The New Yorker. Available at: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/03/14/intelligent-design. [Accessed 19 Jul. 2017].

149

7 Metabolism and Beyond Hajime Yatsuka

Introduction Metabolism’s dramatic debut at the 1960 World Design Conference in Tokyo, a gathering of celebrated designers from various fields and from around the world, quickly established the movement’s lasting prominence within Japanese postwar architecture. Even today, Metabolism remains a benchmark against which Japanese architecture and design are measured.1 It represented Japan’s “miraculous recovery” from the damage of war. However, after the nation’s recovery period passed, Metabolism’s loss of a common objective for rehabilitating the ruined cities and renewing the nation’s cultural pride through a shared philosophy and language—the loss of their historical mission—gravely weakened their impact, even if individual architects continued to be productive after the group’s dissolution. This also marked the end of Japanese modernism in the field of architecture. But what came after, beyond Metabolism’s brilliant ruins? This chapter attempts to survey a dramatic and abrupt tidal shift—from Japan’s challengingly modern architectural era to an extremely sophisticated, though not intellectually stimulating, postmodernism, which is characterized by amnesia. It exists in the days after the “end of history,” as Francis Fukuyama (1992), a neoconservative postmodernist thinker, once argued. Metabolism is no exception; it, too, now lies beyond the oblivion’s curtain. If one were to argue that it is still possible, still valid, to consider Metabolism a reference point in understanding Japanese architecture in subsequent years, for example, in the 1990s, most knowledgeable Japanese observers would not agree; instead, they would probably regard Metabolism simply as a product of the postwar era’s rapid economic growth and excessively optimistic beliefs in the future—a sleazy, perhaps sinful, episode. This chapter aims to refute to such an observation. Japanese intellectuals have often been fond of a tragic perspective. For them, 1973—the first year of the oil crisis—was a decisive turning point. Only three years after Osaka’s Expo ’70 celebrated “Progress and Harmony for Mankind,” an apocalyptic mood prevailed in Japan. The periodical Shumatsu kara [After Termination] was initiated full of dire predilections and pessimistic gestures, with influential novelists, poets, activists, and philosophers (no architect, though!). In popular culture, a Japanese translation of Les Prophéties de M. Michel Nostradamus was published, with great success. 2 Sakyo Komatsu, a leading science fiction writer who had been very close to Metabolist architects and himself played a significant role during Expo ’70, published a 1973 best-seller, Japan Sinks, the tragic story of the collapse of Japanese archipelago. 150

DOI: 10.4324/9781315674469-8

Metabolism and Beyond

A final blow for Metabolism? Possibly. Japan’s economic prosperity in the 1960s was the result of the nation’s collective endeavors beyond the domestic politics of the conservative government, even if its economic foundation was established by the unexpected political situation, the Korean War (1950–53). By comparison, the 1980s correlative was a mere fabrication from the financial heart of global capitalism. However, the quasi-apocalyptic mood heralding the dawn of Japan’s postmodern era continued only a short time, quickly reversed by other sleazy phenomena. Japanese society would again enjoy evanescent prosperity, the so-called Bubble Economy. Was the Bubble a replay of the 1960s? Certainly not. As with most postmodern phenomena, Japan’s 1980s were a time deprived of any serious possibilities, an epoch when the total value of Japan’s land could exceed the whole of North America’s and the budget for a building was almost nothing compared to the value of the land on which it stood. Architects were little more than court jesters. The Metabolists were not like that. Their work had its origins in the challenge of rebuilding a nation devastated by war. The postwar architects’ mission was an ambitious one, not achievable unless they were serious, which was a hard core of the modernism, even more than mere progressive view driven by technological approach. Let us take a closer look at the Metabolism’s backstory and the movement’s polar star, Kenzo Tange, beginning with the days immediately after World War II.

Metabolism in Japan’s Recovery from War Japan’s defeat in 1945 was twofold: physical and psychological. Both required rehabilitation. The militarism that perpetrated the war was highly chauvinistic, the strange amalgamation of two seemingly incompatible systems, an ancient empire of mythical origins and a thoroughly modern nation state established after the 1868 Meiji Restoration. With the end of the war, Japan abandoned its imperial system: the nation was democratized by U.S. Occupation Forces, and the emperor and his family manifested themselves merely human, no longer gods. Although democratization was welcomed by most, damage to national pride was exacerbated by the fact that venerable Japan had been defeated by a country claiming a history of only a few hundred years. The public’s reaction was a mixture of loss and liberation. People's pride in their cultural traditions and the state promotion of economic prosperity should have been re-established in a way that cleanly separated them from prewar ideology. A simple return to tradition was out of the question; most believed a prewar political and social system should definitely be avoided. Although some among the Occupation Forces wanted to reduce the defeated nation to a state totally devoid of any kind of modern industry, the United States eventually chose to rebuild Japan as a modern state once more, in order to establish a front line against a new opponent, the Soviet Union. The task of rehabilitating Japan as an even more powerful modern state than it had been—in economic terms, not military ones—was thus authorized, leaving the country in an ambivalent position. Japan risked becoming a U.S. satellite (a position that tempted conservatives with its earthly gains), while intellectuals’ short-lived hope that the Occupation Forces might be an agency for liberation was soon recognized as an illusion—particularly disappointing leftists, who regarded their own government as America’s puppet. The conflict between the Left and the government culminated with the 1952 “Bloody May Day” incident, which occurred shortly after the Occupation Forces withdrew; during a melee in the forecourt of the Imperial Palace, police forces injured many people. That and similar events turned Japanese intellectuals decisively against the United States and its puppet government in Japan and obliged the Japanese population to seek a renewed national identity. Prewar polemics against Western modernism were revived, now in service of the public’s collective will rather than an imperial system based on ancient myths. This provided the background for arguments championed by Kenzo Tange and the critic Noboru Kawazoe in the mid-1950s, on the question of tradition. 151

Hajime Yatsuka

At the time, Kawazoe was chief editor of the magazine Japan Architect and a committed Marxist, which led his expulsion from the editorial section of the magazine in1957. He might be considered Tange’s intellectual accomplice, who later became a founding member of Metabolism and active promoter of its chief ideology. Tange’s dramatic 1954 debut, Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, was a milestone in postwar Japanese architecture, a dramatic symbol of a unified Japanese nation. Its program was dedicated to victims of the atomic bomb, but Tange’s interpretation was also based on Japanese traditions. The buildings drew on ancient archetypes and structures rooted in imperial culture: Ise Shrine, a private shrine for the imperial family, and Katsura Villa, built by crown princes. This citation was rather a matter of course for Tange, who had been deeply influenced by the Japan Romantic School of literature (Doak, 1994), the ambivalently traditionalist avantgarde, during war time. However, the romantic aestheticism obviously looked awkward for the monument celebrating the start of the new democratic society. This condition led to Tange’s rather obstinate reinterpretation of these archetypes as the crystallization of the collective will of Japanese people, transcending the imperial system as superstructure, throughout its long history. Kawazoe assisted the former national aestheticist architect, Tange, in this reformulation of the traditional culture in the new populist context. Later, in 1962, they published the theory in “ISE Nihon-kenchiku no Genkei” (Tange and Noboru, 1965). For Tange, it was not simply an issue of style and collective aesthetics; he aspired to incorporate the most recent structural innovations, and visions of a highly modernized futuristic city, in his work. Most of his (and Metabolists’) buildings that followed were characterized as fragments of a futuristic city to be systematized and expressed powerfully through the bones of the buildings. They were at once traditional in interpretation and technologically ultramodern in practice. However, it would be unwise to ignore the fact that what seemed to be ultramodern work by Tange and his Metabolist disciples also reflected the realities of Japanese society at the time3 —in doing so, one might misunderstand the historical significance of the movement. To the Metabolists in particular (they were a generation younger than Tange4), as with most Japanese citizens, Japan’s prewar militaristic ambition to expand into new territory overseas was already passé. Yet the nation’s prewar, semifeudal social mentality left an imprint on these architects. On this sense, the work of Tange and the Metabolists was undoubtedly coined by the traumatic influence of the war. These architects were frequently compared to Western contemporaries like Team X, Archigram, and Yona Freedman which shared a strong inclination to represent the most advanced technologies, often via megastructures. Kisho Kurokawa and Arata Isozaki energetically promoted their Western colleagues’ work, while other Metabolists, such as Kiyonori Kikutake and Fumihiko Maki, were personally very close to the members of Team X. But this was only one side of the Metabolists—that they frequently referred to tradition was another. In addition, while it has been scarcely acknowledged in existing literature, the Metabolists were also local—almost provincial—in their biases.

Metabolist Architects’ Unknown History Until the mid-1950s, ambitious people living in Japan’s countryside came to the capital city, Tokyo, bringing with them a contradictory mentality rooted in their native places; this is something unimaginable in the much more homogenized Japan today in the context of globalization. Among Metabolist architects, only Fumihiko Maki was from Tokyo, whose career path was the most international one, involving studying and teaching in the United States. The other three founding Metabolist architects were from outside Tokyo. The youngest Kurokawa was from Nagoya, Japan’s fourth largest city, while Kiyonori Kikutake and the eldest, Masato Otaka, came from agricultural regions and felt strong attachment to the soil. This is essential in understanding their 152

Metabolism and Beyond

belief that an artificial ground plane was needed for a new Japanese Lebensraum.5 This rural bias lay behind their mentality. Otaka recalled that when he was a small boy, witnessing the drastic metamorphosis of his hometown in northern Fukushima Prefecture, one of Japan’s most underdeveloped provinces, left a deep impression. For Otaka, large-scale civil engineering projects presented a revelatory image of his homeland’s future. From then on, he was obsessed with the idea of developing concrete’s technical promise, treating it as a sort of second soil. Fukushima Prefecture’s living conditions were pinched, its meager cropland yielding only scarcity; the area’s impoverishment drove many to Manchuria’s colonies during the war. With defeat, the Japanese’s desperate efforts to acquire property (Lebensraum) overseas were abandoned, redirected toward another kind of challenge with the help of technology. If the Japanese archipelago was too small, the nation could build a new Lebensraum—the three-dimensional city either on the seas or high above the ground. Otaka joined the office of Kunio Maekawa, a leading architect who was also from northern Japan. Maekawa, too, favored reinforced concrete, inspired by his former employers, Le Corbusier and Antonin Raymond. Raw concrete became popular among postwar architects in both Japan and Europe, a manifestation of “New Brutalism.” Lacking large-scale steel industries (compared with the United States), they saw no other option than concrete. Its construction did require human resources rather than advanced industrial equipment, but human labor was plentiful in the postwar destitute country. For Otaka (and Maekawa), concrete was a perfect fit, matching not only their architectural sensibility, but also their desire to construct a second ground plane. Concrete was a deliberate, pragmatic choice, conditioned and urged on by the epoch—and thus modern. The overtly sophisticated aesthetics of concrete surfaces seen a few decades later in Tadao Ando’s work was by contrast more based on his personal preference of the material, and thus a postmodern choice. Even megastructures, widely regarded as Metabolism’s visual trademark, were an outcome of their realistic pursuit of construction techniques that could potentially offset the period’s poor economic conditions. Maekawa’s 1958 Harumi Apartment Building designed under Otaka’s ­supervision—Japan’s first high-rise building, although only 10 stories—was an early example of Metabolist megastructure, which might seem simply Corbusian, following the Unité d'Habitation’s paradigm (Figure 7.1a & b). However, the method was based on the principle of Metabolism. Harumi’s structural device, which consisted of “major” and “minor” structural systems, was a realistic attempt to deal with new public housing standards while simultaneously reducing construction costs. In addition to this pragmatic invention, the dual system of major and minor orders enabled later modification of the units conditioned by the legal standard of the time. Tange's work on megastructures in 1959 when he was at MIT was simply a scaled-up version of this very same idea, as was Otaka's Motomachi Housing in Hiroshima (1968–73), built for homeless or relocated inhabitants from atomic-bomb slums adjacent to Tange’s Hiroshima Memorial Park, one of the last war-related reconstruction projects (Figure 7.2). In his later years, after a long successful career as a Metabolist architect, Kikutake confessed that one of the driving forces behind his views on cities and future forms of habitation was his indignation regarding postwar democracy. This may seem odd, considering the conventional view of the Metabolists as a progressive group, but it is in fact typical for Japanese intellectuals who experienced the twist of their social background caused by the war. Kikutake’s attitude reflects the social continuity of Japan’s transition from a prewar warfare society to postwar welfare society (Koolhaas et al. 2011). Kikutake’s family had been wealthy landlords in the northern part of Kyushu, considered by the “liberal” Occupation Forces to be among the most influential and reactionary social agents supporting war in the first half of the 20th century. His family lost most of their property through the 1947 Agricultural Land Reform program; the tragedy traumatized the 19-year-old Kikutake. 153

Hajime Yatsuka

Figure 7.1  Kunio Maekawa with Masato Otaka, Apartment House in Harumi (public domain).

Figure 7.2  Kenzo Tange, exhibition pavilion in Hiroshima, shot taken immediately after completion of the building in 1954, showing “atomic-bomb slums” in foreground (public domain).

In his work as an architect, Kikutake claimed he was trying to refute the superfluous aspects of a democratic society forced on the nation. Later, Kikutake became engrossed by the idea of designing a series of the floating city, b­ eginning with his 1959 “Tower-Shaped Community” (Figure 7.3). These earliest proposals were conceived for an area in eastern Tokyo that lay below the water level and was regularly flooded in typhoon season, which proved Japan’s technical backwardness of the time. According to Kikutake, larger landlords had been responsible for flood control, but these practices, based on an older social system, forever lost because of unmindful land reform. Ironically, his seemingly ultramodern structures, based on the most advanced technology, were motivated by criticism of the Occupation Forces’ postwar reform promoting democracy. 154

Metabolism and Beyond

Figure 7.3  Kiyonori Kikutake, Tower-Shaped Community (public domain).

Figure 7.4  Kisho Kurokawa, Agricultural City (public domain).

Another project intended to address flooding was Kisho Kurokawa’s 1960 Agricultural City project (Figure 7.4). The youngest Metabolist, Kurokawa, was from Nagoya, whose agricultural hinterlands also regularly troubled by seasonal typhoons. He designed an agricultural community set on a raised “artificial ground” following a grid pattern. Kikutake’s “Tower-Shaped Community” and Kurokawa’s “Agricultural City” were both published in the Metabolist brochure distributed at the 1960 World Design Conference in Tokyo, which launched the Metabolist group. 155

Hajime Yatsuka

1960s: Launching, the End and the New Beginning The Conference was chaired by Tange and Takashi Asada, the former principle partner of Tange and a godfather of the Metabolism group. Four years after the government’s declaration of the end of postwar as rehabilitation period, Japanese society entered the new era oriented toward the unpredictable future. Metabolists attempted to draw their plans against this background. The Korean historian Cho Hyunjung called the larger movement that includes Metabolism “Architecture in the Age of the Cold War” (Cho and Shin, 2014). Japanese architecture from the 1950s to the early 1960s was indeed strongly biased by Cold War menace, in the same way that its counterpart in the 1980s and 1990s was informed by globalization. Frequently, Metabolism’s futuristic inclinations were assumed to share the excessive optimism of its European counterpart, Archigram. However, at least during its early years, Metabolism expressed intense uneasiness weighted by fear of another war. In the 1960 brochure that launched Metabolism, Kawazoe described an apocalyptic scene of total global destruction by nuclear weapons. In Kurokawa’s most futuristic projects during the 1960s, too, even as he presented an organic metamorphosis of the future city, we can witness the uneasiness that drove him to flesh out his vision of the world in the 1953 novel Childhood’s End by British science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. Arata Isozaki, whose personality was much more intellectually complex than his Metabolist colleagues, often presented the future city as a ruin. Even in his built work, like the 1966 Oita Prefectural Library (Figure 7.5), which was planned as an open structure accommodating future growth, Isozaki rejected the predetermined harmony seen in most open-structure projects by Metabolists and other architects of the era, introducing the image of a ruin instead. Indeed, the image of post-nuclear war ruins haunted in the work of Isozaki and early Metabolists. Changes emerged later in the course of 1960s and became somewhat ironic in the next decade, which was a decade of metamorphosis for Metabolism. For example, the marine city projects of Kikutake, who condemned the U.S. army’s intervention to the Japanese social structure 25 years ago, were culminated by the 1971 “Marine City” planned for Hawaii, the project to celebrate the bicentenary of the Independence of America. The technical feasibility for such floating cities was to be endorsed with the cooperation of the U.S. Navy in Hawaii. Notably, the

Figure 7.5  Arata Isozaki, Oita Prefectural Library (photo by Takashi Kimura).

156

Metabolism and Beyond

Metabolists during this period were very different from their European counterparts, such as Superstudio and Archigram. The latter tended to detach from social and political reality, including ­t­echnological feasibility. Conversely, even the least feasible Metabolist projects, like Kikutake’s “Tower-Shaped Community” and Kurokawa’s “Helix City,” were prototypical designs of an “artificial ground” from which more realistic variants could potentially be produced. Their idea of technology transcended personal taste; their intention was to become social engineers, rather than anti-­establishment artists. The 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games and 1970 Osaka World Fair were two events that marked the end of Japan's reconstruction period. Originally, these two events were scheduled simultaneously in 1940, in Tokyo, cancelled by the outbreak of the war. It is quite emblematic that Tange played a key role in reviving these two events, both of which relied on historic symbols to express the nation’s resurrection. His Olympic gymnasia reinterpreted tradition, drawing on Japan’s cultural identity by formally alluding to traditional temple roofs, yet expressed with the most advanced modern technology, bold dual-tension structures sheltering a breathtaking dramatic interior ­(Figure 7.6). These buildings were the culmination of Japan’s recovery, initiated in his earlier project for Hiroshima. After this dramatic success, it was natural for Tange to act as master planner for Expo ’70, designed to simulate a future city. I argue that the Osaka Expo marked both the end of the postwar era and the beginning of a new postmodern era. For the central facility of the Expo, covered by Tange’s “Big Roof,” with Isozaki’s “Festival Plaza” beneath, designers introduced a serious but highly experimental proposal for an indeterminate and unbounded environment. But it achieved only commercial success with its serious dimensions stripped off, perhaps due to a popular mood governed by hedonistic desire. It was the power of advertising, not architects, that really took command of Expo ’70’s successes, which turned the Metabolists’ structures distributed throughout the Expo site into superficial icons.

Architecture after Expo ’70: Resistant to Postmodernism Expo ’70 drastically changed the position of the Metabolist architects as social engineers: 1970s was no longer a period driven by projects replenished with social ambition. Perhaps Isozaki was the exception, who was always concerned with artistic and conceptual issues, and for this reason enjoyed the respect of European radicals who were his contemporaries in the 1960s. It was Isozaki, together with another contemporary of the Metabolists, Kazuo Shinohara, who came to represent Japanese architecture later, when architecture was no longer burdened with social—and modernist —mission as it had been in the 1960s. Both architects were highly individualistic and

Figure 7.6  K  enzo Tange, National Athletic Hall for the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo (photo by Takashi Kimura).

157

Hajime Yatsuka

art-oriented, whether during the times that were pessimistic (as they had been until the 1960s) or optimistic (as they were until the 1973 oil crisis). Isozaki stated that the Osaka Expo was ultimately a serious disappointment and declared his intention to withdraw from the field of urban design and concentrate solely on architecture with a capital “A,” architecture as a private—never social—statement. Isozaki’s post-Metabolist phase is often regarded as his postmodern phase as well, based on his use of the language of European neoclassical architecture seen in projects like the 1983 Tsukuba Town Center or the 1990 Art Tower Mito. However, this view is superficial: Isozaki’s projects did not reflect the sense of shared urban community reflected in European postmodern works by architects like Aldo Rossi or Leo Krier. Nor did he share the more commercial vision in American postmodernist architects’ works. His language did not evoke any sense of nostalgia for a beautiful past among the Japanese. Those references were components of an intellectual fabric of citations instead, along with other architectural languages, like Russian constructivism—and his overtly European classical language only appeared in the late period of his post-Metabolist phase. His first postmodernist phase was based on rather esoteric pure geometry not directly associated with European classicism (except for work by French visionary architects like Etienne Louise Boullé or Claude Nicolas Ledoux). If we search for the traces of his admiration for Palladio, as seen in the 1974 Fujimi Country House or several private residences of the same period, they were expressed in serene geometric spatial operations. But these works, too, should be considered postmodern—not because of their architectural language, but in that he used these intellectual operations as ways to cope with his nihilistic acknowledgement that we were in an age that had lost sight of architects’ serious social tasks. Isozaki repeatedly said “absence of a subject now becomes our subject” during this time. Unlike the case with Western postmodernists, Isozaki’s game of multilingual quotes and excessive, naked geometry during this period were a gesture of refusal, rebuffing simple-minded interpretations. He suggested that architectural language had lost its firm groundings in history and society; architecture was instead tragically suspended in the air. Perhaps—though not consciously—this was the conceptual outcome of his earlier enchantment with the image of ruins. While Isozaki indulged in an architectural rhetoric isolated from context, other Japanese architects moved in the opposite direction, rediscovering the existing city, what Rem Koolhaas would later call the “generic city” (Koolhaas and Mau 1995). This approach also contrasted with the Metabolists’ idealized visions of megastructural cities. It was a strange new hybrid drawing on both the ominous expectations triggered by oil crises in the early to mid-1970s but also the renewed optimism fired by commercial posterity that began in the late 1970s and continued through the end of the 1980s. A more erudite explanation for this strange hybrid would also include theoretic responses from these times, such as Roland Barthes’ “pleasure of the text” (1975) and Christopher Alexander’s (1965) criticism of modern town planning. It was a time lacking grand city plans or visions. Japanese cities, especially large cities, are perpetually metamorphosizing smaller elements— molecular Metabolism.6 Real estate practices still favor “scrap and build” strategies. The average lifespan of individual buildings is as short as 25 years; urban structures and infrastructure are transformed three or four times in a century. Searching for an alternative to planned megacities by Tange and the Metabolists, Japanese architects embraced the realities of chaotic cities—which the Metabolists had believed would be best resolved only by across-the-board surgery. Urban disorder was suddenly good, although nothing physical had changed. It was at this time that Kazuo Shinohara’s influence grew. Inspired by the critic Koji Taki, Shinohara described the contemporary metropolis as “savage machine.” (Taki’s own notion of savageness and machines in turn drew on Claude Lévi-Strauss’ and Deleuze and Guattari’s theories.7) The architect modified these terms into a poetic, provocative metaphor for the city. The intellectual scope of his work, which was for the most part tiny homes, was aggrandized by its urban setting. His houses became grains of sand in the desert of the savage city, challenging the 158

Metabolism and Beyond

surrounding chaos—a metonymy of the city’s very existence, each one a savage machine provoked and synchronized within savage cities. His tiny but powerful 1976 “House in Uehara” in Tokyo (Figure 7.7) was emblematic, provocatively resisting absorption by what Shinohara labeled surrounding chaos. He became an existentialist architect, reflecting an age when lofty architectural visions had been lost. With his opposition to postmodern attempts to reduce architecture to mere commodity, Shinohara is the last tragic architect in contemporary Japan. We should not overlook Taki’s importance. He was an emblematic critic for this contradictory era, theoretical supporter not only of Isozaki and Shinohara, but also by late 1980s and 1990s to younger architects like Toyo Ito, Kazunari Sakamoto, Itsuko Hasegawa, and Kazuyo Sejima. Taki was Noboru Kawazoe’s contemporary—yet the careers of the two were completely antithetical. Kawazoe, the Metabolist ideologue, was most active in the 1950s and 1960s; Taki began his career as a critic only after Kawazoe had ceased to produce significant work. Taki found his place in post-Metabolist architectural culture, introducing French post-structural philosophical theories. Not surprisingly, in the 1970s and early 1980s, Taki wrote almost exclusively about the work of Isozaki and Shinohara. He shared Isozaki’s perspectives on society and culture, while sympathizing with Shinohara’s instinctive understanding of cities. If you treat intellectuals’ loss of faith in meaning and purpose as post-modernism’s beginnings, this phase can be said to have had three architectural protagonists: Isozaki, Shinohara, and Taki. Despite being better-recognized, Isozaki’s use of neoclassical language lacked any long-term significance, except perhaps as a proof of his enchantment with postmodernism’s hedonism.

An Architecture for the “Endless Everyday” The pessimistic 1970s were an odd moment for architects to begin their careers. Many we recognize as leaders today—Toyo Ito, Itsuko Hasegawa, Tadao Ando, Kunihiko Hayakawa, Kiko Mozuna, Kijo Rokkaku, etc.— were born in 1941. They did not recall the war, though they recall the 1950s, when Japan still suffered from war’s devastation and defeat. They came of age in the 1960s, a miraculous age of recovery for Japan, but the era was not yet a stage for their own work as architects. By the early 1970s, that prosperity was over; these young architects were starved by the era’s scarce opportunities to build. They began slowly: small houses, often for family or friends. For architects, houses present a very different set of demands than the national need which Tange and the Metabolists confronted a generation earlier. No wonder many of this younger generation emulated Shinohara’s existentialism. Resisting the context was their response to the new social reality, now indifferent and unfavorable for ambitious architects. “White U” by Toyo Ito and “Sumiyoshi Row House” by Tadao Ando, both built in 1976, were typical of the time. The two concrete houses were closed off from their surroundings,

Figure 7.7  Kazuo Shinohara, House in Uehara (photo by Koji Taki).

159

Hajime Yatsuka

rejecting dialogue with their cities and with the community. To Ito and Ando, their singular works were ultimata—small fragments with a hostile, apocalyptic city. The crisis did not last—but neither did the subsequent “Bubble Economy’s” recovery. The hybrid character for practice at this time is best represented in Tadao Ando’s architecture. His early works resisted a hostile and banal environment—one clearly a product of capitalism’s market orientation. But he quickly showed great success in commercial work, especially buildings for the fashion industry, without any modification to his earlier, austere, raw-concrete aesthetics. These brands would seem to require their own strong commercial identities, but they competed for Ando’s imagery in the sophisticated context of Japan’s 1980s commercial culture. Ito’s approach was different. In 1984, he built “Silver Hut” for his own family (Figure 7.8), adjacent to “White U,” which had been built for his sister. These two were in striking contrast: his sister’s house was entirely closed off from its surroundings—a reflection of his protectiveness in the face of the sister’s private grief for the recent death of her husband. Later, Ito came to regard this house as too eccentric, even autistic. His understanding of Japan’s contemporary cities was excessively dominated by demands for modern privacy, thus sacrificing a sense of neighborhood. It was at this time that Ito moved away from Shinohara’s existentialism; the younger architect’s perspective was no longer the opposition of Shinohara’s savage city, but instead tranquilly fluid. Ito modeled his own home after open huts one might find in South Asian settlements—but it was not simply a primitive hut, it was “Silver Hut,” an aluminum house. Delicate, shiny aluminum was young Japanese architects’ favorite building material in the 1970s and 1980s, symbolizing what they liked to call industrial vernacular—again, part of Japan’s urban realities. Thus, these two architects’ works illustrate the hybrid character typical of the period beginning in the mid-1970s and continuing through the mid-1980s, one maintaining the same language (Ando) and one totally changing (Ito). Both, after regaining rather positive reaction to the surroundings, were enchanted with the sensuality of chaotic cities, nearly paralyzed by narcissistic

Figure 7.8  Toyo Ito, Silver Hut (public domain).

160

Metabolism and Beyond

autointoxication that encouraged an approach to architecture devoid of intellectual tension. With the temporary economic recovery in the 1980s, this eventually resulted in a new architectural culture immersed in the charms of “eternal presence,” or the “endless everyday.” The term was coined by sociologist Shinji Miyadai, a generation younger than Ando and Ito, in reference to Japan’s nihilistic postmodern conditions. It perfectly corresponds to Alexandre Kojève’s (1980: 161) old observations on the post-historical state of culture; the French-Russian Hegelian claimed that premodern Japan or Edo-period artistic tendencies were extremely sophisticated in form but devoid of any sense of historical or intellectual context; the regime of the Shogunate had enjoyed the inner prosperity while keeping the feudal character of the society based on the harsh segregation of the social class. Architects in Ando and Ito’s generation, or their followers like SANAA, create buildings that recall Karl Marx’s point: exquisite nests, spider webs, or beehives “put to shame many an architect” (Marx, 1976–81: 188). But, Marx added, “what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality” (Ibid.) Post-Metabolist Japanese architects are rather close to spiders and bees. Their works, which exist in an “endless everyday,” may put to shame Western colleagues, but that “structure of imagination,” a conception of architecture defined through ideological confrontation with social reality and history, is missing. Their nests are now scattered across the world thanks to globalization. Their exquisiteness and their ideological emptiness—are these not alien to the West, thus confirming global homogenization? The final question, then, is whether these are evidence that we are confronting Francis Fukuyama’s end of the history. Hiroki Azuma, even younger critic than Miyadai, described 3.11—March 11 of 2011, the day an earthquake caused first a tsunami and then nuclear meltdowns at Fukushima—“the day in which the ‘endless everyday’ ended.” In a similar vein, Toyo Ito, together with his followers, responded to 3.11 by building a number of small structures, “Minna-no-Ie (Home for All),” to renew community bonds. They were exhibited in 2012 Venice Biennale and achieved great success. However, it is possible to criticize this charitable effort as suggesting that by simply building places to meet within a devastated community it will not be enough to resurrect the community and its economy. Is that the limit of post-historical architects’ imagination or conception? How could we compare to the works of previous generation of architects like Tange and Metabolists, who also attempted to rehabilitate the wounded country? In the course of the writing of this essay, another large earthquake hit the Kumamoto area of Kyushu in 2016. Since 1989, a series of architectural projects have been built there under the Artpolis program, modeled on Germany’s Bau-ausstellung. Many architects—Isozaki, Shonohara, Ito, Ando, Sejima, Sakamoto—and myself were involved. Isozaki was at one time a commissioner, advising on the direction of the program, and Ito now is. Within a month of the first earthquake, more than a thousand smaller ones occurred, and still more than 10,000 people are displaced. Ito is now trying to raise the funds to build Minna-no-Ie huts for meeting in Kyushu. It remains to be seen what architects can do in this post-“endless-everyday” era and what will emerge after the rehabilitation of the damaged area through building of Minna-no-Ie and emergency dwellings.

Notes 1 This author organized a large exhibition Metabolism: The City of the Future. Dreams and Visions of Reconstruction in Postwar and Present-Day Japan for the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo (September 2011–January 2012). The English catalogue (distributed by Echelle-1) contains abundant texts and illustrations. My book Metabolism Nexus (Yatsuka, 2011) was published on the same occasion, in Japanese only. For English readers, Project Japan: Metabolist Talks… (Taschen, 2011), a series of interviews with many of the Metabolists by Rem Koolhaas and Han Ulbrich Obrist, provides copious material, not only documents but also insightful commentary. For more general information, see Lin (2010).

161

Hajime Yatsuka 2 Michel de Nostredame (1503–66), often Latinized as Nostradmus, was a French astrologist. The Prophesies, partially published in 1555, was actually a collection of multitudinous sensational prophesies for the future and has ever since been very popular as occult writings. 3 Only Maki and Kurokawa were students of Tange. 4 Masato Ohtaka, the eldest member of the group, was 21 when the war ended and Kisho Kurokawa, the youngest, was only 11. 5 “Lebensraum” refers literally to habitat: trees, birds, etc. Migrating animals were thought adapt to Lebensraum. Around 1870-1, the word was began to be used in Germany to justify extension of the “Deutsches Reich.” The concept became particularly useful as ideological justification for the Nazi regime’s imperialistic expansion. Japan’s early 20th-century wartime activities were an Asian correlate to Germany’s Lebensraum. 6 By “molecular,” I hope to suggest ideas related to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1980) and Guattari’s earlier Molecular Revolution (1977). The architect Ko Kitayama used the title “Tokyo Metabolizing” in his presentation at the Japanese Pavilion for the 2010 Venice Biennale. 7 The notion of “savage” was derived from Claude Lévi-Strauss’ The Savage Mind (1972). Taki’s use of machine is related to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s “desiring machine” in their Anti-Oedipus (1977).

References Alexander, Christopher (1965) “A City Is Not a Tree”, Architectural Forum, Vol 122, No 1, April 1965, pp. 58–62 (Part I), Vol 122, No 2, May 1965, pp. 58–62 (Part II). Barthes, Roland (1975) The Pleasure of the Text. Translated by Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang. Cho, Hyunjung and Chunghoon Shin (2014) “Metabolism and Cold War Architecture,” The Journal of Architecture, Vol 19, No 5, pp. 623–44. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1980) A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari (1983) Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia I. New York: Viking Press. Doak, Kevin Michael (1994) Dreams of Difference: The Japan Romantic School and the Crisis of Modernity. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Fukuyama, Francis (1992) The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press. Kojève, Alexandre (1980) Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, edited by Allan Bloom, trans. James H. Nicbols, Jr. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Koolhaas, Rem, et al. (eds.) (2011) Project Japan: Metabolism Talks . . . Cologne: Taschen. Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1972) The Savage Mind. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Lin, Zhongjie (2010) Kenzo Tange and the Metabolist Movement: Urban Utopias of Modern Japan. London: Routledge. Marx, Karl (1976–81) Section 1 in Capital, Volume 1, Part II. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Tange, Kenzo and Noboru Kawazoe (1965) ISE Prototype of Japanese Architecture. Cambridge, MA: The MIT. Press. Yatsuka, Hajime (2011) Metaborisumu nekusasu [Metabolism Nexus]. Tokyo: Ohmsha.

162

8 Professional Agency and Architectural Discourse in Postcolonial India Peter Scriver and Amit Srivastava

In 2014, for the first time in three decades, India elected a majority government. Long-­conditioned to the fragility and relative inertia of complex coalition governments, this was a rare mandate for major change. At the time, over a third of India’s 1.2 billion citizens were already living in cities, the number expected to reach almost 600 million by 2030 (The World Bank 2017). However, relatively limited urban development compared with rapid capital growth and associated rural-urban migration in the previous decades had left an estimated urban housing shortfall of 18.78 million dwellings (Ministry of Housing & Urban Poverty Alleviation 2012). Housing and urban infrastructure were, therefore, among the highest priority issues where massive change was anticipated (Figure 8.1).

Figure 8.1  L  aunch announcement for the Smart Cities Mission, AMRUT and Housing for All programmes, Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), Government of India, June 2015. Source: Image in public domain, issued by the PMO.

DOI: 10.4324/9781315674469-9

163

Peter Scriver and Amit Srivastava

By 2016, the government had launched a host of ambitious new development initiatives to a­ ddress this issue at the national level, including programmes to rejuvenate the infrastructure of no less than 500 cities, and ensure that all of India’s urban poor would be housed by 2022.1 The delivery of even a fraction of this extraordinary agenda is expected to have a transformative impact, not only on the built fabric of towns and cities across the country, but on the whole economic sector associated with its construction. But what support or professional leadership architects are expected to provide in this extraordinary new development scenario is not clear. The professional agency of architects in India has not always been so uncertain. A longer perspective of the contemporary architectural history of India reveals a recurring pattern in which architecture has been integral to the development vision of successive Indian leaders since the nation’s independence from colonial rule in 1947. It is instructive, for instance, to compare the ­nation-building vision and rhetoric of Prime Minister Narendra Modi with that of Prime ­M inister Indira Gandhi four decades earlier. A massive electoral majority in 1971 had given her government a mandate to take a distinct left turn in policy, with a socialist development strategy that simultaneously targeted massive infrastructure development and poverty alleviation in equal measure (Masani 1975). Better known to historians and students of modern architecture are the stridently progressive efforts of the newly independent India in the 1950s, when Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru chose to represent the ethos of the new Indian Republic in iconoclastic new architectural forms. Less appreciated is the fact that the commissioning of Le Corbusier and other master modernists to realise monumental projects in India was also intimately tied to critical internal political and economic factors. The architecture of Nehru’s epoch not only represented a bid to further consolidate the territory, identity and wealth of the fledgling nation state but was also financed indirectly by its success in negotiating the incorporation of India’s previously autonomous princely states into the union (Zachariah 2004; Guha 2007). At each of these moments in recent Indian history, state-sponsored efforts to make a mark on the country’s built landscape have simultaneously contributed to broader understanding of architecture as a discipline (technical, social, artistic, etc.), and the agency of architects as professionals (Figure 8.2). If the scope and limitations of the architect’s vocation in India seem unclear today, this is ­partially because of the quandaries of a profession that emerged from its origins in the yoke of colonial service but never entirely forswore a more technocratic mode of practice. The notion of a profession, however, extends beyond technical expertise, to social and moral norms. Critiquing a rising trend to over-generalise the use of the term, Wilensky, in his 1964 article “The Professionalization of Everyone?”, helped establish the idea that the profession involves a combination of technical competence and “service ideal”. In a liberal-democratic context, as Foucault (1980)

Figure 8.2  ( L) Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in discussion with architect Achyut Kanvinde c.1959; (R) Prime Minister Narendra Modi discussing the Saifee Burhani Upliftment Trust (SBUT) project for Mumbai, 2015. Source: (L) Kanvinde, Rai & Chowdhury; (R) Image in public domain (www.pmindia.gov.in).

164

Architectural Discourse in Postcolonial India

would remind us, these professional norms are not defined by an all-powerful state or the social elite, but through discourse between autonomous subjects who are responsible for establishing their legitimacy. Moreover, this discourse must connect with those outside the profession, who professionals claim to act on behalf of, to develop shared objectives and values through political negotiation (Chatterjee 2011). It is these values or ideals of “public good” that help define the personal conduct component of the professional (Fournier 1999). So, the evidence of the built work notwithstanding, this chapter will focus on the published discourse that was produced by and about this fledging profession over the long half-century since Indian independence, tracing the shifting spectrum of issues and concerns with which contemporary Indian architects have been engaged. If one examines the discourse on contemporary Indian architecture, a conspicuous rise in the quantity and graphic quality of published material is evident beginning in the 1980s. While developments in postcolonial India had previously attracted the occasional interest of the international architectural press, the work of Indian architects had begun by this time to receive considerably greater critical attention from their foreign peers. When one of the present authors travelled to India in the mid-1980s to research and write one of the first books on contemporary Indian architecture (Bhatt and Scriver 1990), it was the wealth of formal invention and tectonic authenticity in the contemporary Indian design scene that was so attractive, not least its apparent immunity to the cynical superficiality of the prevailing postmodern architectural fashion in the West. The links to the concurrent shift in the country’s political climate were not so readily apparent, at least to the external eye. Reflecting on that moment over three decades later, however, it is clear that this “discovery” of contemporary Indian architecture was destined to become part of a larger body of literature that was being constructed and co-opted by the rhetoric of professional and cultural identity in accordance with domestic politics. The importance of public discourse to establish moral norms in the process of professionalisation is clear, but we are also aware that the same discourse serves as the basis for representations of the self and the construction of a self-identity (Giddens 1991). The larger impact of this conflict as a barrier to professionalisation in the case of architecture needs to be dealt with elsewhere, but what will be discussed here is how the discourse can enable elite professionals to author preferred identities when their autonomy is perceived to be threatened (Brown and Coupland 2015). These constructions of favoured identity shift the focus of professional agency from “service ideal” to relations of power and bypass processes of social negotiation. In India, it may be argued that success in achieving and sustaining professional status for architecture has been secured by such a process of elite authorship, which has circumstantially eroded the broader scope of its social and moral responsibility. It is this redacted scope, which limits professionals to their technical expertise, that contributes to the current state of uncertainty. In the account that follows, it will be demonstrated that alternative paths of professional engagement in the building culture of postcolonial India were still being actively discussed before the discipline was definitively constituted as a legally autonomous profession by the Architect’s Act of 1972. Current understanding of the contemporary architectural profession in India emerges from and continues to be dominated by the preponderance of internationally oriented discourse on contemporary “Indian” architecture that began to appear in the 1980s, well over a decade after the profession’s status had been secured. Any attempt to assess or alter that understanding critically must therefore begin by examining that discursive moment more closely.

An Authoring of “Indian” Architecture Diplomatically, politically and ultimately economically, India in the 1980s was consciously ­reopening its doors to the world after a period of self-imposed isolation and years of ensuing ostracisation that had followed from the controversial national “Emergency” of 1975–77.2 After 165

Peter Scriver and Amit Srivastava

the media blackout it had imposed during that period, the Government of India was eager to re-image the nation and put the recent internal dissent behind it as well as the seemingly drab optics that had been associated with the socialist pragmatism of its policies in the 1970s. Efforts were directed accordingly to anticipate international scrutiny and proactively manage India’s new image with displays of national solidarity and harmony in its cultural riches through a constructed notion of “Indianness” (Panicker 2007). To achieve this end, the Central Government deployed a series of cultural diplomacy programmes that were primarily intended for foreign consumption, but it was also expected that the over-arching rhetoric of cultural synthesis would help promote internal harmony and deter regional factions that were threatening political division. One of the most direct and significant implementations of this strategy was a series of international travelling exhibitions and related publications, referred to as the “Festivals of India”. The Festival strategy was effectively launched in London, in 1982, under the leadership of the Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, and her cultural adviser, Pupul Jayakar. Jayakar had been instrumental in the development of the Indian craft industry in the post-independence government of Indira Gandhi’s father, Jawaharlal Nehru, in the early 1950s. As a result, the new cultural diplomacy programme and the associated Festivals privileged Indian crafts as a medium to define this national character and identity of “Indianness” (Brown 2017). For contemporary Indian architectural discourse, the most significant of these festivals were the 1985 Mela in France and the 1987 Festival of India designed for the Soviet Union, which also toured subsequently through Sweden and Switzerland. The Mela exhibition, which was curated by architects Raj Rewal, Ram Sharma and Malay Chatterjee, was subsequently published by Electa Moniteur becoming the first book-length publication documenting contemporary architecture across the nation (Rewal et al. 1985). This was followed by architect Charles Correa’s Vistara for the Exhibition in the Soviet Union representing architecture within the ambit of the arts and crafts of India (Correa 1988). For the most part, these highly influential accounts of architecture in India extended the argument set up by the cultural diplomacy programme, presenting a picture of “Indianness” that regarded these tectonic and spatial practices as a seamless extension of the subcontinent’s rich craft heritage. Not all embraced this view, however. For younger architects in particular, who were engaging with broader contemporary debates about the future of architecture, this essentialist narrative seemingly conflated their discipline with craft, folklore and even mythology to support an invented ideal of synthesis in India’s craft traditions. The representation of “Indian architecture” as part of an indigenous craft tradition had a further value-adding function in the context of ongoing efforts to rebrand India for the emerging neoliberal global marketplace of the late 20th century. By essentialising and re-fashioning its “difference” as a marketable commodity, both government and business were attempting to replace the unflattering contemporary image of India as a poor developing nation struggling to meet basic universal measures of socio-economic equity and modernity, with that of a fabulously exotic emporium of other worldly cultural riches, skills and experiences to be consumed. Reverting, arguably, to the earlier impressions and fantasies that had driven India’s long colonial-modern history of global economic exchange (notwithstanding the privations of economic extraction and exploitation under colonial rule), tourism development was a significant component of this renewed focus on international trade. Architecture was an essential part of the infrastructure of tourism, but it was also becoming an increasingly obvious and attractive advertisement for India, in this light, as both a gateway to that “experience” and a destination in its own right. In new architectural work from this period, not least the design of new hotels, we see a celebration of texture, colour, and the endogenous tectonics of making, allowing everything recognisably ethnic and “of the place” to become the new chic (Figure 8.3). Meanwhile, a new generation of print media was re-invigorating debate on the profession within India and beyond. Glossy new international magazines such as Mimar: Architecture in 166

Architectural Discourse in Postcolonial India

Figure 8.3  I nternal courtyard view of the Central Institute of Educational Technology (CIET), New Delhi, by architect Raj Rewal Associates, built in1986.  Note the distinctive integration of rough-cut sandstone veneers and jaali work with the contemporary concrete construction and geometry. Source: Raj Rewal Associates.

Development, first published in 1981, showcased the contemporary architecture of India as an exemplar of a broader set of tendencies discernible across large regions of post-colonial Asia as well as Africa and South America that were contributing to a global debate on alternatives to modern architecture. Within India, the subsequent launch of Architecture + Design (A+D) in 1984 extended this broader regional debate and filled a gap in related critical discourse that had been left largely vacant since the 1960s. The new magazine was primarily directed at a younger generation of ­architects that used the pages of A+D both to valorise the work of their seniors and to question their role models. However, torn between identity narratives and calls to renew ­focus on poverty alleviation and ecological design from alternative global perspectives, positions and forward trajectories remained uncertain (Panicker 2007). A clearer and collectively shared understanding was emerging, nevertheless, that the mature work of the first post-independence generation of Indian architects was the outcome of a long and intimate engagement with a particular combination of natural and cultural parameters, in short the ­ illiam Curtis “region” in which they worked. For the British architectural historian and critic W (1982), among other external commentators, this region also offered a lens through which Indian architecture, and the locally invested professionals who produced it, could be distinguished from the banal universality towards which a more demotic vein of unquestioning “modernism” was seemingly directing architectural development worldwide to converge. As Curtis foregrounded the argument in a ground-breaking monograph on Balkrishna Doshi (Curtis 1988), intimate and innovative responses to context had been a conscious and consistent driver in the work of many of the leading figures of the modern architectural scene in India throughout their careers. The critical function of regionalism in challenging the notion of an orthodox international modernism, which had recently been discussed in other contexts as “Critical Regionalism” (Frampton 1983; Lefaivre and Tzonis 2003), had a particular resonance. Various commentators, keen to observe this phenomenon within the evolving tendencies of contemporary Indian architects, brought their work to wider international attention through a small but unprecedented tide of glossy monographs that began to appear during this period (Curtis 1988; Khan and Cantacuzino 1987; Taylor 1992). A “critical” stance, so described, seemed to align with the sense of “difference” that was already consciously being articulated in the evolving architectural designs and associated discourse within India. It was possibly no coincidence that in 1984, the year after Kenneth Frampton had published his widely influential manifesto for a critical regionalism of resistance (Frampton 1983), the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) decided to award its prestigious Gold Medal to Charles 167

Peter Scriver and Amit Srivastava

Correa. This was the first time that this highest honour had been granted to an architect from the so-called “Third World” (Murray 1984). For Correa, and the handful of other Indian practitioners who would also attain comparable international recognition in due course, “regionalism” provided a theory for why some of the most intriguing examples of their work were indeed interesting aesthetically, as well as ethically. Moreover, the theory indicated a method, critical or not, by which such qualities could be reproduced with growing intention and conviction, reinforcing the idea of expertise within the profession. *** In parallel with the wider critical attention that the design work and practices of individual Indian architects had attracted by the later 1980s, the role of design in the context of modern India’s exponential urban development was also generating new interest and associated literature at that time. A significant focus was the informal urbanism of India’s bourgeoning cities, through which the social underclasses that underpinned their industrial and service economies tended to make their own housing solutions. Increasingly mindful of the ecological limits to growth, the politics of labour and the social field, interdisciplinary research in applied architectural and urban studies looked to better understand the spatial and cultural resilience of such exceptions to top-down urban design and planning, as well as the technical obstacles to their amelioration. Meanwhile, historical scholarship, such as planning historian Norma Evenson’s richly layered account of the emergence of the modern Indian metropolis (Evenson 1989), offered deeper insight into the legacies of formal policy and planning since the colonial era, while scrutinising the ambitions and limitations of the nascent modern architectural profession in its efforts to engage constructively in such development. In The New Landscape (Correa 1985), a modest manifesto of alternative formal and socio-­ cultural strategies for designing appropriate urbanism for the Third World, Charles Correa himself offered a moral challenge to fellow architectural professionals working in the context of underdevelopment. Published shortly after the award of the RIBA medal, the book also questioned the conventional limits to the agency of the modern professional, having arisen substantially from the work and ideas generated during the author’s preceding tenure as Chief (Government) Architect for the development of New Bombay – a transformative public sector-driven urban expansion scheme for India’s premier commercial metropolis. As Correa wrote: [The] architect must have the courage to face very disturbing issues. For what is your moral right to decide for a thousand, for a hundred thousand, for 2 million people? But then what is the moral advantage in not acting, in merely watching passively the slow degradation of life around you…? (Correa 1985: 132) Balkrishna Doshi, for his part, pursued a less polemical and more empirically grounded approach to the question of architectural engagement in the housing of the urban poor. In a strategic collaboration with the McGill University Centre for Minimum Cost Housing, the research arm of Doshi’s practice, the Vastu Shilpa Foundation, generated comprehensive bottom-up analyses of the everyday spatial patterns and practices of Indian slum dwellers. How the Other Half Builds (Rybczynski et al. 1984) and a related series of publications represented the insight and agency of the architect as “barefoot” facilitator, prompting further questioning of the modern professional’s role in developing contexts where low-cost construction and innovation with traditional or recycled modern materials were a key to what would later be called sustainable design.

168

Architectural Discourse in Postcolonial India

These questions had potentially profound implications for rethinking the modern architectural profession and the limitations of a technocratic model of agency within the Indian context. In the 1960s and 1970s in the maturing practices of many Indian architects of the post-independence generation, there had been growing understanding of the idiosyncrasies of contemporary Indian urbanism, and the possibilities for alternative housing and settlement design. But by the later 1980s, the critical and moral nature of such questions was increasingly side-lined by the cultural turn in design thinking, which these same questions had provoked in part, and the competing attraction of endogenously informed image-making that many of these same architects were now inspired to explore. Again, in B.V. Doshi’s practice for example, it is notable that non-perspectival modes of drawing that emulated the spatial projection techniques of traditional schools of Indian painting were becoming an intriguing new feature of the work in this period. Employed in the widely published drawings of Vidyadhar Nagar, a proposed satellite new-town scheme for Jaipur designed between 1985 and 1987, such an alternative approach to the representation of architectural and urban form creatively, even playfully appeared to challenge the “modulor” conception of the universal human subject central to the particular (Corbusian) paradigm of modernist architectural thinking with which Doshi, among many others of his generation, had previously been aligned. In the context of the shared search for a contemporary Indian architectural identity, however, the potential investigative use of such techniques to explore spatial perception and practices relevant to Indian community life was effectively overridden by their aesthetic affect as they became a distinctive motif of the architect’s own evolving style rather than a generalisable tool for wider professional application. *** By the 1990s, international recognition of the calibre and character of this contemporary Indian architecture had prompted other observers, both internal and external, to take more comprehensive stock of the scope and diversity of that professional scene, beyond the few noted exemplars who had now become more widely known. In the first of several surveys to appear over the next decade, Bhatt and Scriver (1990) discerned a more fragmented if not divided field, articulating the diverging social, commercial and cultural prerogatives of a modern profession that was still struggling to define the boundaries of its discipline. Different readings were also possible by expanding and shifting the frame of reference, as Belluardo and Ashraf (1998) were subsequently to explore in their comparative transnational examination of parallel developments in the architectures of postcolonial India and Bangladesh, which offered an America-centred view of South Asia in the moment of US-dominated mid-century modernisation programmes and policies. A substantially greater diversity of tendencies and constituencies was accounted for in parallel and subsequent surveys (Lang et al. 1997; Mehrotra 2001). Authored as collaborations between academically based Indian and non-Indian scholars, each of these surveys simultaneously attempted both to broaden and to lengthen the view of the modern Indian building world beyond the boundaries of professional authorship and the historical threshold of the pre- and post-colonial eras. By fleshing out the facts and structuring the content under appropriate chapter and subheadings, the latter surveys were also methodical attempts to historicise developments and posit new categories of tendency, and classifications of type, but without scope or intention, as yet, to offer a deeper critical interpretation. As India, along with the rest of the modern and increasingly globalised world of capital and cultural flows, lurched forward into the next millennium, the question of defining a canon of contemporary Indian architectural masterworks seemed premature.3 Nevertheless, the authoring of contemporary Indian architecture had clearly taken a distinct turn.

169

Peter Scriver and Amit Srivastava

These pan-Indian surveys would serve as navigation tools to traverse this extensive landscape and briefly shift the gaze from the few leading professionals who had been the focus of the bulk of publications in the 1980s. But the lack, as yet, of any deeper analysis and criticality in this published discourse could not help the profession gain significantly greater insight into the problems and opportunities of practice within the Indian context, or the specific role of the architect therein.

The “Triumph” of an Elite Profession The notion of an “Indian” mode of design thinking and practice had, by the late 1990s, become a routinely reproduced idea in the steadily growing body of literature on contemporary Indian architecture. This would presently be challenged, however, by a second wave of discourse that was consciously more scholarly and critical in intent. Among these further studies, two distinct approaches could be discerned: those that provided a theoretical alternative to previous modernist interpretations, albeit still based on Western critical theories, and those that undertook original empirical and theoretical work on indigenous examples. The first approach was primarily that of a younger generation of overseas-based academics and worldly practitioners exposed to the growing impact of postmodern and postcolonial studies in the graduate curricula of the late 20th century. Self-consciously reflexive texts such as Chandigarh’s Le Corbusier (Prakash 2002) sought to reassess the idea of an imported modernity, emphasising the appropriation of the modernist project by Indian architects and end-users, and their crucial agency in its unfolding. More polemical and satirical variants of this approach by architect-writers such as Gautam Bhatia (1994) and Romi Khosla (2002) presented a picture of an eclectic local context within which architecture, imported or otherwise, remains subject to local imagined pasts and futures. Others invoked the unfinished project of modernity unpacking issues of labour and gender inequality latent in India’s modern architectural profession (Somaya and Mehta 2000; Desai 2016) or rethinking the grand project through its Indian experience (Mehta 2011). On the other hand, another cluster of academics looked towards indigenous examples seeking to reveal deeper codes embodied in the typology and patterns of the vernacular (Tillotson 1989; Sachdev and Tillotson 2002). Working with students in the growing number of Indian schools of architecture, the empirical work undertaken through field studies and measured drawings would cultivate intimate formal and experiential knowledge of vernacular and historic built fabric. These publications also provided insights into indigenous conceptions of building and dwelling, further defining and mapping the heterogeneous patterns of cultural settlements in the different regions of the Indian subcontinent ( Jain and Jain 2000, 2002; Pandya 2005). Not limited to built fabric, focus on indigeneity also revived interest in the ancient building treatises known as Vastushastra. In the mid-1990s, a relative tide of popular and quasi-professional publications appeared that claimed to reveal the secrets of the ancient treatises in the form of contemporary handbooks for the use of Vastu consultants. These were a new category of practitioners that competed with architects to provide technical expertise to clients on the spiritual benefits of the architectural layouts of their homes and workplaces. For actual scholars, however, the appropriation of these ancient texts went beyond mere rules of building and living, to offer alternate frameworks and deeper understanding of the intricate logics of design and construction of ancient settlements (Chakrabarti 1998). Despite the multiplicity of these narratives, however, such distinctly Indian views on architecture and the readiness of serious architectural scholars and professionals to reconsider and interpret them served to further the idea of their professional expertise. While some of these narratives offered alternative “indigenous”, or “other” modernities in lieu of global modernity, such claims to alterity, as we have seen, only reinforced the exotic “Indian” position of difference to the West 170

Architectural Discourse in Postcolonial India

and promoted the favoured identity of these elite professionals. Even in the case of more empirical research that sought to document and interpret commonplace experiences of dwelling and building, the elite professional assumed the position of an expert mediator to translate the architectural thinking of the subaltern into the more specialised, discipline-specific language of contemporary architectural discourse. *** Economic liberalisation policies that had begun to be introduced in the late 1980s had a direct and almost immediately perceptible impact on India’s architectural and construction industries through new access to imported building materials and technologies. But another less conspicuous area of growth and change of particular significance for the profession was in architectural education. Except for the few who could afford to study overseas, access to the profession had largely been limited previously through admission to a handful of government colleges and university-­ based architecture courses. By the start of the 1990s, however, scores of new independent schools and colleges offering professional training in architecture and other associated disciplines had been opened across India in the vanguard of a new growth industry of privately funded tertiary institutions. These new schools were not only an answer to the accelerating demand for technically qualified design professionals, but a further business opportunity in the changing economy through which private developers and builders were keen to diversify their investments in the broader field of design and construction.4 It is salient, nevertheless, to note in statistical terms how relatively tiny a niche was occupied by the training and practice of the architectural profession in that much larger market of services. By the turn of the year 2000, India’s 2.5 billion USD construction industry was the source of livelihood for over 17.6 million individuals (Planning Commission 2002: 311). Yet, out of an overall population that had just crossed the one billion mark, there were still less than 16,000 registered architectural professionals, or barely one for every 60,000 (Council of Architecture 2017). The professional and academic leaders of the discipline represented an even tinier portion of this number. It is all the more understandable therefore that they felt the need to expand the knowledge base through new schools that could further define their agency and control their narrative as elite professionals. A range of different choices of educational style, professional skills and values were on offer in this new market. The new TVB School of Habitat Studies in Delhi, for example, was the project of Greha, a group of architect-activists who had agitated in the 1970s for a more socially and ecologically engaged practice suitable for India, that now sought to establish an alternative architectural curriculum for the new generation of professionals (Greha 1976; Ganju 1986, 1990). In Mumbai, meanwhile, Sen Kapadia, one of Louis Kahn’s former Indian associates, aligned the curriculum of the new Kamla Raheja Academy of Architecture with the postmodern academic scene of East Coast American schools. Defined by the prevalent discourse that had established itself since the 1980s, and often taught by elite professionals, however, these courses continued to bolster the idea of professional expertise above all else. Coinciding with the emergence of India’s galvanic new IT industry, the rise of computers in architectural production, and increasingly in design as well, raised other questions and choices to be made about architectural training. As graduates of these new schools were becoming part of the establishment by the late 1990s, the technological terrain was continuing to shift and the Internet and mobile phones were becoming primary tools of communication for the new generation. Computers and software were a whole new dimension of investment and pedagogical scaffolding in the training of an architect that could potentially overthrow older curriculum models, and the humanist values that these privileged. Increasingly in practice, if not yet in the academic studio, 171

Peter Scriver and Amit Srivastava

the changing habitat of machines was altering not only the ways in which the problem of architecture was projected, but how it was perceived in the first place. The advent of machine-based design and drawing processes had completely reorganised the traditional office, and limitations of time and geography had disappeared. An outgrowth of the IT-based BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) phenomenon, India’s rapidly emerging architectural services outsourcing industry allowed for these new graduates to work in “remote studios” based in small office buildings in India while carrying out design documentation for large international architecture firms operating around the globe. In the case of “Satellier”, a Delhi-based BPO firm, which produced documentation for several hundred major projects across 5 continents, the office staff grew from 3 to 300 in just six years, between 1999 and 2005 (Tombesi et al. 2003, 2007). The new wave of architecture graduates was rapidly assuming their task as technical service providers with little recourse to any discernible public debate on the social and moral agency of the professional (Figure 8.4). The early 21st century brought a seemingly whole new perspective to bear on the perception and production of architecture in India. While it was still possible to discern the threads of a continuum if one took a longer view of this recent past (Scriver and Srivastava 2015), efforts to extend the ambit of previous surveys and assess the state of architecture in early 21st century India described a plurality of different fields and parallel but increasingly disconnected threads of production (Mehrotra 2011; Mehrotra et al. 2016). A new generation of architects, along with enterprising new clients, was finding its feet in this fast-changing landscape where it was becoming possible to experiment with seemingly any new form or material if the market had a taste for it. From the slick new packaging of high-rise call centres and international hotels on the one hand, to the panoply of green walls and other technologically sophisticated environmental features of LEED-rated corporate headquarters on the other, the drive to globalise the architecture of the “new” India was not just a bid to catch up with the norms and standards of the post-industrial West, but a signal that it was now even aspiring to compete with the economic juggernaut of neighbouring China for a share of global leadership in what many were now regarding as the “Asian Century”. More surprising, and therefore even more conspicuous, was the simultaneous passion to revive and resume the monumental architectural traditions of India’s pre-modern past. But colossal

Figure 8.4  Façade details for Devi Art Foundation, Gurgaon, by architect Aniket Bhagwat, built in 2008. Source: Amit Srivastava.

172

Architectural Discourse in Postcolonial India

schemes such as Delhi’s Akshardham Temple complex and the ISKCON Shri Radha KrishnaChandra Temple in Bengaluru were being realised in such a new key of cultural certitude and at a scale, frequently dwarfing the imagination of the builders of ancient India, that could only have arisen from the hyper-accumulation of capital in a late-modern world of global flows and just-intime production (Inglis 2015). In the dynamically growing economy and society of early 21st century India, the progressive divestment and transfer of agency in physical and spatial development from big government to the market of private sector providers, as a proxy for popular will, has only tended to widen the gaps and complicate the degrees of disconnection between the architectural profession and the public interests it is mandated to serve and uphold. With the arrival of the pro-development, yet culturally conservative, BJP government of Narendra Modi in 2014 the mandate for massive change was clear, and new initiatives in mass housing development and urban rejuvenation were welcomed. But in this new age of “smart-city” development, where organisational systems are defining the idea of professional service, developers and project managers have taken over the role of team leader. Accordingly, seven decades after independence, despite the resonance of its elite narrative, the architectural profession still grapples with its sense of social and moral obligation to provide greater leadership, beyond merely technical expertise. At the beginning of this chapter, we noted that before the legal recognition of the architectural profession in the 1970s, the discourse on architecture presented possible alternative paths of professional engagement. Let us now return to that earlier moment in modern India’s history when the birth of a newly independent nation, following a long-drawn-out struggle for independence from colonial rule, presented different but equally challenging issues of nation building in which the role of the architect was actively being discussed.

Architecture as Political Negotiation Housing and large-scale infrastructure projects, which were deemed essential for the development of a modern industrialised nation, were among the highest development priorities of the newly independent Indian Republic in the 1950s. The need to plan and design housing solutions for the millions of rural-urban migrants who were projected to converge on the major cities in the years ahead was compounded in urgency by the fact that many of these people were already living in provisional refugee accommodation, having been permanently displaced by the partition of the former British India into the separate nations of India and Pakistan. The technical issues of housing design and procurement on a large scale were not unfamiliar to the Public Works Department (PWD) that the new state had inherited from the former colonial administration (Scriver 2007b). But the newly formed democracy, leading the political transformations of a post-colonial world, had to consider the needs of its citizens from a different socio-political perspective. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s desire to look outwards for solutions, and his general attraction to the norms and forms of conventional modernisation theory, had previously been challenged by an altogether different understanding of housing and the basic domestic realm as the essential locus of social development. In this bottom-up view championed by Nehru’s mentor, Mohandas Gandhi, who was widely regarded as the spiritual leader of the independence movement, the local village community as opposed to cities was the prime economic driver for India. Here, the basic family dwelling was regarded not merely as shelter, but simultaneously as both the primary unit of industry and the most elementary but substantive spatial pattern for the cultural and moral cohesion of a modern Indian society (Scriver and Srivastava 2015: 124). Circumstantially, Gandhi’s death in 1948, just months after India had finally won its independence, had effectively pre-empted this profoundly significant philosophical debate. This tipped the scales in favour of the conventional top-down model of modernisation in which social and government 173

Peter Scriver and Amit Srivastava

housing became a component of the technical infrastructure that government assumed overarching responsibility for planning. While Nehru had deeply respected Gandhi as his mentor throughout their long political collaboration, the younger leader did not necessarily accept the moral critique of modern industrial civilisation inherent in the elder’s indigenously grounded development vision. Where Gandhi had aimed to connect with and represent the interests of the rural masses of India, Nehru remained enamoured of the technological progress of the West and convinced that it would inevitably have to be embraced to take the new India forward as a nation on the march of progress. His vision also found inspiration in the transformative modernist developments of contemporary post-war Europe, particularly in housing, and it was under Nehru’s direct patronage that the celebrated SwissFrench architect and urbanist, Le Corbusier, was to become a key consultant to the Government of India throughout the 1950s. In collaboration with a small group of other European architects associated with the influential network of CIAM (Congres Internationaaux d’Architecture Moderne) and a larger team of junior Indian architects and trainees, Le Corbusier’s principal government commission in India was the design of Chandigarh. The new capital city for the state of Punjab was, for Nehru, intended to model both the functional and the psychological benefits of this new thinking in design (Prakash 2002). Soon to follow were other members of CIAM, including the urbanist and UN housing consultant Jacqueline Tyrwhitt, who brought with them further modernist conceptions of how India’s social infrastructure could be transformed through rational new approaches to planning and design. One of the earliest generators of significant critical discourse on issues of housing and infrastructure in postcolonial India was the International Exhibition on Low Cost Housing (Govt. of India 1954) in New Delhi that Tyrwhitt assisted the Government of India, through its Central Public Works Department, to stage. As Prime Minster Nehru himself declared in his prefatory remarks to the exhibition catalogue, “A house is not merely a place to take shelter […] If human welfare is our objective, this is bound up with the house”. These words appeared to acknowledge the Gandhian conception of the house as the centre of social being in Indian culture, and Tyrwhitt herself had focused on the design of a model village centre as the focal display of the exhibition. However, the majority of the displays and associated discourse addressed more prosaic questions of housing design and logistics in terms of production efficiencies and permutations of standardised prototypes. It was the necessity of change that was emphasised, and how the design of housing could, therefore, be a key instrument of cultural transformation. “Indeed”, as Nehru observed, “changes in housing in other parts of the world have affected social revolutions in the community” (Govt. of India 1954) (Figure 8.5).

Figure 8.5  S ketch for “Village Centre” at International Exhibition on Low-Cost Housing, organised by the Central Public Works Department (CPWD), New Delhi, 1954. Source: Image in public domain, Exhibition Souvenir issued by the CPWD.

174

Architectural Discourse in Postcolonial India

Within Nehru’s government, this top-down technocratic approach to modernisation was not limited to the planning of India’s physical and technical infrastructure, but extended to its human resources as well. The latter need was addressed in part by the establishment of national-level institutes in technical and management education (IITs and IIMs) in the 1950s and 1960s, with support from major Western institutions. These institutes would serve to define the elite status and image of the new Indian professional class. In architecture and allied fields, the focus of the IIT curricula on materials science and engineering research emphasised the role that qualified design professionals were expected to play in the modern Indian building world, as technical experts and problem-solvers. *** By the end of the decade, an unprecedented national Seminar on Architecture (Lalit Kala Akademi 1959), organised in New Delhi, brought the question of the professional priorities and prerogatives of the architect in modern India directly to the fore. Significantly, Prime Minister Nehru was yet again motivated to engage directly in the debate. In his opening address, he referred to Chandigarh, memorably, as a “great experiment” that “hits you on the head and makes you think”. It was evidence, in his view, of the impact that the “creative mind” of an architect could have, not only on the new ways that the modern Indian citizen might live, but on the way their thinking could be changed as well (Lalit Kala Akademi 1959). The seminar had been prompted by the question of legislating a national policy on architectural expression, recently mooted in Parliament. In response to this threat to autonomy, emerging leaders of the profession – including Achyut Kanvinde, the convenor of the seminar, and Piloo Mody, a future parliamentarian himself – advocated a more enlightened policy “towards” architecture rather than one that sought to place constraints “on” it. As Cyrus Jhabvala, an emerging architectural educator, argued, it was not so much a question of style with which the profession needed to concern itself, but of perspective. If architects were to sustain a powerful, ethical and productive role in the physical and socio-economic development of modern India, they needed to embrace the economic reality of an overabundant labour force and the scarcity of modern building materials. Such a perspective would allow architects to see the distinctive prerogatives and opportunities of the contemporary Indian building world as M.K. Gandhi may have, from below and from within (Lalit Kala Akademi 1959). This was the challenge that a minority of architectural activists and academics were to take on as the credo for various alternative modes and approaches to practice that were to be pursued from the later 1960s through the 1970s. Still in 1959, however, it was the rhetorical sense of the young Charles Correa in his contribution to this seminal debate that set a spark in the imagination of the evolving profession, which was not fully to ignite for another generation. “Can there be such a thing as an Indian Architecture?” Correa questioned, in a clear retort to the central proposition of the seminar. “Perhaps Indian architecture will be like Mozart”, he answered, “…a great lyricism and in the centre a clear concise idea, as clean and hard as a theorem. The house around the courtyard; the clear statement. The tree, the shadows, the texture, providing rhythm, and patterns, and counterpoint” (Lalit Kala Akademi 1959). Standing firmly in the camp of independent practitioners, Correa championed the autonomy that the architectural professional would require to discern these patterns and inform their own regionally, culturally and individually distinctive approaches to modern architecture. Here, we see the idea of the architect as an autonomous master artist/interpreter beginning to gain traction in the minds of both the architectural professionals and the political leadership (Crinson and Lubbock 1994). Nehru clearly supported this position, having concluded his speech with a call to the government’s increasingly sclerotic public works and planning technocracy “to encourage creative minds 175

Peter Scriver and Amit Srivastava

to function with a measure of freedom, so that new types may come out, new designs, [and] new ideas” (Lalit Kala Akademi 1959). For his part, Correa’s assertion of a masterful insight into the existential qualities and essences that might distinguish a contemporary “Indian architecture” resonated with the important debates and subsequent cultural turn within the CIAM discourse of the late 1950s, which was moving beyond the process and systems focus on infrastructure that had preoccupied Le Corbusier’s generation, to cultural practice and the more holistic notion of “Habitat”. In that evolving discourse, young Indian architectural professionals had begun to see themselves not just as onlookers from the periphery, but as insiders in a shared transnational narrative of modernism that was still unfolding (Figure 8.6). The young India’s immersion in this contemporary international discourse was further reflected in the pages of Marg and Design, India’s leading architectural magazines of the day. Published, respectively, in Bombay and Delhi, each was successful in defining specific regional perspectives and agendas through the personal networks of protégés and regular contributors that their editors cultivated. In their heyday, however, both periodicals converged in their methods and aims, drawing equally on local, regional and international opportunities for critical exchange to sustain a globally informed local discourse in which the prerogatives and limits of agency relevant to the professional and artistic advancement of architecture in modern India were vigorously debated (Lee and James-Chakraborty 2012; Scriver and Srivastava 2015; Crinson 2017). This moment of worldly engagement and public discourse would not last indefinitely, ­however. After Nehru’s death in 1964, the negotiated cohesion of the nation in the immediate post-­ independence era had begun to wane, with some states even threatening to leave the union. It was only with the electoral majority won by Indira Gandhi in 1971, following a brief but decisive war with Pakistan earlier the same year, that India saw itself again, momentarily, through a lens of solidarity. Through the early 1970s, the country experienced another major shift in political orientation as Indira Gandhi’s socialist reforms and policies promoted an increasingly centralised and inward-turning focus on home-grown economic resources and expertise. This was to culminate,

Figure 8.6  T  ownship for Electronics Corporation of India Ltd. (ECIL), Hyderabad, by architect B.V. Doshi and Vastu Shilpa, 1968–71. Source: Vastu Shilpa Foundation.

176

Architectural Discourse in Postcolonial India

ultimately, in virtual isolation from the outside world during the unilaterally declared Emergency, when India’s fragile democracy slid dangerously close to autocratic rule. It was in this particularly volatile period, between the mid-1960s and early 1970s, that architects felt compelled to secure better protection at the constitutional level for their professional status. Championed doggedly by architect-turned-politician, Piloo Mody, and J.R. Bhalla, a key collaborator and senior representative of the Indian profession in the UIA and other international architectural bodies, the Architects Act was finally made Law in 1972. The architectural discipline in India had long had its own unique version of the classical struggle for professional status through the control of expert knowledge. This went back to the colonial era and the hegemony of the engineering profession in the modern Indian building world (Scriver 2007a). Despite the socialist ethos of the moment with its focus on the ideal of collective struggle for the good of the greater population, the new Act would enable a different understanding of the architectural professional – as an independent agent. As the architect/activist and educator, Ashish Ganju, was to assert in his contribution to The Architect: A Symposium on the New Disciplines of a Profession, the profession was based on the “implicit altruism of the architect in managing the interests of his clients” (Ganju 1974). The architect was now recognised as an independent modern professional, relieved of the strictures of political service, to develop his/her own practice, freely defining the client relation and the universal values he/she wished to invoke. The profession could now embrace its legal autonomy and establish its own governing structures and advisory bodies through which it would also provide independent expert guidance to government. This fight for autonomy was indicative of the quandaries of a profession that understood the power of the more technocratic mode of operation that their engineer rivals in the PWD continued to exercise. It was time for action, and the leaders of the profession took a pragmatic approach to this political opportunity to gain legislation, at long last, that would secure for architects an autonomous share of the same technocratic authority. But the establishment of such an organisational and legal definition of the profession would see the focus of their agency shift, in the changing economic and ideological contexts of the 1980s, from moral issues of public good to the elite authoring of technical expertise and power.

Conclusion This chapter has outlined some of the key conceptual issues in the short history of the architectural profession in contemporary India, and the parallel development of the discourse in which its work and its values have been reflected. It is clear from the above that, in the dominant narrative, the profession has been represented through particular formulations of technical and aesthetic expertise. While other more democratic and moral conceptions of the profession were considered periodically, these have not been sustained consistently through the discourse. It is also apparent that the relatively miniscule number of registered architectural professionals in a rapidly expanding and little regulated construction industry engenders vulnerability, where rhetorical claims of expertise become a way to protect professional status. The impact of this narrative on how practitioners in India continue to see their role in terms of the larger society – the very people they build for – requires a deeper discussion. As the present account has noted, there were various moments in India’s recent history when other models of practice and professional engagement were apparent. Further scholarship will need to examine those moments and models more closely. Here, the broader path of what we might call “construction studies” may offer insight, an approach to the history and practice of architecture that focuses on the larger context of the production of buildings. Framing the architectural profession as part of the larger political economy of construction – from material production to process management – as well as the ethno-technological substrate of the building world, might 177

Peter Scriver and Amit Srivastava

allow us to develop a more robust understanding of architecture in the broader and bottom-up sense of the culture of building. Current work is already beginning to address some of these concerns. Considering the complex composition of the construction industry and its non-modern origins, efforts to map the role of a host of allied professionals and stakeholders involved in architectural production will allow for a better understanding of the role of the architect to emerge. Further discussion of the emergence of architecture as a modern profession in India is already being facilitated by efforts to archive and analyse previously embargoed government documents.5 As an industry that has been defined by the scarcity of certain materials and technological resources, on one hand, but also the sheer abundance of labour on the other, new work in the areas of construction history and labour studies is helping us understand the architectural contributions of this craft-based informal labour sector (Inglis 2015; Kumar 2018; Karim 2019). Finally, it is hoped that other work will further explore the opportunities afforded by the bottom-up view of industry and development that was still conceivable at the moment of independence, before the transformation to the modern industrial and technocratic paradigm. In time, this growing body of “construction studies” may allow for a better understanding of both the history and the future of the architectural profession in India.

Notes 1 Proposed programmes included Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT) and the Pradhan Mantri Awaas Yojna (PMAY)/ Housing for All 2022, both launched in June 2015. 2 A constitutional provision for altered governance temporarily suspending civil liberties. For the social and political circumstances of “The Emergency” of 1975–77, see Dhar (2001) and Chandra (2003). 3 See “Nominator’s Notes” by Peter Scriver in Mehrotra (2001). 4 As a measure of this ongoing exponential market-driven growth, the number of architecture schools ­increased by another 140% between 2010 and 2015 with the establishment of 241 new institutions within five years. See Mehrotra et al. (2016). 5 The intersection of allied construction professionals – architects, engineers, surveyors, contractors, builders etc. – in the process of architectural production is explored by a range of recent and ongoing doctoral research work. For instance, see Lal (2017) and Melsens et al. (2019). These recent works are supported by the growing access to archival material through both official government websites ­( parliamentary debates available through http://rajyasabha.nic.in) and others that compile and analyse the discourse through use of new machine learning algorithms. See: https://architexturez.net.

References Belluardo, James, and Kazi Ashraf (eds.) (1998) An Architecture of Independence: The Making of Modern South Asia: Charles Correa, Balkrishna Doshi, Muzharul Islam, Achyut Kanvinde, New York: Architectural League of New York. Bhatia, Gautam (1994) Punjabi Baroque and Other Memories of Architecture, New York: Penguin Books. Bhatt, Vikram, and Peter Scriver (1990) After the Masters: Contemporary Indian Architecture, Ahmedabad: Mapin Pub. Brown, Rebecca M. (2017) Displaying Time: The Many Temporalities of the Festival of India, Seattle: University of Washington Press. Brown, Andrew and Christine Coupland (2015) “Identity Threats, Identity Work and Elite Professionals,” Organization Studies 36(10): 1315–36. Chakrabarti, Vibhuti (1998) Indian Architectural Theory: Contemporary Uses of Vastu Vidya, Richmond: Curzon Press. Chandra, Bipan (2003) In the Name of Democracy: JP Movement and the Emergency, New Delhi: Penguin Books. Chatterjee, Partha (2011) Lineages of Political Society: Studies in Postcolonial Democracy, New York: Columbia University Press. Correa, Charles (1985) The New Landscape: Urbanisation in the Third World, Bombay: Book Society of India. ——— (1988) “Vistara: The Architecture of India,” Mimar xxvii (March): 24–6.

178

Architectural Discourse in Postcolonial India Council of Architecture (2017) “Registration Statistics.” Online. Available https://www.coa.gov.in/ (1 ­September 2017). Crinson, Mark (2017) Rebuilding Babel: Modern Architecture and Internationalism, London and New York: I.B. Tauris. ——— and Jules Lubbock (1994) Architecture: Art or Profession? : Three Hundred Years of Architectural Education in Britain, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Curtis, William J.R. (1982) Modern Architecture since 1900, Oxford: Phaidon. ——— (1988) Balkrishna Doshi: An Architecture for India, New York: Rizzoli. Dhar, P.N. (2001) Indira Gandhi, the “Emergency,” and Indian Democracy, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Desai, Madhavi (2016) Women Architects and Modernism in India: Narratives and Contemporary Practices, London: Routledge. Evenson, Norma (1989) The Indian Metropolis: A View toward the West, New Haven: Yale University Press. Foucault, Michel (1980) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, Brighton: ­Harvestor Press. Fournier, Valerie (1999) “The Appeal to ‘Professionalism’ as a Disciplinary Mechanism,” The Sociological Review 47: 280–307. doi:10.1111/1467-954X.00173. Frampton, Kenneth (1983) “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance,” in Hal Foster (ed.) Postmodern Culture, London: Pluto Press, pp. 16–30. Ganju, M.N. Ashish (ed.) (1974) “The Architect: A Symposium on the New Disciplines of a Profession,” Seminar (India) 180. Online. Available http://architexturez.net (1 September 2017). ——— (ed.) (1986) “Delhi School of Design,” Greha Archives. Online. Available http://architexturez.net (1 September 2017). ——— (ed.) (1990) “Habitat Schools,” Greha Archives. Online. Available http://architexturez.net (1 ­September 2017). Giddens, Anthony (1991) Modernity and Self-identity: Self and Identity in the Late Modern Age, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Govt. of India (1954) “Exhibition Souvenir for International Exhibition on Low Cost Housing ( January– March),” New Delhi: Govt. of India. Greha (1975) “Memorandum Submitted by Young Architects: To the Prime Minister Smt. Indra [sic] Gandhi on 12th August, 1975.” Greha Archives. Online. Available. http://architexturez.net (1 September 2017). Guha, Ramachandra (2007) India after Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy, London: Macmillan. Inglis, Megha C (2015) Factory Processes and Relations in Indian Temple Production. In: Lloyd Thomas K, Amhoff T, Beech N (eds.) Industries of Architecture. London: Routledge, 114–24. Jain, Kulbhushan and Minakshi Jain (2000) Architecture of the Indian Desert, Ahmedabad: India Research Press. ——— (2002) Thematic Space in Indian Architecture, Ahmedabad: India Research Press. Karim, Farhan (2019) Of Greater Dignity than Riches: Austerity and Housing Design in India, Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press. Khan, Hasan-Uddin and Sherban Cantacuzino (1987) Charles Correa, Singapore: Concept Media. Khosla, Romi (2002) The Loneliness of a Long-Distant Future: Dilemmas of Contemporary Architecture, Delhi: Tulika Books. Kumar, Avinash (2018) Economic Re-integration of Returning Migrants in the Construction Sector in India, New Delhi: International Labour Organisation. Lal, Nilina Deb (2017) “Building Calcutta: Construction Trends in the Making of the Capital of British India, 1880‒1911,” PhD thesis, The University of Edinburgh. Lalit Kala Akademi (1959) “Proceedings of the ‘Seminar on Architecture’ Jaipur House, March 17–21,” New Delhi: Lalit Kala Akademi. Lang, Jon, Madhavi Desai and Miki Desai (1997) Architecture and Independence: The Search for Identity, 1880– 1980, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Lefaivre, Liane and Alexander Tzonis (2003) Critical Regionalism: Architecture and Identity in a Globalised World, New York: Prestel. Lee, Rachel and Kathleen James-Chakraborty (2012) “Marg Magazine: A Tryst with Architectural Modernity,” ABE Journal 1. Online. Available http://abe.revues.org/623 (1 September 2017). Masani, Zareer (1975) Indira Gandhi: A Biography, London: Hamilton. Mehrotra, Rahul (ed.) (2001) World Architecture: A Critical Mosaic, 1900–2000, Vol. 8: South Asia, Vienna: Springer, Verlag. ——— (2011) Architecture in India since 1990, Mumbai: Pictor.

179

Peter Scriver and Amit Srivastava Mehrotra, Rahul, Ranjit Hoskote and Kaiwan Mehta (2016) The State of Architecture: Practices and Processes in India, Mumbai: UDRI. Mehta, Jamini (2011) Rethinking Modernity: Towards Post Rational Architecture, New Delhi: Niyogi Books. Melsens, Sarah, Inge Bertels and Amit Srivastava (2019) “The Architectural Production of India’s Everyday Modernism: Middle-class Housing in Pune, 1960–1980,” ABE Journal 16. Online. Available http://­ journals.openedition.org/abe/7011 (1 June 2020). Ministry of Housing & Urban Poverty Alleviation (MoHUPA) (2012) “Report of the Technical Group on Urban Housing Shortage (TG-12) 2012–2017,” New Delhi: Government of India. Murray, Peter (1984) “Correa: Architect in the Third World,” RIBA Journal (February), editorial. Pandya, Yatin (2005) Concepts of Space in Traditional Indian Architecture, Ahmedabad: Mapin Pub. Panicker, Shaji K. (2007) “Indian Architecture and the Production of a Postcolonial Discourse: A Study of Architecture + Design, 1984–1992,” PhD thesis, University of Adelaide. Planning Commission (2002) Planning Commission Reports on Labour and Employment, Ghaziabad: Government of India. Prakash, Vikramaditya (2002) Chandigarh’s Le Corbusier: The Struggle for Modernity in Postcolonial India, Seattle: University of Washington Press. Rewal, Raj, Jean-Louis Véret and Ram Sharma (eds.) (1985) Architecture in India, Paris: Electa Moniteur. Rybczynski, Witold, Vikram Bhatt, et al. (1984) How the Other Half Builds, Montreal: Centre for Minimum Cost Housing. Sachdev, Vibhuti and G.H.R. Tillotson (2002) Building Jaipur: The Making of an Indian City, London: Reaktion. Scriver, Peter (2007a) “Empire-building and Thinking in the Public Works Department of British India.” In Peter Scriver and Vikramaditya Prakash (eds.) Colonial Modernities: Building, Dwelling and Architecture in British India and Ceylon, London and New York: Routledge/Architext, 69–92. Scriver, Peter (2007b) “Between Colonial and Modern: Reception, Resistance and Reproduction in the Design of Government Housing for the New India.” In Scriver P. (ed.) The Scaffolding of Empire, Adelaide: Centre for Asian and Middle Eastern Architecture, 43–61. Scriver, Peter and Amit Srivastava (2015) India: Modern Architectures in History, London: Reaktion Books. Somaya, Brinda (2000). An emancipated place: the proceedings of the conference and exhibition held in Mumbai, February 2000: women in architecture, 2000 plus: a conference on the work of women architects: focus South Asia. Mumbai: Hecar Foundation. Somaya, Brinda and Urvashi Mehta (eds.) (2000) An Emancipated Place: Women in Architecture 2000 Plus, Mumbai: Hecar Foundation. Taylor, Brian Brace (1992) Raj Rewal, London: Mimar Publications. Tillotson, Gilles H.R. (1989) Tradition of Indian Architecture: Continuity, Controversy and Change since 1850. New Haven: Yale University Press. Tombesi, Paolo, Bharat Dave and Peter Scriver (2003) “Routine Production or Symbolic Analysis? India and the Globalization of Architectural Services,” The Journal of Architecture 8(1): 63–94. ——— (2007). “Rules of Engagement: Testing the Attributes of Distant Professional Marriages,” Journal of Architectural Engineering and Design Management 3: 49–64. Wilensky, Harold L. (1964) “The Professionalization of Everyone?” American Journal of Sociology 70(2): 137–58. The World Bank (2017) “World Bank Open Data; Urban Population – India.” Online. Available https:// data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.URB.TOTL?locations=IN (1 September 2017). Zachariah, Benjamin (2004) Nehru, New York: Routledge.

180

9 Architectural Production in Dubai Kevin Mitchell

Successive periods of extraordinary growth following the discovery of oil and natural gas in the Gulf region fundamentally transformed cities through large-scale infrastructure projects and expansion of the built environment. As succinctly described by Saba George Shiber, The unprecedented urban boom here has changed the drab, monotone face of the desert to one with one sleek, sweeping superhighways along both sides of which the strangest forms of buildings have taken shape almost overnight as if by a magical system of nodulation and crystallization. Where once there was hardly a tree to be seen, today hundreds of thousands of trees have been forced to grow despite the distaste of both soil and climate to them. (Shiber 1964: 507) Although Shiber was reacting to the transformation of Kuwait during the late 1950s and early 1960s, his comments could aptly apply to the building boom in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in the 1970s or the situation in Dubai in the early 21st century (Figure 9.1). While the “strangest forms of buildings” and nature-defying landscapes have appeared across the Gulf during periods of rapid growth, the tensions and forces that play a role in the development of the built environment and the production of contemporary architecture have varied. Distinct differences between the economies, political structures, and demographic features of Gulf Cooperation Council (G.C.C.) member states, even among the seven individual emirates that comprise the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.), demand focusing on specific cases in order to move beyond descriptive approaches that tend to rely on well-worn tropes. In order to elucidate how context-specific conditions have impacted the production of architecture, this essay focuses on Dubai, which, due to an uncanny ability to attract foreign direct investment and to position the city as a global hub, has become the object of envy and emulation throughout the Gulf region and across the Middle East and North Africa. And, while architecture and urbanism in Dubai have been widely discussed, there have been few attempts to situate the production of architecture with respect to the forces that have shaped the built environment. Dubai’s emphasis on infrastructural improvements and the measures taken to shift the center of Gulf-based entrepôt trade to the emirate in the mid-20th century charted a trajectory that stands in rather stark contrast to other oil- and gas-dependent economies in the G.C.C. While its neighbors continue to struggle with the effects of decades of reliance on rents derived from natural resources, Dubai has, by necessity, effectively challenged models previously used to explain political and economic structures of Gulf states. The built environment in Dubai has been formed DOI: 10.4324/9781315674469-10

181

Kevin Mitchell

Figure 9.1  Shopping for property at Dubai’s Cityscape real estate exhibition. © Kevin Mitchell

by the complex interplay between global aspirations and local conditions, often with the desire for international recognition adversely affecting the urban environment. While Dubai is certainly not unique in terms of the consequences that result from a speculation-driven building boom, the fact that competing government-related entities (G.R.E.) played a major role as property developers is indicative of a state-sponsored strategy of supporting market liberalization and actively participating in the market through the activity of G.R.E. The role of G.R.E., along with factors that include adopting a neoliberal approach to economic development, establishing a recognized node within broader global networks, and de-emphasizing a comprehensive approach to urban planning beyond the provision of an expansive infrastructure, has both enabled and conditioned the production of architecture. The expansion of the built environment through speculative development and large-scale real estate projects has been driven by a deliberate strategy intended to diversify the economy and position Dubai as a global center and the region’s prime location for trade, logistics, finance, and tourism. In 2012, the Dubai 2020 Urban Masterplan was issued, followed by the release of the Dubai Plan 2021 at the end of 2014. Beyond the fact that the two plans are not integrated and make no reference to each other, the master plan remains rather vague and general in its formulation of processes and policies aimed at structuring the built environment (Dubai Government 2012). In contrast, the Dubai Plan 2021 (Dubai Government 2014) articulates a series of concrete finance-focused aims to be measured using defined key performance indicators. The goal of becoming one of the top five global centers for trade, logistics, finance, and tourism is explicitly stated, as are the aims to maintain a diversified economic base and to become the preferred investment destination for foreign capital. The qualitative differences between the Dubai Plan 2021 and the Dubai 2020 Urban Masterplan indicate that the development of the built environment is driven by the aspirations that are dependent on market liberalization measures to attract and retain capital rather than by a concern for the qualitative aspects of architecture and urbanism that impact the local environment. 182

Architectural Production in Dubai

In terms of individual works of architecture, the astonishing pace of development in Dubai and the particular forces impacting the design and construction of the built environment have severely limited the potential of architects to address fundamental issues related to climate and context in ways that would seem essential in a rapidly expanding city in a water-stressed geographical location characterized by harsh environmental conditions. Paradoxically, the very conditions that gave rise to the production of architecture on a significant scale also served to adversely impact the quality (and qualities) of architecture and restrict the role that architects could potentially play in making substantive contributions beyond the individual building. Investor-driven demands resulted in the collapse of time from concept to construction, which challenged the capacity of both architects and the building industry. At least for the majority of buildings created during the period of harried growth that ended with the global financial crisis in 2008, success was primarily determined by securing the sale—and in many cases the resale—of buildings prior to construction to ensure rapid returns on investment that, in turn, attracts more capital into a real estate market dependent upon off-plan sales (Mitchell 2013).

The Basis for a Building Boom While each of the seven emirates comprising the U.A.E. is distinct to greater or lesser degrees in terms of the forces impacting the built environment, the development of Dubai cannot be fully understood without reference to its unique position within the federation that was formed in 1971. The U.A.E. experienced extraordinary growth since oil was discovered in the late 1950s and the country continues to benefit from approximately 4% of the world’s proven oil and gas reserves. Abu Dhabi, the largest of the emirates and the seat of government, possesses approximately 95% oil and gas reserves in the U.A.E. and maintains a number of sovereign wealth funds, including the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA) fund that ranked second in the world with a value of approximately USD 828 billion in 2017 (SWFI 2017). In contrast, and compelled due to the dearth of rent-bearing natural resources, Dubai exploited its strategic location and connections established through the pearling trade in the late 19th century to support economic growth. Responding to a move by Persian authorities to increase taxation on trade through southern ports at the beginning of the 20th century, the emirate lured merchants with the promise of minimal tariffs and the provision of land for housing near the port. As Michael Herb explains in All in the Family: Absolutism, Revolution, and Democracy in the Middle Eastern Monarchies, providing concessions to entice merchants to Dubai and retain their allegiance is illustrative in general tendencies across the Gulf: Merchant bargaining power lay in the mobility of their trade (and pearling) which allowed them to flee to a different shaykhdom if the ruler’s extraction grew too heavy. The position of a ruler, at least in the smaller Gulf-side shaykhdoms, could not easily withstand a wholesale alienation of the merchant community, and rulers in any case had an interest in the prosperity of the merchant class. (Herb 1999: 58) Once merchants had settled in Dubai, it was essential that the ruler/merchant compact be maintained to counter the risk of relocation, and the mutually beneficial relationship between ruler and merchants served as the basis for Dubai’s growth and prosperity. The reliance on creating and maintaining a competitive advantage in terms of benefits and concessions continues to shape Dubai’s economy and, in turn, its built environment. In order to sustain and consolidate its position as a center of trade after a series of succession challenges that brought increased stability in the late 1950s, Dubai launched a bond issue and 183

Kevin Mitchell

secured a loan to finance a major dredging operation that allowed larger vessels to enter the creek and off-load cargo regardless of the tide, which had previously proven prohibitive due to the depth of the waterway. Other large-scale infrastructure improvements, such as the construction of a ­m ajor vehicular bridge crossing the creek and an expansion of a small airfield in the 1960s, may have seemed unnecessary at the time but ultimately proved prescient as demand exceeded the excess capacity soon after completion. Early large-scale infrastructure enhancements revealed a propensity to build well beyond current needs with the confidence that future growth would ensure that projects would generate demand. The inclination to build in advance of anticipated demand continues to inform development strategies founded on the hope that infrastructure projects and speculative buildings will increase the inflow of capital and influx of people. While other Gulf states have struggled to diversify in anticipation of a post-oil future that has been foreshadowed by domestic challenges associated with oil prices that have remained below USD 100.00/barrel since mid-2014, Dubai provides an alternative model that counters some of the assumptions made by rentier state theory (R.S.T.), which has been used to examine state-­ society relations in states that derive a substantial proportion of revenues from rents derived from payments for oil and gas exports or other forms of foreign aid. Within the G.C.C., R.S.T. has been used to explain how rents generate income that may otherwise only have been possible through taxation, which could lead to calls for representative forms of government. In the case of Dubai, the lack of natural resources required a development strategy to generate income at the level necessary to fund infrastructure improvements and maintain subsidies without imposing direct personal taxation that may result in the demand for additional concessions. Although the introduction of a value-added tax (V.A.T.) in 2018 represents a decisive change that may impact efforts to continue to attract people and capital, Dubai’s free zones offer exemption from taxation and customs duties, 100% foreign ownership, and administrative services intended to circumvent bureaucratic challenges that have hampered private-sector development in the region. Diversification efforts supported by a neopatrimonial governance structure, combined with a complex interdependent web of relations between the ruler and large family-owned enterprises, private businesses, and G.R.E., have challenged some of the assumptions made by R.S.T. However, as Matthew Gray points out, the fundamental societal contract between state and citizens has remained intact as Dubai has sought to generate rent-like income to sustain long-standing rentier bargains: It placated its middle classes as well as its wealthy ones through new opportunities in stocks, property, trade, and work as senior government officials, business intermediaries, and investors. This is why its focus has been on tertiary economic sectors or intermediary roles in international trade, investment and finance, and not in manufacturing or the like. In effect, Dubai’s rulers have sought to develop rentier-like characteristics in a non-oil economy. […] Only the type of rent and how it flows have changed; the rentier bargain beneath remains in place. The “Dubai model” is important in what it says about the attempt by Gulf rulers to diversify and underwrite their rentier bargains with society. (Gray 2011: 27)

The Role of Real Estate The production of architecture, accelerated by the emphasis on real estate development as a core element of a broader diversification strategy, has played a key role in fundamentally transforming the built environment in Dubai. Capitalizing on the return of wealth to the region due to uncertainties after 9/11 and attracting foreign direct investment from across the globe, real estate investment in Dubai provided astonishing returns—for a time. From 2000 until the financial crisis 184

Architectural Production in Dubai

in 2008, the demand for new buildings fueled growth in the real estate and construction industries that, in turn, created the need for an expanded labor force that could not be enlarged by relying on the existing population. The increasing dependence on real estate in terms of contribution to the U.A.E.’s gross domestic product (GDP), primarily driven by activity in Dubai, meant that the sector grew from approximately AED 17 million in 1998 (IMF 2003: 69) to approximately AED 126 million in 2008 (IMF 2012: 25). During the ten-year period from 1998 until 2008, the population in Dubai rose from 822,000 in 1998 (IMF 2003: 80) to almost 1.6 million in 2008 (IMF 2009: 6). With a history of openness resulting from trade relations and, as of 2016, expatriates making up approximately 92% of the city’s overall population of nearly 2.7 million, Dubai could both support growth and benefit from the influx of people and capital from the region and beyond (Dubai ­Government 2016). The correlation between the accelerated expansion of the built environment and the rapid growth in population was characteristic of the situation in other G.C.C. member states with relatively small populations, as described by Saba George Shiber in his account of growth in Kuwait in the 1960s: Speed dominated the portrait of urban buildup in Kuwait. To get this huge job done Kuwait literally recruited engineers, technicians, white-collar workers and laborers by the t­ housands […] This large force itself instigated a large buildup for its own housing, servicing, and ­upkeep. A snow-balling effect, for which there seems to be no immediate end in sight as long as the boom is on in Kuwait, was set off. (Shiber 1964: 6) The “snow-balling effect” described by Shiber was repeated in the early 21st-century Dubai as the population increase created a seemingly endless demand for development, at least until the demand quickly dissipated when the debt burden became unbearable for creditors. The demographic balance between expatriates and citizens across the Gulf has resulted in ­tensions that are periodically expressed in public venues, such as calls for debate in the Kuwait National Assembly (Izzak 2017). With only 233,430 U.A.E. nationals among the resident population of nearly 2.7 million (Dubai Government 2016) and 14.9 million tourists in 2016 (DTCM 2016), Dubai is unique even when compared to Gulf neighbors. At the crest of the building boom in 2007, a survey of U.A.E. citizens concluded that the demographic imbalance in the country was the top current and future “challenge,” and was of greater concern than health-related, economic, and traditional security concerns (Forstenlechner and Rutledge 2011: 28). Regardless of perceptions related to the number of expatriates, Dubai relies heavily on a foreign population to provide the labor necessary to sustain growth and to ensure continued demand for residential units and real estate projects that cannot be supported by tourism alone. Regardless of the concerns resulting from the demographic imbalance in Dubai, citizens benefit directly and indirectly from growth in the real estate sector as urban development ­supported the rentier bargain with society both directly via state subsidies and indirectly through increased investment and business opportunities for U.A.E. citizens. For example, while there are no r­ estrictions on who may work as agents for an established real estate brokerage, U.A.E. law requires that brokerages must be wholly owned by U.A.E. nationals. Ownership laws throughout the Gulf favored citizens and gave rise to the consolidation of resources in family-owned businesses. According to a 2016 article in The Economist, approximately 80% of the companies in the region are owned or controlled by families, and these businesses are responsible for producing more than 90% of nonoil wealth in the Gulf states (The Economist 2016). The sectors that benefited from the amplified production of architecture during the pre-2008 frenzy were predominately owned or controlled by locally based family businesses. A comparison of family- and non-family-owned businesses in Dubai found that of the 5,158 entities operating in the construction sector in 2014, approximately 185

Kevin Mitchell

60% were family owned. And during the same year, family-owned companies accounted for approximately 67% of the businesses operating in the real estate, renting, and business services sector (Rettab et al. 2005: 22). When considered in relation to business ownership structures and the constellation of family-owned entities benefiting from projects initiated by semi-government developers, it is clear that the production of architecture played a central role in maintaining the rentier bargain in Dubai’s non-oil economy. Growth in the real estate sector in Dubai would not have been possible without financing mechanisms that were sufficient to attract and manage the inflow of significant capital from beyond the U.A.E. Building on David Harvey’s work on the connections between the transformation of urban space, state intervention in the built environment, real estate and financial markets, and class formation in mid-19th-century Paris, Michelle Buckley and Adam Hanieh (2014) have explored the relation between real estate and financial markets in what they describe as “diversification by urbanization” in Dubai. Focusing on how the urban development process has become a key site of state diversification agendas through the creation of development-focused financial service markets to attract capital by providing investment and ownership opportunities in real estate, three dynamics related to the liberalization of real estate development were identified: substantial increases in foreign-sector credit to Gulf banks, growth of domestic conglomerates with investment interests in both real estate and financial circuits, and increases in equity financing for urban development. It is important to note that the “domestic conglomerates” are not only domestic but, in many cases, are also family owned; this form of patronage serves to maintain the ruler/merchant compact through the web of relations between the ruler and large family-owned enterprises. In support of the claim that the integration of real estate and financial markets was deliberate rather than a consequence of liberalization of the property market or the inflow of global finance capital to local real estate assets, Buckely and Hanieh demonstrate that, “[…] marketized urbanization has in part constituted a strategy of geofinancial re-engineering in which materially tangible real estate mega-projects have provided a key mechanism for Gulf states to fuel growth and diversification in the financial circuit” (Buckley and Hanieh 2014: 171). Dubai-based G.R.E. played a major role in both developing strategies to diversify through urbanization and implementing plans by acting as primary property developers. These entities were able to secure the capital necessary to undertake large-scale projects through state sponsorship, or at least the perception of state-backed guarantees. Bertrand Renaud, noting that financial markets and the media perceive G.R.E. as positively benefiting from both the security of the public sector and the innovation and vitality that characterizes the private sector, has written The central policy issue with explicit or implicit guarantees to private or semi-private corporations is that during periods of high liquidity and low interest rates, these guarantees are likely to lead to overinvestment and high-risk management decisions for which Dubai is a textbook case, although real estate in China shows plenty of similar cases. (Renaud 2012: 58) The real estate-related strategies resulted in a dizzying array of off-plan developments that were sold immediately after being announced and often resold multiple times at increasing values prior to completion. Real estate development, and the funding that flowed as a result, allowed Dubai to fulfill both the rentier bargain with society and the compact with investors who enjoyed the returns that ensured that capital flowed to, and remained in, the emirate. The investments necessary to support the production of architecture at an exponentially increasing rate between 2000 and 2008 required access to not only capital, but also a regulatory framework that permitted foreign ownership of real property. The federal government allows individual emirates to establish laws and regulations governing property ownership beyond the U.A.E. Civil Code and the Code of Civil Procedure, and 186

Architectural Production in Dubai

Dubai has taken full advantage of its ability to enact legislation and establish free zones allowing 100 percent foreign ownership of businesses, such as the Jebel Ali Free Zone, Dubai Airport Free Zone, Dubai Media City, Dubai Internet City, and the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC). Following a period of uncertainty over foreign ownership of property, Dubai enacted Law No. (7) of 2006 (Concerning Real Property Registration in the Emirate of Dubai), which allows the ruler to designate areas in which non-U.A.E. nationals have the right to (i) freehold ownership or real property without time restrictions and (ii) usufruct or leasehold over real property for a period not exceeding 99 years (Dubai Law No. (7) of 2006). In response to the challenges associated with off-plan sales that fueled the boom, Dubai took steps to control the market through the development of the Real Estate Regulatory Authority (RERA) in 2007 and subsequent legislation, such as an escrow law to protect investors who purchase off-plan property. The measures taken to regulate the property market were intended to strengthen investor confidence and the inflow of capital into real estate indicates that the steps were effective. In 2016, G.C.C. nationals invested AED 35 billion (USD 9.5 billion) in Dubai real estate, whereas investment from outside of the G.C.C. totaled AED 44 billion (USD 12 billion). The Dubai Land Department reported that Indian nationals led foreign investors with AED 12 billion (USD 3.25 billion), which was equivalent to the combined total of other Arab nationals from countries outside of the G.C.C. (Dubai Government 2017). The fact that there was also substantial investment by individuals from Pakistan, the United Kingdom, Canada, China, France, Iran, Russia, and the United States indicates the unabated global appeal of real estate in Dubai. Real estate development has played a major role in Dubai’s 21st-century diversification strategy, which resulted in the rapid expansion of the built environment through the production of architecture. Market liberalization, driving development through the active participation of G.R.E., and geofinancial re-engineering attracted foreign direct investment that was translated into buildings. The forces impacting the production of architecture in Dubai were fundamentally different from those that precipitated the boom in Kuwait 40 years earlier, but Dubai’s extraordinary transformation also, in the words of Shiber, “[…] changed the drab, monotone face of the desert […]” (Shiber 1964: 507).

The Production of Architecture in Downtown Dubai Downtown Dubai, a large-scale development built according to a master plan designed by the firm RNL Design and developed by the G.R.E. Emaar Properties, includes mixed-use buildings of varying scales, hotels, the Dubai Mall, Burj Khalifa, and the Dubai Opera (Figure 9.2). Located just off Sheikh Zayed Road (E11) and connected to the metro system via an 820-meter enclosed walkway terminating in the Dubai Mall, Downtown Dubai is adjacent to the development known as Business Bay and in close proximity to the Dubai International Financial Center. The developers describe the project as follows: Billed as the world’s most prestigious square kilometer and described as the ‘new heart of the city,’ Downtown Dubai is the flagship project of Emaar Properties. It is a mixed-use 500-acre development boasting world-class assets including commercial, residential, hotel, entertainment, shopping and leisure components set in open spaces dotted with lakes and other distinct water features. Located at its centre is Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building developed by Emaar. (Emaar Properties) Downtown Dubai encapsulates some of the broader tendencies that have impacted the production of architecture during the most recent period of rapid growth: privileging infrastructure and 187

Kevin Mitchell

individual works of architecture over broader urban design strategies, leveraging large-scale projects to promote tourism and distinguish Dubai globally, and relying on themed environments and façade treatments to market real estate projects as representative of the architecture of the region. As a new development intended to present the capacity of Dubai to build the world’s tallest building and largest mall, Downtown Dubai benefits from tremendous investment in infrastructure. In terms of individual works of architecture, the projects overseen by the primary developer Emaar have attained a level of quality of construction that many other developers have been unable to match. However, as demonstrated by the renovation of the ground floor of a number of buildings facing Mohammed Bin Rashid Boulevard, Downtown Dubai’s main thoroughfare, the design of the urban environment was considered only after planning for infrastructure and completing the individual works of architecture. Soon after completion, previously blank facades at the base of buildings were transformed through additions that provided space for restaurants and cafés with outdoor seating. Although the additions serve to activate the space of Mohammed Bin Rashid Boulevard through increased pedestrian traffic and the creation of zones that extended the space of private establishments for outdoor seating, the lack of integration with existing structures is problematic (Figure 9.3). There were few attempts to reconcile the architectural languages of the original buildings and the additions, which results in a lack of visual and spatial coherence. The expansive well-maintained sidewalks and attention to features such as lighting and paving produce the appearance of a designed public space, but the visible presence of security personnel and the absence of seating beyond outdoor areas provided by restaurants and cafes exert subtle controls that are sufficient to effectively exclude those unable to afford to pay the prices charged by the establishments that provide the only opportunities for rest. Following the renovations that transformed previously blank walls in ways that connected interior and exterior and activated the space of the street, Downtown Dubai overcame some of the urban design problems that initially resulted from focusing on infrastructure and individual buildings rather than on developing cohesive urban plans that consider the space between buildings to be as important as the space within.

Figure 9.2  Downtown Dubai. © CNES/Airbus Defense Space, 2012 [Note: use file K_Mitchell_ Figure_2_New.tif ]

188

Architectural Production in Dubai

Figure 9.3  Altered façade of a building along Mohammed Bin Rashid Boulevard. © Kevin Mitchell

However, in spite of the change in the approach to the urban environment that is evident in the recent interventions in buildings along Mohammed Bin Rashid Boulevard, the appearance of public space is challenged by a lived reality that is, in all respects, exclusive. While debates about the privatization of public space continue in cities such as London (Garrett 2017), the notion of public space in Dubai is challenged by the fact that all urban space is essentially private and access is either explicitly controlled or implicitly subject to unwritten codes that circumscribe usage. 189

Kevin Mitchell

The world’s tallest building and largest mall in terms of the total area are Downtown Dubai’s primary attractions and both have played key roles in the city’s efforts to brand itself as a tourist and financial center capable of competing globally. The Burj Khalifa and the Dubai Mall were developed by Emaar Properties and the mall is currently part of Emaar Malls, a company that is publicly listed on the Dubai Financial Market and majority-owned by the parent company. Designed by Singapore-based DP Architects, the Dubai Mall is currently undergoing a major expansion to increase the total floor area by nearly 20% to approximately 6.9 million square feet (Figure 9.4). As of mid-2017, the 828-meter Burj Khalifa designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill remains the tallest building in the world, although the Kingdom Tower in Jeddah is under construction and projected to reach 1 kilometer. Not to be outdone, in 2016 Emaar Properties announced that the Santiago Calatrava-designed Tower at Dubai Creek Harbor, another largescale mixed-use development, would exceed the height of the Burj Khalifa—but of course the actual height remains confidential. Shrewdly, rather than increasing what has proven to be excess high-rise capacity, the Tower at Dubai Creek Harbor will function as an observation tower while still being eligible for accolades such as the world’s tallest freestanding structure if it exceeds the Kingdom Tower in height. Jean Baudrillard has written that, All Manhattan’s tall buildings had been content to confront each other in a competitive verticality, and the product of this was an architectural panorama reflecting the capitalist system itself – a pyramidal jungle, whose famous image stretched out before you as you arrived from the sea. (Baudrillard 2002: 42) The competitive verticality that was once confined to Manhattan is now become a global competition, with only one of the world’s ten tallest buildings in 2017 located in the United States (One World Trade Center in New York). Of the top 100 tallest buildings in the world, the largest numbers (18) are located in Dubai and four are located in Abu Dhabi, including the 381.2-meter Burj Mohammed Bin Rashid, a Norman Foster+Partners-designed residential tower within the

Figure 9.4  The Dubai Aquarium at the Dubai Mall. © Kevin Mitchell

190

Architectural Production in Dubai

World Trade Center that carries the name of Dubai’s ruler, who also serves as the vice president and the prime minister of the U.A.E. The naming of a major project in honor of the ruler of Dubai is significant and must be considered in relation to the naming, or rather re-naming, of the Burj Khalifa, which had been known as the Burj Dubai up until the opening celebrations on January 4, 2010. While one can speculate on whether there was a long-standing plan to name the building in honor of Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the President of the U.A.E. and Ruler of Abu Dhabi, the fact that Abu Dhabi had recently provided USD 10 billion to stave off defaults reveals the multifarious relationships between the emirates that comprise the U.A.E. In 2014, it was reported that Dubai signed an agreement to roll over the USD 10 billion provided by Abu Dhabi in 2009 and an additional USD 10 billion in bonds owed to the Central Bank of United Arab Emirates for a period of five years at an interest rate of 1% (Reuters 2014). While Abu Dhabi and Dubai compete for foreign direct investment to support diversification efforts, they remain interconnected and Dubai’s ability to manage the USD 80 billion debt that had accumulated by 2008 would most certainly have had a more significant impact on the real estate market and investor confidence without direct intervention from Abu Dhabi. The buildings, and naming, of the Burj Khalifa and Burj Mohammed Bin Rashid demonstrate how contemporary works of architecture perform a representative function in the Gulf, revealing architecture’s role in the competition between cities and in efforts to communicate cohesion among neighboring states. Perhaps more than any other single project, the Burj Khalifa illustrates the role that the iconic presence of individual works of architecture has been used to market Dubai as a global city capable of competing with more established urban centers, as evidenced by the promotional material on the Web site for the building, which interestingly emphasizes entrepreneurialism over oil: [The Burj Khalia] is also tangible proof of Dubai’s growing role in a changing world. In fewer than 30 years, this city has transformed itself from a regional centre to a global one. This success was not based on oil reserves, but on reserves of human talent, ingenuity and initiative. Burj Khalifa embodies that vision. (Burj Khalifa n.d.) At the base of Burj Khalifa are a series of themed developments that include Souk Al Bahar, a complex containing restaurants and small-scale shops, the Palace Hotel Downtown Dubai, and the residential districts Old Town and Old Town Island. Described as “drawing inspiration from traditional Arab architectural styles,” the facades employ elements found in courtyard houses prevalent in coastal settlements prior to the discovery of oil. In terms of urban design, the Old Town and Old Town Island provide shaded pedestrianized streets that are humanely scaled. Sensitivity to massing resulted in low street walls enclosing ground-floor gardens and the buildings ensure that pathways are shaded in the early morning and late afternoon. In spite of the considered approach to creating a habitable urban environment, the free interpretation of “traditional Arab architectural styles” raises critical questions related to visual expression in the built environment. In an essay entitled “In What Style Should Dubai Build?,” which drew its title from German architect Heinrich Hübsch’s 1828 study that posed questions regarding the appropriate style for buildings in early 19th-century Germany, I considered the problematic nature of “style” relative to the Dubai’s diverse population: The difficulty in addressing Hübsch’s question begins with the use of “we” as it implies communality and the potential for consensus regarding a singular “style” of buildings reflecting and responding to inhabitants. While Dubai-based developers indicate that their projects will create “communities”, it is unclear whether shared norms and values will emerge and lead to 191

Kevin Mitchell

the development of institutions and social capital that may mitigate the adverse effects of a market-driven economy. (Mitchell 2009: 130) Although all of the buildings were built in a short time period, Downtown Dubai is characterized by a variety of architectural expressions that range from the “traditional” facades of Old Town to the glass-sheathed Burj Khalifa. In terms of urban design, Downtown Dubai appears as an assemblage of dispersed and disparate works of architecture (Figure 9.5). This tendency is replicated across the city as speculative schemes compete for the attention of investors. In spite of achieving a quality of construction that was rarely attainable during the boom, the buildings within Downtown Dubai reveal the shortcomings of a piecemeal approach to urban planning and the struggles associated with responding to the context when the context remains in a state of flux.

Concluding Remarks The production of architecture for speculative real estate projects resulted in a city that seemed to emerge instantaneously from the desert to become a center of trade, logistics, finance, and tourism; however, as explained above, Dubai’s development was based on deliberate decisions that positioned the city as a key node within regional and global networks. While growth in other Gulf countries was financed through rents derived from natural resources, the lack of natural gas and oil in Dubai demanded diversification and resulted in a state-sponsored strategy of supporting market liberalization and actively participating in the market through the activity of G.R.E. Additionally, the production of architecture in Dubai has been influenced by factors such as geofinancial re-engineering to attract foreign direct investment, the adoption of neoliberal policies, and de-emphasizing a comprehensive approach to urban planning beyond providing an expansive infrastructure.

Figure 9.5  T  he “Arabian”-themed entrance for the parking at Souk Al Bahar with the Burj Khalifa in the background. © Kevin Mitchell

192

Architectural Production in Dubai

Developments such as Downtown Dubai represent a myriad of approaches to the question of style, and projects such as Burj Dubai and the Dubai Mall illustrate how superlatives such as the world’s tallest and the world’s largest are consistent with a broader strategy to capture the imagination of prospective tourists and attract media attention that accompanies promotional campaigns touting, among others, the world’s “only seven-star hotel,” largest man-made island, busiest airport, largest indoor theme park, and richest day in thoroughbred racing. The superlatives come at a price well beyond the financial investment associated with such immense aspirations, and the costs are inextricably linked with the production of architecture. The construction industry throughout the G.C.C. relies on migrant workers whose plight has been well documented, although prominent architects working in the region have shunned ­criticism and rejected calls for direct involvement. The late Zaha Hadid created controversy when she stated that the high number of construction-related deaths on the building sites for the 2022 World Cup stadiums was not the duty of the architect to “look at” and the Frank Gehrydesigned Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, due to the high-profile nature of the project, has been the ­locus of debates focused on the conditions of workers and the guarantee of rights under a restrictive sponsorship system. Beyond the serious issues associated with the rights of workers during the construction process, the long-term sustainability-related impacts of building within an extreme environment are also significant. With some of the highest rates of water and electricity consumption per capita in the world and a growing population, the resource demands in the U.A.E. are tremendous and the challenges are exacerbated by the scarcity of fresh water and reliance on energy-intensive desalination processes that result in brine discharge and residual chemicals that impact the Gulf ecosystem. The demand for air-conditioning alone accounts for approximately 70% of the energy consumption in the U.A.E. Although policies have been developed to address issues related to the sponsorship system, worker’s rights, and environmental sustainability, substantive reform depends on comprehensive and consistent implementation that can often be at odds with market liberalization efforts and the rentier bargains upon which the state and the economy have been built. Focusing on the “strangest forms of buildings,” which is often common in criticisms of Dubai, can prohibit a more nuanced understanding of the development of the built environment. While the appearance of cities that have been transformed through speculation-fueled building booms can be similar, understanding the production of architecture requires consideration of ­context-specific factors. Measures such as market liberalization, active engagement of G.R.E., and geofinancial re-engineering have changed the face of the desert through enhanced infrastructure and expansion of the built environment; the measures also served to hinder the development of place-sensitive architecture in Dubai by privileging global aspirations over the local context.

References Baudrillard, Jean (2002) Requiem for the Twin Towers. The Spirit of Terrorism, trans. Chris Turner, London: Verso. Buckley, Michelle and Hanieh, Adam (2014) “Diversification by Urbanization: Tracing the Property-­ Finance Nexus in Dubai and the Gulf ”, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38(1), pp. 155–175. Burj Khalifa. Online. Available HTTP: http://www.burjkhalifa.ae/en/the-tower/vision.aspx (2 March 2017). Dubai Department of Tourism and Commerce Marketing (DTCM) (2016) Dubai Tourism 2016: Performance Report. Online. Available HTTP: https://www.visitdubai.com/en/tourism-performance-report (20 July 2017). Dubai Government (2012) Dubai 2020 Urban Masterplan. Online. Available HTTP: https://www.dm.gov. ae/wps/wcm/connect/52ee5cab-66bb-463f-af bd-8ca3c46cc0c1/Dubai+2020-+broshure%2C+A4-+­ english+24.4.2012.pdf?MOD=AJPERES (2 April 2017). Dubai Government (2014) Dubai Plan 2021. Online. Available HTTP: http://www.dubaiplan2021.ae/ dubai-plan-2021/ (2 April 2017).

193

Kevin Mitchell Dubai Government (2016) Estimated Population Number by Nationality. Online. Available HTTP: https:// www.dsc.gov.ae/Report/Copy%20of%20DSC_SYB_2016_01%20_%2002.pdf (20 July 2017). Dubai Government (2017) AED 259 Billion Real Estate Transactions for 2016. Online. Available HTTP: http://www.dubailand.gov.ae/English/MediaCenter/Pages/news-viewer.aspx?nid=438 (2 March 2017). Dubai Law No. (7) of 2006 (2006) Dubai Law No. (7) of 2006 Concerning Real Property Registration in the Emirate of Dubai, https://www.dubailand.gov.ae/Style%20Library/download/EN-Legislation.pdf (15 December 2016). The Economist (2016) “Succession failure”. Online. Available HTTP: http://www.economist.com/news/ business/21690027-family-businesses-arabian-gulf-need-address-problem-succession (30 January 2017). Emaar Properties. Online. Available HTTP: http://mydowntowndubai.com/en/Discover/Emaar/emaar. aspx (2 April 2017). Forstenlechner, Ingo and Rutledge, Emilie Jane (2011) “The G.C.C.’s “Demographic Imbalance”: Perceptions, Realities and Policy Options”, Middle East Policy 18(4), pp. 25–43. Garrett, Bradley L. (2017) “These Squares are our Squares: Be Angry about the Privatisation of Public Space”, The Guardian. Online. Available HTTP: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/jul/25/ squares-angry-privatisation-public-space (25 July 2017). Gray, Matthew (2011) A Theory of “Late Rentierism” in the Arab States of the Gulf, Occasional Paper No. 7, Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar. Herb, Michael (1999) All in the Family: Absolutism, Revolution, and Democracy in the Middle Eastern Monarchies, Albany: State University of New York Press. International Monetary Fund (IMF) (2003) United Arab Emirates: Selected Issues and Statistical Appendix, IMF Country Report No. 03/67. International Monetary Fund (2009) United Arab Emirates: Statistical Appendix, IMF Country Report No. 09/120. International Monetary Fund (IMF) (2012) United Arab Emirates: Selected Issues and Statistical Appendix, Country Report No. 12/136. Izzak, B. (2017) “Lawmakers Seek Special Debate on Expat Numbers”, Kuwait Times. Online. Available HTTP: http://news.kuwaittimes.net/website/lawmakers-seek-special-debate-expat-numbers/ (15 March 2017). Mitchell, Kevin (2009) “In What Style Should Dubai Build?” in Elisabeth Blum and Peter Neitzke (eds.) Dubai: City from Nothing, Basel: Birkhäuser, pp. 130–40. Mitchell, Kevin (2013) “The Future Promise of Architecture in Dubai” in Ahmed Kanna (ed.) The ­Superlative City: Dubai and the Urban Condition in the Early Twenty-First Century, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Graduate School of Design/Harvard University Press, pp. 148–166. Renaud, Bertrand (2012) “Real Estate Bubble and Financial Crisis in Dubai: Dynamics and Policy ­Responses”, Journal of Real Estate Literature 20(1), pp. 51–77. Rettab, Belaid, Abu Fakhr, Tarek and Morada, Marietta (2005) Family Businesses in Dubai: Definition, ­Structure & Performance, Dubai Chamber of Commerce, Data Management and Research Department Working Papers. Reuters (2014) “U.A.E., Abu Dhabi Roll over $20 Billion of Dubai’s Debt”. Online. Available HTTP: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-emirates-dubai-debt-idUSBREA2F0EQ20140316 (10 July 2017). Shiber, Saba George (1964) The Kuwait Urbanization, Kuwait: Kuwait Government Printing Office. Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute (SWFI) (2017) Online. Available HTTP: http://www.swfinstitute.org/ sovereign-wealth-fund-rankings/ (29 April 2017).

194

10 The Afterlives of Modern Housing Cecilia L. Chu

High-rise mass housing has long held a paradoxical place in modern architectural history. Despite the widespread celebration of canonical works by avant-garde architects, the reputation of these buildings as a type is much more mixed in practice.1 As Florian Urban describes in his seminal study of the global history of mass housing, since their emergence in the 1930s, “towers and slabs have been alternately glorified as the salvation of mankind and scorned as generators of misery and distress” (Urban 2012, p. 1). The negative view toward standardized high-rise dwellings intensified in the 1970s, when it became clear that many social housing projects initiated in Europe and America in the welfare state era fell short of fulfilling their social agendas in enabling greater equity and human progress. These associations have been augmented by other critiques that seek to establish correlations between physical design and human behavior, which suggest that the monotonous design of mass housing blocks does not adequately address human needs and desires for functional, “defensible spaces” and has led to a proliferation of crime, poverty, and weakening of community life (Newman 1973; Colman 1985). Despite the uneven outcomes of social housing policies instituted in different places, selective building images, such as those of the stunning implosion of the Pruitt−Igoe housing estate in St. Louis, Missouri, have become seen as embodiments of the general failure of modernism within architectural discourse (Bristol 1991). The environmental-determinist narratives associated with postwar social housing have, however, taken on a new turn in recent years amid growing calls to salvage some of these buildings for adaptive reuse purposes. First led by heritage groups interested in reevaluating the Modern Movement, these calls are increasingly supported by policy makers who see the restoration of a greater variety of existing buildings as a means to save resources, attract urban investment, and revitalize cities.2 Behind these efforts is the belief that the social housing model of the welfare state predicated on “warehousing the poor” in standardized tower blocks does not work (Madden 2015). The remedy is to convert these buildings into mixed-income housing through privatization, an arrangement that combines subsidized and market-rate housing that would supposedly enable better management, foster social interactions between different income groups, and allow residents to take pride in where they live. A recent prominent example of such experiments is the Park Hill housing estate in Sheffield, the ­Britain’s largest Corbusian-inspired social housing scheme that was listed by English Heritage in 1998. The estate was subsequently sold to a property developer who has since transformed ­t wo-thirds of its existing flats into market-rate condominiums along with the creation of new commercial and office spaces. Despite criticisms from housing activists that the project caused displacement of existing residents, it has been praised internationally for setting an effective model of urban regeneration while reaffirming the value of postwar modernism in Britain (Blundell Jones 2011). DOI: 10.4324/9781315674469-11

195

Cecilia L. Chu

Although the interpretation of Park Hill’s architectural significance is context-specific, its reincarnation from a social housing project predicated on equalitarianism to a mixed-tenure property project that aligns with neoliberal urban processes opens up new questions concerning the nature of design intention and changing assumptions about housing: stripped back to its concrete frame and retrofitted into trendy and expensive apartments, to what extent has the transformation of the estate rendered void the presumed linkages between the social and esthetic ideals of modern architecture? What is the new role of design in housing production that is no longer centered on collective social betterment but increasingly subjected to the logics of the market? How has the rising property value of the once beleaguered estate reshaped collective assumptions about housing provision and desires for urban living in the 21st century? This chapter engages with these discussions by examining the “afterlives” of three modern social housing projects that have undergone significant transformation in recent years and in each case were diverted away from the original social purposes for which they were first built. The attempt here is to situate each case within the discourse of modern architecture while linking their development to emergent global narratives of housing. By doing so, the chapter invites critical evaluation of the ways in which modernist housing design facilitated new patterns of living, the contested values that became inscribed in these built forms, and the emergent rationalities behind their ongoing transformation in different places. My discussion begins with the Park Hill estate, whose evolution from an iconic council housing estate to a “heritage property” provokes reflection on the changing roles of the state and market in reshaping housing provision in the past two decades. In the second case, I trace the redevelopment of Columbia Point, a 1950s public housing complex in Boston which was transformed into a mixed-use community along the principles of New Urbanism in the 1980s. Unlike Park Hill where the conservation emphasized the estate’s modernist architectural merits, the preserved buildings in Columbia Point were retrofitted with pitched roofs to retroactively bring back a “traditional esthetic” that resonates with “American middle-class taste.” In the final case, I explore a controversy surrounding the Hunghom Peninsula Estate in Hong Kong, a newly built subsidized public housing complex that was converted into private condominiums after the 1998 Asian financial crisis. The developer’s initial proposal to demolish the never-occupied complex triggered a protest led by environmental activists. But the momentum quickly subsided after the developer agreed to save the buildings and convert them for new use. While public discussions of the controversy did not center on formal architectural esthetics, much attention was paid to the challenge of redesigning the standardized apartments from ones catering for lower income groups to ones for wealthier homeowners. Like Park Hill and Columbia Point, the discussion of the Hunghom Estate underscores both the crucial role of design in enabling the success of the project as well as the malleability of its original architectural intention in providing for the less well-off in society. Although all three projects discussed in the chapter fit with emergent neoliberal policies that favor market solutions over state provision of housing, the ways in which each case unfolded were also significantly shaped by existing institutional practices and discourses about property, class, and presumed roles of the state and market in social provision, which continue to reproduce particular assumptions of the forms and norms of housing and how architecture supports these relationships in their specific contexts.

From “Slums in the Sky” to Heritage Property: The Remaking of the Park Hill Estate When it was completed in 1961, Park Hill, the largest council housing estate in Britain, was widely praised as a shining example of the welfare state. It was a time when mass housing construction reached its peak, with images of serial apartment blocks being the most popular representation of modernization and progress in cities across the world (Saint 1996; Levitt 2102). The significance 196

The Afterlives of Modernist Housing

of Park Hill was accentuated by the British government’s then stated commitment to expand the provision of social housing and enable every citizen to have a decent home. This was notably expressed by Harold Macmillan, the founding Minister for Housing and future prime minister, who claimed that “housing was not a question of conservatism or socialism, but a question of humanity” (Hanley 2012, p. 91). Although Macmillan’s “grand strategy for housing” would later be criticized for prioritizing quantity over quality and for focusing on short-term results to score political points, the equalitarian rhetoric of building for the masses was nevertheless embraced by architects in charge of implementing the housing policy on the ground. Among these were two young architects, Ivor Smith and Jack Lynne, who had just graduated from the Architectural Association School of Architecture and came to work under John Lewis Womersley, the visionary City Architect of Sheffield who was committed to modernize the city and put its architecture on the world map (Scoff ham 1984, pp. 88–90; Bryant-Mole 2017). Central to this effort was the clearance of slums and rehousing their residents from insanitary and overcrowded dwellings to well-designed council housing that would help foster a strong sense of community. It was in this context that Park Hill was conceptualized to demonstrate how modern architecture could fulfill its social potentials. The prominence of Park Hill was marked by its scale, location, and design innovation. Located on top of a hill formerly dominated by slum dwellings, the estate consisted of 995 dwellings—500 maisonettes and 495 flats—housed in four interlocking tower blocks that offered each apartment a sweeping view of the city (Figure 10.1). The design of the scheme was influenced by emerging approaches to urban living, namely the idea of “streets in the air”, which could be traced back to experiments in collective housing in the Soviet Union in 1920s and were later elaborated in the works of Le Corbusier, Alison and Peter Smithson, and others (Scoff ham 1984, pp. 86–7; Saint 1996; Blundell Jones 2011). The goal was to provide a modern living environment in the tower blocks while replicating the social functions and vibrant street life on the ground. To achieve this purpose, Smith and Lynne created 12-foot wide street decks that ran from one side of the estate to the other on every third floor, an arrangement that encouraged active social interaction among residents, children’s play and even milk floats to drive through the streets. Communal living was further enhanced by the provision of shops, pubs, playgrounds, nurseries, a laundry, and residential clubs. The apartments were each fitted with modern amenities, including heating and a “Garchey system” of refuse collection, all designed with the purpose of providing a healthy home for the residents with a good balance of collective and private life. The progressive intent of Park Hill was reflected in the choice of the building’s esthetics—later defined by Reyner Banham as brutalism—which was characterized by the use of unfinished concrete to emphasize the imprint of labor.3 As Banham explained, the turn to a brutalist esthetic was motivated by an attempt to create an architectural ethic of “honesty”, which rejected the clean geometries of mainstream modernism that was deemed to have become entwined with postwar corporate capitalism (Banham 1960). This moral position was already articulated in several earlier modernist housing proposals, such as the Smithsons’ Golden Lane Apartments, which was itself influenced by Le Corbusier’s acclaimed Unite d’habitation in Marseille. In Park Hill, the egalitarian aspiration was expressed in other architectural features as well, including the single roofline maintained throughout the estate that allowed residents looking out from their apartments to see another block at eye level: a visual metaphor for “the purported equalitarian nature of social housing” (Bryant-Mole 2017). To strike a balance against uniformity, different colored linoleum panels were installed at each doorstep which allowed households to maintain a degree of individuality. The high esteem accorded to Park Hill in its initial years did not last long. By the 1960s, many unforeseen structural problems soon became apparent: the rusting of reinforced beams led to rapid corrosion within the concrete walls; the Garchey system proved to be too expensive to operate; 197

Cecilia L. Chu

Figure 10.1  T  op: The original Park Hill estate and its surrounding context. Bottom: A view of one of the estate’s street decks, or “streets in the sky”, which were aimed at replicating the social functions and vibrant street life on the ground. Image credit: Paolo Margari (top); and Roger Mayne (bottom).

and residents complained about the lack of sound-proofing in the apartments (Bryant-Mole 2017). But like so many other postwar social housing schemes, the real reason behind the estate’s eventual decline was economic: the global stagflation and collapse of the steel industry in the 1970s turned Sheffield from a prospective city to one of broken dreams. As the impoverished city council struggled to keep up with building maintenance costs, social problems escalated in tandem with rising unemployment and increased crime. The situation was complicated by the introduction of 198

The Afterlives of Modernist Housing

the “Right to Buy” policy in 1980 by the Thatcher administration, which allowed local authorities to sell off council flats at a discounted rate and transfer the responsibility of management to homeowners. The result was a growing divide between the deserving and underserving poor, with aspirational families moving into estates with high Right to Buy take-up rates and unpopular estates such as Park Hill becoming even more emptied and isolated.4 By the mid-1990s, one-third of the flats in Park Hill were unoccupied, and the remaining ones were mostly occupied by transient tenants. Many Sheffield residents deemed the estate as an eyesore and referred to it as a “slum in the sky”. There were growing calls to demolish the entire estate following the footsteps of its adjacent neighbors, Kelvin Flats and Hyde Park.5 It was therefore ironic when English Heritage decided to award Park Hill a Grade II listed status in 1998 in recognition of its “exceptional architectural value” (Historic England 2013). The move reflected a growing interest among heritage groups in reassessing the value of postwar architecture, including that of social housing, which was rapidly disappearing amid accelerating urban renewal processes since the 1980s (Glendinning 2008). Despite the controversial nature of the listing, it gave incentives to Sheffield City Council to conserve the buildings for adaptive reuse purposes. In 2004, a contract was awarded to Urban Splash, a Manchester property firm known for its success in turning derelict industrial properties into trendy loft complexes. The firm’s mission was to transform Park Hill from a “sink estate into a place where people would desire to live and invest” (Hatherley 2009; Blundell Jones 2011). Following emergent trends of urban regeneration, mixed tenures would be introduced by transforming two-thirds of the existing flats into market-rate condominiums, with the remaining one-third as subsidized rental housing. The “brutalist identity” of the estate, which has been posited as the project’s selling point, would be retained by careful restoration of the building’s original concrete frames. The signature “streets in the sky” will remain although they would be narrowed to increase the flats’ sizes. To make the buildings attractive to affluent residents, the original brick infills would be replaced with sleek aluminum panels, and the renewed estate would be gated with 24-hour concierge services (Figure  10.2). The bottom floors of the blocks would be leased out to new retails shops, bars, restaurants, and offices. Despite English Heritage’s initial opposition to some of the more “radical” alterations, it eventually gave in to the developer’s insistence that the changes were necessary to meet market demands. It was further argued that the rationale follows emergent principles of conservation; that is, the ultimate value of heritage buildings relies on their ability to adapt to new economic functions. As the renovation gathered pace, public opinion soon turned in favor of saving the estate, which was recast as a “monument of postwar modernism” and key resource for regenerating postindustrial Sheffield.6 The reaffirmation of Park Hill’s modernist status and renewed interest in brutalist architecture delighted many architects, who found solace in looking back to a forward-looking era in which architects shared collective confidence in their work with other professional experts under the welfare state (Till 2012). However, a closer examination of the reappraisals of the estate also suggests that the celebration of its history was a selective one, with the emphasis being placed more on the altruism and achievements of those responsible for the project and less on the yet-to-be fulfilled, equalitarian ideal that drove its modernist design. In the process, brutalism’s ethical origin in enabling collective social betterment has also been abstracted into a nostalgic image that was no longer believed to be relevant in the present (Dobraszczyk 2015; Saval 2016). This can be seen, for example, in the many news articles on Park Hill’s restoration that were accompanied with beautiful photographs featuring its brutalist details. These images, which were similar to the monographs of other masterpieces of the Modern Movement, also tend to reinforce the architects’ long-held conviction that design is key to creating a better world—an inspiring but generic statement of goodness that allows architecture to maintain a sense of disciplinary autonomy.7 However, as the discussion of this chapter shows, the production of architecture can never be divorced from 199

Cecilia L. Chu

Figure 10.2  A comparison of the facades of the old and new Park Hill estate. Image credit: Paolo Margari (top); and Andrew Basterfield (bottom).

the economic and political frameworks within which it operates, and the provision of housing— both public and private—is always tied to larger, ongoing development processes that shape the built environment. The transformation of Park Hill and an increasing number of contemporary adaptive reuse projects has been driven by the neoliberal economic order, which sees the delivery of social services including housing as provided by the private market. Although design plays a key role in enabling the success of these schemes, it often entails turning their original architectural intentions in providing for the masses on its head. 200

The Afterlives of Modernist Housing

From Columbia Point to Harbor Point: Re-Visioning Mixed Communities in New Urbanism If the conservation of Park Hill predicates on a nostalgia about the esthetic ideal of postwar modernism associated with the British welfare state, the relation to such ideal is quite different in the United States (US). There, social housing—more commonly referred to as public housing—has never comprised a significant portion of the housing stock in part because such provision has been consistently deemed by conservatives to be a waste of public money that undermines the private housing market. This negative view toward public housing has also been perpetuated by the media, which has historically used images of public housing, especially those of inner-city tower blocks, as a convenient shorthand for urban poverty and government malfeasance (Bloom et al. 2015, pp. 10–13; Madden & Marcuse 2016, pp. 1–13). The discourse of disaster associated with public housing has been further reinforced by a persistent focus on a small number of troubled projects, most notably the now-demolished Cabrini−Green project in Chicago and the Pruitt− Igoe estate in St. Louis, whose designs have been seen as contributing to crime and weakening community ties and have, more broadly, come to stand for the failure of architectural modernism itself. Despite these generally negative portrayals, critical housing scholars have pointed out that many public housing projects are actually in decent shape and remain a crucial resource for low-income families and other disadvantaged groups that the housing market does not serve (Madden 2015). Although public housing does face many problems in its operation, most are lesser than the result of inherent flaws of its architecture than of larger shifts in housing policies and resulting disinvestment that have led to inadequate building maintenance and collapsing infrastructure provision, coupled with the inability of local housing authorities to maintain a tenant base that could support and benefit from the program (Bloom et al. 2015, p. 21). Like in Britain and elsewhere, the dominant discourse of housing development in the past two decades has been one of a “dispersal consensus”, which involve deconcentrating poor households and creating new mixed-income communities (Vale 2015). Central to facilitating this process is the Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere program (also known as the Hope VI program), which was introduced in 1992 by the US Government to provide funds for local housing authorities to replace existing public housing with mixed developments that combine market rate and subsidized housing.8 The architecture of these projects is strongly influenced by New Urbanism, which entails a return to “traditional” built forms in 19th century America with an emphasis on “life on the street” that would help resurrect a lost sense of community (Robbins 2013, pp. 312–31). Although New Urbanists are adamant in rejecting modernist ­design approaches that are deemed to have produced monotonous superblocks with no regard to ­existing contexts and human needs, the Hope VI program was heavily influenced by one earlier redevelopment project, the Harbor Point on the Bay Apartments, which involved the preservation of several e­ xisting apartment blocks of a 1950s public housing scheme, Columbia Point in Boston. As in Park Hill, the apartments of Columbia Point were retrofitted to suit the needs of more affluent m ­ arket-rate tenants of Harbor Point. Despite constituting less than one-third of the redevelopment, the conversion of these buildings made a strong statement about the value of transforming—and not abandoning—one of the largest public housing projects and allowed their proponents to solicit further government support for similar redevelopment schemes elsewhere. The Columbia Point Housing Development was initiated by Boston Housing Authority (BHA) in 1951 as a result of the 1949 US Housing Act, which made funding available to local housing authorities for slum clearance, urban renewal, and construction of public housing. The project, which consisted of 27 tower blocks with 1,504 units designed for low-income families, was located at the edge of Dorchester Bay just south of downtown Boston, an isolated site not valued highly by real estate developers owing to its ongoing usage as a landfill and sewage treatment plan (Roessner 201

Cecilia L. Chu

2000, pp. 20–1).9 Unlike its more idealistic counterparts in Britain who were committed to devising innovative infrastructure for collective living, BHA’s priority was on maximizing housing production from the start. Its focus on achieving economic efficiency also led it to put aside recommendations by the Boston planning board to provide basic amenities such as shops, schools, recreational facilities, and transportation that were considered essential to a new neighborhood.10 Despite the lack of this infrastructure and its isolated location, the completion of Columbia Point in 1954 nevertheless generated much excitement for its new tenants, who were then mostly living in dwellings without heat, hot water, and proper bathrooms. As with elsewhere that saw completion of new social housing schemes in the early postwar period, these apartments became the key means for residents to experience modern urban living. The tower blocks themselves also acquired a wider symbolic significance associated with modernization and progress. However, such positive associations would be short-lived as unforeseen political and economic circumstances began to threaten the viability of the public housing program a decade later. While many public housing projects functioned well in their initial years, signs of trouble emerged by the early 1960s, when local housing authorities were hit by reduced revenues due to migration of predominantly white middle-class population to the suburbs, a move that opened up the inner-city rental market to blacks and in turn caused a decline of occupancy rates in public housing (Bristol 1991). Like in Britain, these economic pressures severely affected local authorities’ ability to upkeep the buildings and maintain a tenant base to support the projects, which were increasingly occupied by the poorest segment of the population.11 By the 1970s, Columbia Point was suffering a similar fate as that of Park Hill as the buildings became besieged by frequent mechanical breakdowns, drug use, vandalisms, and other crime (Roessner 2000). Although the problems were tied to broader political and economic shifts, social commentators tended to blame them on the design of the tower blocks and saw the deteriorating buildings as embodiments of all that were wrong with the public housing program. Meanwhile, architectural critics argued that the demise of public housing projects such as Columbia Point was a clear sign of the failure of modernism itself.12 In an effort to salvage the declining project, the City of Boston approved a proposal to lease the entire site of Columbia Point to a real estate developer, Corcoran Mullins Jennison (CMJ), in 1979 to redevelop it as a privately managed mixed-income community while retaining one-third of it as subsidized housing. The design intention was to “deinstitutionalize” Columbia Point and create a safe and pleasant neighborhood that would attract residents of different backgrounds to live (Farbstein and Wener 1993, p. 13; Rybczynski 2013). These objectives fit well with emerging ideas of New Urbanism, which called on architects to work with local communities to derive contextual solutions based on “ordinary people’s aspirations” (Robbins 2013, 332). To achieve these purposes, CMJ hired the Boston-based architectural firm Goody Clancy & Associates and collaborated with the Columbia Point Community Task Force which represented existing public housing tenants. The project architect Joan E. Goody explained that the tenants’ desire to live in a “normal” environment led her team to model the new Harbor Point after other “successful” Boston neighborhoods (Goody 1993, p. 31). The resulting design, which won the Urban Excellence Awards by the Bruner Foundation, incorporated a new waterfront park and a landscaped mall that took inspiration from 19th century American townscapes, as well as a reoriented street grid that reconnected the site with the city (Farbstein and Wener 1993). The arrangement also allows the reuse of ten existing buildings, all of which underwent a “radical rehabilitation” by the addition of “traditional” architectural elements including new pitched roofs, entrance canopies, bay windows, and brick stains that resonated with the styles of adjacent new townhouses (Goody, p. 25) (Figure 10.3). To address the concerns of safety of potential market-rate tenants, the development was gated with a private security force, and a code of behavior in public areas was enforced by the management. Although all existing low-income households of Columbia Point were offered a new unit at a subsidized rate, a dozen “problematic households” were evicted from the site. 202

The Afterlives of Modernist Housing

Figure 10.3  T  op: One of the preserved tower blocks of Columbia Point in new Harbor Point on the Bay Development. All the existing towers underwent “radical rehabilitation” by the addition of “traditional” architectural elements including new pitched roofs, entrance canopies, bay windows, and brick stains that resonated with the styles of adjacent townhouses. Bottom: A bird’s eye view of the standardized high-rise towers of the Columbia Point Housing Development project in the late 1960s. Image credit: Spencer Grant (top); and Dorothy Tang (bottom).

In many ways, the story of Harbor Point is similar to that of new Park Hill. Both have been praised for having successfully transformed from a “social housing ghetto” into a privately funded mixed-income community. The moves align well with emergent principles of urban renewal that support the conservation of derelict buildings and retrofitting them with new social content. 203

Cecilia L. Chu

Notwithstanding their different esthetic preferences, both Park Hill and Harbor Point were underpinned by a neoliberal rationality that sees the market as a more effective provider for affordable housing than the state. This economic argument is further supported by a moral claim that the mixing of low-income tenants with more affluent households in a “normal” (i.e., middle class) environment can help foster aspirations among the less well-off for upward mobility, reduce their dependency on the state, and lead to social harmony in the longer term. However, as Lawrence Vale and other scholars have argued, there is thus far little evidence to demonstrate the presumed positive effects of such processes (Vale 2015, pp. 147–51). Although proponents of Harbor Point and Hope VI projects that modeled after it often highlight their successful collaborations between developers and tenant task forces; the latter did not represent all the public housing tenants, particularly those who were forced out from the neighborhoods. Indeed, the fact that all Hope VI projects provided much fewer subsidized housing units meant that a significant number of poorer tenants would not have a place in the new developments.13 Other critics pointed out that despite their stated commitment to social betterment, housing authorities are motivated to support the Hope VI program essentially because they can derive income from selling newly built units, and developers are attracted to these projects because they allow them to develop prime real estate and make considerable profits (Williams 2003). Although New Urbanist architects eschew the modernists’ aversion to “popular taste” and claim to support economically diverse communities, their conception of community in reality is rather singular and fixed. Like the modernists before them, New Urbanists subscribe to an environmental essentialism that defines “community” as a physical entity, as if it could result from the design of streets and buildings rather than from the people who inhabit these spaces (Robbins 2013). However, revisiting the historical transformation of Park Hill and Harbor Point makes it clear that the presumed linkages between built forms and social behaviors are far from fixed but always subjected to larger shifts in the political economy of housing. As the preceding discussion illustrates, the modern tower blocks have evolved from a salient representation of modernization and progress in the 1950s to “slums in the sky” in the 1970s, and most recently to reincarnation as “modern heritage” and “traditional built forms”. In each phase of their careers, the buildings were inscribed with particular moral and symbolic values that were tied to the rise and fall of property values and changing discourses of housing in the larger urban context. These dynamics are further illustrated in the final case study, the conversion of a subsidized housing project to an upscale condominium complex in the Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong (HKSAR).

Transforming the Hunghom Peninsula Estate: Demolition and Preservation of the Public Faith In recent years, housing scholars have been paying growing attention to the public housing programs in East Asia, whose considerable success and popularity provides a sharp contrast against the perceived failure of those in Britain and the US.14 Among these is Hong Kong, where close to half of its population lives in government-managed high-rise housing. Since its inception in the 1950s, Hong Kong’s public housing program has evolved from an emergency scheme to accommodate the homeless and refugees to a major mechanism for assisting low- and middle-income families to acquire property at a subsidized rate. While the government’s long-term goal to create a “homeownership society” aligns with the neoliberal development model that emerged in the 1970s elsewhere, the success of the program and challenges it confronted were shaped by Hong Kong’s unique developmental history as a former colonial city state where market liberalism was long combined with a tight control of land by an interventionist government (Chu 2008, 2010). This arrangement enabled both local business elites and the government to derive considerable profits from real estate development while providing a safety net through the construction of 204

The Afterlives of Modernist Housing

public housing for a large number of refugees-turned-laborers. The sustained economic boom in the 1970s and 1980s gradually gave rise to a discourse of the “benevolent state”15 in which the government was expected to protect the interests of both private businesses and welfare of workers. However, these assumptions were unsettled after the Asian financial crisis in 1998, a time that coincided with the transfer of Hong Kong’s sovereignty to China. The collapse of the housing market prompted the new HKSAR Government to scale back its public housing program to support the private housing market, triggering new debates over the role of the new government and ethics of businesses. These dynamics were encapsulated in the Hunghom Peninsula Estate, a newly built subsidized public housing project which was sold by the government to a private developer in 2004. The Hunghom Peninsula Estate comprised 2,470 housing units designed for purchase by lowand middle-class families at a subsidized rate, and it was located on a waterfront site in the Kowloon Peninsula. It was originally conceived as part of the HKSAR Government’s plan to expand housing production and increase the overall homeownership rate from 52% to 70% within ten years in Hong Kong (HKSAR Government 1998; La Grange 2003). However, the introduction of the plan in 1998 coincided with the Asian financial crisis, which led to a sharp decline of property prices. The price collapse generated widespread dissatisfaction especially among Hong Kong’s middle- and upper-income classes which had invested heavily in property. Under pressure to support the market, the government announced that it would suspend the sale of all subsidized housing, including the newly completed Hunghom Peninsula Estate in 2001. The complex was later sold to a private developer, Sun Hung Kai Properties, which intended to destroy the new flats and replace the unoccupied buildings with private condominiums. The news of the proposed demolition triggered complaints from those on the waiting list of the subsidized housing program and numerous politicians, who accused the government of failing to fulfill its bold promise of providing homeownership for the less well-off (Chu 2008, p. 4). Strong voices also came from environmental activists, who led a public protest accusing the developer for wasting resources and damaging the environment. Under pressure to address growing criticisms from different fronts, Sun Hung Kai eventually decided to preserve the estate and “upgrade” its units for resale at a lower price. The decision swiftly put a stop to the controversy and has since been hailed by the government and business elites as a historical moment of Hong Kong, where “businesses were awakened to their corporate responsibility in protecting the public good” (SCMP 2004a, p. 3). While public discussions of the Hunghom Peninsula Estate did not evolve around the esthetic ideals of architectural modernism in a formal sense, much attention was paid to the design of the tower blocks and the impacts of the development on Hong Kong’s economy and the property market. This can be seen, for example, in the developer’s original argument that the new estate needed to be demolished to correct “a major mismatch of land resources”, as the subsidized flats in these existing towers “were too small and their quality too poor for market consumption at a prime waterfront site” (SCMP 2004a, b; Chu 2008). As the controversy grew, both the developer and government began to emphasize that the estate sale was in full accordance with “the principles of the free market and rule of law”, which were the cornerstones for Hong Kong’s prosperity and economic success (Chu 2008, 2010). When the renovated towers were unveiled in 2008, public debates immediately turned to whether the redesigned units succeeded in shedding their image as subsidized public housing, an issue that aroused great enthusiasm especially among prospective homeowners at a time when housing prices and property speculation was again on the rise (Figure 10.4). Although the evolving narratives of the project may seem to contradict each other, they illustrate the competing justifications for the use of land and property that had long defined discourses about Hong Kong’s housing economy, namely, scarce land resources, public housing as benevolent, and the competitive free market. Although public housing continues to accommodate a large portion of the working class who have benefited from the program, it was built upon a model of 205

Cecilia L. Chu

Figure 10.4  T  op: The Hunghom Peninsula Estate in the process of being transformed from a subsidized housing complex into a private condominium development, Harbour Place, in 2007.  Bottom: A view of the luxurious clubhouse of Harbour Place that was converted from a parking garage of the old Hunghom Peninsula Estate. Image credit: Baycrest (top); and Apple Daily (bottom).

development that consistently emphasized individual upward mobility and played down the notion of welfare. Central to this model was the encouragement of entrepreneurial property activity, which has long been key to the profitability of many Hong Kong corporations, a primary source of revenue for the government, and an important generator of wealth for many average citizens who speculate on real estate investments (Chu 2007, p. 51). This history also helps to explain the 206

The Afterlives of Modernist Housing

starkly different meanings and values ascribed to the thousands of standardized tower blocks in public housing which are largely similar in forms and functions as those enacted elsewhere. Unlike Park Hill and Harbor Point, these buildings did not represent a failure on the part of the state in achieving collective social betterment. To the contrary, they have been seen as an important component in enabling upward mobility for the working class. The core of the controversy behind the demolition of Hunghom Peninsula Estate thus was not rooted in discontent about social inequality or discrimination but in the loss of public faith in the government in its continual role in providing a safety net for the working population while facilitating property investment in which everyone could potentially participate. The irony of the case is that during times of economic downturn, the subsidized homeownership program to which Hunghom Peninsula Estate belonged became seen as competing against the private housing market. The situation temporarily exposed the cracks in the longstanding discourse of Hong Kong’s “economic miracle” and governing strategies. But the equation was quickly restored when the government backed away from its ambitious long-term housing policy and the economy gradually recovered, thus reinstating “business as usual”. Indeed, the collective enthusiasm toward property investment among the Hong Kong public was on full display in the unveiling of Harbour Place, the new condominium complex that replaced the former Hunghom Peninsula Estate in 2008. This was a time when the economy had largely recovered and property speculation had regained full momentum. As in all major residential properties in Hong Kong, the sales launch of Harbour Place included a series of lavishly designed model units, which were visited by not only potential homebuyers and speculators but also many members of the general public who were simply curious about the new property (Apple Daily 2008a, b). The interior design of the model units attracted much attention owing to the constraints of their small size, a legacy of their original configuration as subsidized housing units which could not be altered. As discussions in the media debated over the effectiveness of the design in transforming the basic flats into luxurious dwellings, focus was also directed to other architectural features that aimed to increase the estate’s prestige and property value as high-end condominiums. These included a “six-star” luxurious clubhouse which was converted from a parking garage of the former Hunghom Peninsula Estate (Apple Daily 2008a) (Figure 10.4). The extraordinary transformation became a major talking point in the media, inciting enthusiastic comparisons of the project with other upscale developments in the city.

Conclusion The examination of the “afterlives” of the three housing schemes in this chapter raises several issues for further consideration in the study of modern architectural history. The first is that although the transformation of each project from social housing to private development was tied to global trends favoring market solutions for the delivery of housing, the ways in which each project was implemented and their outcomes were shaped by specific historical experiences and existing discourses about the role of the state and market in social provision. This observation builds on those of critical urban scholars, who argue that to understand the actual impacts of neoliberalism on the built environment, one must take into account its “path-dependent character” and study its diverse manifestations across a range of geographical scales (Brenner and Theodore 2002). The preceding discussions have shown that although the standardized tower blocks were key features of postwar modernism and had been applied in many social housing projects in different parts of the world, the meanings, values, and associations ascribed to these buildings were not the same everywhere. A salient contrast of these views can be seen between those in the US, where public housing has from early on been deemed as a waste of public money and used as shorthand for government malfeasance and those in Hong Kong, where its public housing program continues to be seen as a major 207

Cecilia L. Chu

mechanism for allowing average citizens to move up the “housing ladder” (Forrest and Wu 2014). Meanwhile, it is important to point out that despite the negative perspective toward mass housing propagated by postmodern architectural critics since the 1970s, many tower blocks in American cities are in decent shape in reality and provide an important resource for lower income families not served by private markets. As noted by a growing number of housing commentators, the problems of the tower blocks often have less to do with their inherent architectural flaws but more with their isolated locations and inadequate infrastructures, which were strongly influenced by allocation of resources and shifting housing policies that in turn impacted the meanings of public housing tenure (Urban 2012; Bloom et al. 2015, pp. 10–13; Madden 2015; Narefsky 2015). A second consideration brought up by this chapter is the notion of design and shifting social roles of architects over the last decades. While design has been key to enabling the success of adaptive reuse in all three projects by capturing the collective imagination of the public, the visions presented, especially those in new Park Hill and Harbor Point, were markedly different from those of the original estates conceived during the 1950s and 1960s. It is worth noting here that architects are in general not unaware of such changes and some indeed have lamented that the growing “dictates of the market” have prevented them from directing architecture to serve “social ends”. This is evidenced in some of the reflections regarding original Park Hill, which was seen as having been constructed at a time when architects were entrusted with the power and authority to devise innovative housing solutions with the intent for collective social betterment. But as the preceding sections have shown, the success and failures of architectural projects are always shaped by ongoing development process and the political economy of housing. This also suggests that the heroic image of the architect associated with the heyday of the welfare state may have been an overstatement of the discipline’s power and autonomy.16 As Jeremy Till argues in his recent comment on Park Hill’s transformation, the growing reappraisals of the brutalist esthetic ideal have only perpetuated the long assumed tensions between “seeing architecture as an autonomous discipline with a false strength of its own, and as an act of engagement with larger forces that tend to weaken its internal strength” (Till 2012, pp. 19–20). The recognition of the limits of design and malleability of architectural intention leads to a third consideration: If architecture is always significantly constrained, or indeed more accurately, produced, by prevailing social and political forces, how can today’s architects maintain a degree of social and ethical independence in an era of neoliberalization and growing social disparities? What kinds of engagement are needed in order for them to address the multifaceted processes that have been reshaping the housing landscape and to improve the lives of those who do not belong to the property-owning class? These concerns inevitably bring up further questions about the role of contemporary architectural history and the extent to which critical analysis of past projects might inform practice. Dell Upton has pointed out some years ago that although architecture has always been a human enterprise embedded with complex material, social and political relations, this history has for far too long been construed as one of heroic stories of architects striving to create a better world through beauty and order (Upton 1991). These narratives have not only helped to legitimize the architectural profession but also allowed design to retreat to a state of autonomy whereas attempts at social betterment often predicate on an environmental essentialism that regards people and communities as abstract entities. The task of a critical architectural history therefore must be to elucidate the social concerns of the modern built environment and all their contradictions. It should make the point that although design can never provide complete solutions to all the social problems, there is an intrinsic relationship between the design of the built environment and the design of institutions. As the reexaminations of Park Hill, Columbia Point, and Hunghom Peninsula Estate all suggest, one always needs to ask how particular forms and norms of housing have been institutionalized, endorsed, and challenged by society over time. An awareness of the historicity and specificity of contemporary housing design and housing policies 208

The Afterlives of Modernist Housing

and their connections with emergent global economic discourses can be the first step for architects to reconsider the potentials of architecture in reorganizing everyday relations and the world, and by doing so engage more deeply with questions of social justice and political change.

Notes 1 For a discussion of the histories of mass housing and its mixed receptions and outcomes in different parts of the world, refer to the study by Urban (2012); and Stohr (2006). 2 One organization that has been leading these efforts is Docomomo (International Committee for the Documentation and Conservation of Buildings, Sites, and Neighbourhoods of the Modern Movement). Formed in 1988, Docomomo has since then organized biannual conferences and published several themed issues focusing on mass housing. See, for example, the special issue, entitled “Postwar Mass Housing” published in Docomomo Journal in 2008. 3 As pointed out by Smith himself, he and Lynne never thought of themselves as “brutalists” until Reyner Bahham “invented them” in his writing (Smith 1996, p. 65). 4 As Lynsey Hanley contends, the Right to Buy was the “Trojan horse of privatization” under the neoliberal turn. From 1980 to 1994, over one million British households bought their homes from councils. The mission was largely accomplished by the end of the period: “to privatize as much public housing as possible, thereby reducing a once monolithic pillar of the state to a manageable rump” (Hanley 2012, p. 91). 5 Kelvin Flats and Hyde Park Estate were the “sister estates” of Park Hill whose design were similar to the latter. Kelvin Flats was demolished in the 1980s, and Hyde Park Estate was transformed into an athlete village and student housing after a refurbishment. 6 A number of documentaries on Park Hill have been produced by British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) that discusses the status of the estate and its residents. See, for example, “Park Hill: who live there now?” (BBC 2016). 7 For a discussion of the autonomy of the architectural discipline, refer to the study by Larson (1995) and Till (2012, 2013). 8 The Hope VI program stands for “Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere”. The program provides money from the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development to local housing authorities to demolish and reconstruct “distressed: projects”. For a critical evaluation of the program, refer to the study by Tracy (2008, p. 1). 9 According to Roessner, given BHA’s priority in allocating valuable lands for private development, the site was, therefore, a perfect choice for building a large-scale public housing. 10 It was also suggested that the two landfills in operation to be closed to avoid potential hazards to public health. BHA’s failure to address these concerns would later be criticized faulted as key factors leading to the decline of the project. 11 Similar processes can be observed in other housing projects such as the Pruitt−Igoe Housing Estate. Refer to the study by Bristol (1991). 12 This was the key argument of a number of influential architectural critics. For example, refer to the study by Jencks (1977). 13 Although they were offered housing vouchers, these were often only enough to rent an apartment near a Hope VI project, resulting in a reconcentration of poverty elsewhere (Vale 2015). According to a study by the Urban Institute, it was found that only 19 percent of households studied returned to their Hope VI−redeveloped homes (Williams 2003; Urban Institute 2002). 14 For an earlier discussion on the public housing projects in Hong Kong and Singapore, refer to the study by Manuel Castells et al. (1990). For more recent reflections on the public housing program in Hong Kong, refer to the study by Forrest and Wu (2014); and Glendinning (2015). 15 The notion of “benevolent state” is borrowed from Marcuse (1986). 16 For a reflection on the role of architects under the welfare state, refer to the study by Swenarton et al. (2015). Also refer to Larson’s discussion of the relationship between architecture and the political ­economy (1995).

References Apple Daily (2008a), “紅磡海濱南岸: 居屋格, 豪宅價” [Hunghom’s Harbour Place: Subsidized Housing Style, High-end Condominium Pricing], 6 January, available at: https://hk.finance.appledaily.com/­ finance/daily/article/20080106/10611082 (Accessed: 1 June 2018).

209

Cecilia L. Chu Apple Daily (2008b), “紅磡海濱南岸: 16億化妝未脫胎換骨” [Hunghom’s Harbour Place: Six Billions for a Makeover that Didn’t Quite Succeed], 18 May, available at: https://hk.finance.appledaily.com/finance/ daily/article/20080518/11120764 (Accessed: 1 June 2018). Banham, Reyner (1960) Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, London: The Architectural Press. Bloom, Nicholas Dagen, Umbach, Fritz, and Vale, Lawrence J. (eds.) (2015) Public Housing Myth: Perceptions, Reality, and Social Policy, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Blundell Jones, Peter (2011) “Reframing Park Hill,” The Architectural Review, October: 83–93. Brenner, Neil and Theodore, Nick (2002) “Cities and Geographies of ‘Actually Existing Neoliberalism,’” Antipode 34 (3): 349–79. Bristol, Katharine G. (1991) “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth,” Journal of Architectural Education 33 (3): 163–71. British Broadcasting Corporation (2016) “Park Hill: Who Live Here Now?” available at: https://www.­ youtube.com/watch?v=MwC5Yer-2B0 (Accessed: 1 June 2018). Bryant-Mole, Bart (2017) “Ad Classics: Park Hill Estate,” Archdaily, 27 January, available at: http://www. archdaily.com/791939/ad-classics-park-hill-estate-sheffield-jack-lynn-ivor-smith (Accessed: 1 June 2018). Castells, Manuel, Goh, Lee, and Kwok, R.Y.W. (1990) The Shek Kip Mei Syndrome: Economic Development and Public Housing in Hong Kong and Singapore, London: Pion. Chu, Cecilia (2007) “Heritage of Disappearance: Shekkipmei and Collective Memory(s) in Posthandover Hong Kong,” Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review 18 (2): 42–55. Chu, Cecilia (2008) “The Myths and Politics of Housing in Hong Kong: The Controversy Over the ­Demolition of the Hunghom Estate,” Habitat International 32 (3): 375–83. Chu, Cecilia (2010) “People Power as Exception: Three Controversies of Privatisation in Post-handover Hong Kong,” Urban Studies 47 (8): 1773–92. Colman, Alice (1985) Utopia on Trial, London: Hilary Shipman. Dobraszczyk, Paul (2015) “Sheffield’s Park Hill: The Tangled Reality of an Extraordinary Brutalist Dream,” The Guardian, 14 August, available at: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/aug/14/park-hill-­ brutalist-sheffield-estate-controversial-renovation (Accessed: 1 June 2018). Farbstein, Jay, and Wener, Richard (1993) Rebuilding Communities: Re-creating Urban Excellence,” New York: The Bruner Foundation. Forrest, Ray, and Wu, Ying (2014) “People Like Us? Social Status, Social Inequality and the Perceptions of Public Rental Housing,” Journal of Social Policy 43 (1): 135–51. Glendinning, Miles (2008) “Ennobling the Ordinary: Postwar Mass Housing and the Challenge of Change,” Docomomo Journal 39: 4–10. Glendinning, Miles (2015) “From European Welfare State to Asian Capitalism: The Transformation of ‘British Public Housing’ in Hong Kong and Singapore,” in Mark Swenarton, Tom Avermaete and Dir Ven den Heuvel (eds.), Architecture and the Welfare State, London and New York: Routledge, 299–318. Goody, Joan E (1993) “From Project to Community: The Redesign of Columbia Point,” Places 8 (4): 20–33. Historic England (2013) “Park Hill,” available at: https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-­ entry/1246881 (Accessed: 1 October 2015). Hanley, Lynsey (2012) Estates: An Intimate Story, London: Granta Books. Hatherley, Owen (2009) “Penthouse and Pavement,” The Guardian, 2 May, available at: https://www. theguardian.com/artanddesign/2009/may/02/architecture-brutalism-park-hill (Accessed: 30 June 2019). HKSAR Government (1998) Chief Executive Policy Address, Hong Kong. https://www.policyaddress.gov.hk/ pa98/english/index.htm Jencks, Charles (1977) The Language of Postmodern Architecture, New York: Rizzoli. La Grange, Adrienne (2003) “Economic Transformation and Public Housing Reform in Hong Kong,” The Journal of Comparative Asian Development 2 (1): 21–46. Larson, Magali Sarfatti (1995) Behind the Postmodern Façade: Architectural Change in Late Twentieth-Century America, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Levitt, David (2012) “Park Hill: The Facts,”’ in Jeremy Till Keith Collie (eds.), Park Hill Sheffield in Black and White, Herne Bay: Categorical Books. Madden, David (2015) “Five Myths About Public Housing,” The Washington Post, 11 September, available from: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-public-housing/2015/09/11/­ 2e55a57e-57c9-11e5-abe9-27d53f250b11_story.html?utm_term=.996ff46e1da7 (Accessed: 30 June 2018). Madden, David and Marcuse, Peter (2016) In Defense of Housing: The Politics of Crisis, London and New York: Verso. Marcuse, Peter (1986) “Housing Policy and the Myth of the Benevolent State,” in Rachel Bratt, Chester Hartman and Ann Meyerson (eds.), Critical Perspectives in Housing, Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

210

The Afterlives of Modernist Housing Narefsky, Karen (2015) “In Defense of Public Housing,” Jacobin, 8 November, available at: https://www. jacobinmag.com/2015/11/public-housing-social-welfare-crisis-affordable-gentrification (Accessed: 30 June 2019). Newman, Oscar (1973) Defensible Spaces: Crime Prevention Through Urban Design, New York: Macmillan Publishing Co. Robbins, Edward (2013) “New Urbanism,” in Rodolphe El-Khoury and Edwards Robbins (eds.), Shaping the City, London and New York: Routledge. Roessner, Jane (2000) A Decent Place to Live: From Columbia Point to Harbor Point: A Community History, ­Boston: Northeastern University Press. Rybczynski, Witold (2013), “Looking Back at the Success of Harbor Point,” Architect Magazine, 16 A ­ ugust, available at: http://www.architectmagazine.com/design/looking-back-at-the-success-of-harborpoint_o (Accessed: 30 June 2018). Saint, Andrew (1996) “Park Hill: What Next?” in Andrew Saint (ed.), Park Hill: What Next? London: ­A rchitectural Association. Saval, Nikil (2016) “Brutalism is Back,” The New York Times Style Magazine, 6 October, available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/06/t-magazine/design/brutalist-architecture-revival.html?_r=0 ­(Accessed: 30 June 2019). Scoff ham, E.R. (1984) The Shape of British Housing, London and New York: George Godwin. Stohr, Kate (2006) “100 Years of Humanitarian Design,” in Cameron Sinclair (ed.), Design Like You Give a Damn: Architectural Responses to Humanitarian Crisis, New York: Metropolis Books. Swenarton, Mark, Avermaete, Tom, and Ven den Heuvel, Dir (eds.) (2015) Architecture and the Welfare State, London and New York: Routledge. Smith, Ivor (1996) “Park Hill 2000,” in Andrew Saint (ed.), Park Hill, What Next? London: Architectural Association. South China Morning Post (2004a) “When the Dust Settles,” 2 December. South China Morning Post (2004b) “Demolition of Estate ‘Not Acceptable’” 4 December. Till, Jeremy (2012) “Modernity and Order: Architecture and the Welfare State,” in Jeremy Till and Keith Collie (eds.), Park Hill Sheffield in Black and White, Herne Bay: Categorical Books. Till, Jeremy (2013), Architecture Depends, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Tracy, James (2008) “Hope VI Mixed-Income Housing Projects Displace Poor People,” RP & E Journal: Reimagine 15 (1): 26–29. Upton, Dell (1991) “Architectural History or Landscape History?” Journal of Architectural Education 44 (4): 195–9. Urban Florian (2012) Tower and Slab: Histories of Global Mass Housing, London and New York: Routledge. Urban Institute (2002) The Hope VI Resident Tracking Study, 1 November, available at: https://www.urban. org/research/publication/hope-vi-resident-tracking-study (Accessed: 30 June 2018). Vale, Lawrence J. (2015) “Myth #6: Mixed-Income Redevelopment is the Only Way to Fix Failed Public Housing,” in Nicholas Dagen Bloom, Fritz Umbach and Lawrence J. Vale (eds.), Public Housing Myth: Perceptions, Reality, and Social Policy, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Williams, Sabrina L. (2003) “From HOPE VI to HOPE SICK?” Dollar and Sense: The Magazine of Economic Justice, July/August, available at: http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2003/0703williams.html (Accessed: 30 June 2018).

211

11 Social-Interest Architecture in Brazil The Seed of Something New Daniela Sandler

This chapter focuses on the meaningful but overlooked production of a segment of Brazilian architecture known as assessorias técnicas—nonprofits that work on low-income housing through participatory design. Assessorias contribute to a more just urban environment by creating low-cost, high-quality housing while reaffirming the unique and irreplaceable role of architects in the process. Although the work of assessorias is small in scale, I argue that its importance is outsized for at least two reasons: First, assessorias offer a model of sociopolitical emancipation through residents’ involvement in design, building, and construction-site management. Second, they produce buildings of much higher quality than conventional public housing. Assessorias reconcile politics and design without subsuming one to the other; I suggest that this contribution is as valuable as their typological and technological innovations. I begin the chapter by defining assessorias in more detail. I move to an overview of the housing deficit in São Paulo, a city of severe sociospatial inequalities and inadequate housing policies. I include a history of grassroots social movements as precursors to today’s assessorias, and I focus on the concept of the mutirão, or cooperative self-built housing, as a crucial element in this history. The mutirão was used by early grassroots movements in the 1970s and is still used by assessorias today, albeit with critical modifications. After discussing the ethical complexities of the mutirão, I move on to the two case studies that make the bulk of this chapter: the Peabiru and Usina assessorias, in São Paulo. I devote most of my attention to their experiences and the knowledge gained from their practice, through close readings of their designs and testimonies from their members. A deep understanding of the spaces produced by assessorias as well as a critical account of their professional methods and practices are essential first steps in establishing their contributions. I choose to focus on this close account of the work of assessorias as an entry point, a first step that might offer the basis for theoretical explorations in future studies. Similarly, the assessorias could also be approached from a broader perspective as part of a longer, international history of participatory design and cooperative building. Although the questions of theory and history are undoubtedly necessary, they fall outside of the limited scope of this chapter.

The Concept of Assessorias Técnicas Assessorias técnicas are nonprofit technical consultancies formed by “architects, planners, engineers, social workers” (Imparato and Ruster, 2003: 93), who work with communities on affordable housing. Their multidisciplinarity responds to contexts with many needs beyond dwelling: unemployment, lack of access to health and education, etc. (Busko, 2012). Despite the chronic lack 212

DOI: 10.4324/9781315674469-12

Social-Interest Architecture in Brazil

of funds and the challenges of collaborative design, these organizations have built the impossible. They achieve high-quality design with minimum resources; they create not just buildings but urbanity; they provide not only homes but also tools for political and socioeconomic inclusion. They do so by combining their expertise with community participation. Designers and communities work in dialogue, sometimes even in tension, as assessorias do not relinquish their position as technical experts qualified to address constructive, environmental, and design challenges. Participatory design is of course nothing new—the work of Ralph Erskine, Lucien Kroll, and others also involved user input. But assessorias have an even more horizontal structure. Most assessorias are not led by a single architect; even when they are, they are not associated with that architect’s name as an authorial signature. Their decision-making process is nonhierarchical, and members rotate leadership positions along with other jobs (construction site management, blueprints, codes and approvals, etc.). In their study on different approaches to housing, Ivo Imparato and Jeff Ruster (2003: 93) spotlight assessorias as “one of the most innovative and promising” models because of their flexibility and community connections. Once assessorias register with the government, “the decision on which assessoria to hire is made by the housing associations” (93). So while the government provides funds, the “clients are actually the community groups”. What is more, a connection to communities “outside the public sector means that the assessorias suffer less of an impact in times of political transition” (93). Assessorias thus provide an alternative to the mainstream approach to housing, where the government is the client and architects or, more often, big developers provide large-scale plans from top down. Alternative approaches to social housing are necessary in Brazil, where the mainstream has failed to supply enough housing despite decades of public policies. The most recent census (Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística, 2010) revealed 11.4 million people (6% of a total population of over 209 million) living in “subnormal settlements”, that is, with no “property title and including at least one of the two: irregular streets and parcels; and/or lack of essential public services (garbage collection, sewers, water supply, electricity, and public lighting)”. A study from 2016 expanded the definition to include overcrowded dwellings, high-burden rents, and tenements, finding a deficit of 6.2 million units, or at least 18 million people (Federação das Indústrias do Estado de São Paulo). Small-scale assessorias do not purport to solve this deficit in all its magnitude, but they offer innovative solutions that could potentially translate to different scales and contexts.

A History of Self-Building: The Mutirão The demand for housing in Brazil has accelerated since the 1950s, when industrialization and urbanization intensified. Mass rural migrations toward large centers such as São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro caused explosive urban growth. Most of the migrants were poor and, even when fully employed, could not afford housing in the private market. Many of them occupied unused land and built their own homes, creating vast neighborhoods and favelas with little to no public infrastructure (Maricato, 1996). From the 1960s to the 1980s, the government—a military dictatorship (1964–85)—built 2.4 million low-income housing units (Bonduki, 2008: 73). This number was insufficient, and the quality was dismal: there was no concern for functionality, comfort, or culture—to say nothing of public services, common spaces, and mixed uses. The program favored large developers, who were awarded profitable contracts for cut-rate housing in cheap, remote areas. They produced dreary, repetitive mass storage for tens of thousands of people, who were further segregated from the rest of the city. As informal settlements and favelas grew in the 1970s, many residents began to organize around the right to housing (Sader, 1988). Political engagement was a necessity, not a choice. In the words of a community leader, Reginaldo Oliveira de Almeida (Didi), “It is useless to come here, submit 213

Daniela Sandler

an application [for a public-housing unit], and go back home and think that God will give you an apartment. What will ensure this is our fight, our organizing power” (Usina, 1990). Social movements took matters in their own hands by approaching municipal agencies and volunteering their labor to maximize resources. Following these community-led first steps, architects and engineers became involved, contributing technical expertise. This was before assessorias existed, and these professionals worked individually, on the basis of personal connections to communities, sometimes mediated by the government. In 1989, a progressive mayor, Luiza Erundina, created a program for mutual help and self-management, or Mutirão program (Ferreira, 1998), partly based on these experiences. The Mutirão program lasted only four years (1989–92), but had a foundational impact. For one, it spurred the creation of the first assessorias as legal entities that could receive public funds to participate in the program and assist communities in their self-building efforts. The Portuguese word for self-building, mutirão, is a combination of “mutual help” and “task force”. Unlike most Portuguese words, mutirão does not come from Latin, but Tupi−Guarani, a family of indigenous Brazilian languages. Originally, it referred to agricultural work, implying collaboration and manual labor (Caldeira, 1956: 23, 26). Today, it refers to any joint effort to benefit a community, an institution, or a person; there are mutirões in medicine, science, computing, etc. Historically, mutirão had a domestic and informal character. As the sociologist Francisco de Oliveira put it, in “the traditional mutirão, you call your buddy in the weekend, drink beer, eat sausage, and build your house little by little” (2006: 68). When the mutirão became a public policy in 1989, it represented a new, systematic way of producing social-interest housing cooperatively for larger groups than just “your buddy”. However, it did not do away completely with sentimental notions. For Eulalia Portela Negrelos, the Mutirão program recovered “the idea of the ‘mutirão’ … from the rural world, in the sense of cherishing community life, imbuing dwellings with more identity, unlike … those maligned massive complexes” (2014: 28). The bottom-up nature of the mutirão seemed the antidote to standardized projects. Caio Santo Amore de Carvalho, a scholar and architect at the Peabiru assessoria, notes the mythical power of the mutirão in the late 1980s and 1990s. For architects and students, “the mutirão house, designed and built as a result of the popular struggle for rights, supposedly had ‘something different’ about it” (2007: 212). This “something different” had to do not only with political struggle but also with what Oliveira deems romantic ideas of vernacular craft and community (2006: 82). Oliveira, a leading Brazilian sociologist, argues that the mutirão is intrinsically problematic for relying on free labor (2003). The labor pool is necessary for a task as complex and demanding as building a house (or many houses); one may only benefit if one contributes. This obligation was formalized as a requirement in Erundina’s Mutirão program and continues in the nongovernmental work of assessorias. A publicly funded mutirão requires that beneficiaries be affiliated with a registered community association. For Oliveira, this means double coercion: individuals are forced to join an organized, politically engaged entity and to devote time to the mutirão. The mutirão assumes that people are unemployed or that they will work overtime on top of regular jobs. For Oliveira, this is a perverse kink in the system (2006: 68). Because of these ethical contradictions, many assessorias who used to rely on self-building now turn to self-management, in which communities are responsible for managerial aspects, but hire third parties for most or all of the building. Time devoted to managing construction is seen as empowering because participants learn administrative, budgetary, and logistical skills. It is also seen as politically meaningful, as communities learn to negotiate internal conflicts and self-advocate externally, while gaining consciousness of their broader socioeconomic context. The new motto is “less mutirão, more self-management” (Carvalho, 2007: 222). But some, like Pedro Arantes—a scholar and architect at the Usina assessoria—see in the mutirão unique opportunities: “In the mutirões, producer and building are re-united, as opposed to the 214

Social-Interest Architecture in Brazil

brutality and the iron rules that are the norm on building sites run by capitalist concerns”. He notes that “this does not mean a return to handicraft” and that mutirões incorporate technologies such as steel structures and rational workflows. He also posits that the complex organisational and constructive tasks give participants a holistic understanding of how the urban environment is produced. The mutirão, for him, “points to a possible sense of totality and resistance, a space appropriated by social forces, as opposed to the domination of space by the state and profit-making companies. The mutirões are embryos of a kind of counter-space” (2004: 195, 196, 197). Not everyone shares Arantes’ view; for many, the mutirão is problematic. But the problems are not intrinsic to the mutirão. They are broader Brazilian problems, related to a colonial slave-­ holding past, uneven industrialization, and persistent economic disparities. Assessorias can refuse to work via the mutirão system, but this will not diminish structural unemployment, poverty, and favelas. Assessorias find themselves in perpetual quandaries, caught between ethical concerns and the urgent needs of a vast population. In addition, the mutirão had a necessary place in the history of housing in Brazil. In its heyday in the 1990s, the mutirão gave voice to a critique of modernist paradigms. It also produced actual alternatives to failing policies. Even if many assessorias have now found different approaches, working with mutirões was a formative step for assessorias to develop connections, technologies, designs, and critical insights. Assessorias also face their own challenging conditions. Many professionals use the word “precariousness” to denote their low wages, unpaid work and overwork, and job insecurity. Compensation is low, some of the work—such as institutional development—cannot be compensated at all because of nonprofit restrictions, and even work that can be compensated is sometimes done for free because there are no funds. As is the case with many offices in Brazil—even for-profit ones—most full-time architects work as service providers, and not as hired employees, because of the cost of benefits and taxes. As a result, many professionals have no health care, retirement plans, and job security (Werna et al., 2001: 129). So why do people work for assessorias? They are motivated by idealism and political engagement. In the words of architect João Busko, they “see the transformative potential of the architect’s work and the architect’s role as agent of this transformation” (2012: 13). They also find assessorias a satisfying environment, where they have more input in the creative process, and quickly experience all aspects of design and construction. But it is difficult to maintain this for long. Often, members leave as they get older—“It is easier to be available for work there when one is young, single, and has no kids” (Lombardi, 2011: 70). Some assessorias, like Peabiru, aim at reducing such precariousness, at least as a goal in the horizon (Busko, 2012: 75). Other assessorias, like Usina, prevent members from working full time so as to ensure that they have other income sources (Lombardi, 2011: 70). There are no easy solutions, and the history of assessorias is also one of making do. It is tempting to wonder what they could achieve with more resources. When I asked him, Carvalho (2017) ventured the following: Maybe we could buy our own office space so we wouldn’t need to pay rent; maybe we would offer better pay and benefits… We would provide more direct support to right-to-housing movements … all over Brazil. It would be great to have exchanges with other movements and technical consultancies in Latin America, Africa… Dreams! Carvalho suggests what assessorias could do not only for themselves but also for the profession, in Brazil and beyond. But perhaps the most telling answer comes from another Peabiru member, Fernando Nigro Rodrigues (2017): “I have the impression that if we had unlimited resources, we would not exist”. Creativity and innovation in the assessorias have often been spurred precisely by lack of resources, operational constraints, and socioeconomic and spatial challenges. 215

Daniela Sandler

Peabiru The Peabiru assessoria was founded in 1993 in São Paulo, by professionals who had participated in the recently defunct Mutirão program, as a way to keep working with communities (Werna, 2001: 129–31). The team included architects, engineers, lawyers, a psychologist, a sociologist, and social workers, who saw housing as intertwined with education, property rights, and social inclusion. They believe that “the system is not about merely building housing units” (Werna, 2001: 130). Peabiru’s output over the last two decades is far-reaching. It includes academic research and publications; design and building of new housing; spatial improvements to favelas; and even photography essays on Brazilian crafts (Peabiru, no date). Their practical work is enriched by research in design, sociology, and environmental studies, in addition to critical self-reflections. They divulge their research findings to academic and lay publics and engage diverse groups, whether in a city-council forum or in conversation with a neighborhood association. In this way, their work circulates through a variety of channels. This branching out is important because the work of assessorias is often invisible. They work on sites in extreme urban peripheries, where socioeconomic segregation is paralleled by spatial segregation. This pushes assessorias outside of the main field of vision of other sectors of society, potentially preventing new opportunities for funding, recognition, and support. Peabiru’s projects are quite diverse; the example below might not stand in for their whole body of work, but it is representative of their sensitive approach. Batistini (unbuilt, 2014) is a project to improve an unregulated, self-built settlement in the municipality of São Bernardo do Campo, part of the greater metropolitan region of São Paulo. Incomes are low; 70% of the population makes less than 7,200 dollars a year. The informal settlement began in the 1990s; now it contains 1,968 buildings, mostly residential (87%) with a density of 80,800 inhabitants/km 2 (Peabiru, 2014). In the past, the knee-jerk approach would have been to raze the whole settlement down and displace the inhabitants to a housing project. But in the late 1970s, scholars and policy-makers began to see favelas as an ineluctable fact (Denaldi, 2003). Architects and planners thought of ways to make them more livable and connected, an approach called “urbanization of favelas”. This pragmatic approach keeps people in place, close to their social networks, work, and transportation. For the Batistini settlement, Peabiru combines this approach with new buildings, so as to keep as much of the settlement as possible. This required a painstaking study of present conditions. The architects visited every single one of the 1,968 dwellings to decide which could be kept, which needed improvements, and which had to be replaced (Hodapp, 2017). They developed a range of solutions, from a kit of parts for do-it-yourself renovations for dwellings in good condition to new multifamily buildings. In some areas, condemned dwellings are scattered among homes in good condition; their removal will dot the extant fabric with tiny open parcels. These should be occupied by new single-family homes, a typology called Evolutiva (Evolutionary). Evolutionary houses start as one-story, one-bedroom homes of about 358 ft2. The footprint is a narrow rectangle that attaches to buildings on three sides. The structure can be expanded up to two additional stories and a roof terrace. If a home grows vertically, the ground-floor bedroom can be opened to the street. The architects anticipate that inhabitants might want to convert the bedroom into a garage or commercial space (Hodapp, 2017). The Evolutionary home can be customized in other ways. An evocative presentation perspective shows Evolutionary homes with different configurations (Figure 11.1). Façades are individualized with colors, windows, terraces, eaves, screens, and even a balustrade. The balustrade is particularly revealing of the architects’ views. Such balustrades are part of a vernacular of residential middle-class architecture in São Paulo; many apartment buildings by private developers, since the 1950s, have neoclassical elements such as mansard roofs, decorative coursing, friezes, columns, and the ubiquitous balustrades. These neoclassical condos should not be mistaken for ironic postmodernism; these buildings are self-serious and so are the residents 216

Social-Interest Architecture in Brazil

Figure 11.1  Peabiru, Batistini Housing Complex, Evolutionary Homes, rendering, 2014.

who made them popular. Many scholars and architects derided the style as middlebrow and kitsch, and the balustrades were particularly reviled as a symbol of bourgeois poor taste (Pulici, 2015). Sold as precast cement elements, the balustrades trickled down to low-income houses as a visual token of class belonging. The Peabiru architects would likely never design a neoclassical building, but their inclusion of balustrades in the perspective validates esthetic preferences other than their own. The Evolutionary houses are hybrids of architectural design and vernacular adaptation, spawned by “the needs and creativity of the inhabitants [which] are always infinitely superior to our projections” (Hodapp, 2017). The origins of the Evolutionary typology go back all the way to the 1960s, when the Brazilian federal government built expandable low-income houses called “embryos”. Since then, many public projects and mutirões have used the tactics as a way to address low budgets and changing family needs (Carvalho, 2007: 216; Hodapp, 2017). This is a similar solution to Alejandro Aravena’s “half houses”—built with a few essential rooms, structure, and infrastructure to be expanded and customized later (Aravena and Iacobelli, 2012). Other architects have proposed similar ideas—from Álvaro Siza and Steven Holl (Graft, 2016: 12) to Carlos González Lobo’s system for modular vaulted units that can be expanded and assembled in a variety of footprints (Ortiz, 2004). The idea for the Evolutionary has yet another precedent: the puxadinho, informal building extensions that are common in Brazil (Costa, 2007: 28). Puxadinho means “the little pulled one”, referring to the fact that extra rooms can be “pulled out of ” or extended from existing ones. Puxadinhos can be new attached rooms and whole additional stories and can even be cantilevered or corbeled out of upper floors. Many multistory housing projects from the 1970s have since been reconfigured by puxadinhos, which are self-built and unregulated (Bellucci, 2011). The Evolutionary house makes room for safer and more efficient puxadinhos. Peabiru developed two other types of buildings: a small multifamily typology with three floors and only two flats per floor (Figure 11.02) and a larger typology (6-story buildings with four to 217

Daniela Sandler

Figure 11.2  Peabiru, Batistini Housing Complex, Passageway Typology, 2014.

Figure 11.3  Peabiru, Batistini Housing Complex, Block Typology, 2014.

six units per floor) to accommodate a high number of families to be relocated because of environmental concerns (Figure 11.3). There are also landscaped grounds, institutional buildings, and a soccer field. The whole project combines minute attention to detail with a holistic vision. Unfortunately, the project was halted because of a political crisis (“Brazil’s Political and Economic Crisis”, 2016). In the words of architect Alexandre Hodapp, a member of Peabiru, “This is a labor of five years that is now no more than paper” (2017). Even if it is, for now, only paper, the project deserves to live on as a model of what is possible under different circumstances. 218

Social-Interest Architecture in Brazil

Usina Usina, along with Peabiru, is one of the first and longest-lived assessorias (Busko, 2012: 81). The foundation of Usina in 1990 stemmed from the involvement of its members with mutirão movements in São Paulo (Usina, 2015a); political engagement was central from the start. A social scientist, Jade Percassi, a former member, describes their approach as horizontal, based on Paulo Freire’s popular education theories, where exchanges happen through “collective processes, and not as a gift, an extension of knowledge to a supposedly ignorant population” (Usina, 2015a). In the words of two other members, Joana Barros and Edson Miagusko, the assessoria “must think with the movement”—it cannot think for it, neither should it try to think like it (Barros and ­M iagusko, 2015: 38). The mutirão as practiced by Usina moves toward a transformation of all involved. Their goal is to allow for participants to become powerful political subjects and agents in the production of the built and social environment. Take, for example, resident Gilmara de Oliveira (Usina, 2015a), who participated in a mutirão with Usina: There are courses to become a mason. I enrolled in one. When I arrived, there were only men. Everybody kept looking at me. … the guys turned to me and said, you’re not going to be able to cope, you’re not going to be able to carry the building block. … One day I turned to them and said, I am the coordinator of a right-to-housing group, I manage five hundred families…. what is one block in the middle of a mutirão? They looked at me in surprise, thinking, she’s bigger than we thought. Oliveira suggests that constructive techniques are just one small part of what participants learn in the mutirão. Managerial and logistical skills are equally important, but not with the intention of fitting into a business model; rather, it is the political dimension that matters: coordinating a large, diverse group of people with conflicting interests and personalities; rallying these people behind a common goal that benefits the collectivity as opposed to a few individuals; and mobilizing group energies through roadblocks and challenges. Oliveira’s testimony also points to the crucial role of women in mutirões. Most mutirão participants are women because of a complex set of sociocultural circumstances. These include patriarchal family dynamics where men get to rest from their full-time jobs during the weekend, whereas their wives (who are often also employed full-time) are responsible for the “second shift” of house and childcare. The mutirão gets lumped into the domestic realm of “house chores”. Beatriz Tone, a former architect at Usina, suggests another factor: the men often doubt that the mutirão will be successful, in contrast with the women’s optimism (Usina, 2015a). Tone also notes that many women come from abusive relationships, and the mutirão offers them an escape. They gain material independence and personal confidence in the mutirão, where they often have to be in positions of leadership. If the mutirão represents the possibility of emancipation and gender equality, gender relationships in the construction site are fraught. The challenges extend to women architects and other technical professionals (lawyers, social workers), who are seen with distrust by the men—even if in many cases these men are outnumbered (Tone estimates that on weekends, up to 80% of mutirão workers were women). Women architects from Usina report having to work twice as hard to establish their personal authority and professional credibility (Usina, no date; Lombardi, 2011). For Usina, participating in a mutirão is synonymous with citizenship and social justice. The mutirão is not simply a smaller-scale version that mimics exterior political processes; rather, the mutirão is a part of these processes because it involves the management and use of public funds. The mutirão “established a new baseline for the relationship with the State, in the administration 219

Daniela Sandler

of public resources and … the acceptance of new subjects who would be responsible for managing the construction funds, configuring a new political culture” (Barros and Miagusko, 2015: 36). But it would be misleading to restrict Usina to the realm of politics. Some of their most original contributions are in construction and design, such as the use of structural ceramic masonry, which they proposed for their second project, the Cazuza complex, in 1990. The project, in the city of Diadema in the greater metropolitan region of São Paulo, had started before Usina got involved, calling for a reinforced concrete structure and cinderblock walls. The beneficiaries, the Diadema Community Association, asked Usina to rethink the project so that it could be self-built. A selfbuilt project involving a reinforced concrete structure would be challenging and costly, requiring skilled workers (Usina, 2015b: 215–21). Usina proposed to use structural ceramic blocks instead, not widely used at the time partly because the cement industry had been happily providing cinderblocks to public projects within a system that favored large developers. Despite initial resistance, the association embraced the blocks, which were easier to assemble and had the advantage of being much lighter than cinderblocks, making construction less taxing. There were other benefits: the internal block perforations aligned to form ready-made ducts for wires and pipes, and after they were cleaned and varnished, the blocks looked polished enough to dispense with plastering or paint. The warm tone and texture of the ceramic form a counterpoint to the crisp straight lines of the coursing. If the white slabs of mass public housing look unhomely, the reddish-brown Cazuza buildings look domestic and inviting. The ceramic blocks were particularly daring because they were used not only in two-story row homes but also in four-story apartment buildings (where the blocks were strengthened with grout poured into the perforations). The multistory buildings were doubly groundbreaking: because of the structural system and because they had been done through self-building (Usina, 2015c: 240). Until then, the assumption had been that self-building meant small single-family homes. Being able to design multistory buildings meant a new world of possibilities for assessorias, allowing for higher densities, lower land costs, and more common spaces. Usina went on to use the structural ceramic blocks in other projects, such as União da Juta (Figure 11.4) and the one for the Cooperativa Pró-Moradia de Osasco (Pro-Housing Cooperative of Osasco), known by its acronym, COPROMO, where the blocks became modules that rationalized construction by defining the dimensions of rooms, apartments, and buildings (Usina, 2015c: 242). In using the blocks, Usina tested their limits and improved the system—“in the 1990s, Usina was the main group working on research and development of structural masonry, even developing new elements”, according to Arantes (Arantes, 2017). Their work was not simply applied technology; they produced new knowledge that spread beyond social-interest design. The fact that the ceramic blocks were lightweight and easy for nonskilled workers to manipulate should not be overlooked; a concern for work conditions is central to Usina. Mário Braga, a Usina member, asks as follows: “When the architect chooses a constructive system, does he have any data on whether it is more or less dangerous? … When the architect designs, he is responsible for this” (Usina, 2015a). This ethical preoccupation led to yet another innovation. In the COPROMO complex (1990–98), Usina used steel—a material considered high-tech and out of the financial and technological reach of public housing and self-building. The steel was used only for stairwells (the five-story buildings are made of structural masonry). The architects wanted to circumvent problems caused by reinforced-concrete stairs, which require experienced workers and additional time and expenses (Usina, 2015a). Steel staircases rise up quickly and can be self-built (Usina, 2015c: 244). The steel staircases were erected before the rest of the building and offered a safe means for workers to climb up and transport materials. Before, vertical circulation during construction was performed with unstable ladders and ropes that made work challenging and dangerous. In addition, steel stairs served as a ruler and level for each masonry course—no small help for unskilled workers. 220

Social-Interest Architecture in Brazil

Figure 11.4  Usina, União da Juta Housing Complex, São Paulo, 1992–98.

The use of steel stairwells in subsequent projects such as União da Juta (1992–98) emboldened Usina to consider steel for the whole structure of the Paulo Freire complex (1999–2010) ­(Figure 11.5). One of the challenges was to house 100 families in a small, steep, and irregular parcel. The steel structure addressed this by allowing for taller buildings (up to seven stories), which not only increased density but also occupied the difficult terrain more efficiently without sacrificing interior spaces or circulation. Because the steel structure is slimmer than either ­reinforced-concrete or ceramic blocks, it yields more spacious apartments than the norm for public housing. The slender structure also has an effect at the ground level, allowing for more communal spaces—this had been a request from the community (Usina, no date). Cut-rate public housing often skimps on shared spaces; here, the community made it clear that spaces for sociability are an essential part of dwelling, even if they are outside of the individual housing unit. The residents also appreciated other benefits: excellent natural light and ventilation and flexible interior plans that could be customized and even changed over time easily because partition walls are independent from the structure. For the Usina architects, there “was also a symbolic meaning in using a technology usually reserved for expensive buildings in Brazil, such as office towers, factories, and malls … This was a statement that no technology was out of reach for self-­organized workers” (Usina, no date). However, there were considerable challenges. The steel made the ­project more expensive than average, and lack of experience created technical challenges for the architects and self-builders at every point. The project ended up taking much longer than expected, and many Usina members describe it as a trying experience—but one that was nonetheless worth the trouble (Usina, no date). The Paulo Freire complex, named after the famed pedagogue whose work was so foundational for Usina, is striking. The expressive stairwell landings double as semiprivate terraces, and the steel structure stands out against the green building walls. Circulation and common areas make lemonade out of the steep terrain, with a variety of open spaces: elevated walkways, semi-sunken pathways, and small multilevel patios. A variety of uses—from a playground to a small garden— stimulate residents to maintain and enjoy these spaces. Cristiane Lima, one of the inhabitants, speaks with pride: “Everyone who visits Paulo Freire says that these are the best buildings in the area. Even the guy from the electricity company … says they are the most beautiful” (Usina, no date). 221

Daniela Sandler

Figure 11.5  Usina, Paulo Freire Housing Complex, São Paulo, 1999–2010.

Architecture and Politics In the last quarter century, assessorias técnicas proved that functional, culturally meaningful, high-quality low-income housing is possible in Brazil. But public policies have gone the other way. In 2009, the federal government launched the largest housing program in Brazilian history, called My House, My Life (Minha Casa, Minha Vida). It consists of federal subsidies and loan 222

Social-Interest Architecture in Brazil

guarantees for low-income groups. Housing is limited to a few preapproved typologies—all repetitive, undersized, and barebones—and built by large private developers (Arantes and Fix, 2009; Hehl and Angellil, 2014). Only 3% of program funds were devoted to nonprofits, assessorias, and community associations. Peabiru and Usina, as well as other assessorias, are still fully staffed and undertaking projects, but the economic and political conditions for their work have become even more difficult. The unfavorable political context suggests the limitations of the assessoria model. Assessorias developed precisely to circumvent changing political tides by working with affordable housing outside of government agencies, but they still depend heavily on the government for funding, land use, project approval, and political support. This dependency is problematic in a broader context of neoliberal economic policy, made worse in 2014 when Brazil entered a multiyear recession (World Bank, 2017). Even aside from external circumstances, the work conditions and political engagement of assessorias are difficult to maintain in the long term and even more difficult to replicate. All of this might suggest that assessorias are a limited example, a niche case study with some interesting particulars but no broader application. I argue, however, that this is not an appropriate way to assess the value of assessorias. They are not models to be followed literally and everywhere. Rather, they perform a pedagogic and critical role that can potentially ripple through professional practice and education broadly. Their practice, by its very precarious nature, is an empirical testing ground for creative work-arounds and innovative solutions. In other words, their work represents ongoing research in progress (even if this research is outside the molds of academia). What is more, the political gains they offer—from the economic and personal emancipation of women to the political effectiveness of communities—are relevant for Brazilian society as a whole. As the country struggles with corruption scandals, police violence, and socially conservative forces (BBC, 2017; Human Rights Watch, 2017), the idea of self-determined and proactive community-building is sorely needed.

References (2016). “Brazil’s Political and Economic Crisis,” Strategic Comments, 22(3): ix–xi. https://www.tandfonline. com/action/showCitFormats?doi=10.1080%2F13567888.2016.1198151 Arantes, Pedro Fiori (2004). “Reinventing the Building Site,” Elisabetta Andreoli and Adrian Forty, eds., Brazil’s Modern Architecture, London: Phaidon Press, 174–201. ——— (2012). Arquitetura na Era Digital-Financeira: Desenho, Canteiro e Renda da Forma, São Paulo: Editora 34. ——— (2017). “Perguntas sobre Usina e Você.” Online. E-mail: [email protected] (7 ­February 2017). ——— and Mariana Fix (2009). “‘Minha Casa, Minha Vida,’ o Pacote Habitacional de Lula,” Correio da ­Cidadania, July 30. Online. Available HTTP. http://www.correiocidadania.com.br/­index.php?option=com_content &view=article&id=3580:pcthabitacional310709&catid=66:pacote-­habitacional&Itemid=171 Aravena, Alejandro and Andrés Iacobelli (2012). Elemental, Berlin: Hatje Cantz. Barros, Joana and Edson Miagusko (2015). “Mutirão União da Juta: Do ‘Fim do Mundo’ à Padaria Comunitária,” Ícaro Vilaça and Paula Constante, eds., Usina: Entre o Projeto e o Canteiro, São Paulo: Edições Aurora, 35–57. Online. Available HTTP. https://issuu.com/usinactah/docs/usina BBC (2017). “Brazil Corruption Scandals: All You Need to Know,” BBC News, July 13. Online. Available HTTP. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-35810578 Bellucci, Raffaélla Gatto (2011). “O Direito de Laje e a Problemática do Registro Imobiliário,” Direito UNIFACS– Debate Virtual, 127. Online. Available HTTP. http://revistas.unifacs.br/index.php/redu/article/view/1386 Bonduki, Nabil (2008). “Política Habitacional e Inclusão Social no Brasil: Revisão Histórica e Novas Perspectivas no Governo Lula,” Revista Eletrônica de Arquitetura e Urbanismo, 1: 70–104. Online. Available HTTP. https://www.usjt.br/arq.urb/numero_01/artigo_05_180908.pdf Busko, João Lucena (2012). “Arquitetura: Prática Profissional e Militância Política: O Caso das Assessorias Técnicas aos Movimentos Populares em São Paulo.” Senior Thesis, University of São Paulo. Caldeira, Clovis (1956). Mutirão: Formas de Ajuda Mútua no Meio Rural, São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional.

223

Daniela Sandler Carvalho, Caio Santo Amore de (2007). “O Mutirão Por Dentro,” Maria Lucia Caira Gitahy and José ­Tavares Correia de Lira, orgs., Arquiteses vol. 2: Cidade: Impasses e Perspectivas, São Paulo: Annablume. ——— (2017). “Entrevista.” Online. E-mail: [email protected] (3 February 2017). Costa, Carlos (2007). “Entrevista – Raquel Rolnik: Pensar a Cidade Como Lugar Para Todos,” ­G etulio, 5: 24–31. Online. Available HTTP. bibliotecadigital.fgv.br/ojs/index.php/getulio/article/download/61406/59594 Denaldi, Rosana (2003). “Políticas de Urbanização de Favelas: Evolução e Impasses.” PhD dissertation, University of São Paulo. Ferreira, Paulo Emílio Buarque (1998). Mutirão e Autogestão em São Paulo: Habitação Popular na Gestão Erundina, São Paulo: FAU/USP. Federação das Indústrias do Estado de São Paulo (2016). “Levantamento Inédito Mostra Déficit de 6,2 Milhões de Moradias no Brasil.” Online. Available HTTP. http://www.fiesp.com.br/noticias/ levantamento-inedito-mostra-deficit-de-62-milhoes-de-moradias-no-brasil/ Graft (2016). Architecture Activism, Basel: Birkhäuser. Hehl, Rainer and Marc Angellil, eds. (2014). Minha Casa—Nossa Cidade: Innovating Mass Housing for Social Change in Brazil, Berlin: Ruby Press. Hodapp, Alexandre (2017). “Entrevista.” Online. E-mail: [email protected] (3 February 2017). Human Rights Watch (2017). “Brazil: Events of 2016.” Online. Available HTTP. https://www.hrw.org/ world-report/2017/country-chapters/brazil Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (2010). “Aglomerados Subnormais – Informações Territoriais.” Online. Available HTTP. http://www.ibge.gov.br/home/presidencia/noticias/imprensa/ppts/ 00000015164811202013480105748802.pdf Imparato, Ivo and Jeff Ruster (2003). Slum Upgrading and Participation: Lessons from Latin America, Washington, DC: World Bank. Lombardi, Maria Rosa (2011). Políticas de Habitação Popular, Trabalho Associado e Relações de Gênero: A ­E xperiência da USINA, São Paulo: FCC/DPE. Maricato, Ermínia (1996). Metrópole na Periferia do Capitalismo: Ilegalidade, Desigualdade e Violência, São Paulo: Hucitec. Negrelos, Eulalia Portela (2014). “Recentes Políticas Habitacionais no Brasil,” Luis Octavio de Faria e Silva and Ruben Otero, eds., Habitação e Cidade, vol. 5, São Paulo: Escola da Cidade. Online. Available HTTP. http://www.escoladacidade.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/Livro_Habitacao_e_Cidade_5_web.pdf Oliveira, Francisco de (2003). Crítica à Razão Dualista: O Ornitorrinco, São Paulo: Boitempo ——— (2006). “O Vício da Virtude: Autoconstrução e Acumulação Capitalista no Brasil,” Revista ­Novos Estudos, 74: 67–85. Online. Available HTTP. http://novosestudos.org.br/v1/files/uploads/­ contents/108/20080627_o_vicio_da_virtude.pdf Ortiz, Humberto González (2004). “Arquitectura en Precario. La Propuesta de Carlos González Lobo,” Ciencia Ergo Sum, 11(1): 117–24. Peabiru (2014). “Batistini, Rua das Flores e Vila do Bosque,” Seminário Nacional sobre Urbanização de Favelas, Universidade Federal do ABC, Santo André, Brazil. Online. Available HTTP. https://issuu. com/peabirutca/docs/ufabc_posters ——— (no date). “Programas.” Online. Available HTTP. http://www.peabirutca.org.br/?page_id=207 Pulici, Carolina (2015). “Prédios Neoclássicos’ no Espaço Residencial das Elites de São Paulo,” Estudos Avançados, 29(85): 237–61. Rodrigues, Fernando Nigro (2017). “Entrevista.” Online. E-mail: [email protected] (3 February 2017). Sader, Eder (1988). Quando Novos Personagens Entram em Cena: Experiências, Falas e Lutas dos Trabalhadores da Grande São Paulo (1970–80), Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra. Usina (1990). As Mil Moradias, Videodocumentary, Brazil. ——— (2015a). Arquitetura como Prática Política: 25 Anos de Experiência da Usina, videodocumentary, Brazil. Online. Available HTTP. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgrnvEhKFSw ——— (2015b). “Cazuza,” Ícaro Vilaça and Paula Constante, eds., Usina: Entre o Projeto e o Canteiro, São Paulo: Edições Aurora, 214–21. Online. Available HTTP. https://issuu.com/usinactah/docs/usina ——— (2015c). “COPROMO,” Ícaro Vilaça and Paula Constante, eds., Usina: Entre o Projeto e o Canteiro, São Paulo: Edições Aurora, 238–47. Online. Available HTTP. https://issuu.com/usinactah/docs/usina ——— (no date). “Mutirão Paulo Freire: Movimento Popular, Arquitetura e Pedagogia da Práxis” Online. Available HTTP. http://www.usina-ctah.org.br/mutiraopaulofreire.html Werna, Edmundo et al. (2001). Pluralismo na Habitação, São Paulo: Annablume, 2001. World Bank (2017). Global Economic Prospects: A Fragile Recovery, Washington, DC: International Bank for Reconstruction and Development; the World Bank.

224

PART II

Interrogations Introduction

Part II, “Interrogations”, examines significant themes in architectural research in recent decades, which have been broadly informed by developments in critical theory, cultural studies, gender studies, phenomenology, and theories about postmodernism, postcolonialism, and globalization. Tahl Kaminer’s “Autonomy, Criticality and the Avant-Garde” outlines the development of the modern idea of architectural autonomy and examines its complex relationship with the structural conditions of the discipline. Theories of architectural autonomy address ontological questions regarding architecture and define the relation of the discipline to its “outside”, typically claiming disciplinary freedom from subjugation to society, economy, and politics. Criticality, in turn, is presumed to require some level of autonomy from society – an autonomy that enables a critical distance. Consequently, questions regarding the autonomy of architecture are intertwined with architecture’s criticality. Autonomy and critique used to intertwine with the historic avant-garde’s project: the critique of architecture’s autonomy from city, in which the city, as a direct manifestation of political decisions, economic development, and societal organization, is the stand-in for society. Kaminer suggests that the historic avant-garde consisted only of a specific and critical section within modernism, namely, the designs that attempted to merge the building with the city. Today, however, autonomy can no longer be considered critical. The story of theories of architectural autonomy is told here as a story of transforming meanings, disputed associations, and exaggerated and unsubstantiated claims. While the idea of autonomy ought to have been exhausted by the 21st century–an era of flows, networks and of inter-, post-, trans- and cross-­ disciplinarity–Kaminer argues, it nevertheless continues today to animate architectural positions, self-perception, and discourse. Criticism is a craft with its own tools of the trade, used for explanation and evaluation, by students and teachers, writers, and designers. It is important to clarify the practice today, when so many opinions are broadcast so widely through so many different means, in person, print, and online. David Leatherbarrow’s chapter “Crafting Architectural Criticism” explores questions including: What is really critical about the several forms of architecture criticism in our time? Have the current means of communication changed the nature of what is communicated? And who are today’s critics: professional writers, professors, the architects themselves, or anyone who enjoys or suffers works that have been built? Leatherbarrow argues that practicing criticism involves a number of steps or skills. To be useful and persuasive, architectural criticism must bring into view a design’s unique characteristics. Imagination is required in criticism to reveal a new set of relationships. With a critic’s interest in the field extending a more basic interest in the DOI: 10.4324/9781315674469-13

Interrogations

world to which the work contributes and the culture in which it plays its part, criticism provides another means of access to the work, not only in one or another of its many aspects, but those that endow it with significance. As one can find in a given work its stance with respect to broader issues, Leatherbarrow argues, the work of architecture itself may form a kind of disciplinary criticism. Domesticity and gender used to be located outside architecture’s legitimized boundaries. If the canon of architectural history has privileged particular agents and processes, relocating domesticity and gender within architectural discourse implicitly addresses the shortcomings of a patriarchally biased historiography by reconsidering the contributions, outcomes, and impacts of other marginalized agents. Lilian Chee’s chapter “Domesticity, Gender, and Architecture” reconsiders the connections between “domesticity” and “architecture” by using the category of gender. She differentiates the monolithic conception of “home” from the processual aspects of “domesticity” and “domestic space.” Domesticity involves productions from which home is actively constructed through occupancy. Domestic routines include maintenance work, creative practices such as sewing, cooking, gardening, decorating, affective care (child-raising and elderly care), and increasingly, productive paid labour (freelancing from home, or the rise of the “home office”). In positioning homemaking as an ideological production, domesticity is inherently opposed to phenomenological accounts of home which emphasize stability and nostalgia. The chapter first revisits the fraught relationship between domesticity and gender during the 1950s to the 1990s. It then discusses the development of domesticity as an analytical category in recent contemporary architectural discourse. Based on research conducted in the Asian context, Chee attempts to situate domesticity and gender within an architectural continuum that extends beyond its customary Anglo-American sphere of influence. She argues that confrontational issues emanating from domesticity and gender can be communicated through an affective mode, and that this route is methodologically strategic particularly within a conservative Asian context. It is widely recognized that built environments have been instrumental in the most complex processes of cultural, social, and political changes. Andrzej Piotrowski’s chapter “The Architecture of Preemptive Spectacles” takes a step further to show that they may prevent people from thinking in certain politically inconvenient ways. Even when not deliberately intending to distort viewers’ knowledge of important facts, designers of material or visual environments have been able to alter or suppress prevailing perceptions of reality. In this way, they help avoid problems of the present and disconnect built structures from their political and social implications. This architecture of preemptive spectacles, as Piotrowski terms it, operates by redirecting attention and silencing interest in broader consequences of political, social, and economic trends. It has gained popularity by satisfying a subconscious desire to replace critical understanding with a superficial notion of visual effectuation. In his chapter, Piotrowski first discusses the transition from so-called Mannerist to Baroque architecture as a shift from a critical and artistically inquisitive modality of thought to a superficial and self-referential one. He then explicates how the kaleidoscopic ordering of commodified reality in Victorian England helped to cover up the conflicted character of the emerging consumer culture and how the same practices of denial resurfaced in late capitalism. Lastly, he explores how the recent shift from an engagement with critical theories in architecture to a superficial fascination with parametric complexity in visual compositions exemplifies how architecture directly contributed to the rise of neoliberal tendencies in the 21st century. Arising in continental Europe at the start of the 20th century, phenomenology involves the description and interpretation of human experience, awareness, and meaning. David Seamon’s chapter “Architecture and Phenomenology” reviews the complex, shifting relationship between phenomenology and architecture by focusing on an architectural phenomenology, the descriptive and interpretive explication of architectural experiences, situations, and meanings as constituted by qualities and features of both the built environment and human life. A complicated thread of events is presented, showing how architects (Ernesto Nathan Rogers, Jean Labutut, and 226

Interrogations

Charles Moore) and architectural theorists (Christian Norberg-Schulz, Karsten Harries, Thomas Thiis-Evensen, ­Juhani Pallasmaa, and Jorge Oteros-Pailos) became interested in phenomenology. The chapter highlights two key phenomenological topics in architecture: environmental embodiment and architectural atmosphere. Environmental embodiment relates to the lived body in its unself-­conscious perceptual awareness as it encounters and coordinates with the world at hand, especially its environmental and architectural aspects. One significant constituent of environmental embodiment is place, defined as any environmental locus that draws human experiences, actions, and meanings together, spatially and temporally. Architectural atmosphere refers to the ineffable material presence and ambience of a building that make it unique or unusual as an environment and place. Seamon considers two key questions in relation to architectural atmosphere: first, are there heuristic means whereby one might become more sensitive to the ineffable qualities of architectural atmosphere? Second, can architectural atmospheres be designed for directly? The chapter closes by indicating what value phenomenology might have for the future of architecture, particularly in relation to the imminent arrival of virtual reality. Vincent Canizaro’s chapter “Critical Regionalism: From Critical Theory to Postcolonial and Local Awareness” offers an updated review of the multi-faceted, variably defined, and continuously refined theory of critical regionalism. Beginning with Lewis Mumford’s writing, ­A lexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre’s 1981 coining of the term in “The Grid in the Pathway”, and both theirs and Kenneth Frampton’s extensive revisions, it discusses the theory, trajectory, evolution, and intellectual contributions to the concept. This includes critical theory, social and political theory, and literary theory. The account of critical regionalism is one that parallels architectural theory in the late 20th century and into the 21st. It is a cultural critique both of postmodern architecture and of previous theories of regionalism, paralleling and critiquing post-modernism for destroying legitimate and meaningful cultural references. As a theory and practice of resistance, it seeks to establish a dialectic between an increasingly globalized civilization and the local traditions found in regions, without resorting to romanticism or nostalgia. Its most recent evolution involves the inclusion of environmental concerns, an embrace of social justice and communitarian concerns as writ in architecture, and an embrace of a wider variety of “critically” regional practices and built exemplars. By doing so, Canizaro argues, the theories of both Frampton and Tzonis/Lefaivre have become more alike with the commonalities providing a dependable set of tenets that befit a globally relevant and promising theory and practice of critical regionalism. Marcel Vellinga’s chapter “Vernacular Architecture” explores the history and development of the discourse on vernacular architecture. Comprising an immense variety of diverse building traditions, vernacular architecture makes up a significant part of the built environment of the world. Because of its rootedness in place, culture, and tradition, it often plays a central role in the processes of cultural, national, and political identification. Vernacular architecture has frequently served as an inspiration for contemporary design, while at the same time it has found itself subject to processes of appropriation, folklorization, and commercialization. It has emerged as a significant area of architectural research during the 20th century, which has traditionally involved the documentation of the vernacular architecture of specific people, cultures, or places. But in the last few decades, in line with developments in cultural theory, more dynamic and active approaches that engage with issues around the definition, analysis, representation, appropriation, and sustainable development of vernacular architecture have emerged. Vellinga discusses the key authors, approaches, publications, and debates that have helped shape the field of vernacular studies, using a variety of examples to illustrate key themes. His central argument is that vernacular architecture is a residual concept that has served to define a category of architecture in opposition to “capital A” architecture, in order to define and validate the architectural canon. Its continued use in architectural discourse raises important questions about the way in which the latter values and represents 227

Interrogations

the architectural traditions of other peoples and cultures in a time of increased globalization and multiculturalism. From the late 18th century, the modern value-system of respect for old buildings began to emerge. The British expression, “The Conservation Movement”, sums up its essence especially clearly: the idea that the “protection” of old buildings is not just a technical or antiquarian doctrine but an ideological and ethical world-outlook linked into wider political ideas, which have fluctuated constantly. By the late 20th century, the “Conservation Movement” seemed to be at the peak of its power and prestige. But in its very moment of greatest triumph, in the 1970s and 1980s, that feeling of authoritative movement and destiny began to subtly weaken. Miles Glendinning’s chapter “Heritage Conservation: The Rise and Fall of a ‘Grand Narrative’” reviews three focal aspects of this broad shift. Firstly, he discusses conservation’s reliance on “place” – including its ideological stress on genius loci and its political alliance with nationalism and the 20th-­century “strong nation-state” – demonstrating how its sharp self-definition has been challenged at both a geographical and economic level by the processes of globalization. Then, he focuses on conservation’s most vital internal theoretical discourses, and above all its reliance on the concept of “authenticity” Glendinning shows how these have been displaced away from fixed, authoritative monuments towards the amorphous territory of intangible heritage or memory landscape. Thirdly, he dissects another foundational conservation discourse: the old, passionately expressed Ruskinian (or equally modernist) emphasis on the distinction between new and old, and between “restoration” and “original”, and illustrates how these began to lose cohesion and force. Shaped by the postmodern shift in values from “reality” to “image”, Glendinning argues, all these elements have started to merge together – with profoundly disorientating effects. Inscriptions of power in the built environment project very different values of imperialism and colonization, of nationalism and identity politics, and of the neo-colonial processes associated with globalization. Anoma Pieris offers a reading of the architecture of the colonial encounter in Asia and the ways in which cities and buildings were impacted by decolonization in her chapter “Power, Empire, and Nation”. She argues that imperial and national framings produce distinct historiographical traditions that reflect these very different legacies of power. The chapter starts with a review of the troubling imposition of European imperial power on racially and culturally different populations during the colonial period when European systems of knowledge and politics were introduced to colonies as pathways to modernity. It then discusses the indigenization of postcolonial architectures. Pieris suggests that given the histories of communal violence and suppression of minority entitlements in many of these nations, their use of monocultural architectural expressions for public architecture is problematic. Following the end of the Cold War, global city networks and mega region developments enable the rapid spread of liberal democracy and neoliberal economic change. They play host to western forms of cultural imperialism producing a range of imitative supermodern spaces, such as mega malls, hotel chains, and industrial campuses. Pieris argues that the West is still regarded as a model for progress, and its institutions and intellectual culture assumes world leadership. This is evident in the number of Euro-­A merican star architects with commissions, the global division of labour through the outsourcing of design documentation, and the unequal international architectural collaborations that maintain the ­western partner’s privileges. From a different perspective, Anthony King’s chapter “Architecture and Globalization” ­provides a comprehensive overview on the links between built environments and global p­ rocesses from the colonial period to the present. Starting with the bungalow as an example of how d­ ifferent building types have become transplanted around the world, he introduces different methodological approaches to global architectural flows in the distinctive economic, social, and political contexts. The historical and contemporary role of imperialism and colonialism in laying the foundations of the postimperial and globalized world is also discussed. He then moves to the urban 228

Interrogations

and architectural consequences of speeding up in worldwide inter-connectedness, where the long-held assumption that architects should pay respect to a building’s surroundings in terms of materials, cultural context, or climate, disappeared. A totally new paradigm of iconic architecture has inflated the role of the architect, giving rise to the notion of the “starchitect”. There is also a worldwide competition of building the tallest tower as the most important symbol portraying that a country has “arrived on the scene”. The result is the tendency of homogenization in the built environment. Homogeneity, however, King suggests, is not necessarily or inherently “bad”; it could be a way of reducing social conflict and creating harmony. In concluding the chapter, King argues that the wealth and power of corporations as well as state support behind them are the contexts in which architecture and globalization relate to each other in our time.

229

12 Autonomy, Criticality, and the Avant-Garde Tahl Kaminer

To acknowledge that the discipline of architecture engages in practice and thought with a wide array of fields of knowledge, ranging from philosophy to engineering, is to state a truism. The porosity of architecture’s limits only serves to highlight the existence of a disciplinary center and boundaries and the ongoing battles to shape them. “What is it to think architecturally?” asked the architectural historian Stanford Anderson (2009: 76). “The question is not new. We are led back to attempts to claim, and then discern, the autonomy of architecture”. The emergence of disciplinary-specific practices and methodologies was vital to the formation of the discipline – but was also related to the division of labor in modern societies, the ongoing process of formation of “silos” of knowledge and expertise, and the bifurcation and fragmentation of existing fields. Émil Durkheim and Max Weber have associated this process with the growth of knowledge and increasing need for narrow expertise in complex societies, whereas Adam Smith correlated it with machinic efficiency and Karl Marx, with capitalist exploitation in industrial society. In the visual arts, the beginning of such a process was particularly early. It was generated by the project of elevating painting, sculpture, and architecture from the status of crafts to liberal arts (Pevsner 1973), to the formation of new disciplinary institutions, theories, and practices. In the centuries following the Renaissance, academies of art – and by 1671, the Académie Royale ­d'Architecture – replaced the guilds of feudal society; geometry was advanced as an architectural form of knowledge; architectural drawings were codified as a specific area of expertise. A new professional elite was created, and the modern discipline of architecture, in effect, began forming. From the 18th century onward, the discipline was placed under increasing pressures by the forces of modernity. These “external” pressures ranged from economic to political forces, from technological to engineering advancements, and have been countered by disciplinary-specific fortifications that privilege and legitimize “internal” considerations and issues perceived as more purely and acutely architectural. Such defenses include the search for the “origins” of architecture as a mythical foundation, an emphasis on drawing or geometry as the epicenter of architecture, the focus on architectural typologies, the privileging of the design process, or histories of “internal” architectural progress in the absence of an “outside”. These defenses are at the heart of the diverse theories of architectural autonomy, theories that legitimize discipline-specificity. Architectural autonomy has been associated with the concepts of autonomy in Immanuel Kant’s humanist philosophy (Kaufmann 1933a, 1933b) and with Mario Tronti’s “autonomy of the political” (Aureli 2008), but its development owes more to theories in art and aesthetics. The understanding of architecture as autonomous of society typically spreads at moments of convergence 230

DOI: 10.4324/9781315674469-14

Autonomy, Criticality, and the Avant-Garde

between art and architecture and dissolves at other. Architecture’s status as a fine art made it susceptible to artistic understandings of autonomy; but despite many parallels, at certain moments in the history of the modern discipline of architecture, its development diverged significantly from the trajectories taken by the other arts. This chapter outlines the development of the modern idea of architectural autonomy and the manner in which autonomy relates to another ingredient of modernity: criticality.1 It will unfold the relation of architectural autonomy to artistic autonomy, a relation that has mostly been neglected despite its implicit presence in architectural notions of autonomy.2 The main argument of this chapter is that, in contrast to persistent claims, autonomy can no longer be considered critical. A second argument is that the historic avant-garde consisted only of a specific and critical section within modernism, namely, the designs that attempted to merge the building with the city. The story of theories of architectural autonomy is a story of transforming meanings, disputed associations, and exaggerated and unsubstantiated claims. Although the idea of autonomy ought to have been exhausted by the 21st century, an era of flows; networks; and inter-, post-, trans-, and cross-disciplinarity, it nevertheless continues today to animate architectural positions, self-­ perception, and discourse.

Artistic Autonomy Artistic theories of autonomy preceded their architectural counterparts and established certain understandings regarding autonomy that would later filter into architecture’s self-perception. Their emergence was related to the formation of aesthetics. Initially, in the 18th century, early theories of aesthetics were posited by Lord Shaftesbury (1671–1713) and Alexander Baumgarten (1714–62). The former argued that to judge work in a specific field – such as art – by parameters external to the field is immoral, whereas applying the field’s own parameters is “moral” (Stolnitz 1961). In effect, Lord Shaftesbury identified a moral argument for the suspension of moral judgement in the reception of art. By the end of the century, Kant (1724–1804) not only developed aesthetics into a recognized area of philosophy but also introduced the idea of the autonomy of the reception of art: namely, that an aesthetic rather than moral or utilitarian faculty is key to the appreciation of artistic work (Kant 1952). More radical conceptions emerged in the following century, in which artists associated with the loose art for art’s sake movement demanded that art avoid subjugation to economic motivations, to utilitarian ends and to political interests. “The useless alone is truly beautiful”, exclaimed the playwright and poet Théophile Gautier in 1834, “everything useful is ugly, since it is an expression of a need, and man’s needs are, like his pitiful, infirm nature, ignoble and disgusting. – The most useful place in the house is the latrines” (Gautier 1987: 99). By now, autonomy was identified not only in the reception of art but also in the artifact itself – an autonomy from society. The early bohemian artists of the same era articulated their own freedom from society’s norms in their lifestyle, clothes, and behavior. The distancing of the artist, the artefact, and the reception of art from compromised society encouraged a critical stance: modern art was seen to critique society for its utilitarianism, for its dullness and lack of creativity, and for the absence of self-realization, spontaneity, and freedom – the critique known as the artistic critique of society (Boltanski & Chiapello 2005). Art held a mirror to society, or offered an alternative by transcending society, demonstrating the wealth and beauty of a world beyond compromised reality. Theories of artistic autonomy, then, emerged in tandem with modern and protomodernist art. By the early 20th century, they were widely disseminated and increasingly dominant. The art critics Konrad Fiedler, Clive Bell (1928), and particularly Clement Greenberg (1989a), were major figures in the 19th and early 20th centuries who further developed such ideas. The latter’s focus was on abstract expressionist art that severed its representational dependency on the world 231

Tahl Kaminer

external to the canvass. “The picture has now become an entity belonging to the same order of space as our bodies”, he wrote, “it is no longer a vehicle of an imagined equivalent of that order” (Greenberg 1989c: 136). Greenberg argued that such nonrepresentational, self-referential art was avant-garde – understood as “cutting edge” – and critical of society. His argument found its more sophisticated counterpart in Adorno’s aesthetic theory. For Adorno, to be critical of society, art had to be at once part of the world and other than it – a condition of limited freedom, of autonomy: “Whereas art opposes society, it is nevertheless unable to take up a position beyond it; it achieves opposition only through identification with that against which it remonstrates” (Adorno 2002: 133). Art, then, had fully fledged theories of artistic autonomy long before the first architectural counterpart was presented in 1933 in the work of the Viennese architectural historian Emil Kaufmann (1891–1953). Why had such theories emerged in art in late 18th and 19th centuries and why was architecture so late in developing its own theories of autonomy? The literature critic Peter Bürger has argued (1996) that structural changes in the production of art during the 17th and 18th centuries were responsible for the formation of aesthetics as a specific philosophy of art during Enlightenment and for the emergence the theories of artistic autonomy. He identified a developing structural autonomy in the production of art once the aristocratic courts began crumbling. The rich traders sought to emulate their social superiors by assembling collections of art, but owing to their financial limitations, they had to pursue this by buying art works in the market. Hence, a modern art market emerged, whereas commissioned work dissipated. The artifact–commodities were increasingly produced by solitary work in the studio. The dissipation of commissions meant that art freed itself from the dictates of patrons, and was no longer obliged to represent society’s values. This radical transformation required a response – an explanation of the need for art. The function of aesthetics was to provide such an explanation. Artistic theories of autonomy, in turn, were developed to legitimize the modern conditions of artistic production and to valorize the freedom artists now enjoyed despite the pauperism and loss of financial security brought about by these transformations. The modern discipline of architecture had developed up to that moment in a very similar manner to the other visual arts. All three – architecture, painting, and sculpture – were elevated from the status of crafts to liberal arts in the preceding centuries, a process led by figures such as Alberti and Michaelangelo (Pevsner 1973) and dependent on development of particular disciplinary knowledge, practices, theories, and institutions. But the production of architecture did not transform during the 17th and 18th centuries in the same manner as painting and sculpture. Only after industrialization and urbanization did architecture begin experiencing its own structural upheavals. Among the major pressures experienced by architects in the second half of the 19th century were the new technologies and materials made available by technological advances, the emergence of mass-housing commissions, and, in particular, the need for housing solutions for the working class. The adequate response to many of these issues was developed only in the 1920s, in the Bauhaus and other centers of modernism, in which questions of adapting the object to the conditions of mass production were finally addressed. Modernist architecture distanced itself from art and embraced new technologies, a social role, and utilitarianism. Perceptions of architecture as art did not completely dissipate, but, at least in Europe, were mostly relegated to a secondary status. The emergence of Kaufmann’s theory of autonomy appears baffling in this context.

Kaufmann’s Conception of Autonomy Emil Kaufmann elucidated his theory of architectural autonomy in a series of publications, the most significant of which was his 1933 Von Ledoux bis Le Corbusier. This first theory of architectural autonomy was preceded by tacit propositions of autonomy by architects, historians, and 232

Autonomy, Criticality, and the Avant-Garde

critics (Kaminer 2011: 77–8), yet these propositions fell short of the rigor expected of theory. Kaufmann’s work contributed to the categorization of neoclassicism (Klassizismus) as a distinct architectural style expressing the revolutionary spirit, in contrast to earlier classicism (Klassik).3 Von Ledoux, more specifically, differentiated the early neoclassical architecture of Enlightenment from its Baroque-infused predecessors by identifying a transition in four phases during the 18th century. One of the features of the emergent neoclassical system, according to Kaufmann, was the autonomy of the singular element – the singular building – from the urban whole, enabled by the Pavillionsystem. The latter was a loose urban layout in contrast to earlier “organic” Baroque layouts (Barock-Verbandsystem) discussed by Kaufmann and the tight “set piece” and axial layouts of the highly symbolic “embellishment” projects of the 18th century. Kaufmann associated the independence of the singular unit from the whole with the radical ideas of the revolutionary era: the autonomy of the individual will in Kantian humanism and the concept of freedom in the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Kaufmann explicitly claimed the following: At the moment when, with the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the rights of the individual are affirmed, at the moment when, in place of the old heteronomous morality, Kant instituted the autonomous ethic, Ledoux laid the foundations for an autonomous architecture. (translation in Vidler 2002: 20; originally in Kaufmann 1933a: 12) The emergence of the Pavillionsystem was indeed an 18th-century phenomenon. It enabled the ubiquity of the villa as the ideal abode of the bourgeoisie in urban or early protosuburban conditions. The villa, beginning with Renaissance Venice and leading to the new homes of the wealthy merchants at the edges of English cities, projected respectability and the newly established social rank of the traders (Bentmann & Müller 1992; Ackerman 1986, 1995). Its emphasis on privacy and individuality perfectly expressed the values of the bourgeoisie. The loose urban layout of the Pavillionsystem allowed each villa or detached house maximum freedom from the “tyranny” of the whole. In Kaufmann’s later work (1952: 474, 1968), the understanding of autonomy shifted somewhat, and was primarily understood as an architect’s autonomy from disciplinary dogma, a will to break with accepted conventions,4 as displayed by Ledoux, Soane, and other “revolutionary” architects. Kaufmann’s argument is driven by the idea of zeitgeist, and the “revolutionary” architects are commended in his later books for synchronizing architectural advancement with their era’s spirit. Le Corbusier, featured in the title of Kaufmann’s first book, is mostly absent in the architectural historian’s work, as is modernism. Yet, there is tacit support for the modernist project and a discovery of the origins of modernism in the neoclassicism of Ledoux’s work. Ruskin and Arts and Crafts, major protagonists in Nikolaus Pevsner’s history of emergent modernism (2011), are all absent in this story. So, Kaufmann implicitly associated autonomy with a movement that idealized progress and modernization, that was driven by what Reyner Banham called “the utopianism, the zeal for social reform” (Banham 1999: 285). This argument places Kaufmann’s work somewhat awkwardly vis-à-vis the positions of the interwar years, including the rise of an antiautonomous avant-garde in both art and architecture, as will be discussed later. It highlights the historian’s immersion in his own field of architectural history. The core lineage of architectural history, from Alois Riegl, Heinrich Wölfflin, and Jacob Burckhardt to Pevsner, Sigfried Giedion, and Kaufmann, emphasized a reading of architecture as a form of art. Issues of composition, proportions, and decorum combined in such histories with historical progress in the form of zeitgeist and advancement of successive styles. In comparison with his contemporaries, Pevsner and Giedion, who introduced social consciousness and a conception of time-space, respectively, Kaufmann appears relatively rearguard. His periodization of neoclassicism may have been novel and contributed to a better understanding of 18th-century architecture, but the methodology deployed reflects a conception of architectural development in which the relation of architecture to external 233

Tahl Kaminer

forces is primarily associative rather than structural, an “idealist” conception privileging ideas. Hence, Kaufmann’s history did not absorb the spirit of its own era and its materialist–productivist impetus and was formed by the focus of his Viennese milieu on artistic autonomy and “artistic will” (Schapiro 1936; Teyssot 1981; Anderson 2009). His history of architecture not only introduced a theory of autonomy but was itself grounded in an autonomous approach. Kaufmann’s work entered the United States via the circle surrounding Philip Johnson at ­Harvard (Mertins 1997). As stated above, the idea of artistic autonomy was well-disseminated within artistic circles. Architecture’s status as a fine art meant that many critics and architects were susceptible to Kaufmann’s argument. A key component of European modernist architecture, however, was its ambition to engage with and shape society. This component was repressed in the reception of modernism in the United States, a reception which emphasized the aesthetic novelties of the movement (Banham 1999). The architectural critic Colin Rowe wrote (1975: 3-4) that: in the United States, the [European] presumption that only architecture could turn a “bad” revolution into a “good” one, that only a Wagnerian recourse to “total” design could avert social catastrophe, this could never seem to be very highly plausible. For in the United Stated the revolution was assumed to have already occurred – in 1776 […]. “If the business of getting the house to run well takes precedence over your artistic invention”, wrote Johnson in 1954, “the result won’t be architecture at all; merely an assemblage of useful parts” ( Johnson 1999: 209). Consequently, Kaufmann’s idea of autonomy was welcomed in America whereas mostly overlooked in Europe. It fitted neatly the positions of Johnson, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, and Alfred Barr (Mertins 1997; Kaminer 2011: 79–80).

After Modernism As the Fordist order and its utilitarian worldview crumbled in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Fordist-driven modernist architecture of mass housing and efficient, “functional” cities faced intense opposition. Members of the ’68 generation, ranging from Rudi Dutschke to Jean-François Lyotard, criticized the overbearing technocracy and bureaucracy of their society, a “one dimensionality” that assimilated all differences into a faceless mass. These critiques found their expression in architecture: critiques of faceless modern cities, of monotonous urbanscapes, of assembly-line housing, and of the destruction of cultural heritage, societal structures, and community networks. The artistic critique of society had become dominant. Once modernism reached its endgame in the 1960s, and as the radical politics of the “techno-­ utopias” of the era began waning (Scott 2007), an architectural interest in autonomy reemerged. A route originally spelled out some years earlier by Hans Hollein, Oswald Mathias Ungers, Aldo Rossi, and others gained traction. This trajectory disavowed the radical (“vulgar”) politics of the techno-utopians as much as the reformism of the modernists, and by emphasizing architecture’s aesthetic features began reclaiming the autonomy of the discipline. The return to architectural autonomy and the positing of architecture as a form of art were a critical stance against the hegemonic order of the time, yet covertly aligned with the emerging post-Fordist, neoliberal order (Kaminer 2011). Aldo Rossi and his colleagues read Kaufmann’s work and adopted and modified some of the ideas of the Viennese historian in the 1960s. Rossi was influenced also by the Marxist political theorist, Mario Tronti, a leading figure in the Workerist movement of the era. Tronti’s conception of society’s structure informed also the work of the philosopher Massimo Cacciari, and the architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri. His theory posited a society composed of diverse stratified levels: each level, or instance, paralleled and depended on others, and primarily on those belonging to the (economic, infrastructural) base, yet each maintained a level of autonomy. Tronti’s interest was 234

Autonomy, Criticality, and the Avant-Garde

in the autonomy of the political stratum, which meant that politics were not merely a reflection of and shaped by the base, but could actively take part in shaping society. Rossi outlined a similar position for architecture. In effect, although Kaufmann’s theory of autonomy had no relation to Tronti’s Marxism, the two theories were not necessarily inimical. Both Kaufmann’s “architecture” and Tronti’s “politics” could be described as “horizontal” strata with their own “internal” histories and with “vertical” elements linking them to other strata. In Tronti’s theory, the link was the assembly line as a mode of organization reproduced in each stratum during the Fordist era; in Kaufmann’s, it was the revolutionary thought of Enlightenment that shaped the architecture of the era. Rossi, then, could absorb Kaufmann and Tronti. Rossi’s particular understanding of architectural autonomy enabled avoiding the straightjacket imposed on practice by the idea of zeitgeist and facilitated arguing for an architecture that related only loosely to society. An architecture richer in its palette and meanings than the ascetic, utilitarian forms of modernism; a form of art, but not one which shuns society and politics. While Rossi sustained, to a degree, a relation of architecture to its externalities, architects on the American East Coast moved to completely sever architecture’s relation to its outside. The chief spokesperson for this rarefied architecture was Peter Eisenman. Eisenman was primarily preoccupied with theories that legitimized his practice, such as Noam Chomsky’s linguistics or Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction – theories that were positioned at such a distance from architecture that their “interference” would be minimal, if at all. Yet, Eisenman engaged with ideas of autonomy directly and indirectly: indirectly, through his critiques of utilitarianism and of architecture’s subjugation to an outside (2000a, 2000b) and, more directly, through a couple of essays in which he claimed that autonomous architecture is critical and that autonomy is the defining characteristic of the avant-garde (1987, 1997). He declared (1997: 78) that “Neither the autonomy of architecture nor the idea that this autonomy, in particular with respect to architecture, constitutes a permanent condition of the avant-garde can be merely willed away”. Eisenman’s conception of autonomy is, in effect, a transposition of Greenberg’s theory to architecture (Anderson 2009: 79; Kaminer 2011: 98): autonomous architecture, meaning architecture that is not subjugated to its externalities, is the avant-garde, and this avant-garde is necessarily critical of society. A somewhat disparate position surfaced in K. Michael Hays’s argument (1984) that an architecture that is at once an integral part of the cité, the political community or city, and autonomous of it, is critical architecture. This formulation was an adaptation to the architectural sphere of Adorno’s argument regarding modern art. For Hays as well as Stanford Anderson (2002, 2009), an “in between” or “quasi-autonomous” position offered the desired balance between disciplinary freedom and engagement. It allowed architecture to be critical of society. Eisenman shunned such a balance, suggesting that architecture becomes critical by a disavowal of hegemonic commodified culture. He wrote (1987: 167) that “[r]ecently, architecture has […] placed itself in the service of institutions, therefore in the service of perpetuating the current metaphysics of architecture”. Berating architecture for its subjugation to reason, representation and institutions (Eisenman 1987, 2000a, 2000b), Eisenman, instead, propagated the new, advocated “dislocations” and encouraged a focus on issues more purely architectural – on the process of design and form-making. Ostensibly, he advocated an “authorless” architecture (Eisenman 1987: 174–7). Yet his early Do-It-Yourself-style axonometric drawings only served to obscure the sharp focus in his work on authorship and on the role of the architect as the master of form. By 2000, Eisenman’s understanding of the critical shifted somewhat from Greenberg’s formulation. “This autonomy is neither formal nor semiotic per se”, he wrote elliptically (2000c: 91): rather, it opens up the internal processes of architecture to their own internal possibilities. It is the manifestation of these processes that will constitute the critical. […] criticality can be understood as the striving or will to perform or manifest architecture’s autonomy. 235

Tahl Kaminer

Less enamored with the idea of autonomy, yet occasionally associated with it (Eisenman 1997; Vidler 2002: 16), was Robert Venturi. The American architect’s 1966 Complexity and Contradiction studied architectural form through a narrow architectural prism, comparing and contrasting diverse designs and buildings from different ages in the absence of overt “externalities”. Yet his interest in mass culture is already manifested in this book (“Our buildings must survive the cigarette machine,” 1977: 42) and in his subsequent joint endeavors with Denise Scott Brown, the interest in “pop” and mass culture would only grow at the expense of any autonomous tendencies. In reaction to Eisenman’s influence over American architecture, a mutiny of a younger ­generation – Robert Somol, Sarah Whiting (Somol & Whiting 2002), Michael Speaks – against architectural autonomy engendered also a disavowal of criticality (Baird 2004). The “postcritical debate” accepted, in effect, Eisenman’s argument regarding the correlation of autonomy and criticality. To counter Eisenman meant to opt for a form of pragmatism, modeled on conditions in other countries such as the Netherlands and on precedents such as the work of Venturi Scott Brown and Rem Koolhaas. The latter, in particular, inspired an interest in architectural engagement with the world, even if this meant subservience to economic forces. Via influential articles such as “The Generic City” (1997a), “The Terrifying Beauty of the Twentieth Century” (1997b); and “Junkspace” (2002), Koolhaas offered not a rarefied autonomy, but rather an immersion in and celebration of the dystopian forces of modernity.5 The “postcritical debate” posited a-la-Koolhaas engagement (“surrender”) against an “autonomous” (“ineffective”) disavowal of the world. The marginalization of architectural practice in the United States, brought about by structural conditions rather than by architectural theory (Kaminer 2016), became invisible in this debate.

Bürger, Tafuri, and Criticality The visual arts, then, by gravitating from the crafts to the liberal arts in the centuries after Renaissance, began a process of developing disciplinary-specific forms of knowledge and practice, and eventually formed their own disciplinary institutions, such as the 1671 Academy of Architecture. Such disciplinary focus and specificity, and the inclusion of architecture within the fine arts, would later facilitate the rise of theories of architectural autonomy. Yet up until a later moment, the visual arts were subjugated to society: artists and architects were commissioned, the boundaries of their work clearly stated, and the symbolic role of representing society’s values dominated. Up until modernity, the world was experienced by individuals as a whole, a totality in which the arts had a particular and clear function. The dissolution of the aristocratic courts and formation of a modern art market altered the production of art. Artists were freed from commissions and suffered from financial insecurity. Aesthetics emerged as a means of explaining the role of art once this role was no longer self-evident, and artistic theories of autonomy were developed to legitimize a condition of production over which artists had no power. Architecture’s symbolic role began to wane only later, in the 19th century, when the discipline was required to respond to new needs (industry and mass housing) and new means (new materials and techniques). Increasingly, architecture distanced itself from art and emphasized its utilitarian prowess and its social value. The call for artistic autonomy was initially experienced as a provocation by a utilitarian society, a critique of industrial society’s inadequacies. However, as autonomous art became increasingly accepted by the most advanced bourgeoisie in artistic centers such as Paris, an avant-garde emerged that criticized art’s distance from life. For the artists of Dada, constructivism, and other avant-garde movements, the autonomy of art had to be undermined, and art had to merge with life. The avant-garde’s assault on mainstream modernist art continued in the postwar years with groups such as Fluxus and the Situationists. Peter Bürger described (1996) the onslaught by the historic avant-garde as courageous but futile: the avant-garde could delegitimize theories of autonomy, but could not alter the structural 236

Autonomy, Criticality, and the Avant-Garde

conditions of (semiautonomous) artistic production. In contrast, he sneered at the neo-avantgarde, which, in the postwar years, repeated in vain the gestures of its ancestors, gestures that had been themselves sublimated into rarefied art. Bürger’s work was a response to the changing conditions of the art world. The autonomous art that provoked 19th and early 20th century societies was no outsider by the 1960s; it was celebrated by the media and the elites, and was sold for high prices. The critical dimension of autonomous art had dissipated once the elites embraced contemporary modernist art. Bürger, then, differentiated between the artistic movements that challenged autonomy and the modernist “autonomous” mainstream. The latter focused on technical issues over which the artist had full control: line, contour, composition, color, materials. He reserved the term “avant-garde” for the former movements that challenged artistic autonomy by attempting to merge art with life. Tafuri’s Architecture and Utopia, published in 1973, one year ahead of Bürger’s Theory of AvantGarde, unfolds a similar argument. Here, one trajectory within modern architecture, “the irrational”, emphasized the issues of which the architect has full control, such as formal composition and materialization. Architects such as Hans Scharoun and Erich Mendelsohn developed the compositional rigor and expressiveness of their designs. In contrast, a second trajectory, “the rational”, proposed the merging of the singular building with the city. Tight urban compositions by Ludwig Hilberseimer,6 Ernst May, Martin Wagner, and others undercut the autonomy of the singular building and eschewed the Pavillionsystem. Rather, the design and form of the building were determined by the city, by the urban layout. Architecture, in designs such as Plan Obus (Le Corbusier) and Vertical City (Hilberseimer), was subjugated to society via the city. This second trajectory neatly fits Bürger’s description of the avant-garde: here, the parallel of the merger of art with life is the merger of the building with the city and architecture with urbanism. The city is understood as a cité – the city as the socius. Architectural autonomy vanishes in such designs to rectify a fragmented, alienated city and society. The singular building is subsumed into a tight whole, a totality. Rethinking Tafuri through Bürger leads to describing the architectural avant-garde as a critique of architectural autonomy. Yet while the artistic avant-garde could not undermine the structural autonomy of art, Fordist urban development, driven by tight spatial planning, realized the architectural avant-garde’s ambition of a building–city continuum in the postwar years. The work of Bürger and Tafuri, then, rejected the earlier formulations by Greenberg, Adorno, and others, in which the avant-garde is “the most advanced” in its field, and hence the spearhead of the mainstream, and in which a critique of society is expected to emerge by transcending society. Instead, their work suggested to rethink the avant-garde as a critique of autonomy rather than as “cutting edge”. In opposition to the mainstream of modernism that focused on technical progress, on disciplinary-specific issues of form and composition, the avant-garde sought to merge art and life, building and city. Considering the exaltation of autonomous art in contemporary society, the recent return of Adorno’s argument in a new guise in Jacques Rancière’s aesthetic theory is disconcerting (Kaminer 2017: 98–103; Rancière 2004, 2009, 2014). The autonomous art of “the aesthetic regime of art” is described in Rancière’s work as a force of dissensus, a critical force that disrupts the status quo. As an extension of his political theory – “the distribution of the sensible” – into aesthetics, the realm of the sensible par excellence, Rancière’s argument seems logical enough. On the one hand, the actual political process of “the distribution of the sensible”, the (political) decisions regarding what can be heard, seen or said and by whom, involves an aesthetic dimension. On the other hand, within aesthetics too, there are strict codes controlling who and what can be heard, seen, or said. Rancière’s argument, however, goes further by arguing that “the aesthetic regime of art”, which, in effect refers to autonomous art, is a force of dissensus. The Kantian overtones of his argument appear detached from the evidence, anchored in a bygone era in which autonomous art was indeed a disruptive force. Art’s autonomy is celebrated in the most advanced capitalist societies 237

Tahl Kaminer

precisely because its threat has been neutralized; Rancière does not acknowledge this condition of disempowerment through inclusion.7 Another recent return to autonomy, by the architect and theorist Pier Vittorio Aureli (2008, 2011), has resuscitated the arguments of Rossi, Hays, and Anderson: one-off, autonomous architectural “monuments” are presented as critiques of capitalist, Fordist urbanization, evoking a critical consciousness of capitalist urban development. Aureli, like Rossi before him, extended Tronti’s theory of the “autonomy of the political” to architecture (Aureli 2008), an argument that is used, in effect, to legitimize architectural autonomy. He has also introduced the idea of “the absolute” (Aureli 2011), a Kantian, idealist category, which, like the idea of autonomy, distances architecture from the messiness of reality and everyday life. Aureli’s antagonist, to which he posits the autonomy of singular architectural “monuments” as a response, is none other than Fordist urban development, the same antagonist against which the earlier generation of Rossi and Eisenman had posited autonomy. Fifty years after the original turn of architects to autonomy against the dominance of Fordism and utilitarianism, long after the demise of modernism and the rise of post-Fordism and neoliberalism, of fluid, contingent and risk-based financial, organisational and social structures, Aureli continues the battles of the 1960s, but this time against a much-diminished adversary. These recent excursions into autonomy have meant that autonomy remains on the agenda of art and architecture, yet the acceptance of these arguments requires a willful reading of contemporary society, a problematic return to exhausted concepts, and a certain blindness to the mountain of evidence suggesting that autonomy has lost its critical dimension. Cultivating an idea of autonomy leads to the myth of the architect as a demiurge, a convoluted notion of agency not within the world but within a limited fiefdom of culture. Such a mythical figure has given birth to the “starchitect” system and, more generally, supports the high standings of architects in society. It motivates young architects to enter badly paid internships and invest in unpaid competition work, driven by false belief in their own immanent ascendance; or, in other words, the idea of autonomy has shaped the relations of production and has contributed to the economic productivity of architects, often enabling outright exploitation. Art, today, enjoys a certain autonomy to “speak” freely; on other levels, however, it is hardly autonomous, deployed to gentrify urban areas, sell homes, and attract global investments. Architecture, in contrast, has never enjoyed structural autonomy, yet it too is allowed to “speak” freely, even encouraged, like art, to do so. The free “speech” of the one-off expressive landmark building masks the total assimilation of the work into a web of economic and ideological structures. Theories that legitimize and propagate autonomy are no more than a discrete ideological element in this web, a vital means of reproducing the logic of neoliberal, post-Fordist society in architecture.

Notes 1 For a discussion of critique as a particular feature of modernity and as an instrument of reformist politics, refer to the study by Kaminer (2017: 20–63). 2 Notable exceptions to this are Stanford Anderson’s “Thinking in Architecture” (2009) and Meyer Schapiro’s review (1936) of the Viennese School book that included a chapter by Kaufmann – although Schapiro’s review was undertaken within the context of an art review of an art history publication; hence, the cross-references to art are expected here. 3 In his investigation of neoclassicism, Kaufmann was responding to discussions of classifications and periodization of classicism, romanticism, and neoclassicism by contemporary Germanic architecture historians. Significantly for Kaufmann’s hypothesis, Giedion had identified in 1922 a certain independence of elements from the whole as a characteristic of what he termed “romantic neoclassicism”. Refer to the study by Giedion (1922) and Teyssot (1978, 1981). 4 Reflecting, to a degree, the concept of Kunstwollen, “artistic will”. This concept, associated with Riegl and cherished by the Viennese School of art historians, emphasized the artist’s authorship and control of form and of the disciplinary-specific aspects of a work of art.

238

Autonomy, Criticality, and the Avant-Garde 5 Much of the work of the Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) and Rem Koolhaas in the 1970s and 80s could be associated with autonomy: the interest in Leonidov, in which Koolhaas joined forces with Eisenman, John Hejduk, and others in attempting to “salvage” modernism, could easily be ­u nderstood as an attempt to battle postmodernism by reviving “autonomous” and “populist” ­modernism. The OMA entry to the Milan Triennale of 1985 was an assemblage of surviving elements from Mies’s Barcelona Pavilion, a commentary about architecture. And the inclusion of OMA in the Deconstructivist Architecture exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1988 suggested a preoccupation with the formal qualities of architectural design. Yet in the 1990s, Koolhaas was explicit in condoning architecture’s subjugation to economic forces and expressing a fascination with the city and its “grotesque” intermingling and intertwining of diverse forces and processes. Koolhaas increasingly assumed the position of the sage of “the real”, arguing that architecture lacks agency and autonomy (Kaminer 2011: 140–59). 6 Hilberseimer, in fact, embraced the idea of autonomy, although his understanding of it differed from Tafuri’s and Kaufmann’s. Refer to the study by Mertins (1997). 7 Although Rancière appears to endow all autonomous art with the power of dissensus, his theories have been used to legitimize art which is posited against its own autonomy. His work was particularly useful for Claire Bishop, in her attempt to retrieve something of the aesthetic within the context of socially and politically committed art in her 2012 book Artificial Hells. Rancière’s work aided in striking a balance between the aesthetic and the political, in a sense not dissimilar to the aesthetic theory of Adorno.

Bibliography Ackerman, James (1986) “The Villa as Paradigm,” Perspecta, 22, Paradigms of Architecture, pp. 10–31. ——— (1995) The Villa: Form and Ideology of Country Houses, London: Thames & Hudson. Adorno, Theodor W. (2002) Aesthetic Theory [1970], trans. R. Hullot-Kentor, London: The Athlone Press. Anderson, Stanford (2002) “Quasi-Autonomy in Architecture: The Search for an ‘In-Between’,” Perspecta, 33, Mining Autonomy, pp. 30–7. ——— (2009) “Thinking in Architecture,” in E. Laaksonen, ed., Ptah 08 Yearbook, Helsinki: Alvar Aalto Academy, pp. 72–86. Aureli, Pier Vittorio (2008) The Project of Autonomy: Politics and Architecture Within and Against Architecture, New York: Princeton Architectural Press. ——— (2011) The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Baird, George (2004) “‘Criticality’ and its Discontents”, Harvard Design Magazine, Fall/Winter, No. 21, available HTTP:

­(accessed 24 July 2005). Banham, Reyner (1999) “Actual Monuments,” in A Critic Writes: Essays by Reyner Banham, selected by ­Banham, M., P. Barker, S. Lyall, and C. Price, Berkeley, CA and London: University of California Press, pp. 281–91. Bell, Clive (1928) Art, London: Chatto & Windus. Bentmann, Reinhard & Michael Müller (1992) The Villa as Hegemonic Architecture, New Jersey and London: Humanities Press International. Bishop, Claire (2012) Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, London: Verso. Boltanski, Luc & Eve Chiapello (2005) The New Spirit of Capitalism [1999], trans. G. Elliott, London and New York: Verso. Bürger, Peter (1996) Theory of the Avant-Garde [1974], trans. M. Shaw, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Eisenman, Peter (1987) Houses of Cards, New York: Oxford University Press. ——— (1997) “Autonomy and the Avant-garde,” in Somol, R., ed., Autonomy and Ideology: Positioning an Avant-Garde in America, New York: Monacelli Press, pp. 68–79. ——— (2000a) “Post-functionalism” [1976], in Hays, K.M., ed., Architecture Theory since 1968, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, pp. 236–9. ——— (2000b) “The End of the Classical: The End of the Beginning, the End of the End” [1984], in Hays, K.M., ed., Architecture Theory since 1968, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, pp. 524–38. ——— (2000c) “Autonomy and the Will to Be Critical,” Assemblage, No. 41 (Apr.), pp. 90–1. Gautier, Theophile (1987) “Preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin” [1835], trans. J. Murphy, in Harrison, C., Wood, P. and Gaiger, J., eds, Art in Theory 1815–1900, London: Blackwell Publishers, pp. 96–100. Giedion, Siegfried (1921) Spätbarocker und romantischer Klassizismus, Munich: F. Brückmann. Greenberg, Clement (1989a) Art and Culture: Critical Essays, Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

239

Tahl Kaminer ——— (1989b) “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” [1939], in Art and Culture: Critical Essays, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, pp. 3–21. ——— (1989c) “Abstract, Representational, and so Forth” [1954], in Art and Culture: Critical Essays, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, pp. 133–8. Hays, K. Michael (1984) “Critical Architecture: Between Culture and Form,” Perspecta, 21, pp. 14–29. ——— (1997) “Abstraction’s Appearance (Seagram Building),” in R. Somol, ed., Autonomy and Ideology: Positioning an Avant-Garde in Americas, New York: Monacelli Press, pp. 277–91. Johnson, Philip (1999) “The Seven Crutches of Modern Architecture” [1954], in Jencks, C. & Kropf, K., eds, Theories and Manifestoes of Contemporary Architecture, London: Academy Editions, p. 209. Kaminer, Tahl (2011) Architecture, Crisis and Resuscitation: The Reproduction of Post-Fordism in Late-­TwentiethCentury Architecture, London: Routledge. ——— (2016) “Capital A”, in Deamer, P., Cayer, A., Korsh, S., Peterson, E. & Shvartzberg, M., eds, ­A symmetric Labors: The Economy of Architecture in Theory and Practice, New York: The Architecture Lobby, pp. 16–20. ——— (2017) The Efficacy of Architecture: Political Contestation and Agency, London: Routledge. Kant, Immanuel (1952) The Critique of Judgement [1790], Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kaufmann, Emil (1933a) Von Ledoux bis Le Corbusier: Ursprung und Entwicklung der Autonomen Architecktur, Vienna: Passer. ——— (1933b) “Die Stadt des Architekten Ledoux,” in Pächt, O., ed., Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen II, Berlin: Frankfurter, pp. 131–60. ——— (1952) Three Revolutionary Architects: Boullée, Ledoux and Lequeu, Philadelphia, PA: The American Philosophical Society. ——— (1968) Architecture in the Age of Reason: Baroque and Post-Baroque in England, France, and Italy [1955], New York: Dover. Koolhaas, Rem (1997a) “The Generic City”, in Koolhaas, Rem, OMA, and Mau, B., eds, S, M, L, XL, New York: Monacelli Press, pp. 1238–64. ——— (1997b) “The Terrifying Beauty of the Twentieth Century”, in Koolhaas, Rem, OMA, and Mau, B., eds, S, M, L, XL, New York: Monacelli Press, pp. 205–8. ——— (2002) “Junk Space”, October 100, Spring, pp. 175–90. Mertins, Detlef (1997) “System and Freedom: Sigfried Giedion, Emil Kaufmann, and the Constitution of Architectural Modernity,” in Somol, R., ed., Autonomy and Ideology: Positioning an Avant-Garde in America, New York: Monacelli Press, pp. 212–31. Pevsner, Nikolaus (1973) Academies of Art, Past and Present [1940], New York: Da Capo Press. ——— (2011) Pioneers of Modern Design, from William Morris to Walter Gropius, Bath: Palazzo. Rancière, Jacques (2004) The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Rockhill, G., New York: Continuum. ——— (2009) Aesthetics and its Discontents, trans. Corcoran, S., Cambridge: Polity Press. ——— (2014) Dissesnsus: On Politics and Aesthetics, trans. Corcoran, S., London and New Delhi: Bloomsbury. Rossi, Aldo (1991) The Architecture of the City [1966], Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rowe, Colin (1975) “Introduction”, Five Architects: Eisenman, Graves, Gwathmey, Hejduk, Meier, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 3–7. Schapiro, Meyer (1936) “The New Viennese School,” The Art Bulletin, 17, pp. 258–66. Scott, Felicity D. (2007) Architecture or Techno-Utopia: Politics after Modernism, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Somol, Robert & Sarah Whiting (2002) “Notes Around the Doppler Effect and other Moods of Modernism”, Perspecta, 33 – Mining Autonomy issue, pp. 72–7. Stolnitz, Jerome (1961) “On the Origins of ‘Aesthetic Disinterestedness’,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 20, No. 2, pp. 131–43. Tafuri, Manfredo (1976) Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development [1973], trans. Luigia La Penta, B., Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. Teyssot, Georges (1978) “Emil Kaufmann and the Architecture of Reason: Klassizismus and ‘Revolutionary Architecture’,” Oppositions, 13, pp. 47–74. ——— (1981) “Neoclassic and “Autonomous” Architecture: the Formalism of Emil Kaufmann,” Architectural Design, 51, 6/7, pp. 24–9. Venturi, Robert (1977) Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture [1966], second ed., New York: The ­Museum of Modern Art. Vidler, Anthony (2002) “The Ledoux Effect: Emil Kaufmann and the Claims of Kantian Autonomy,” ­Perspecta, 33 – Mining Autonomy issue, pp. 16–29.

240

13 Crafting Architecture Criticism David Leatherbarrow

Of the many approaches to architecture criticism one could take—stating its purpose, distinguishing it from other forms of writing or speaking, or describing its history, current state, and prospect—I will mainly describe it as a craft, with its own tools of the trade, used for explanation and evaluation, by students and teachers, writers, and designers.1 Clarifying the practice is an important task today, when so many opinions are broadcast so widely through so many different means, in person, print, and online. With all that is said about buildings and cities these days, one feels obliged to ask what is really critical about today’s several forms of architecture criticism? Have today’s means of communication changed the nature of what is communicated? And who are today’s critics: professional writers, professors, the architects themselves, or anyone who enjoys or suffers works that have been built? Professional criticism grows from the same soil that sustains nonprofessional assessments, the works that comprise our built environment, as they embody and express cultural norms and individual desires. It is hardly surprising that many people have opinions about the qualities of one place or another, newly built or long-standing, for never was there a room, building, or street that satisfied everyone’s expectations and wishes. Praise is sometimes intended in these judgments, just as often complaint. Deep knowledge of the field is not required for the expression of one’s views; instead, common sense, although opinions about quality do vary. Today, the media of nonprofessional assessment are social in two senses: conversational and digital, the latter becoming increasingly common and quickly disseminated (in architecture blogs, for example). Journalism is something different, for several reasons. One is that it is a profession, craft-like I have said, practiced by contemporary equivalents to traditional apprentices, journeymen, and masters. Steady interest in the field, not only single buildings but also writing skills can be assumed. Intended mainly for the general public, architectural journalism has historically appeared in the newspapers of large cities or magazines. Today more and more appears online, sometimes in parallel with print editions. No matter what format, most writers use lively and rather self-assured prose.2 This kind of assessment is the polar opposite to architectural theory, still another kind of critique, published mainly by professors in architecture journals and academic books, most of which assume well-informed authors and readers, who are perhaps too willing to tolerate wordiness and jargon in place of clarity and precision. Everyday opinion and academic theory overlap with my concern here, but can be distinguished from it.3 My focus is on the kind of description, interpretation, and evaluation that takes particular care with its observations. Furthermore, its “readings” indicate nontrivial knowledge of the field. And finally, its judgments show a-typical insight. While other types of commentary may benefit DOI: 10.4324/9781315674469-15

241

David Leatherbarrow

from these faculties and skills, they are essential in criticism. Although writings will be my principal focus, I also have in mind what designers and teachers say when faced with a project that needs a sorting or sifting of good and bad alternatives and decisions. Describing the practices of a related craft, Marc Bloch observed the following: “like any scholar, like any mind which perceives at all, the historian selects and sorts (Bloch 1953: 144)”. The word criticism is cognate with crisis. Both words derive from the Greek Krinein, which means to sift or separate. Professionals and professors no less than writers sift and sort the good from the bad, and, I will insist, must. Yet, architecture criticism has still another “voice” that I’ll consider toward the end of this study, one that expresses itself silently, in steel and stone. Built works, too, can offer criticism, not so much of other works, although that is often implied, but of the social and spatial conditions in which they are built. Obviously, buildings can only perform this role indirectly, by embodying the evaluations and judgments of their designers, clients, and builders. Once the work is built, however, their decisions are superseded by the work’s stance with respect to conditions in its vicinity and the concerns of those who use it; making the street more public, perhaps, or redefining the city’s skyline, or demonstrating how construction with local materials can be more refined, and so on. I’ll give an example. Once the Philadelphia Saving Fund Society Building (PSFS), designed by George Howe and William Lescaze, took its stand on Market Street in Philadelphia in 1932, public life could be enjoyed on not one but three levels (the subway concourse, sidewalk, and mezzanine—thanks to the novel use of escalators). Also, an unprecedented, although now rather typical roof-top sign identified the institution from a far distance. And exceptionally high-quality materials and finishes, then affordable because of the onset of the Great Depression, were apparent inside and out. Special training in the field was not required to grasp what the building had to say about the city and ways of living in it; its criticism of what existed before was there for all to perceive, and still is today. Just after it was built, critics enlarged and enriched nonprofessional appreciation, thanks to their careful study of its new solutions, their wider knowledge of the field, and their insight into the kinds of problems city buildings address more largely—social, economic, technological, and political problems. William Jordy, for example, adduced historical information about the bank’s culture of “practicality” as a key to its stratified public levels. When explaining the handling of materials, he pointed to the architects’ awareness of new forms of construction and material treatment in both American and European modernism ( Jordy 1972: 90).4 A second type of assessment was thus built on the first, professional on prosaic. Second here is not an indication of inferior significance, only that it is generally preceded by something more commonly shared. Jordy used the term “muted splendor” to describe the laconic beauty of the stainless steel, granite, and marble of the PSFS Building.5 Many critics after him expressed the same judgment. Complementing the broadly cultural function of criticism is its role in the history and development of the discipline. When Le Corbusier commented on the mechanical equipment and construction joints in the PSFS Building, he said “they are gods”. For an architect dedicated to tall buildings, its escalators and elevators were breathtakingly beautiful. Considering architecture as a form of knowledge, my thesis is this: without criticism, projects do not progress, students fail to learn, and works do not benefit one another as they might. This last failure, I’ll argue, weakens the discipline. I am hardly original in arguing for its role within the history of the field, nor the first to aver its advantage in education and professional practice. The English poet, Alexander Pope, described criticism as “the handmaid of the muse (Pope 1975: 61)”.6

Worldmaking My coupling of criticism and creativity is likely to be rejected in some quarters, particularly among architects who claim or celebrate originality for the sake of self-explanation or self-­promotion. Based on a conception of artistic creativity that emerged in the romantic period and is still 242

Crafting Architectural Criticism

maintained today, inventive works result from free-ranging experimentation. Open-ended, rather like the throw of the dice, originality thus understood is assumed to be most successful when untainted by external assessments. Rulings of all sorts are not thereby excluded, since the Mannerist period imaginative artists have allowed themselves “judgments of the eye”.7 Intuition may well be the base line of this type of artistic criticism. When criteria of judgment are internalized in this way, any criticism other than the artist’s own oscillates between direct citation—what Frank Gehry himself said he was doing—and broad assertions about the field or contemporary society.8 Romantic assumptions about untaught and unreflective invention parallel the notion that individuals trained in design go into teaching—where criticism is not only allowed but also ­expected—because they lack the talent for creative practice. Accordingly, criticism is “a symptom, if not a cause, of creative impotence”.9 Whatever the truth of this claim about career choices, I believe there is, nevertheless, an imaginative, productive, or creative core to criticism, that it, too, is a “way of making”, even of worldmaking (Goodman 1978). I also maintain that architecture is enriched by the critic’s craft, which means the field is impoverished by its absence.

Setting the Record Straight To be useful and persuasive, architectural criticism must bring into view a design’s unique characteristics. Although criticism may take additional steps, this is the first. General theories, impressions, or common opinion are not offered, or not these primarily. This is true no matter what form criticism takes, in print or online, by journalists, professors, or architects. Just as newspaper criticism records the particulars of what has been designed or built, journal essays set out the work’s salient aspects or details. The adequacy of such a report, brief as it often must be (in a newspaper or on a blog), is measured by its accuracy with respect to the work being reviewed and the sufficiency of the information for the criticism being given. Typically, critical accounts provide readers with correct information about the several agents responsible for the work’s design and construction, also where it is located, its purpose, and so on. Information such as this should possess a high degree of transparency. “Received wisdom” is inadequate to criticism’s recording or reporting function because it is often deficient of detail and oversupplied with assumption and inference. In short, the critic’s first task is to set the record straight. In architecture, this part of the craft involves specific kinds of work. Documents must be reviewed, visits made, and sometimes interviews conducted so that the account provided is reliable. Close observation—the critic’s equivalent to the historian’s close reading—is also decisive. Viewing a few photos is generally insufficient. Likewise, there is need for alertness to atypical kinds of evidence. Although possibly obvious, I would like to stress this point. Close observation and careful description often reeducate the critic, enlarging his or her understanding of what is possible. Not only is the education thus received a real pleasure but also it disabuses the critic of a false sense of superior understanding that is sometimes assumed when assessments are expected. Critical judgment is often less concerned with good and bad than the specific ways the work deepens one’s understanding and expands the field. Given the potential abundance of information about any given project, discrimination is necessary too. Receiving information and rendering an account are related tasks but not the same. The critic must determine which facts are significant, which is to say, are necessary for the construction of a readable picture. Earlier, I called this selecting and sorting. Already at this stage, choice plays a part, invoking the critic’s interests and values. An example should make this clear. Skirkanich Hall, designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, was criticized in the popular press when it was first opened in 2006 for its apparent indifference to the vicinity in which it was built, the eastern edge of the University of Pennsylvania campus in Philadelphia (Figure 13.1). When offering this assessment, critics typically pointed to photos of the street front that indicated how 243

David Leatherbarrow

Figure 13.1  S kirkanich Hall, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 2006, Tod Williams and Billie Tsien. © David Leatherbarrow.

the new building was much taller than anything around it and was enclosed on the upper levels of its front side by unusually large planes of glass or brick, the large bulk of which extended over the sidewalk, far beyond the line of adjoining facades. Altogether acontextual most critics said, because it neglected the street’s upper profile, was indifferent to the typical window pattern and proportioning of facades nearby and broke the line of adjoining fronts along the street. In my criticism of the project, I relied on similar photographs, but also made use of views of the block interior together with plans and sections shared by the architects (Leatherbarrow 2009a: 32–54). Making a number of visits also seemed sensible, on different days of the week and at various times of the day. Based on these “documents”, I came to see the building otherwise, not as an instance of indifference to the location but of interconnection with it; actually, a rather sophisticated, if unexpected, intermeshing of a new building into an urban block largely comprised of preexisting facilities for the School of Engineering. The cross section was a decisive drawing because it indicated lateral connections to adjoining buildings by means of passages, bridges, shared rooms, and borrowed lights. The opposite section, together with the site and entry-level plans, indicated how the upper–floor extension created a loggia-like space that allowed not only three entry points to different parts of the building and the center of the urban block but also a semipublic space along the sidewalk, shaded from the mid-day sun. Lastly, the plans showed that at the rear, the architects established a court, garden, and fountain to be shared by all who used the buildings nearby, buildings that had previously turned their backs on what had been a service yard. Opinions about acontextuality were not wrong, only short-sighted. The building did, indeed, diverge from precedents, but thereby discovered new possibilities for public space, possibilities that the architects saw as likely to arise in the future, thanks to the building itself. Its context was the one the architects imagined would develop in coming years, one that would be taller, more porous, and generous. By a curious sort of self-estrangement, one tries to see the work and the world it creates anew, as if unlike anything seen before. Ultimately, of course, comparison is both desired and decisive. Seeing such as this, however, is not as easy as might be assumed. “We must always say what we see”, Le Corbusier asserted when explaining the aim of his “laboratory of patient research”. This 244

Crafting Architectural Criticism

first command was followed by a second that he thought was more challenging: “above all, and more difficult, we must always see what we see (Le Corbusier and Petit 1956)”.10 Applying the first requirement to architecture criticism, one can say that two kinds of commentary are to be avoided: elaboration of what has already been said and restatement of what others have seen, even if those others are critics or designers one greatly admires. Le Corbusier’s second injunction also gives criticism its proper subject matter: “above all, and more difficult, we must always see what we see”. What is the difficulty here? The world is what we see; what we see is the world. Plainly evident as this truism may seem, he suggests nothing is more difficult than seeing the world and works of architecture for what they are, as they give themselves directly to experience, unfiltered by the observations of others or concepts that have been useful in the past. Saying for others but seeing for oneself, these are the tasks of “patient research” and criticism; difficult, Le Corbusier says, but not impossible. For example, the play of shadows in the depth of the Carpenter Center’s brise soleil can certainly be seen as a shifting geometry of lights and darks, but it is also—or was for him—an indication of the seasons and times of day, also a sign of the way modern spaces would result from new forms of concrete construction, and a declaration of correspondences between the scale of buildings and the human body.11 Much of this was said in his many publications. It was also there to be seen in what he built. Critics visualize and verbalize architecture. This two-part process may be seen as analogous to other types of recording, a photographic or audio transcription, for example, by means of which a composition of sights or sounds is converted into a form that is more permanent and widely accessible. An obvious although mechanical case is the recording of a concert performance. Such a recording changes something enjoyed (or suffered) by a few for a while into something widely accessible and more lasting. The conversion that occurs in architecture criticism is from visual to verbal kinds of sense: the street that surrounds us is transcribed onto the page, the façade before us reformatted for discussion. The photographs that today typically accompany a critical text not only parallel the written transcription they enrich the reading, or should, particularly when the views are carefully selected (another instance of sifting and sorting). An abbreviation of qualities is required for any translation of this kind, even some violence to the “original”, but compensating for whatever is lost is a gain in accessibility, for a verbal and photographic record can be shared more widely than the street or façade itself.12 Here, the word “original” must be put in quotation marks because few designs if any are developed in the absence of criticism—its vocabulary, concepts, and tacit ­premises—which means there is no pre- or non-verbal project, untainted by reflection, despite claims for creativity free from reflective judgment. Criticism, then, is the discursive path by which particular projects enter into a community of discourse, one that is much wider and more inclusive than the circle of individuals who have visited a particular building. Speaking or writing for others, the critic helps create or extend architecture’s public dimension, a dimension I think is essential. Today, much of that discussion is online, among many who have not personally seen the work in question, only published photos, but freely enter the conversation nonetheless. That discussion’s gain in amplitude or interactivity—more people talking/thinking/posting about contemporary ­architecture—is no doubt positive. Yet, the benefit is sometimes reduced by snap judgments and the spread of misinformation. To say that a range of assessments is possible and should be encouraged does not mean each of them is equally well-informed or persuasive. Architecture critics who have acted as “public intellectuals” have played important roles in the history of cities. In New York City, for example, figures such as Lewis Mumford, Jane Jacobs, and Ada Louise Huxtable not only helped shape public discourse about the city but also influenced decisions about its future.13 Read by professionals, people in power, and members of the general public alike, Mumford widely contextualized individual works, for he saw and stressed the ways buildings shape and are shaped by collective history and culture. Jacobs, no less “embedded” in a particular urban context (New York City), was acutely attuned to everyday behaviors and the patterns of prosaic life—the poetry of that prose—because she judged it to be not only the subject 245

David Leatherbarrow

matter of design but also its criterion of relevance and success, or irrelevance and failure. Huxtable was also interested in everyday life and its accommodation in a wide range of institutions and environments, but she was no less observant and critical of the architect’s manner of practice, its professional, ethical, and political implications.

Reconstructing What Has Been Constructed Even though careful reporting and recording are necessary for the development of criticism, they are insufficient. Nor is the most intelligible text the one that supplies the greatest amount of information about a building. Perhaps it will be a little confusing to describe the process by which a critical account is formed as reconstruction because the work that serves as the target of criticism has been constructed already, at least designed to some level; otherwise, there would be nothing to describe and assess. But insofar as some, not all of the aspects of a building are selected for consideration, one can say that criticism remakes the project, opening debate and offering an interpretation a new form. Of course a new work is not made, rather a new set of relationships is revealed, among the work’s parts. I had this step in mind when I suggested that imagination is required in criticism, that it is creative or constructive in its own way. It also provides another means of access to the work, not only visual but also verbal, and in not only one or another of its many aspects but those that endow it with significance, for other architects and for the public. The skills that accomplish verbal reconstruction are different from those of recording. Observation is not chiefly important; instead, selection. For this to occur, the work’s overall unity must be overlooked so that significant parts can be singled out. Although an art critic might try to describe the whole of a painting, or a literary critic, all of a poem, no architecture critic tries to assess all the parts of a building. The perspectival nature of viewing an object—not all of the sides can be seen at once—is especially evident when that object is an architectural work: several sides and aspects can be seen at once, but never all that have significance. After the selection of pertinent parts, connections must be formed or continuity must be (re)established between the several elements the account has brought into focus. The result, one can say, is a new ­configuration—a building prepared for discussion and evaluation. Although many architects seek criticism, especially when it is positive, they often find its descriptions somewhat surprising; familiar, but strangely so.14 The critic’s objectivity reaches its limit at precisely this point.15 Of course preliminary judgments had already been made in the basic description, in the decisions about which facts should be recorded and which ones overlooked. Even earlier, there had been a decision that the project merited criticism. After all, not all projects are equally interesting, let alone consequential. When writing about the Lyric Theater in Belfast, designed by Sheila O’Donnell and John Tuomey, what struck me most about the building was the spatial thickness of its façade, the diagonal hollows in its depth, for seating, the display of show bills, a slab of stone with an inscribed poem, and the main entry (Figure 13.2). Above all of this, on the second level, there is a canted window wall that directs views away from the river (toward which the street slopes), back toward the town. Still higher, on the third level, a wooden screen filters light into practice rooms. Convergences between spaces ostensibly separate was achieved through this surprising thickness, as was increased orientation, within the building and the town. Of course there were many other elegant and interesting elements and details in the building, but for the story, I wanted to tell—an account of what I called “verging space”—the street-side wall thickness was key. Culturally speaking, the building has had a very positive impact on the part of the city in which it was sited, thanks in a large part to the intelligence and effectiveness of this unusual way of making a façade: a form of enclosure, of display, of inhabitation, orientation, and entry. If not all of the facts that can be observed are equally relevant in the development of a critical account, what types of details, views, situations, and events should be raised to the level of 246

Crafting Architectural Criticism

Figure 13.2  Lyric Theater, Belfast, Ireland, 2012, Sheila O’Donnell and John Tuomey. © David Leatherbarrow.

significance? There is no simple answer to this question, nor one that can be generalized for a wide range of projects. A double contingency governs decisions about importance: the particularity of the work and the unique story it tells, as recounted by the critic. Certain aspects are retained in the report because they are the ones that belong together in the makeup of a readable picture. An important aspect of readability is continuity among the parts of the project that have been highlighted (even if the basic premise of the project is spatial discontinuity or fragmentation). It is not only professional critics who verbally reconstruct built works but also their designers. Commenting on the façade of the American Folk Art Museum in New York, Billie Tsien said she wanted the building’s front to say as follows: “Look at me, I’m not what you think I am”. What can criticism offer in response to this hint about the designer’s intention? The initial step has been mentioned already; the right documents must be assembled. As I have said, this means selection and coordination. In this case, relevant evidences would include not only elevation drawings and photographs of the front side but also the building’s longitudinal section (perpendicular to the façade) and some of its construction details, likewise the schedule of finishes for its materials, and a plan of the building’s several entrances, together with views through them, a map and views of the street and plaza at the front, and so on. . . all the documents that illustrate the details that will “hang together” in an intelligible account. Other details, photos, or drawings, despite their factuality, may well be distracting; not wrong, just unhelpful. When offering her explanation, the architect herself would have had in mind a set of details or documents that supported her reading, and in so doing would have been constructing her own criticism of the project, thus remaking it as an-image-to-be-discussed in what I called the community of discourse. One assumes she would have said something similar—similarly critical—when presenting the project to her clients. She would also have shown the critical drawings. All architects stress what they see as the key issues in these types of presentation. This is learned at school, or should be. That selection and reconstruction such as this is subjective cannot be denied, but it is a rather moderate subjectivity, constrained by the evidence on record, according to which, incidentally, casual readings can be invalidated. The key point here is this: the stories that criticism presents are for others to hear and read, others who may or may not know the building being described, but do know something about architecture and the world in which it is built. More than description and commentary are intended, the threshold of understanding the work as a work is crossed. Reconstruction is thus also relocation, to which I will turn next, whereby the single work is repositioned among others of its kind; not just those that are similarly good or bad, but more largely those one can call other 247

David Leatherbarrow

works of architecture. At this point, criticism invokes basic premises, which are fundamentally philosophical, even though, as I said, criticism’s basic purpose is neither philosophy nor theory. If conventional norms of a building’s durability, use, and appearance are thought to form the horizon of assessment, no special training or faculty of apprehension is required for a rudimentary form of architecture criticism. As I said at the outset, each of us has opinions about the buildings we live in, visit, or simply observe. Widely shared knowledge of life’s typical situations allows each of us to say the materials of this building are flimsy, the rooms of that one awkwardly arranged, and the imagery of a third out of place. Yet, criticism that deserves the name—because it enlarges public understanding and enriches the discipline—is something different. Everyday or preprofessional judgments are not wrong, just lacking in penetration, for the norms they presuppose are themselves subject to criticism. When the discipline is viewed historically, it is obvious that conventional norms are subject to change. As long ago as the 18th century, David Hume argued in his short treatise on taste that standards vary over time, even though they can appear to be both obvious and natural at a given historical moment. Knowledge of these changes, historical knowledge, raises the critic’s assessments to another level. The paradox of criticism is that the grounds for assessing single works are both assumed and redefined in the process of developing criticism. That refinement comes from practicing the craft.

Relocating the Work: From Its Site to the Discipline Although singular, every work under critical review is repositioned among others; not only those that are nearby physically but also works of its kind. What Aldo Rossi said of typological ­comparison—that it invokes its own principles of association—can also be said of criticism: comparison presupposes an insight into likeness (Rossi 1982: 41). As suggested above, the significant difference between the professional and nonprofessional critic is that the former operates within a broad cultural horizon when judging the qualities of the particular project; the latter, by contrast, makes assessments within a more local (disciplinary) framework. “Regional” scope is natural to the critic because both the craft and the vocation arise out of a deep interest in the field as such, which is to say in principle and developed historically. The critic’s concern is with the work as a work, how it contributes to the discipline as a whole and how our understanding of architecture is enriched or deepened by the project under consideration. In my criticism of the Poli House by Maurizio Pezo and Sophia von Ellrichshausen, located near Concepcion, Chili, and finished in 2005, I sought to position the building in three ways: in its physical topography, as part of the body of work completed by these architects, and within the field of modern architecture (Leatherbarrow 2013b: 10–15) (Figure 13.3). The interconnection between volumes within the house’s interior can be distinguished from the raumplan designs of Adolf Loos—which it so vividly recalls—by two defining characteristics: a highly controlled framework of geometric proportions and greater porosity of the external walls, despite their massive thickness (suitable to the local seismic terrain). The proportioning gives the differentiated volumes coherence as a single work, and the large-size openings establish more direct connections with the vicinity, admitting air and light while allowing very wide views, despite the wall thickness. The project can thus be seen as one of the most recent and instructive experiments with a long-standing problem within modern architecture: how to structure the so-called “flow” of space from inside to outside, not a topic to be avoided Le Corbusier insisted, for “the outside is always an inside (Corbusier 1930: 78)”.16 Quite apart from this work’s specific use program and actual site, the solution belongs to the field as such, and positions the design just as much in the discipline as on a cliff overlooking the Pacific. Yet, it is no less true that a critic’s interest in the field often extends a more basic interest in the world to which the work contributes, the culture in which it plays its part. When performed 248

Crafting Architectural Criticism

Figure 13.3  Poli House, Concepción, Chile, 2005, Pezo von Ellrichshausen. © David Leatherbarrow.

well, criticism’s readership is not limited to professors and professionals. What’s more, when they read it, architects themselves are led to consider the building in its wider context, to consider it historically, environmentally, and politically. That task gives criticism its world-building function. One of Wang Shu’s more recent buildings, the Guest House in the Academy of Art, Hangzhou, China, makes this wider framework of reference for criticism particularly clear (Leatherbarrow 2013: 15–19) (Figure 13.4). Wang Shu asked himself how the memories of a place could endure when the streets and buildings that defined the place were torn down to make room for new construction. He decided that he would “collect the materials from the ruins and use them” for his “new” buildings. One well-known example is the Ningbo History Museum, more recently, at the guest house in the China Academy of Art campus. All who visit China today can see that the destruction of traditional villages is not only devastating but also alarmingly widespread. Wang Shu’s fear is that with the leveling of traditional houses comes the loss of memory and cultural identity. Hence, his alternative is reuse. Neither restoration nor remaking was what he had in mind. If a preservationist were dogmatically inclined, Wang Shu’s recycling could be called misuse of historical material. The aim, so far as I can tell, was to couple recollection with a sense of new possibilities, the latter in recognition of contemporary expectations for scale and use, and his own explorations in construction, geometry, and architectural equivalents to traditional Chinese landscape paintings. An architect’s stance with respect to his own culture is evident in the result, criticism of that culture that intends renewal. The double prospect architecture criticism opens onto—works and their worlds—is admittedly very wide. But seeing and saying something about all that can be observed is hardly the point. The selection of parts, the focus on details at one scale or another occurs perforce in all criticism. Close description inaugurates interpretation. Which parts reward concentration? I would say those that are whole parts; I mean the details that epitomize entire works and not just the work itself but its wider frames of reference—the location it inhabits, the culture it expresses, and the topics of architectural knowledge it addresses. Aby Warburg focused on “marginal accessories”, and Ananda Coomaraswamy, on “necessary accidents”. In each case, single things, seemingly minor things, indicated wider concerns—approaches, styles, or ideas. 249

David Leatherbarrow

Figure 13.4  W  a Shan Guest House, China Academy of Art, Hangzhou, China, 2013, Wang Shu. © David Leatherbarrow.

Criticism Silently Understood Practicing criticism involves a number of steps or skills. I have described three: recording, reconstructing, and repositioning, evident, I believe, in both writings and buildings. Works of architecture themselves can accomplish disciplinary criticism, as can books, poems, and plays. The outcome of built critique is not necessarily political or cultural. Nevertheless, one can find in a given work is its stance with respect to broader issues, criticism of the bigotry, or base nationalism of the world around us; likewise, exposure and denunciation of the world of money, of technology, and so on. Expressions of this kind often carry invective and raise the temperature of debate. When seen through the lens of philosophical/political reflection, this practice is often called the critique of ideologies. Its parallel in psychoanalysis is called critique of false consciousness. Both types of criticism—of works and of the world—can be seen in buildings themselves. No project begins without an assessment of given conditions and a determination of what they are lacking. Criticism is one of the foundation stones of project making. To begin a work, one must not only assess existing conditions but also discern how they could be made more perfect with respect to contemporary expectations. The three steps of written or verbal criticism I reviewed have exact parallels in design’s surveying, configuring, and remaking given locations. Thus, the architect’s criticism of the world evident in the built work does not end with description; the real task is envisaging, articulating, and constructing an alternative. The silent partner in this enterprise is a more or less explicit sense of what ought to be. The productive aspect of project making can be seen as critical if one observes that an outcome of disapproval can be the offering of an alternative. Perhaps this outcome can be seen more clearly by returning to the dimension of criticism described above, disciplinary criticism, or the assessment of architectural works by architects themselves. Examples may be helpful: Rem Koolhaas’s extension of the (patient) research of Le Corbusier, Francesco Borromini’s long-standing preoccupation with Michelangelo, “the prince 250

Crafting Architectural Criticism

of architects”, or Michelangelo’s concern with Donatello, whose details he repeatedly redrew. Louis I. Kahn often asked: “How’m I doing Le Corbusier?” In each of these cases, one architect has taken up a problem another has struggled with, reviewing and assessing previous project, to attempt a more perfect, plausible, or relevant solution. In these cases, one is witnessing criticism of works, not the world. Still, description is involved in both, as is selection and judgment, the results of which are better alternatives. Given these observations, a number of questions come into view. The first and perhaps most basic is this: what sorts of creative activity in architectural practice allow it to be construed as critique? It seems plain that the answer will involve reflection on the productive dimension of architecture, its images, and its fictions. More difficult is the second question: how can critique occur in a situation of complicity, of working with the very conditions the project seeks to overturn? A third question is implicit in the one just asked: has there ever been a project when this rejection and acceptance was not required? More emphatically, could there even be a project if this were not the case, if the project’s aspirations were not measured against some existing condition, if it did not found its hopes on both denunciation and recollection? Still another question, one that is particularly pressing to a number of contemporary critics, is the following: must critique as both elucidation and denunciation have political consequences, the capture or redistribution of power? The answer given by an activist critic such as Michael Sorkin is an emphatic yes. Many who write in the popular press and online argue similarly, increasing architecture’s currency in contemporary culture. That increase is no doubt positive, especially when sufficient ground work is done and the critic accepts the injunction to “see what one sees”. But there is an alternative that is less instrumental than the activist form of criticism, although no less productive: the opening of a horizon of possibilities within the discipline, opportunities that were previously unapparent—a new kind of street configuration, a new type of community space, or an unprecedented plan form. Criticism such as this, disclosing new possibilities for the field, as evident in recent projects, is closer to the practice of figures such as Reyner Banham, William Jordy, and Alan Colquhoun. Remaking or reshaping was certainly their concern, but not society in any direct way, instead, architecture itself.

Notes 1 This study combines some but largely extends other parts of two earlier studies: “The Craft of Criticism” and “Criticism and Affirmation”. Sources that have helped me develop these arguments will be cited below, but at the outset, I would like to note that a key text has been Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft. Together with Lucien Febvre, Bloch founded the journal Annales d’histoire économique et sociale, the articles of which gave rise to the school (Annales School) and style of study that goes by that name still today. Also useful to me has been another study on historical method: Paul Ricoeur, “Objectivity and Subjectivity in History”, History and Truth. As will be plain in what follows, I see several similarities between the “crafts” of the historian and critic. I will also note the differences. 2 A recent critic of criticism has argued the great criticism is characterized by “arresting” prose. Refer to the study by Fisher (2011). 3 Of course there are a number of ways of discussing and writing architecture criticism, each distinct, although not categorically so, ranging from conversational opinion to published journalism, then professional criticism, next history and theory, and finally philosophy. Architecture criticism can, of course, also be found in the literature. 4 I cite his essay and the comparable arguments of other critics in “Practically Primitive”, Architecture Oriented Otherwise (2009: 175–96). 5 The recent transformation of the bank into a hotel has received positive reviews from most journalists. Websites that assess the quality of hotel rooms in Philadelphia are similarly positive. 6 The relevant lines are as follows: “The generous critic fann’d the poet’s fire,/ And taught the world with reason to admire./ Then criticism the Muse’s handmaid proved,/ To dress her charms, and make her more beloved. . .” 7 Refer to the study by Summers (1981: 368–79). More largely, refer to the study by Rykwert (2008).

251

David Leatherbarrow 8 On these points, I have benefited from the arguments set forth in Wylie Sypher, Loss of the Self in Modern Literature and Art (1962), particularly the chapter called “The Romantic Touch in Painting”, and August Wiedmann, Romantic Roots in Modern Art (1979), especially Part 2, Chapter 3 “Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Inwardness”. 9 This indictment is introduced and rejected by T.S. Eliot in The Use of Poetry & The Use of Criticism (1933: 20). Octavio Paz, to whom I have referred above, was more direct than Auden: “Criticism and creation live in permanent symbiosis. . . Creation is criticism and criticism creation,” Octavio Paz, Alternating Current (1973: 35, 39). 10 I have adopted Eardley’s translation, published in The Athens Charter (1973). Le Corbusier’s original is as follows: Il faut toujours dire ce que l’on voit, surtout il faut toujours, ce qui est plus difficile, voir ce que l’on voit. 11 The best account of this building is as follows: Eduard F. Sekler and William Curtis, Le Corbusier at Work The Genesis of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts (1978). 12 Although criticism was not his subject, rather printed books in general, Victor Hugo famously made this same observation when reminding readers, including architect readers, about the greater permanence of the book of lead (Gutenberg’s) over the book of stone; refer to “This Will Kill That”, in Notre Dame de Paris. 13 An informative recent account of a number of these New York critics is set out in the following: Alexandra Lange, Writing About Architecture (2012). See also the text by Fisher cited above. 14 In a personal communication, the Irish architect John Tuomey used the term “strangely familiar”, one he also used as the title of a book chapter, to explain his reaction to an essay I had written on the Lyric Theater in Belfast he had designed with Sheila O’Donnell. He found the building I described recognizable, but curiously so. Refer to the study by Tuomey (2004: 62–4) and Leatherbarrow (2013: 14–18). 15 On this point, as others about recording and reconstruction, I follow Paul Ricoeur, cited above. 16 “le dehors est toujours un dedans,”

References Bloch, Marc (1953) The Historian’s Craft, New York: Knopf. Corbusier, Le (1930) Precisions on the Present State of Architecture and City Planning, Zurich: Park Books, p.78. Fisher, Thomas (2011) “The Death and Life of Great Architecture Criticism,” Places Journal https://doi. org/10.22269/111201. Goodman, Nelson (1978) Ways of Worldmaking, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Jordy, William (1972) American Buildings and Their Architects, vol. 4, New York: Doubleday, p. 90. Lange, Alexandra (2012) Writing about Architecture, New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Le Corbusier and Petit, Jean (1956) La Chapelle Notre-Dame du Haut, Ronchamp trans. Anthony Eardley, The Athens Charter, New York: Grossman. Leatherbarrow, David (2009a) “Practically Primitive,” Architecture Oriented Otherwise, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, pp. 175–96. Leatherbarrow, David (2009b) “World Building: Skirkanich Hall by Williams and Tsien,” Architecture Theory Review, 14, no. 1: 32–54. Leatherbarrow, David (2011) “Criticism and Affirmation,” Architecture Theory Review, 16, no. 2, pp. 202–12. Leatherbarrow, David (2013a) “Creative Movement: The Architecture and Ideas of Wang Shu,” The Architect, no. 161: 15–19. Leatherbarrow, David (2013b) “The Lyric Theater: An Exercise in Verging Space,” Lyric Theater—O’Donnell + Tuomey, Edge °6, Gandon: Co Cork, pp. 14–18. Leatherbarrow, David (2013c) “Work—World: Part—Counterpart: The Architecture of Pezo von Ellrichshausen,” A & U, no. 513: 10–15. Paz, Octavio (1973) Alternating Current, New York: Viking, pp. 35, 39. Pope, Alexander (1975) “Essay on Criticism,” [1711] Collected Poems, London: J.M. Dent & Sons, p. 61. Ricoeur, Paul (1965) “Objectivity and Subjectivity in History,” History and Truth, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, pp. 21–40. Rossi, Aldo and Eisenman, Peter (1982) Architecture of the City, New York: Rizzoli, p. 41. Rykwert, Joseph (2008) The Judicious Eye, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Sekler, Eduard F. and Curtis, William (1978) Le Corbusier at Work the Genesis of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Cambridge, MA: Harvard. Summers, David (1981) “Giudizio dell’occhio,” Michelangelo and the Language of Art, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 368–79. Sypher, Wylie (1962) Loss of the Self in Modern Literature and Art, New York: Random House. Tuomey, John (2004) “Strangely Familiar,” Architecture, Craft and Culture, Gandon: Co. Cork, pp. 62–4. Wiedmann, August (1979) Romantic Roots in Modern Art, Gresham: Old Woking, Surrey.

252

14 Domesticity, Gender, and Architecture Lilian Chee

In Mike Mills’ poignant coming-of-age film 20th Century Women (2016), it is 1974, and an adolescent boy Jamie is growing up in an open-spirited Santa Barbara household with Dorothea Fields, a Depression-raised, single mother in her mid-50s. Dorothea’s domestic space has a permeable quality, “[Home] had always in one way or another been open; constructed out of movement, communication, social relations, which always stretched beyond it” (Massey 1992, 14). Won in an auction, it is crumbling and urgently needs repairs that Dorothea cannot afford. One of her lodgers is an ex-mechanic, William, who works on the house in exchange for rent. Believing that it takes more than a mother to raise a “good man”, Dorothea enlists the help of two young women—Abbie, another lodger who is a punk artist-photographer, and Julie, a precocious teenage neighbor. Her home is maintained by an alternative economy of gifting, exchange, and good will. An analogical relationship may be drawn between the perpetually incomplete state of Dorothea’s house and her own resistance toward a nuclear, heteronormative family. If indeed the institution of marriage is historically foundational to the privilege of the single-family house (Wigley 1992, 336), then a critical discussion of Dorothea’s domestic space demands new theoretical tools, evidence, and narratives. Instead of starting from the stable referent of the single-family house, how does thinking through domesticity transform the discourse of house or home? In other words, does the ­family-centric idea of a house, create blinds pots in its own discourse? Does it exclude specific groups of people, their practices, and the spaces they occupy? In her thought-provoking essay, the architectural theorist, Gulsum Baydar (2005), similarly argues that the absence of nonnormative subjects from studies of domesticity reveals the risks these subjects pose to destabilizing conceptual boundaries, not just of domesticity but of architecture itself. In particular, Baydar identifies the criticality of gender and sexuality in sharpening the discourse of domestic architecture: Sexuality is an implicit burden of domesticity and its architecture. It is implicit because the sexual overtones of architectural discourse on domesticity are too often and too conveniently naturalized. It is a burden because the stakes in its recognition are usually high. Once sexuality is explicitly and critically addressed, disciplinary boundaries are threatened, established categories fail, and new terms emerge, which productively disable the status quo. (Ibid., 30) At the same time, the architectural historian Barbara Penner (2020, 160) rightly emphasizes that we cannot discount the longstanding significance of home which “remains operative DOI: 10.4324/9781315674469-16

253

Lilian Chee

culturally, as a symbol, a space, and a set of values and practices”. “Home” might refer to physical, architectural, social, or imagined entities of varying scales. It could mean a single-family house, an apartment, a communal space (a squat, for instance), a temporary refuge from harm (a refugee camp, for instance), a transient space (a hotel, a serviced-apartment, for instance), a mobile space (a caravan or a boat, for instance), a colonized territory, or a national frontier. Mass housing and the single-family house are, as the architectural historian Gwendolyn Wright (1987, 12) observes, “the favorite design problem(s) of twentieth-century American ­a rchitects” wherein an exploration of “personal visions”, “formal innovations”, and “symbolic expressions about concepts like function or family” might be productively undertaken. The ­absence of ­domesticity, or more significantly, the anxiety toward its appearance in the discourse of ­a rchitect-designed homes or housing (Heynen 1999; Sparke 2008) is the legacy of a discipline that has prioritized design documentation being anterior to occupation. Consequently, the intersections of occupancy and lived experiences with design intent, programmatic function, aesthetic taste, and use of materials, remain largely unexamined (for exceptions see Penner 2018, 2013, Jacobs, Cairns, and Strebel 2012, 2007). Here, I differentiate the more monolithic conception of “home” from the more processual aspects of “domesticity” and “domestic space”. Domesticity involves productions from which home, wherever this is located and whatever forms it may take, is actively constructed through occupancy. Its evidence is deposited in objects and routines associated with such a space. Domestic objects may be useful or frivolous, ranging from the modern kitchen and the air conditioner to the decorative vase and the holiday souvenir. Domestic routines include maintenance processes (housework such as cleaning, washing, mending, laundry), creative practices (sewing, cooking, gardening, decorating), affective care (child-raising and elderly care), and increasingly, productive paid labor (freelancing from home, or the rise of the “home office”). In an earlier essay (Chee 2013a), I argued that in positioning homemaking as an ideological production, domesticity is inherently opposed to phenomenological accounts of home which emphasize stability and nostalgia (Bachelard 1994; Heidegger 1993): It concerns specific expectations of tradition, continuity and privacy. It connotes modes of production: biological, material, psychological, social, or national. Domesticity draws upon the performative aspect of bodies in space — occupants, tenants, parents, grandparents, children, single men and women, maids, architects, designers, builders — and delineates how these individuals visualize, negotiate and realize ambitions for comfort, security, privacy and independence provided through the agency of architecture. (Chee 2013a, 12) Domesticity equally regulates unremarked modes of production including housework, childbearing, and caring. It implies particular “spatial arrangements, in which certain practices of reproduction (… as well as certain modes of production) are situated” (George 1998, 3). Furthermore, and pertinent to this chapter, domesticity traditionally reproduces and protects social relationships that are conducive to biological reproduction and the maintenance of heteronormative family life. In so doing, domesticity articulates the gendered politics of home wherein housework, childbearing, and caring are roles regularly prescribed to a wife or a mother, who is assumed to operate exclusively within a separate, private sphere. Thus, domesticity, as the architectural historian, Hilde Heynen (2005, 7), argues, is inherently more than the study of private dwellings because it delineates an “ideology” that discloses the “norms” for “gender, space, work, and power”. As such, domesticity also gives us insights into and can be discussed “in terms of legal arrangements, spatial settings, behavioral patterns, social effects, and power constellations—giving rise to a variety of discourses that comment upon it or criticize it” (Ibid.). Penner (2020, 139) similarly cautions 254

Domesticity, Gender, and Architecture

that an architectural discourse of home cannot be pursued critically without considering the gendered relations within it because these domestic relations mirror those prevalent outside of home, “Whether our historical focus is on patriarchy, heteronormativity, capitalism or imperialism (or the way in which these operate in concert), the home quickly emerges as a crucial nexus for the formation and regulation of gender relations”. This chapter reconsiders the connections between domesticity and architecture through the former’s gendered dimensions. The first part of the chapter revisits the fraught relationship between domesticity and gender during the 1950s to the 1990s, by surveying the resistance toward and subsequent reclaiming of agency through domesticity. It draws on architectural texts as well as key art works and films that reframed the boundaries and reconfigured a gendered understanding of domestic space. The second part discusses the development of domesticity as an analytical category in recent contemporary architectural discourse. Incorporating research conducted in the Asian context, I also attempt to situate domesticity and gender within an architectural continuum that extends beyond its customary Anglo-American sphere of influence. I argue that confrontational issues emanating from domesticity and gender can be communicated through an affective mode and that this route is methodologically strategic particularly within a conservative Asian context.

Happily Accommodating: Gender, Sexuality, and Modern Domestic Architecture Peaking in the 1950s, the American postwar cult of domesticity found many women taking on the role of homemaker at an earlier age, with their average marriage age dropping to 20 years by the late 1950s (Friedan 1983, 16). This trend coincided unsurprisingly with the rise of modern architecture in the United States. Modern architecture in the US found its international footing in 1949 with the construction of three iconic houses in the same year—Philip Johnson’s Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut; Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois; and the Eames House in Santa Monica, California (Colomina 2007, 24). Later, in July 1950, the widely read French architecture journal, L’architecture d’aujourd’hui, devoted an issue to the single-family house featuring among its cast of international architects, ten American architects including Johnson, Pierre Chareau, Richard Neutra, Paul Laszlo, and Paul Rudolph (Ibid., 25–6). Architecture was key to the depiction of mid-century American middle-class contentment as smiling families posed in picture-perfect interiors or frolicked on manicured lawns. Paraphernalia associated with the fulfillment of domestic bliss ranged from kitchens (Penner 2018), lawn mowers (Wigley 1999), and sanitary wares (Penner 2013) to the art and politics of interior decoration (Penick 2014; Sparke 2008). The architectural historian, Beatriz Colomina, attests that the brand of domesticity in the postwar years was “embattled” and “obsessive” (2007, 19) with the American home of the 1950s packaged as a middle-class, mass consumable commodity. With the “new form of domesticity … found within images” (2007b, 8), a consumerist impulse to recreate the ideal home was opportunistically taken up by mass media, particularly product advertisements as well as home design and home decorating publications. Domesticity reemerged as the veritable battlefront where homeowners exercised control over their individual household environments. Through its accessibility and reach, domesticity was an effective weapon to pacify widespread anxieties consequent to the Cold War with the Soviet Union. The accumulation and explosion of fashionable furnishings, home appliances, interior design manuals, and numerous housekeeping magazines eulogized the virtues of sewing, cooking, and decorating. Significantly, the target audience of such aggressive media campaign was the housewife. Yet architecture was slow to catch on to the mass consumption of the domestic interior. Architects particularly steered away from the “kitsch”, “vulgarity”, and “triviality” associated with populist home improvement trends (Colomina 1991, 4–5). Where architects embraced this paradigm, 255

Lilian Chee

architectural representation was reconceptualized as if architecture came “straight out of the logic of Hollywood” (Colomina 2007, 31). Among those testing such new media boundaries were the American architect-artist couple, Charles and Ray Eames. Charles Eames was trained in architecture but was prolific in stage and product design, while Ray Eames was a painter and artist with an acute sense of color and texture. Invited in 1958 by the magazine Family Circle to respond to the proposal “If I could tell a woman one thing about furnishing a home”, Charles Eames distinguished himself from other architects (who showed their own works) by featuring “a Native American pueblo interior … in which rugs, blankets and other textiles served both decorative and functional ends” (Kirkham 2009, 172). The design historian, Pat Kirkham, points out that the Eameses’ “affection for things” (Ibid., 2009) resulted in their refusal to make anything sacred. Their house (Case Study House No. 8) was inevitably caught among knickknacks—driftwood salvaged from the beach, combs, decorative cherubs, textiles of various origins and fabric, Mexican piñatas, potted geraniums and Monstera deliciosas, porcelain and brass dishes, and weather-worn pebbles. The Eameses called their eclectic mix of things “functioning decoration” (Ibid., 2009). In their house, decoration was an integral part of the couple’s design ethos, and thus, completely at one with architecture. Nevertheless, modern architecture continued to eschew decoration in preference of structure. The Eameses’ fascination for objects was perceived to be eccentric at best and schizophrenic at worst: “a frightful case of overcompensation, the spare frame of the exterior, where economy is definitely key, conceals an interior world of magpie acquisitiveness and eclecticism” ( Jones and Canniffe 2007, 14). The advent of the acquisitive postwar domestic consumer, however, translated into “the role of the architect (being) simply that of happily accommodating these objects” (Colomina 2007, 108). Charles Eames himself declared how he regretted not treating their house less as architecture and more as a kind of “product design” (Charles Eames quoted in “Life in a Chinese Kit,” Architectural Forum, September 1950, p. 96. Cited in Colomina 2007, 30). In fact, the success of the Eames House is instructive of how modern architecture gradually began to shift its representational modes. The architect had to tune in to a new audience who were coaxed by mass media to desire, acquire, and consume at home: Where did the work of the designer end and that of the occupant begin in this house? Were the famous colored panels on the façade ephemera (picked up from the history of modern art like the pieces of driftwood the Eames were always picking up and rearranging) or “unselfconscious structure”?... But for the Eames, the real architecture of the house was to be found in their endless rearrangement of the collectibles within it. The real space was to be found in the details of their daily life. (Colomina 2007b, 90–1) The convivial atmosphere cultivated by the Eames through their own personalities and their designs were part of a “propaganda campaign” (Colomina 2007, 12) which embedded a laudatory view of Americana. Colomina reminds us how the Eames, who were commissioned by the US government in 1959 to curate an exhibition and a film in Moscow, also designed mass-produced plywood military products during the war. Charles and Ray Eames were acutely aware of how powerful the mass consumed image could be. They purposefully choreographed the portrayal of their designs—the house; their iconic Mid-century Modern furniture designs; their trove of collected objects, both unique and banal; and their intensely documented daily routines. Carefully curated images appeared regularly on a wide range of mass media including television, women’s and household magazines, advertisements, exhibitions, and film. These images transformed the image of modern design from austere, masculine, and aloof, to celebratory, airy, and livable. Demonstrating a magpie tendency, the Eames also gave the aesthetics of modern architecture an ambiguously gendered turn, albeit accommodating softer textures, a wider color palette, and a greater tolerance 256

Domesticity, Gender, and Architecture

for an assortment of everyday things. Altogether, these decisions spelled a congenial design attitude to everyday life. Gradually becoming iconic as an image, the Eameses’ personal domestic environment was strategically used to advance national sentiments of the “good life”. That their personal papers were eventually deposited at the US Library of Congress following their deaths attests to the couple’s casual domesticity and their household designs being inseparable from the political contexts that surrounded their architectural and autobiographical making/remaking. In her study of mid-century American domestic architecture, the architectural historian Monica Penick (2017) makes a similar argument. Penick points out how House Beautiful, a consumer lifestyle magazine in the 1950s, led by editor-in-chief Elizabeth Gordon, influenced the formation of a distinctively American domestic lifestyle and brand of architecture. Gordon emphasized the importance of an aesthetics that did not reject traditional styles while preserving the functionality and performance of modern design. With its large readership, House Beautiful successfully pushed for an “architectural setting” which matched a desired “sociocultural value system” that became known as the “American Style” (Penick 2014, 224). The “American Style” meshed social life and domestic life, catered for the needs of children, realized mundane domestic needs such as the necessity of storage space, and strove to make design more accessible and amenable to the masses. Yet, although both the Eames House and House Beautiful reconsidered the gendering of domestic space through their eclecticism and accommodation of mass preferences, neither explicitly addressed the gendered blind spots of American domestic architecture with its unsaid reliance on the housewife as perennial guardian of that cherished traditional lifestyle. Thus, at the same time as the architectural designs of middle class, single-family dwellings were being fought across opposing fronts, the surge in domestic bliss had already been heavily criticized for suppressing women’s nondomestic potentials. In her polemical 1949 book, The Second Sex, the feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir saw women’s domesticated roles as ultimately stripping them of their subjectivity. Mistresses of their homes, they became the passive “Other” restricted to supplementing, maintaining, and nurturing husband and family. While a man sees marriage and domestic life as a natural progression of “his work and political life”, …the wife has no other task save the one of maintaining and caring for life in its pure and identical generality; she perpetuates the immutable species, she ensures the even rhythm of the days and the permanence of the home she guards with locked doors; she is given no direct grasp on the future, nor on the universe; she goes beyond herself toward the group only through her husband as mouthpiece. ([1949] 2011, 506–7) Significantly, it was also because of housewife malaise and unhappiness in American suburbia, that a feminist revolution was sparked off in the 1970s. That decade marked the middle of 30 turbulent years when second-wave feminism gained momentum particularly in the United States. Historically, feminism was important in reconfiguring a critical perspective of home. Liberal and socialist feminist discourse reexamined and questioned the effects of domestic life and the gender-biased designs of the domestic sphere. Second-wave feminism openly debated controversial issues, many of which impacted the formation of the domestic sphere and its unquestioned notions of privacy and rights to space. These issues included sexuality, familial structures and privacy, reproductive rights and contraception, inequalities in the work place, and domestic violence. In particular, the vocalization of a woman’s place at home was provoked in 1963 by Betty Friedan’s polemical book, The Feminine Mystique. Friedan argued that the need to keep up appearances and maintain a picture-perfect household—influenced no less by consumerist mass media features published in magazines such as House Beautiful, or the home improvement television shows that popularized the Eames and their lifestyle—resulted in the suburban housewife suffering low self-esteem and 257

Lilian Chee

depression. Identifying the suburban single-family house as the site of “the problem that has no name”, Friedan accords this problem a subject and a voice: As she [i.e. the suburban wife] made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Club Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night, she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question: “Is this all?” ([1963] 2010, 5) Contemporaneously, feminist practitioners in art and film also produced critical work that challenged the conventional stereotyping of women at home. In 1969, following the birth of her first child and crisis of self-definition as artist/wife/mother/woman, the artist, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, wrote the Manifesto for Maintenance Art. Ukeles (1969) asked, “After the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?” The manifesto sought to raise awareness of how housework—for example, cleaning, cooking, and child-rearing—though habitually accorded low cultural status (minimum wage or unpaid labor), were in fact central to one’s well-being. Such maintenance work ensured that comfort and ease went undisrupted. Ukeles’ works included public acts of cleaning and waxing floors and collaborating with maintenance staff and cleaners at the museums. Her art challenged the binary thinking which separated the professionalization of art from mundane everyday domestic life (Phillips 1996). In artist Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975), Rosler plays the housewife who ­demonstrates her kitchen tools, classified in alphabetical order. As the film unfolds, the h ­ ousewife’s efficient passivity turns into unpredictable aggression—she stabs the fork and, then more violently, the ice pick, in the direction of the viewer. At the end of the alphabet, Rosler inscribes U, V, W, X, Y, and Z using her body, showing how the housewife is instrumentalized and subsumed at home, eventually becoming one of her hyper-efficient kitchen tools. A similar kind of passive domestic aggression is portrayed in filmmaker Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). The film creates a “concreteness of image” (Margulies 1996) around the household routines of Jeanne, a devoted single mother who also works as a prostitute from her apartment. Akerman’s long takes on Jeanne’s domestic rituals when preparing dinner or fussing over her son not only defines the film, but also overshadows what would have been a filmic “climax”—the murder of a client by Jeanne. In effect, the stale coffee she makes seems more tragic than the murder she commits. The film compels the viewer to experience domestic time as a bodily event, tied specifically to Jeanne’s body as she moves through her flat making coffee, washing potatoes, mending clothes, and sweeping the floor. Yet, unlike the intense opposition to domestic entrapment portrayed in Rosler’s performance, in Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles—a film which literally identifies a woman through or with her address—Akerman remains ambivalent about domesticity’s potentials to enslave or to empower. This shift reconfigures the binary opposition accorded to the private home and the public sphere. The private domestic sphere is a safe, nurturing space, capable even of soothing over something as scandalous as murder. Nevertheless, Akerman’s strategic swopping of familiar boundaries unsettles the audience. We are left to wonder about the conventional role of the woman in the house, to think of whether familiar domestic rituals may be pernicious, and to fear the dead body on Jeanne’s bed. Instinctively, our idea of home is averse to such disruptions. We are viscerally drawn into Jeanne’s world, into her time, and we begin to worry about “stasis and containment, time and domestic anxiety” (Margulies n.d.), for we become, like the housewife, at the same time, engrossed and restless: … as the shot goes on, the viewer becomes aware of his/her own body, restless and then again interested. After “reading” the image of a woman washing dishes, one’s attention starts to wander to tiles, to colors, to a rag. (Ibid.) 258

Domesticity, Gender, and Architecture

This is the irony of gendered experiences within the domestic sphere—the women’s bodies are simultaneously invested in, as they are equally resistant to, a spatial politics that preserves the sanctity of familial relations and ideally guarantees the privileges of security and comfort. By “gender” I am referring to a sociocultural/historical construction (masculine and feminine) rather than biological (male and female) differences between bodies (Rendell 2000). Both Jeanne Dielman and 20th Century Women unravel questions of gender and sexuality foundational to home but are persistently muted in mainstream discourse. In these, it is the absence of the heteronormative nuclear family structure that forces us to redraw the boundaries and renovate our perceptions of Jeanne’s flat and Dorothea’s house. Freed from the “regulatory norms of sexual deportment” (Scott 2010, 9), their bedrooms, living rooms, and kitchens begin to take on new functions. The “alternative domesticities” (Pilkey, Scicluna, and Gorman-Murray 2015) in these two instances transform home into sites for the unlikely—for Jeanne, it is where necessary work (paid sex) and pleasurable housework (cooking, baking, cleaning) intersect and for Dorothea, it is where collaborative exchange and new social ties are engineered. Through their alternative familial structures, we are confronted with the complex gendered production of home, one which is necessarily constructed “through notions of control, restriction and liberation, visibility and invisibility” (Pilkey et al. 2017a, 3). The removal of the heteronormative nuclear family as a precondition for home, as these two situations highlight, further accentuates the importance of thinking about home through the “analytical category” of gender (Scott 1986). The feminist historian Joan W. Scott underscores the need for a historicized account of sexual difference such that the dialectical relationships between different bodies constituted by sexuality, race, ethnicity, religion, and age are recognized. This acknowledgement of difference is opposed to the tactic of seeing home as only constituted by a normative family structure: … gender is a useful category of analysis because it requires us to historicize the ways sex and sexual difference have been conceived. … It doesn’t reduce to some known quantity of masculine or feminine, male or female. It’s precisely the particular meanings that need to be teased out of the materials we examine. When gender is an open question about how these meanings are established, what they signify, and in what contexts, then it remains a useful – because critical – category of analysis. (Scott 2010, 13) Gender is a significant analytic category because it opens up a priori meanings to question. Scott emphasizes that gender must remain a pliable category of inquiry that rejects essentialist masculine or feminine norms. As an analytic category, gender interrogates the invisible capillaries of power as domestic subjects—both men and women—become bound to specific social roles within a domestic setting: “how issues of power and rights played into definitions of masculinity and femininity; how symbolic structures affected the lives and practices of ordinary people…” (Ibid., 9). In particular, a focus on gender necessitates an inquiry into the relationship between the architecture of the house and the subjective positions available to its occupant. In the case of the housewife, the mother or wife—figures explicitly linked to the foundations of home—how is she constituted by the architecture of the house both in terms of its design as well as its sociocultural symbolic role? Baydar (2005) similarly argues that questions of gender and sexuality inflected upon domestic architecture raise questions which concern both women and men. The analytic category of gender makes it possible to interrogate domestic subjectivity in its specific and multivalent forms—not simply in terms of normative roles assumed by “women” and “men” at home but thinking through the many unremarked subjects in the domestic realm including women as “aged parents, adult daughters, domestic servants, and single women”, and men as “bachelors, gay men, adult sons, aged fathers, and servants” (Ibid., 33). Given that the heteronormative single-family household 259

Lilian Chee

represents a common understanding of domesticity, the inclusion of nonnormative subjects “provides unprecedented opportunities to reconsider not only the boundaries of domesticity, but of the architectural discipline as well” (Ibid., 34). These questions inevitably destabilize architecture by exposing the assumptions and exclusions it makes with regard to production, experience, and agency. Thus, if, as Colomina (1996) contends, we should understand architecture as a system of ­representation—not unlike film, drawings, and models—then domestic architecture is inevitably sexualized because it is co-produced by occupants and users whose sexed bodies are culturally and politically constructed. The single-family house is the consequence of a heteronormative marriage contract and the site of traditional family life. In endorsing these relationships, the ­single-family house subsequently also becomes a space that naturalizes, and privileges, heteronormativity and procreative coupling. “The politics of space are always sexual, even if space is central to the mechanisms of the erasure of sexuality” (Colomina 1996). The sexualized politics of domestic space has been continuously subjected to feminist architectural critique. Socialist and Marxist feminist architectural historians and practitioners including Dolores Hayden (1981), Gwendolyn Wright (1983), and Alice T. Friedman (2007) critiqued particularly domesticity’s “man-made” spaces (Rendell 2012, 86–8). These feminist historians reorganized the study of modern housing and the domestic sphere by looking at architecture from ground-up. Their research recentered the production of domestic architecture by shifting it from the architect to the occupant. Arguments forefronted the transformative use of domestic through everyday inhabitation and experience. Studies included rationalizing popular household typologies as opposed to focusing on architect-designed attributes, understanding the impact of architecture on domestic practices and familial relationships, rethinking the distribution and responsibility of housework, and reframing the agency of the woman in the house from one of passive consumer to active producer. Likewise, contesting the neat separation of public and private spheres, Heynen and Baydar’s Negotiating Domesticity (2005) reframes the production of modern architecture as inherently bound to gender. The volume offers a critical rethinking of architectural narratives and evidence as well as architectural production and reception from the perspectives of domestic experience, use, and engagement. In a more recent interdisciplinary collection, Sexuality and Gender at Home (Pilkey et al. 2017b), questions of embodiment—physical, social, cultural, political, economic—become increasingly central to interrogating the sexualized politics of home.

Beyond the Object: Domesticity, Gender, and Affect The fascination toward the domestic sphere as an analytical category in and of itself has resulted in noteworthy volumes from a multitude of disciplines including geography, ethnography, cultural and social histories, and material culture (Briganti and Mezei 2012; Blunt and Dowling 2006; Miller 2001; Anderson 2000; Reed 1996). Research from these areas has focused on domestic objects, processes, habits, biases, rituals, and the negative impacts of taboos, violence, and natural disaster on domestic existence. The shared argument is that home must be defined through “a continuous process of negotiations, contracts, renegotiations and exchanges” (Brickell 2012b, 226). Thus, domesticity becomes central to spatial and identitarian politics. Geographers and cultural theorists particularly, have advanced domesticity’s significance by mapping its “critical geographies” in relation to power relations (Brickell 2012a; Blunt and Dowling 2006; Blunt 2005a; Blunt and Varley 2004), examining its geopolitical influences manifested through colonization (Blunt 2005b; Gowans 2001; Blunt 1999) or migration (Ahmed 1999), advocating domestic justice for situations of household violence and abuse (Baxter and Brickell 2014; Brickell 2014, 2008) and studying how mundane domestic routines such as cooking and cleaning might empower, or reproduce gender relations (Meah and Peter 2013; Dowling 2008). 260

Domesticity, Gender, and Architecture

In her illuminating essay on home, house, dwelling, and domestic space iterated from an architectural perspective and directed toward a nonarchitecture reader, the architectural historian Lynn Walker concludes that the study of home is inherently implicated in the acknowledgement of various subjectivities and discourses outside of the discipline: …it is no longer possible to speak of architects’ understanding of the home without reference to interdisciplinary approaches and discourses outside architecture. By the same token, the concept of the home, produced at intersections of language, space and social dynamics, is not fixed but changing over time. (Walker 2002, 831) Yet, the interdisciplinary conversation necessary to the study of home continues to fracture the limits of the discipline as much as it enriches our understanding of domestic space as something that is both designed and lived. This is perhaps the most difficult and contested aspect, resulting in domesticity still being marginalized in the realm of architectural discourse. In this sense, it is not regarded as an important subject matter in its own right, often seen as peripheral to the associated topics of housing or house design. Domesticity is also closely linked to the occupant’s spontaneous transformation of the architectural interior through usage, habits, and tastes ( Jacobs and Cairns 2008; Rendell 1998). As such, discourse on the politics, poetics, and aesthetics of domestic space often find their way into the subdisciplines of interior architecture and interior design. Histories of the modern domestic interior (Sparke et al. 2009; Sparke 2008; Sparke, Martin, and Keeble 2006), theoretical and psychoanalytical discourse of domestic interiors (Rice 2007; Fuss 2004), gendered readings (Colomina 2007; Sanders 2002; Wigley 1992), and theories of interior design (Brooker and Weinthal 2013; Kleinman, Merwood-Salisbury, and Weinthal 2011; Weinthal 2011; Taylor and Preston 2006) are located at the margins of architectural discourse—compelling as architecture’s Other but also threatening architecture’s assumed autonomy through the evidently interdisciplinary character of the interior, and its complex modes of inhabitation and production. “The (un)doing of ‘home’ may transgress [conventional] definitions of domesticity, challenge ideas about the ways we occupy space and the ways architects do architecture” (Rendell 1999, 103). The use of domesticity as analytic category is gaining traction in several pieces of work located in the Asian context. With the home as a site that embeds sentiments of familial piety and national solidarity, the study of domestic space in the Asian milieu is multiply complex. Home does not merely reproduce and naturalize gender relations; it is also a site where imperialist, and, subsequently, nationalist agendas are housed and inscribed as part of an architectural language of progress and modernity (Chee 2013b; Pieris 2013, 2007; Lu 2011). The challenge then becomes how to read against the grain of overwhelming evidence. Indeed, what else can we turn to in order to create a discourse which might include other forms of subjectivities? How do we make sense of other tangible evidence produced through domestic occupation that are left out of documented policies and proliferating state-sanctioned archives? In his interpretation of Henri Lefebvre’s (1991) concept of abstract space, the political economist Japhy Wilson (2013) argues that Lefebvre’s critique of abstract space is rooted in a critique of modern spatial practice, one that is not just driven by capital but argues against a space of disalienation dictated by technocratic rationality. In the way home is represented and conceived as ultimately serving the nation, this iteration derives from an abstract and homogeneous space linking perceived communities and calculated desires of progress and productivism. It is also a space that discourages self-actualization or individual investment. Lefebvre’s conception of a differential space in a postproductivist economy is particularly compelling for rethinking the relationship between domesticity (spatial practice of lived experiences), the architecture of dwelling (representational 261

Lilian Chee

space of design), and the ideological notion of home (representation of technocratic space). How can domesticity be employed as an analytic category to trace the unsaid but sensed? In tandem with efforts to trace narratives of domestic space through lived experiences, the role of affect and affective evidence are increasingly important. Affective evidence is particularly resonant in the domestic sphere, given its occupants’ emotional and relational investments in such spaces. Affect is a relational intensity transmitted between objects, spaces, and people (Pedwell and Whitehead 2012; Gregg and Seigworth 2010; Massumi 1995). Unlike emotion which “happens inside and tends toward outside expression”, affect is exteriorized and prepersonalized, making it “relational and transformative” (Flatley 2008, 12). The psychologist, Silvan Tomkins (Sedgwick and Frank 1995, 33–74), argues that affect has its own specificity and is not derived from elements of “cognition” such as belief, thought, or choice. Rather, affect occurs within an assemblage, a network, or a system. In architectural terms, affect may be more appropriately described as a sensed feeling between us and the space we find ourselves in. Indeed, affect is atmospheric, pointing us to “something in the air”. Affect in architecture is, however, not restricted to the architectural space itself, but that which comes into effect “in the middle” (Ballantyne 2007, 85–6) or in the midst of a constellation comprising architecture, the objects within it, and the people who encounter both architecture and objects. “Affects need objects to come into being”, and hence, affects are “always experienced in relation to an object or objects” (Flatley 2008, 16). Thus, the material quality and atmospheric sense of a space—an intensity we can perceive bodily, but perhaps not register cognitively yet—is where affect is ultimately located. Affective evidence becomes an important means of unpacking domesticity particularly where there are obstacles to accessing knowledge because of difficult circumstances including war, conflict, governmental embargoes, and individual censorship. Looking at the postwar political entity of Northern Cyprus, which was invaded by Turkey in 1974, the anthropologist Yael Navaro-Yashin (2012) discusses the affective spaces and stories discharged by the material domestic landscape of the Turkish-Cypriot homes and their scarred occupants. Her research is based on the hidden histories and unspoken contemporary stories of the Turkish-Cypriot house—an unhomely space of guilt—detected through affective evidence “produced and transmit(ted) … relationally” between the current occupants and their expropriated houses (2009, 14). These domestic environments and their material objects are entities embroiled with “politics and law in the most intimate spheres of existence: around people’s most private and personal belongings” (2012, 179). Navaro-Yashin traces the domestic unease through a close reading of the occupants’ household routines, patterns of use, habits, and reactions toward household objects looted from the original Cypriot owners. Her ethnographical methodology combines the subjective (occupant) and the objective (objects and space) to extend a story repressed by Turkish institutional archives. For Navaro-Yashin, the affective is inseparable from both subjects and objects. She argues that affective evidence produces situated knowledges, particularly accounting for “the merging of the forces, energies, and affective potentialities of human beings with their natural, built, and material environment” (2012, 27). The continuum between what is sensed, what is lived, and what is imaginable through domesticity is key to taking apart the officially documented “representational space” of home. This methodology is extended by architectural historian Anoma Pieris (2017) in her study of minority Tamil homes abandoned by their residents during the Sri Lankan civil war in 1983. Pieris develops an intimate sociospatial architectural ethnography which relooks at the affective materiality of three suburban home in ruins. Interviewing two generations of Tamil female householders about their struggle with self-exile and their relationship with their abandoned natal homes, she offers affective-subjective portraits of domestic architecture that critiques studies of Sri Lankan dwellings premised on aesthetic, functional, and formal qualities. These exilic homes are “interpreted as artefacts that are affectively and performatively emplaced” (2017, 16), where the exiled Tamil 262

Domesticity, Gender, and Architecture

women enact a “private resilience” (ibid.) by making “war-related adaptions and compromises” to their dwellings (2017, 17). For Pieris, there is a necessity to read between the lines of both objective and subjective evidence. The role of affect—what is palpable and perceivable yet has no cognitive form or language of articulation—becomes the outcome of Pieris’ architectural discourse around these war-torn houses. In another context, the architectural historian Izumi Kuroishi (1998) highlights how the fieldwork drawings of peasant houses by Japanese architect Kon Wajiro (1888-1973) constructs affective lived evidence—a series of situated architectural-ethnographical document not seen before. Beginning in 1910, Kon began to document peasant houses and their way of life in rural Japan. His intention was to collect and preserve information of these traditional cultures as well as to use such material to steer government policies in these areas. Kon’s visual research method involved the production of detailed drawings which depicted not only the interior space but also all the ­objects—tools, utensils, clothing and shoes, furniture, and other belongings—found in that space. It resulted in lively, expressively, and vividly detailed drawings that, according to Kon, would make audible to the viewer, the voices of the house’s occupants (Kuroishi 2011, 100). Kon’s drawings portrayed domestic space as an entangled phenomenon where architecture, furniture, belongings, usage patterns, and occupancy habits became inseparable (Figure 14.1). These drawings also advanced Kon’s philosophy of architecture as a “container for everyday life”. Their affective capacity is rendered in the excesses of transient and trivial domestic details. Moving away from normative architectural representation, such detail brings Kon’s drawings closer to the genre of filmic storyboards. Through these drawings, we perceive space through its residues of movements, habits, and identities. The careful inventory of key household objects also forces upon the viewer a relational engagement not just with the objects but also the personal histories tied to them. To this end, Kuroishi argues that Kon’s excessive visual displays “expressed [the objects’] imaginative qualities and his consciousness about the spatiality between objects and interior space, inviting viewers to empathize with the unseen owners and their movements” (Ibid., 115).

Figure 14.1  D  rawings by Kon Wajiro exhibited at Kinokuniya Shinjyuku in 1927, capturing a family’s possessions in the living room and a plan of the house (Courtesy of Kogakuin University Library).

263

Lilian Chee

My own recent research explores the gendered biases of domestic architecture in Singapore. Public housing policy in Singapore is outwardly proheteronormative family (Oswin 2010). S­ ingles may purchase smaller one-bedroom subsidized public housing flats in non-matured estates or resale flats from the open market, only upon reaching the age of 35 years, coincidentally also the critical age for female biological fertility. With almost a third of the national population now choosing singlehood, the issue of preferential housing for nuclear families is a pressing one. Yet, how does one contemplate the issues of social inclusion, spatial justice, and gender when the architectural discourse of nationalized public housing does not recognize these terms? It is from within this academic “road block” that I conceptualized the architectural essay film 03-FLATS (Chee 2017; Lei 2014). The film—a collaboration with the award-winning Singaporean filmmaker, Lei Yuan Bin—revolves around the domestic lives of three single women in Singapore public housing units. Edited from over 200 hours of footage and eight months of filming, 03-FLATS is an affective portrait of public housing visualized from the interiors of the flats (Figure 14.2). Consider these three scenes: A woman moves slowly between her kitchen and her bedroom. The flat is quiet as she works on her old sewing machine. Another woman makes large charcoal drawings in her living room. She fills every surface of her flat with collectibles. A third woman entertains her friends in the cramped corridor outside her flat at the end of the Muslim Ramadan month. She is dressed in her finest clothes. These public housing interiors are only three among the thousands found in Singapore, a country famed for its mass housing program, the Housing and Development Board (HDB). The HDB flat is synonymous with the nuclear family. Yet these three women are neither mother nor wife. They live alone. 03-FLATS is an experiment in architectural representation. It questions architecture’s propensity to remove affect and life from architectural representation. Its impetus is the rich material offered by domesticity, which architectural discourse on Singaporean public housing has ultimately disregarded, neutralized, or repressed. Contrary to current practice where public housing is spoken through the planner or the architect’s language, what happens to the discourse of public housing when it is experienced through a domestic perspective? The focus on domesticity inevitably forefronts the milieu of public housing. “Milieu” refers to a surrounding environment which impinges on the object and describes architecture as a noninsular object. Architecture is always in the middle of something. In 03-FLATS, we find public housing in the milieu of gendered

Figure 14.2  P  hotograph taken during the filming of 03-FLATS (2014), showing occupancy of a Singapore public housing interior (courtesy of Lei Yuan Bin).

264

Domesticity, Gender, and Architecture

bodies marked by age, sexuality, ethnicity and class, and the multiply complex domestic situations of the three women. Domesticity is studied here not so much because it is contained with the architecture of public housing and so must be given attention; I would argue, rather, that it must be addressed because it gives presence to architecture. In other words, 03-FLATS contends that domesticity gives public housing architecture its form. As a consequence, the architecture of public housing is portrayed not as anterior to occupation, but its architecture comes into being as the consequence of someone living in it. Through domesticity and moving beyond block upon homogeneous block, public housing gains an identifiable identity. In the months spent thinking about the narrative structure of the film, I was especially struck by how the filmic image constantly juxtaposed architecture with something else. Architecture was the subject, but in the film, it became the background. Architecture only surged to the foreground through the women’s embodied actions. Spaces for gathering, sleeping, and cooking were understood through household routines, their repetitions, and their durations. Perceptions of physical scale, size, proximity, as well as ideologies, desires, and anxieties were played out in the bodily routines of each woman, who was in turn, marked by her class, race, ethnicity, and age. The filmic encounter made the architecture of public housing inseparable from its milieu. It made public housing incredibly difficult to study as a rarefied object. Yet, the possibility of thinking about public housing simultaneously as both foreground and background also changes the limits of its knowledge. Rather than abstract policy, the film underscores the importance of rethinking public housing through lived, embodied occupancy. And again here, as Lynn Walker argued previously, the gap between domesticity and architecture continues to be challenged and persists as a problem.

Conclusion The relationship between architecture, domesticity, and gender is simultaneously enduring and fraught. Architecture is a system of othering—it excludes and represses everything else which is not part of the discipline. Not coincidentally, domesticity and gender are located outside architecture’s legitimized boundaries. “Outside architecture”, the feminist philosopher, Elizabeth Grosz (2001, xvii), reminds us “is always inside bodies, sexualities, history, culture, nature—all those others [architecture] seeks to exclude but which are the constitutive edges, the boundaries of its operations”. If the canon of architectural history has privileged particular agents and processes, relocating domesticity and gender within architectural discourse implicitly addresses the shortcomings of a patriarchally biased historiography by reconsidering the contributions, outcomes, and impacts of other marginalized agents. At the same time, feminists continue to question, debate, or reject the domestic realm because its ideological frame can be deployed to subjugate women, limiting their contribution within traditional familial roles. Yet, because domesticity highlights the productive/nonproductive processes which go on to constitute the sense of home—including the production of identity, security, comfort, belonging, and the negotiations necessary to maintain the status quo—domesticity is a double-edged tool, both limiting and emancipatory in its different guises. More significantly, the gendering of domesticity highlights the politics of embodied actions, opens up unremarked areas of agency, as well as exposing the biases and norms placed upon specific gendered household relationships. Certainly, domesticity’s shapeshifting abilities—on the one hand, explicitly linked to safeguarding status quo notions of family and home and on the other hand, implicitly critical in unravelling the very same protocols of status quo maintenance—asserts an incredibly pliant position within architectural discourse. It is also this ambiguous position that affords domesticity and its gendered overtones some critical space within Asian architectural discourse’s tightly managed and essentialized narratives, 265

Lilian Chee

as well as its antipolemical arguments on home and gender. If home is wedded to particular architectural claims of self-identity and belonging, then the usage of gendered domesticity as an analytic architectural category might begin to take such assumptions apart. In doing so, domesticity makes contingent the architectures of dwelling, housing, and home. Consequently, entering the discourse of dwelling and home through the conduits of domesticity and gender requires more than a change of perspective. The shift entails rigorous questioning of analytical tools, modes of evidence, attendant agencies, and their voices. The inclusion of domesticity and gender enable often idealized and abstract entities of “home” or “housing” to reconsider lived experience and occupancy as relevant to the production of situated knowledge around these subjects.

Acknowledgements The author thanks Duanfang Lu, Barbara Penner, Ailian Chee, Izumi Kuroishi, Tomohisa ­M iyauchi, Lei Yuan Bin, and the Kogakuin University Library. Research for this article is ­supported by the National University of Singapore’s Humanities and Social Sciences Seed Fund WBS R-295-000-131-646.

References Ahmed, Sara (1999) “Home and Away: Narratives of Migration and Estrangement”. International Journal of Cultural Studies 2 (3): 329–47. Akerman, Chantal (1975) Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels. Drama. France: Criterion Films. Anderson, Bridget (2000) Doing the Dirty Work? The Global Politics of Domestic Labour. London: Zed Books. Bachelard, Gaston (1994) The Poetics of Space. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Ballantyne, Andrew (2007) Deleuze and Guattari for Architects. London: Routledge. Baxter, Richard, and Katherine Brickell (2014) “For Home UnMaking”. Home Cultures 11 (2): 133–43. Baydar, Gülsüm (2005) “Figures of Wo/Man in Contemporary Architectural Discourse”. In Negotiating Domesticity: Spatial Productions of Gender in Modern Architecture, edited by Hilde Heynen and Gülsüm Baydar, 30–46. London: Routledge. Baydar, Gülsüm, and Hilde Heynen (2005) Negotiating Domesticity: Spatial Productions of Gender in Modern Architecture. New York: Routledge. Beauvoir, Simone de (2011) The Second Sex. Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-­ Chevallier. 1 edition. New York: Vintage. Blunt, Alison (1999) “Imperial Geographies of Home: British Domesticity in India, 1886–1925.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 24 (4): 421–40. ——— (2005a) “Cultural Geography: Cultural Geographies of Home”. Progress in Human Geography 29 (4): 505–15. ——— (2005b) Domicile and Diaspora: Anglo-Indian Women and the Spatial Politics of Home. 1 edition. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Blunt, Alison, and Robyn Dowling (2006) Home. New York: Routledge. Blunt, Alison, and Ann Varley (2004) “Introduction: Geographies of Home”. Cultural Geographies 11 (1): 3–6. Brickell, Katherine (2008) “‘Fire in the House’: Gendered Experiences of Drunkenness and Violence in Siem Reap, Cambodia”. Geoforum 39 (5): 1667–75. ——— (2012a) “Geopolitics of Home”. Geography Compass 6 (10): 575–88. ——— (2012b) “‘Mapping’ and ‘Doing’ Critical Geographies of Home”. Progress in Human Geography 36 (2): 225–43. ——— (2014) “‘Plates in a Basket Will Rattle’: Marital Dissolution and Home ‘Unmaking’ in Contemporary Cambodia”. Geoforum 51 ( January): 262–72. Briganti, Chiara, and Kathy Mezei, eds. (2012) The Domestic Space Reader. 1 edition. Toronto; Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division. Brooker, Graeme, and Lois Weinthal (2013) The Handbook of Interior Architecture and Design. London: Bloomsbury Press. Chee, Lilian (2013a) “Domesticity + Home: Reframing Narratives, Reforming Boundaries”. In Home + Bound: Narratives of Domesticity in Singapore and Beyond, edited by Lilian Chee and Melany Sun-Min

266

Domesticity, Gender, and Architecture Park Park, 10–19. Singapore: Center for the Advanced Studies in Architecture, National University of Singapore. ——— (2013b) “The Public Private Interior: Constructing the Modern Domestic Interior in Singapore’s Public Housing”. In The Handbook of Interior Architecture and Design, edited by Graeme Brooker and Lois Weinthal, 199–212. London: Bloomsbury. ——— (2017) “Unhousing Sexuality: Sexuality and Singlehood in Singapore’s Public Housing”. In Sexuality and Gender at Home: Experience, Politics, Transgression, edited by Brent Carnell, Rachael M Scicluna, Barbara Penner, and Ben Campkin, 35–50. London; New York: Bloomsbury. Colomina, Beatriz (1991) “Domesticity at War”. Discourse 14 (1): 3–22. ——— (1996) “Introduction”. In Sexuality and Space, edited by Beatriz Colomina, 4 edition, unpaginated. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. ——— (2007) Domesticity at War. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Dowling, Robyn (2008) “Accommodating Open Plan: Children, Clutter, and Containment in Suburban Houses in Sydney, Australia”. Environment and Planning A 40 (3): 536–49. Flatley, Jonathan (2008) Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Friedan, Betty (1983) The Feminine Mystique. 20th anniversary edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Friedman, Alice T (2007) Women and the Making of the Modern House. 1 edition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Fuss, Diana (2004) The Sense of an Interior: Four Rooms and the Writers That Shaped Them (Google EBook). Vol. 9. London: Routledge. George, Rosemary Marangoly (1998) Burning Down the House: Recycling Domesticity. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Gowans, Georgina (2001) “Gender, Imperialism and Domesticity: British Women Repatriated from India, 1940–47”. Gender, Place & Culture 8 (3): 255–69. Gregg, Melissa, and Gregory J Seigworth, eds. (2010) The Affect Theory Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Grosz, Elizabeth (2001) “Architectures of Excess”. In Architecture from the Outside, 151–66. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hayden, Dolores (1981) The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Heidegger, Martin (1993) “Building Dwelling Thinking”. In Basic Writings, 2 edition, 343–64. New York: HarperCollins. Heynen, Hilde (1999) “Mimesis, Dwelling and Architecture: Adorno’s Relevance for a Feminist Theory of Architecture”. In Adorno, Culture and Feminism, edited by O’Neil Maggie, 174–90. London: SAGE Publications Ltd. ——— (2005) “Modernity and Domesticity: Tensions and Contradictions”. In Negotiating Domesticity: Spatial Productions of Gender in Modern Architecture, edited by Hilde Heynen and Gülsüm Baydar, 1–29. London: Routledge. Hughes, Francesca (1998) The Architect: Reconstructing Her Practice. Boston, MA: MIT Press. Jacobs, Jane M., and Stephen Cairns (2008) “The Modern Touch: Interior Design and Modernisation in Post-Independence Singapore”. Environment and Planning A 40 (3): 572–95. Jacobs, Jane M., Stephen Cairns, and Ignaz Strebel (2007) “‘A Tall Storey... but, a Fact Just the Same’: The Red Road High-Rise as a Black Box”. Urban Studies 44 (3): 609–29. ——— (2012) “Materializing Vision: Performing a High-Rise View”. In Visuality/Materiality: Images, Objects and Practice, edited by Gillian Rose and Divya P. Tolia-Kelly, 133–52. Surrey: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. Jones, Peter Blundell, and Eamonn Canniffe (2007) Modern Architecture through Case Studies 1945 to 1990. 1 edition. Amsterdam: Taylor & Francis. Kirkham, Pat (2009) “New Environments for Modern Living ‘At home with the Eameses’”. In Designing the Modern Interior: From the Victorians to Today, edited by Penny Sparke, Anne Massey, Trevor Keeble, and Brenda Martin, 171–82. Oxford: Berg. Kleinman, Kent, Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, and Lois Weinthal, eds. (2011) After Taste: Expanded Practice in Interior Design. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Kuroishi, Izumi (1998) “Kon Wajiro: A Quest for the Architecture as a Container of Everyday Life”. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing. ——— (2011) “Visual Examinations of Interior Space in Movements to Modernize Housing in Japan, c. 1920–40”. Interiors 2 (1): 95–124. Lefebvre, Henri (1991) The Production of Space. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing.

267

Lilian Chee Lei, Yuan Bin and Chee, Lilian (2014) 03-FLATS. Film. Singapore: National University of Singapore and 13 Little Pictures. Lu, Duanfang (2011) Third World Modernism: Architecture, Development and Identity. New York: Routledge. Margulies, Ivone (1996) Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday. Durham, NC” Duke University Press. ——— (n.d) “A Matter of Time: Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles”. The Criterion Collection. Accessed 25 July 2017. http://www.criterion.com/current/ posts/1215-a-matter-of-time-jeanne-dielman-23-quai-du-commerce-1080-bruxelles. Massey, Doreen (1992) “A Place Called Home”. New Formations 17: 3–15. Massumi, Brian (1995) “The Autonomy of Affect”. Cultural Critique 31 (31): 83–109. Meah, Angela, and Jackson Peter (2013) “Crowded Kitchens: The ‘Democratisation’ of Domesticity?” Gender, Place and Culture 20 (5): 578. Miller, Daniel, ed. (2001) Home Possessions: Material Culture behind Closed Doors. 1 edition. Oxford: Bloomsbury Academic. Navaro-Yashin, Yael (2009) “Affective Spaces, Melancholic Objects: Ruination and the Production of Anthropological Knowledge*”. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15 (1): 1–18. ——— (2012) The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books. Oswin, Natalie (2010) “The Modern Model Family at Home in Singapore: A Queer Geography”. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 35 (2): 256–68. Pedwell, Carolyn, and Anne Whitehead (2012) “Affecting Feminism: Questions of Feeling in Feminist Theory”. Feminist Theory 13 (2): 115–29. Penick, Monica (2014) “Modern but Not Too Modern: House Beautiful and the American Style”. In Sanctioning Modernism: Architecture and the Making of Postwar Identities, edited by Timothy Parker, Monica Penick and Vladimir Kulic, 219–43. Austin: University of Texas Press. ——— (2017) Tastemaker: Elizabeth Gordon, House Beautiful, and the Postwar American Home. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Penner, Barbara (2013) Bathroom. London: Reaktion Books Ltd. ——— (2018) “The Cornell Kitchen: Housing and Design Research in Postwar America”. Technology and Culture 59(1): 48–94. ——— (2020) “Gender and Home: (Re)Scripting Domestic Life and Design”. In A Cultural History of the Home in the Modern Age, 1920–2000, edited by Despina Stratigakos, 137–160 London: Bloomsbury. Phillips, Patricia (1996) “Maintenance Activity: Creating a Climate for Change”. In But Is It Art? The Spirit of Art as Activism, edited by Nina Felshin, 165–93. Seattle, WA: Bay Press. Pieris, Anoma (2007) “Modernism at the Margins of the Vernacular: Considering Valentine Gunasekara”. Grey Room 28 (28): 56–85. ——— (2013) Architecture and Nationalism in Sri Lanka: The Trouser under the Cloth. Routledge. ——— (2017) “Dwelling in Ruins: Affective Materialities of the Sri Lankan Civil War”. The Journal of Architecture, August, 1–20. Pilkey, Brent, Rachael M. Scicluna, Ben Campkin, and Barbara Penner (2017a) “Introduction”. In Sexuality and Gender at Home: Experience, Politics, Transgression, 1–11. London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic. ——— eds. (2017b) Sexuality and Gender at Home: Experience, Politics, Transgression. London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Pilkey, Brent, Rachael M. Scicluna, and Andrew Gorman-Murray (2015) “Alternative Domesticities”. Home Cultures 12 (2): 127–38. Reed, Christopher, ed. (1996) Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture. New York: Thames & Hudson. Rendell, Jane (1998) “Doing It, (Un)Doing It, (Over)Doing It Yourself: Rhetorics of Architectural Abuse”. In Occupying Architecture: Between the Architect and the User, edited by Jonathan Hill, 229–46. London: Routledge. ——— (1999) “(Un)Doing It Yourself: Rhetorics of Architectural Abuse”. The Journal of Architecture 4 (1): 101–10. ——— (2000) “Introduction: ‘Gender’’”. In Gender Space Architecture: An Interdisciplinary Introduction, 15–24. The ArchiText Series. London: Routledge. ——— (2012) “Tendencies and Trajectories: Feminist Approaches in Architecture”. In The SAGE Handbook of Architectural Theory, edited by C. Greig Crysler, Stephen Cairns, and Hilde Heynen, 85–106. London: SAGE Publications Ltd. Rice, Charles (2007) The Emergence of the Interior: Architecture, Modernity, Domesticity. London: Routledge.

268

Domesticity, Gender, and Architecture Rosler, Martha (1975) Semiotics of the Kitchen. Single-channel video, black-and-white, sound, 6'09". New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Sanders, Joel. 2002. ‘Curtain Wars: Architecture, Decorators, and the Twentieth-Century Domestic Interior’. Harvard Design Magazine 16: 14–20. Scott, Joan W. (1986) ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis’. The American Historical Review 91 (5): 1053–75. ——— (2010) “Gender: Still a Useful Category of Analysis?” Diogenes 57 (1): 7–14. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, and Adam Frank, eds. (1995) Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books. Sparke, Penny (2008) The Modern Interior. London: Reaktion Books. Sparke, Penny, Brenda Martin, and Trevor Keeble (2006) The Modern Period Room: The Construction of the Exhibited Interior 1870–1950. London: Routledge. Sparke, Penny, Anne Wealleans, Trevor Keeble, and Brenda Martin, eds. (2009) Designing the Modern Interior: From The Victorians To Today. 1 edition. Oxford; New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Taylor, Mark, and Julieanna Preston, eds. (2006) INTIMUS: Interior Design Theory Reader. Chichester, Hoboken: Wiley-Academy. Ukeles, Mierle Laderman (1969) “Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! Proposal for an Exhibition ‘CARE’”. http://www.feldmangallery.com/media/pdfs/Ukeles_MANIFESTO.pdf. Walker, Lynne (2002) “Home Making: An Architectural Perspective”. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 27 (3): 823–35. Weinthal, Lois (2011) Toward a New Interior. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Wigley, Mark (1992) “Untitled: The Housing of Gender”. In Sexuality and Space, edited by Beatriz Colomina, 327–89. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. ——— (1999) “The Electric Lawn”. In The American Lawn, edited by Georges Teyssot, 155–95. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Wilson, Japhy (2013) “The Devastating Conquest of the Lived by the Conceived: The Concept of Abstract Space in the Work of Henri Lefebvre”. Space and Culture 16 (3): 364–80. Wright, Gwendolyn (1983) Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America. Reprint edition. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. ——— (1987) “Domestic Architecture and the Cultures of Domesticity”. Design Quarterly, no. 138: 12–19.

269

15 Architecture and Preemptive Spectacles Andrzej Piotrowski

While discussing the recent history of architecture and prompted by his seemingly paradoxical observation that “architecture today seems to represent contemporary culture by avoiding the present” (2013: 16), Ole W. Fischer poses a fundamental question of whether it is “possible to disconnect architecture from political implications and social contents” (2013: 15). This question, he notes, is symptomatic of the relationship between the postmodern condition and neoliberal capitalism which, as a broader issue, has already been addressed by writers such as Fredric Jameson (1991), David Harvey (1990), and Reinhold Martin (2010). Left unanswered, however, has been whether such a question is limited to contemporary phenomena or if it reveals a broader challenge within the discipline of architecture. The traditional mode of researching historical buildings has assumed that architectural monuments have always expressed a dominant ideology. Supposedly, such buildings have related to the social conditions of their time only to the degree they solved practical problems associated with implementing political programs of the ruling elites and representing their dominant narratives.1 In contrast, many studies of buildings associated with the recent phase of capitalism, especially those whose design ideas fall into the category of spectacle, have reached beyond issues of practical necessity and symbolic communication to examine what may be called perception management.2 Such scholarship, often explicitly neo-Marxist and even crypto-teleological, has revealed how deeply contemporary architecture is implicated in the practices of late capitalism and has shifted from viewing architecture as satisfying functional needs or representing an ideological agenda to analyzing it as a type of fetishistic fantasy in service of capitalist forces. Some of the most insightful discourses on this subject, such as those in Architecture Between Spectacle and Use (Vidler 2008), are deeply indebted to the work of Guy Debord (1967), a chain of influence that implies that such cultural phenomena can be explained within the deterministic logic of Marxist theories and that spectacles, seen as capitalist propaganda and a tactic of self-conscious power, can and should be resisted.3 Informed by the Frankfurt School’s critique of the culture industry, this argument not only encouraged the cultural upheaval of the late sixties but also still inspires many studies of how buildings relate to commercial imagery and branding practices.4 As novel and productive as many of these studies are, this chapter argues, they share two major shortcomings: (1) they assume that buildings are inherently at the receiving end of scripted cultural, political, and social processes, and (2) they privilege interest in present phenomena at the expense of knowledge regarding historical structures and processes. In contrast, I posit that architecture has always been instrumental in the most complex processes of cultural, social, or political change. Indeed, as I shall show, it has contributed to the development of new ways of thinking 270

DOI: 10.4324/9781315674469-17

Architecture and Preemptive Spectacles

by exploring modes of sensemaking and, perhaps even more importantly, has prevented people from thinking in certain politically inconvenient ways. Even when not deliberately intending to distort viewers’ knowledge of important facts, designers of material or visual environments have been able to alter or suppress prevailing perceptions of reality. In this way, architects, despite often being unaware of the repercussions of their own production, have avoided problems of the present and helped to disconnect built structures from their political implications and social contents. This architecture of preemptive spectacles, as I term it, has operated by redirecting attention and silencing interest in broader consequences of political, social, or economic trends and has gained popularity by satisfying a subconscious desire to replace critical understanding with a superficial notion of visual effectuation. These practices, I argue, have escaped scholarly scrutiny because they reach beyond the logic of problem-solving and do not explicitly follow well-articulated ideological or artistic programs. To substantiate this argument, I will first discuss the transition from so-called Mannerist to Baroque architecture as a shift from a critical and artistically inquisitive modality of thought to a superficial and self-referential one. Second, I will explicate how the kaleidoscopic ordering of commodified reality in Victorian England helped to cover up the conflicted character of the emerging consumer culture and how the same practices of denial resurfaced in late capitalism. Lastly, I will explore how the recent shift from an engagement with critical theories in architecture to a superficial fascination with parametric complexity in visual compositions exemplifies how architecture contributed to the rise of neoliberal tendencies at the beginning of the 21st century.

Mannerism The diverse characteristics of Mannerism have puzzled architectural historians attempting to define it as a style or explain its role in the evolution from the Renaissance to Baroque design principles. As a result, Mannerism has the most complex and conflicted historiographical record of any stylistic category in the Encyclopedia of World Art (Becherucci 1964).5 Although historians have identified Mannerist attributes in multiple and widely spread examples, they have found it almost impossible to talk about the style in terms of a formula. While Vasari discussed, maniera using words such as “capriccioso (whimsical), varietà (vario) (variety), originalità (originality)” (Cheney 2016: 1166) to praise architects’ God-given ability to create, later critics of the Mannerist style presented it as merely individualistic or elegantly capricious artistic inventiveness. This analysis, however, moves beyond these style-related controversies to consider the architecture of the Palazzo del Te in Mantua, Italy, an emblematic early example of Mannerism, as a site of critical explorations of the political and religious tensions of the period and to reveal ways in which people may think about truth, faith, and deception at times of political and religious turmoil. As Egon Verheyen suggests, “it seems more than coincidence that the plans to transform the [old] villa into a palace were made at the same time as the Sacco di Roma” (1977: 19). Indeed, Federigo Gonzaga commissioned Giulio Romano – an architect who fled Rome to avoid imprisonment for a scandalous offence – to design the Palazzo del Te, an aristocratic pleasure retreat.6 It was built between 1524 and 1534, at the time coinciding with Martin Luther’s challenge to papal authority and direct military threat to the power of Rome. The Gonzaga family was strong and politically shrewd enough to preserve Mantua’s independence, and the records of the Roman Inquisition reveal that Mantua sheltered many freethinkers and religious dissenters under Federico’s rule and that of his son.7 That independence and play of ideas can be discerned in the design of the building. Figure 15.1 presents three images of a fragment of the Palazzo del Te courtyard elevation. At the top is an unaltered photograph that shows the Doric order of this portion of the building. Even somebody unfamiliar with the principles defining this classical convention would notice that this particular composition implies a sense of doubt and instability. Without explicitly referring 271

Andrzej Piotrowski

Figure 15.1  Palazzo del Te in Mantua, Italy.

to any symbols of Roman control over the Catholic world, Romano’s creation reveals a tension between the style’s conventional expectations of firmness and stability and its visible symptoms of decay and imminent failure. This structural flaw is seemingly caused by forces emanating from niches, which are empty because they refer to criticism of “Catholics [who] leave no niches free of idolatrous statues” (Randall 1999: 35) to promote the economically driven cult of saints. The niches’ pediments are splitting pressed from below, and, as the middle image in Figure 15.1 shows, the trabeated system is on the verge of collapsing, as the keystones connecting the ill-­ proportioned beams are beginning to droop. The bottom image in Figure 15.1 makes even clearer that the apparent construction or tectonics of the wall provides nothing but a false visual impression. The blocks of stone do not rest on their adjacent column shafts, and the masonry pattern is so incomplete that it would have been unable to support its own weight. Behind the surface impression of the columns, the solid wall made of bricks tacitly distributes the forces of gravity to the ground in the actual working of the structure. Like Luther’s challenge to the use of Christian dogma to justify an economy based on peddling indulgences and power manipulation, this architecture questions superficial trust in conventions and appearances. The tension between the apparent and actual logic of operations in this building can therefore be seen as a reflection of broader issues of the time. 272

Architecture and Preemptive Spectacles

During a period when Europe was already largely divided in accordance with the principle of cuius regio, eius religio (the religion of the ruler is the religion of the land), this struggle continued in the Commonwealth of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Starting in 1520, but especially in the 1560s, when religious and political repression in the Low Countries after the Dutch Revolt of 1566 coincided with similar actions of the Roman Inquisition in northern Italy, masses of religious dissenters immigrated to the Commonwealth – “a state without stakes”, as Janusz Tazbir (1973) calls it.8 Still nominally Catholic Poland continued to accept people who represented politically radical tendencies during the Reformation.9 The Compact of Warsaw of 1573 – the crowning example of these tolerant policies – earned the Commonwealth the infamous name of asylum haereticorum (heretics’ safe haven) among papal officials (Załęski 1908: 3). The rise of critical attitudes among Polish and Lithuanian religious nonconformists and the influx of diverse foreigners challenged preexisting social and political status quo. Because these mixed communities could not be governed by the old rules and hierarchies dominated by the Catholic Church, they needed to establish a different order of things and people. In many ways, Mannerist architecture helped to negotiate these tensions and critically explore new ways of thinking about coexistence and diversity. The town hall in Chełmno (Kulm) provides a good example of these processes (Figure 15.2). Chełmno, a member of the Hanseatic League but since 1505 also a town governed by a Catholic bishop, was the center of a region that attracted many Protestants, mostly Lutherans and Mennonites (Nowak 1968). The expansion of its town hall building created an opportunity to explore representations of self-governance and political relationships. In 1567–72, the older two-story medieval structure underwent a major remodeling and the vertical addition of an elaborate roof parapet. If the architectural composition shown in Figure 15.2 had been designed at the end of the 20th century, it might be discussed as an example of strategies of deconstruction. Its façade is a site in which tacit but frequently dominant rules were questioned, and their unspoken assumptions were revealed. The overall character of this composition is so closely based on Italian Renaissance principles that even today many Polish historians categorize it as an example of Renaissance architecture, yet it also alters or violates many of the stylistic rules associated with decorations promoted by the Catholic elites. For instance, the different layers of the elevation corresponding to different floors do not align compositionally. This design subverts the traditional esthetic rationale dictating that a harmonious composition reflects well-resolved structural relationships in a variety of ways. For one, weak elements seem to support the heavy ones. Stone, which works well in compression, is apparently working in tension where the window frames appear suspended by thin stone hangers from the cornice above. The composition tests many conventional elements as if somebody wanted to see at which point these elements would stop conforming to the prevailing formula. For example, the columns in the center of Figure 15.2 have only two large flutes each, which seems to defy the very definition

Figure 15.2  The town hall in Chełmno, Poland.

273

Andrzej Piotrowski

of a column shaft. Window openings are only implied, as if to toy with the infamous notion of empty niches. They appear deconstructed. Attributes of these seeming niches are singled out and probed. Empty niches are implied by both rectangular recesses and partial frames installed in the wall. Other suggested niches have columns placed in front of them, as if to disguise the presence of empty space that could be occupied by figures. Like the Palazzo del Te, this building appears to be an exercise in raising critical issues beyond mere esthetic considerations. Its composition teases out and calls into question conventional assumptions and demonstrates that a sense of overall balance can be achieved even if very diverse rationales coexist side by side. In a town in which various cultures and beliefs coexisted despite the political domination of the Catholic Church, the design of the Chełmno’s town hall seems to demonstrate as much effort to test compositional relationships as to prevent any single rule from dominating all of its parts.10

Baroque In the Commonwealth, architecture was able to play an instrumental role in thinking about the changing reality because the whole society, with its rise in religious dissent, was in an early phase of understanding how to define and order itself. Material compositions provided a venue for testing ideas that were too nascent to produce verbally codified rules or artistic programs. At a time when politicians in many other European countries used the polarization of religious differences to exercise power, Poland and Lithuania were still indiscriminately absorbing people of different beliefs. Architects designing town halls, temples, and houses used their craft to explore this new reality. Two primary issues were at stake in these explorations: how to identify and dismantle old hierarchical or dogmatic ways of thinking – in the Kingdom of Poland, mostly those rooted in the politics of the Roman Catholic tradition – and how to create orders that preserved individual differences while constructing a sense of a collective whole. Although Mannerist compositions played an important role in reshaping ways of thinking about these processes, the architectural reaction to these progressive tendencies led to the transition to the Baroque as a new architecture of preemptive spectacles. Of all the 16th-century developments discussed here, the most threatening to the existing status quo and the most disturbing to those who found comfort in conventional ways of thinking was the newly revealed relationship between religion, economy, and political power. To suppress these kinds of critical insights, freethinkers and so-called heretics were prosecuted and even burned at the stake. Religious factions waged bloody wars. Although the systematically organized CounterReformation started with the Council of Trent, which specified new rules of religious conduct and defined the function of religious art, the Council never spelled out what I believe was the most consequential design practice helping to suppress the critical mode of thought: the opulence of Baroque decorations. That effort to make critical insights difficult to consider – or at least unattractive – led architectural designers to shift from politically charged experimentation to spectacular and visually pleasing performances. Baroque architecture therefore marks places all over the world where the Catholic Church was reasserting its dominance. Although many of the exuberant churches and their interiors designed in Rome by architects and artists such as Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Pietro da Cortona, Francesco Borromini, or Carlo Fontana could serve as examples, some of the most telling cases of this reactionary transition can again be found in the Polish−Lithuanian Commonwealth, where this struggle lasted the longest and the locations of new architecture coincide precisely with centers of religious dissent.11 Figure 15.3 shows the interior of the St. Johns Church at the University of Vilnius (originally the Jesuit college Almae Academia et Universitas Vilnensis Societatis Jesu), which played a key role 274

Architecture and Preemptive Spectacles

Figure 15.3  The main altar in the St. Johns Church in Vilnius, Lithuania.

in eradicating Protestantism in Lithuania. The composition of this altar arrangement has more in common with the design of stage sets than with traditional ways of establishing the symbolic center in a Catholic temple. Everything seems to be in an implied motion. The set is spatially and visually saturated in all three dimensions. Its two layers of sculptures and Corinthian columns completely fill the large presbytery of the older Gothic church. As the picture indicates, this layout is highly dynamic; its appearance changes with the slightest shift in the viewer’s position. The space is also designed to strongly respond to any change in light sources, a possibility the Jesuits frequently exploited. In such a composition, candles or lamps could remain hidden while their effects, especially in the evening, mesmerized spectators. The Baroque sculptures highlight similar aspects of artistic expression. They are realistic but fluid; the decorations defy their own materiality, and the figures are overtly expressive, all appearing as if frozen in the middle of a play. This architectural spectacle is designed to arrest viewers’ attention. Such compositions produced by the artists of the Counter-Reformation repeated, and even heightened, many of the Reformation’s tactics of transforming traditional elements and their rules, although for a completely different reason. The visual complexity of this arrangement makes it difficult to focus on the broader implications of any particular design decision. Unlike the architecture in Mantua or Chełmno, which drew attention to particular elements or relationships and encouraged critical reflection on culturally rooted conventions or assumptions associated with them, the awe-inspiring effect of a Baroque altar limits that interaction to liking or disliking what one sees. If successful, such a site implies that stimulating a personal emotional response is all that matters in this case because even the most fascinating relationships among forms are self-referential – starting and ending within the same composition. While religious dissenters created architecture that helped viewers think about difficult political and religious issues, defenders of the Roman Catholic Church created art that shielded religious institutions from political considerations.

Representational Practices in the Victorian Era A few centuries later, the same visual operation became emblematic of efforts to bring comfort to people unsettled by the speed and magnitude of changes triggered by the emergent consumer culture. This time, the turmoil was triggered by the way capitalism was transforming the traditional sense of the order of things. In 19th-century England, as Marshall Berman (1982) has discusses after Karl Marx, all traditional value systems appeared to melt into air. As Thomas Richards (1990) shows, not only material goods but old beliefs, arts, historical places, and events, and even the concept of monarchy were symbolically disintegrated and commodified. Within this new 275

Andrzej Piotrowski

regime of perception, only when things and ideas were fragmented and perceived as forming fluid relationships could they support the forces of the market economy. Although necessary for the progress of capitalism, this unstable and disintegrated world was difficult to accept for people used to living their lives based on stable value systems and symbolic orders. Among the many material practices invented to diminish this problem, perhaps the most representative was the kaleidoscope, an esthetic prosthesis designed to provide a place of mental refuge in the symbolically chaotic reality of the period. Sir David Brewster, who invented the kaleidoscope in 1817, promoted this seemingly benign device as the highest class of machinery because it was speeding up the artistic invention of beautiful and precise compositions (Brewster 1856: 134–6). A simple instrument designed to create multiple geometrically structured reflections of random forms consists of three mirrors creating a tube, at one end of which is an opening to look into and at the other, a container of loose small objects such as colored glass, tinsel, or beads. Kaleidoscopic compositions consist of multiple identical parts that together form the illusion of a disk. In this self-referential composition par excellence, only one of the visible fragments of the disk shows the actual material pieces, whereas the other parts are mere reflections of the first one, repeated based on rules of symmetry. Two primary features made kaleidoscopes popular in Victorian England. First, the images they created revealed a paradoxical possibility of an easy complexity, a visual order made of the same elements. In this way, this “scientific toy” promoted the visual appeal of self-referential relationships. This esthetic exercise was also interactive; anybody could effortlessly and endlessly produce such highly structured arrangements. The second feature, essential for its cultural functioning in a world flooded by commodities, was that the elements that created these beautiful orders were completely random. Thus, the kaleidoscope not only implied that the disintegrated world of commodities is not threatening but also associated visual pleasure with endless processes of creating arbitrary visual relationships among random things. The Great Exhibition of 1851 belongs to the same category of spectacles as the kaleidoscope and was perhaps the most consequential experiment with this new modality of thought. It presented market forces as an essential component of high culture but also preempted critical discourses concerning commodification of reality. Organized by Prince Albert and the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce, the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations was at once a celebration of modern industrial technology and of the power of the British Empire. The exhibition was designed as a superior viewing device capable of representing under one roof the whole world as a collection of industrial products and crafts. As Tony Bennett (1988) postulates, it could be seen as a didactic machine designed to train members of the working class in how to behave in new kinds of public places while also providing the middle class with a spectrum of commodities with which to signify their social status. Figure 15.4 shows part of the section of the exhibition devoted to architecture. It exemplifies the degree to which the space of the Crystal Palace was saturated with objects and visual sensations. The official Tallis’ History and Description of the Crystal Palace describes viewers’ experience in terms of its didactic intensity, as one where the “education of eye and mind was going on at a thousand points at the same moment directly and indirectly, – formally and informally – by example, suggestion, and illustration” (Tallis et al. 1852: 101–2). Mr. Maloney was quoted as explaining his experience more simply: With conscious pride I stud insoide And looked the World’s Great Fair in, Until me sight Was dazzled quite, And couldn’t see for staring. (Hobhouse 1851: 175)

276

Architecture and Preemptive Spectacles

Figure 15.4  T  he Crystal Palace and the Great Exhibition of 1851, fragment of a picture published in the Illustrated London News in July, 1851.  (Courtesy University of Minnesota Library; public domain).

The presence of such a multiplicity of different and unusual things in one interior was unprecedented and often had an overwhelming impression on visitors; according to Richards, the environment produced an “almost hallucinatory experience” (Richards 1990: 31). Clearly, this was not a structured educational effort, but rather a practice of commercial enchantment designed to so dazzle visitors that their appreciation for what they perceived was no longer bound by any preconceived logic of understanding or judgment. This novel experience, I would argue, represented an attempt to establish ductility in thoughts and judgments through a preemptive spectacle that simultaneously concentrated and confused viewers’ interest to produce an irrational reverence for the world of commodities. The space of the exhibition created a visual environment in which the multiplicity of visual attractions erased the distinction between the knowledge of things and the promotion of commodities. Similar to kaleidoscopic compositions, the exhibition was also intended to leave visitors with the impression of a synthesis – of a totalizing or systematic order reconciling the most arbitrary commercial choices with the principles of arts and knowledge, and thereby with high culture and industrial progress. This was achieved with the help of not only highly structured catalogues but also the building itself, which complemented the hallucinatory experience. Just as a kaleidoscope balanced the diversity of visual forms by replicating and dividing them into systematically organized identical segments, the backlit steel frame of the Crystal Palace provided a rational backdrop for the sensory overload of displays. Yet, as I discuss elsewhere (2011: 209–11), the most kaleidoscopic of the visual techniques of the exhibition may have been the arrangement of displays. Many images published at that time show that each themed grouping was designed to imply a set of visual relationships. The most common of these was a Baroque-altar-like composition in which the most unique and tallest object was positioned in the center and other commodities were symmetrically balanced around it.12 This mode of implying symbolic relationships where none existed satisfied a subconscious need for establishing an effect of order in the conflicted world of early capitalism. And it was exactly this esthetic practice that became the prevailing pattern in Victorian interior decoration and was absorbed into the everyday life of the period. 277

Andrzej Piotrowski

Figure 15.5  M  r. D. L. Einstein’s Dining Room, published in Artistic Houses, 1883.  (Courtesy Fine Arts Library, Harvard University; public domain).

Figure 15.5 shows a sample from Artistic Houses, a collection of photographs intended to provide “interior views of a number of the most beautiful and celebrated homes in the United States with a description of the art treasures contained therein” (Sheldon 1883). The arrangement of the precious objects decorating the walls in this photograph replicates displays at the Great Exhibition. In a quintessentially Victorian way, the balancing act of implied symmetry does not require the pairing of identical commodities but rather of things similar in size, finish, or material. An explicit use of the kaleidoscopic technique can be seen in the way the mirror replicates objects standing on the fireplace mantle of the dining room in Figure 15.5. Although the designer of the room probably had not even seen the Great Exhibition, by the time of this photograph, this kind of interior design had become a common practice within polite society. In this way, affluent people unconsciously and uncritically affirmed the consumer culture of the period. The preemptive spectacles they inhabited affirmed the belief that the commercial fragmentation of lived-in reality did not require critical reflection but could instead be domesticated as an esthetic practice that created a superficial sense of order among arbitrary commodities. Such an interior fully succeeded when the collected things seemed to coalesce without forming permanent and meaningful relationships. The quintessentially Victorian perceptual complexity of these arrangements prevented a definite reading of any dominant design logic. As Figure 15.5 shows, these spaces were so saturated that they made it almost impossible to visually discern individual objects. The multiple patterns of the wallpaper, carpets, and upholstery, combined with the kaleidoscopic play of replication, turned any sense of order into a hallucinatory impression endlessly open to interpretation, thus representing the world of commodities as infinitely mutable.13

Kaleidoscopic Parametricism These material and visual practices are not, I argue, a thing of the past but an integral aspect of capitalism. Take, for example, how architects and their clients at the turn of the 21st century reacted to the intellectual turmoil triggered by postmodern theories. Postmodernism, understood as a critical departure from modernism, owes its name to Charles Jencks (1977), an architectural historian, but reflects a broad movement across philosophy, the arts, and critical studies. Other disciplines accepted the architectural label, I believe, because architects and their International Style best exemplified the pathology of technocratically controlled societies. High modernism became synonymous with a system in which socially harmful and culturally repressive decisions were hidden behind the lofty master narratives of scientific progress. Although many thinkers around the world understood the need for radical changes, this crisis produced different kinds of responses. 278

Architecture and Preemptive Spectacles

Postmodern theories included developments in cultural studies such as those of Frederic Jameson (1991), the insights of postcolonial scholars such as Edward Said (1979), and the work of new geographers discussed by Richard Peet (1998) that uncovered profound and disturbing truths about the operations of late capitalism, revealing deep-seated problems without trivializing them by proposing superficial solutions. Other postmodern commentators, such as Jencks, instead preempted a critique of modernism by implying a nostalgic remedy, a return to 19th-century cultural practices associated with laissez-faire economic liberalism. Although the postmodern theories were intellectually progressive, Jencks seems to have been unaware of the breadth of the new intellectual efforts already underway in the humanities and instead identified postmodernism as a new architectural style, symbolically literal and controllable in the way that John Ruskin defined a national style, and commercially all-inclusive in the way Beresford Hope promoted eclecticism in the 19 century.14 The postmodern style in architecture quickly exhausted itself because symbolically nostalgic practices, such as those Jencks had proposed, proved insufficient to fully disarm the disturbing effects of architects’ and their clients’ heightened awareness of the late capitalism phenomena. Consequently, in the way similar to the historical examples I have discussed above, two complementary strategies emerged. First, the function of the architectural profession was gradually redefined. While some designers still attempted to integrate critical theories, even the poststructuralist strategies, in their conceptual processes and some architectural historians used feminist, postcolonial, or other critical perspectives, the market for architectural services increasingly rewarded those who managed to provide the most widely accessible and simple understanding of complex issues. At the end of the 1990s, the interest in critical theories in architecture started to dwindle within the academic and professional communities. Critical insights, if not accompanied by immediate and straightforward solutions, were equated with cynicism. Encouraged by the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and its communist ideology, economists such as Hernando de Soto Polar made a new case for neoliberalism – an ideology promoting the self-regulating and redemptive powers of the untethered market economy as a simple recipe for all contemporary problems.15 At that time, architectural theorists such as John Rajchman (1998), Robert Somol and Sarah Whiting (2002), and George Baird (2004) proposed a theoretical framework for studying consequences of pragmatism in architecture. But a sufficiently straightforward and broadly appealing architectural trend emerged from this work only when Michael Speaks published a series of articles under the general heading of “design intelligence” in which he argued that architects’ conceptual work and professional practices should be opportunistic and overtly modeled after the most successful business practices (2002a, 2002b).16 At a time when conservative forces have been tightening their grip over power in the world, this vision of the market-driven future of the architectural profession has brilliantly tapped into now increasingly popular neoliberal sentiments.17 Architects were encouraged to abandon their years of questioning the condition of late capitalism and conceptually confronting the emerging social and cultural dynamics of the globalized economy in favor of practices that instead reduce such discourses to the quantifiable issues and judgment criteria to financial gain or loss. The second strategy for disarming the anxiety involved preemptive spectacles, which, just as in Victorian England, helped many people unconsciously redirect their attention from the recently revealed cultural, political, and social complexities of the world. During this period, many architects discovered the representational benefits of algorithmic form manipulation – a perfect medium for embracing the uncritical mode of thought. As was the case with Baroque or kaleidoscopic practices, this new kind of esthetics, exemplified here by forms shown in F ­ igure 15.6, started to fascinate designers and create a place of mental refuge for viewers looking for visual ­experiments that seemed inventive but were devoid of any critical challenges. The commercial success of these forms within the architectural profession can be gauged by the degree to 279

Andrzej Piotrowski

Figure 15.6  Collage of graphics promoting parametric design in architecture.

which such esthetics have come to dominate the market of architectural education and publishing. As Michael Meredith points out, the field’s “use of the parametrics has been superficial and skin-deep…lacking of a larger framework of referents, narratives, history, and forces” (2008: 6). Parametric complexity has become widely popular precisely because it helps silence the need to confront difficult and real issues. Examples of graphics promoting parametric experimentation (Figure 15.6) look similar to one another because they all support the same way of thinking. Although algorithmic design tools are truly innovative in terms of controlling and testing the physical performance of a design solution, these new techniques have become popular primarily as a way to generate complex forms. Instead of broadening the scope of nonquantifiable issues in design decisions, these parametric design methods tend to dazzle a viewer with geometrically self-referential complexity and perfectly fabricated appearances. Individually and as a collage, they create a sensory overload similar to that of Figures 15.3 and 15.5. In architectural projects of this kind, designers typically use a limited number of well-defined variables to generate a large number of compositional options that differ primarily in terms of their geometry. If the design task is not focused on physical performance, an architect’s final choice among this multitude is esthetically based – that is, the right solution is the one that generates the most parametric design appeal. Similar to other preemptive spectacles, these digital forms attract attention and offer viewers mental satisfaction by disguising what they exclude; they project a superficial complexity and visual integrity where little substance and no conceptual relationships actually exist. Such parametrically designed architecture is symptomatic of the neoliberal shift in politics and economics in ways that reach far beyond Debord or Foster’s understanding of spectacles.18 Neoliberalism represents an attempt to restore and redefine the 19th-century logic of laissez-faire 280

Architecture and Preemptive Spectacles

economic liberalism involving extensive privatization and deregulation of the market leading to radical income disparity and defunding of public programs. Parametric architecture diverts attention from those issues, disconnects design from political implications and social contents, and creates a superficial impression of conceptual integrity. Parametricism, which Patrik Schumacher describes as “a new global style for architecture and urban design” (2009), may, in fact, serve as the crowning example of these practices.19 Demonstrating both of the contemporary strategies I have outlined above, Schumacher simultaneously argues for an apolitical and uncritical future for the architectural profession and promotes forms that preempt critical interest in the consequences of such an attitude. Take, for example, ­Figure 15.7, a portion of the work that students under Schumacher’s supervision (Ludovico Lombardi with the help of Du Yu, Victoria Goldstein, and Xingzhu Hu) designed and presented in Shanghai to envision the Expo 2010 urban strategies. Although that project, which spans the Huangpu River, seems to preserve the existing traditional fabric of the city, the illustrated vision offers limited clues about the complexity of such urban design decisions. Yet its Baroque complexity is definitely fascinating. Schumacher, sounding just like Victorian theoreticians, refers to such “elegance of ordered complexity and the sense of seamless fluidity, akin to natural systems, [as] the hallmark of parametricism” (2009: 16). Indeed, it is exactly the shift of attention away from the actual complexity of the living city to the kaleidoscopic impression of visual cohesion that is the most important feature of this exercise. Neither the proposed structures nor the relationships between the old and the new architecture on the site manifest much interest in the exiting conditions or social consequences of this design strategy. The proposed new form with a commercial program is simply mechanically inserted into the living fabric of the traditional neighborhood. This conceptual attitude is consistent with Schumacher’s broader claims that “political controversy and activism would overburden and explode the discipline” of architecture and urban design (2015: 19) and that “to be an effective, the innovative architect does not require any explicit political position” (2015: 22) – or, I might add, any social empathy. Unfortunately, if neoliberal strategies and their populistic rhetoric fully succeed, Schumacher may be correct. Creating an impression that architectural commissions are reducible to short-term problem-solving and taking limited or no responsibility for defining socially or politically desired outcomes of design decisions makes it much easier to benefit from economic opportunism.20 In 1998, Richard Rorty predicted the rise of populism and the increase of demagogy in politics leading to autocratic consequences, such as those revealed by the 2016 presidential election in the United States of America and in many other places in the world. He could not predict, however,

Figure 15.7  A proposal for the Expo 2010 in Shanghai. (Courtesy of Ldvc - Ludovico Lombardi).

281

Andrzej Piotrowski

that new technologies of thought and perception, such as those that, according to Christopher Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica Ltd. used, could become the indispensable political tool (2019). These digital techniques would not be efficient in manipulating outcomes of elections or shaping public opinion if not for the prevailing uncritical worldviews such companies have exploited, and these are the attitudes that architects of preemptive spectacles had helped to create. The alignment between the digital technology of thought, populist rhetoric, and forces of neoliberalism continues producing a more dominant model of what David Harvey (2005) calls neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics. If some of the observations in this chapter seem disturbing, that only reflects the broader epistemic issues at stake. In short, built structures have been shaping thought for centuries, in the form not only of buildings famous for their symbolic meaning but also less known design practices that helped people negotiate cultural differences or find comforting ways to avoid or cope with difficult truths about their reality. These representational phenomena remain insufficiently explored, I believe, because architectural knowledge still tends to cling to outdated 19th-century epistemological assumptions. Moving beyond these assumptions and developing more insightful understanding of design practices, historical and contemporary, will be crucial if architectural design is not to become an unselfconscious craft in the neoliberal market-driven world.21

Notes 1 This kind of teleological epistemology assumes that buildings can be understood only in so far as they are shaped by an explicit purpose. According to Hegel, who developed this epistemic logic to justify the imperial politics of his time, built environments implicitly affirm teleological assumptions because, he argues, designing a dwelling is practically and symbolically analogous to establishing goals and the structure for a well-designed state (Hegel 2001: 41–2). 2 Guy Debord’s Marxist argument that spectacle is the highest form of capitalist propaganda. Yet, ­so-called postmodern theories and the present visual or design culture studies ( Julier 2006) have uncovered that the true power in late capitalism has operated not by conclusive indoctrination but rather by reshaping modes of perception and judgment. The United States Department of Defense definition of “perception management” seems to have followed those theories. Generally speaking, these studies of visuality have focused attention on the processes of subject constitution and other previously overlooked or seemingly marginal aspects of cultural phenomena (for example, Foster 1983, 1985; Kellner 1995; Crary 1990, 2000). 3 Both Debord’s definition of spectacle as “capital accumulated to the point where it becomes an image” (1967: 24) and Hal Foster’s definition of spectacle in architecture as “an image accumulated to the point where it becomes capital” (2002: 41) are just elaborations on Karl Marx’s much earlier observation that in capitalism, money became “a purely esthetic phenomenon, self-breeding, self-referential, autonomous of all material truth”, a constitutive element of “the realm of chimerical fantasy” (Eagleton 1990: 201). 4 See, for example, Shiloh and Stefan Al Krupar, “Notes on the Society of the Brand” (2012), or various articles in the special issue of the Architectural Theory Review edited by Duanfang Lu (2008) discussing environments that have been transformed into spectacles. 5 Such a historiographic complexity has been discussed by Lynette Bosch, (Bosch 2020: 72–115). 6 At the beginning of his artistic career, Giulio Romano found himself on the Vatican’s wanted list for publishing sexually explicit images that, as Bette Talvacchia says, “challenged established powers and ideas” (1999: xi). 7 Citizens of Mantua, especially many artisans, professional men, and courtiers, became infamous as part of the heretical conspiracy known as the “scandal of Modena and Mantua” (Caponetto 1999: 252–69). These findings are based on Sergio Pagano’s research (1991) and confirmed by Massimo Firpo (2015). 8 Italian immigrants from the northern territories to the Commonwealth were called Komaskowie and Lugańczycy; refer to the study by Stefan Kozakiewicz (1959). Some records of their Italian origins ­coincide with Caponetto’s findings. Refer to the study by Piotrowski (2011: 292). There were also strong connections between leaders of the radical Reformation in Europe and religious nonconformists in the Commonwealth (Szczucki 1993).

282

Architecture and Preemptive Spectacles 9 The Polish Brethren (Arianie or Socinians) were leaders among those progressive groups consisting of citizens of the Commonwealth and immigrants. Although the wave of religious nonconformism ­originally triggered by politically defensive responses in Poland, King Zygmunt Jagiellończyk’s early antireformation rulings limiting the freedoms of the dissenters were as unenforceable as they were harsh on paper (Tazbir 1980: 27). In some cases, inviting religious dissenters, especially Lutherans, was politically motivated, as a way to redefine relationships and dependencies (Musteikis 1988: 41–8). 10 According to Nowak (1968), history records many religious conflicts between the burghers the ruling bishop Stanisław Hozjusz (Hosius) and then Piotr Kostka, who in 1580 expelled many Protestants from Chełmno. 11 As I discuss elsewhere (2011), there were two tendencies in Baroque architecture, one explicitly reasserting old orders and conventions and the other encouraging formal experimentation and management of perception. 12 Many pictures of such arrangements in the Great Exhibition were published in the Illustrated London News. See, for example, a picture in the July 1851 issue on page 20. 13 As I discuss elsewhere (2011), this spatial practice had its counterpart in theoretical discourses on ­a rchitecture. John Ruskin’s notion of the beautiful and the sublime, for example, may be seen as a ­contemporaneous attempt to name and reconcile forces shaping capitalism and high culture. 14 Similar to Ruskin, who argued that architectural styles should be constructed like language (1989: 202), Jencks’ The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (1977) represented an attempt to literally align ­a rchitectural design with the production of narratives. When buildings are reduced to coded signs, similar to branding, they become subject to rules regulating the commercial economy of signs. And it is not surprising that the next step was to argue for “radical eclectism” ( Jencks 1977: 87) as Beresford Hope (1858) had a century earlier. 15 For a comprehensive discussion of these processes see writings of David Harvey, especially his A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005). 16 Later, when Speaks (2005) talked about “Intelligence after Theory”, he argued for, what I would call a new kind of statistical opportunism in place of the architectural theory. 17 Richard Rorty (1998: 87–91) predicted the rise of populism and the increase of demagogy in politics leading to autocratic consequences, such as those revealed by the 2016 presidential election in the U.S.A. David Harvey (2005), on the other hand, has argued that the alignment between the populist rhetoric of neoliberalism and the authoritarian power structures has long been in the making. 18 Hal Foster, for example, sees the expansion of capitalism through pop culture when a building such as Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao becomes an “instant icon”, making that city a global player in the market economy (2008: 175). 19 In the context of this chapter, it seems telling that Schumacher’s argument for the free-market−driven mode of designing is supported by a graph (Figure 2.7, 2015: 40), in which architectural styles considered in the progression toward stylistic freedom are evaluated in terms of their ability to order reality. Baroque represents conceptual achievement second only to Schumacher’s own style of Parametricism and, what he calls, Deconstructivism marks the lowest point in the history of architecture. 20 It was symptomatic that, on November 18, 2016, in the keynote speech delivered at the World Architecture Festival in Berlin, Schumacher proposed eliminating public housing and privatizing public space to deal with London’s housing crisis, an attitude toward politics and social contents of architecture which triggered a critical reaction among many architects, including those working with him in Zaha Hadid Architects (Z.H.A.). 21 The notion that the architectural profession is frequently understood as an unselfconscious craft has been critically discussed by Iain Borden and Jane Rendell (2000: 3).

References Baird, George (2004) “‘Criticality’ and Its Discontents”, Harvard Design Magazine 21: 16–21. Becherucci, Luisa ([1958] 1964) “Mannerism”, in Bernard S. Myers (ed.) Encyclopedia of World Art, New York: McGraw-Hill, pp. 443–78. Beresford Hope, A. J. B. (1858) The Common Sense of Art: A Lecture Delivered in Behalf of the Architectural ­Museum, London: John Murray. Berman, Marshall (1982) All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, New York: Simon and Schuster. Borden, Iain, and Rendell, Jane (2000) “From Chamber to Transformer”, in I. Borden and J. Rendell (eds.) InterSections: Architectural Histories and Critical Theories, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 3–24.

283

Andrzej Piotrowski Bosch, Lynette M. F. (2020) Mannerism, Spirituality, and Cognition: The Art of Enargeia, New York: Routledge. Brewster, David (1856) The Kaleidoscope: Its History, Theory, and Construction, London: John Murray, pp. 134–6. Caponetto, Salvatore (1999) The Protestant Reformation in Sixteenth-Century Italy, Kirksville: Thomas Jefferson University Press. Cheney, Liana De Girolami (2016) “Giorgio Vasari and Mannerist Architecture: A Marriage of Beauty and Function in Urban Spaces”, Journal of Literature and Art Studies 6(10): 1159–80. Crary, Jonathan (1990) Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ——— (2000) Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Debord, Guy (1967) The Society of the Spectacle, Cambridge, MA: Zone Books. Eagleton, Terry (1990) The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Oxford: Blackwell. Firpo, Massimo (2015) Juan de Valdés and the Italian Reformation, Translated from the Italian by R. Bates, Farnham: Ashgate. Fischer, Ole W. (2013) “From Liquid Space to Solid Bodies: Architecture between Neoliberalism and Control Society”, in Jeinić, Ana, and Anselm Wagner (eds.) Is There (Anti-) Neoliberal Architecture? Berlin: Jovis Verlag, pp. 14–31. Foster, Hal (1983) The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press. ——— (1985) Postmodern Culture, London: Pluto Press. ——— (2002) Design and Crime and Other Diatribes, London: Verso. ——— (2008) “Image Building”, in Anthony Vidler (ed.) Architecture between Spectacle and Use, Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute and Yale University Press, pp. 64–79. Harvey, David (1990) The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. ——— (2005) A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (2001) The Philosophy of History, J. Sibree (trans.), Kitchener, ON: Batoche Books. Hobhouse, Christopher (1951) 1851 and the Crystal Palace, London: John Murray. Jameson, Frederic (1991) Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham, NC: Duke ­University Press, Jencks, Charles A. (1977) The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, London: Academy Editions. Julier, Guy (2006) “From Visual Culture to Design Culture” Design Issues, 22(1): 64–76. Kellner, Douglas (1995) Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity, and Politics between the Modern and the ­Postmodern, London: Routledge. Kozakiewicz, Stefan (1959) “Początek działalności Komasków, Tessyńczyków i Gryzończyków w ­Polsce– Okres Renesansu (1520–1580)”, Biuletyn Historii Sztuki 21(1): 3–29. Krupar, Shiloh and Stefan Al (2012) “Notes on the Society of the Brand”, in Greig Crysler, Stephen Cairns, and Hilde Heynen (eds.) The SAGE Handbook of Architectural Theory, Los Angeles, CA: SAGE Publications, pp. 247–63. Lu, Duanfang (ed.) (2008) Rethinking Architectural Spectacle ( journal special issue), Architectural Theory Review, 13 (2). Martin, Reinhold (2010), Utopia’s Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism, Again, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Meredith, Michael (2008) “Never Enough (Transform, Repeat ad Nausea)”, in Michael Meredith and Tomoko Sakamoto (eds.) From Control to Design: Parametric, Barcelona: Actar-D, pp. 6–9. Musteikis, Antanas (1988) The Reformation in Lithuania: Religious Fluctuations in the Sixteenth Century, Boulder, CO: East European Monographs. Nowak, Zenon Hubert (1968) “Dzieje Chełmna do końca XVIII w.”, in Marian Biskup (ed.) Dzieje Chełmna i jego regionu: zarys monograficzny, Poznań: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, pp. 63–128. Pagano, Sergio (1991) Il processo di Endimio Calandra e l’inquisizione a Mantova nel 1567–1568, Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. Peet, Richard (1998) Modern Geographic Thought, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Piotrowski, Andrzej (2011) Architecture of Thought, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rajchman, John (1998) “A New Pragmatism?”, in Cynthia C. Davidson (ed.) Anyhow, New York: Anyone Corp, pp. 212–17. Randall, Catharine (1999) Building Codes: The Aesthetics of Calvinism in Early Modern Europe, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Richards, Thomas (1990) The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

284

Architecture and Preemptive Spectacles Rorty, Richard (1998) Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Said, Edward (1979) Orientalism, New York: Vintage. Schumacher, Patrik (2009) “Parametricism – A New Global Style for Architecture and Urban Design”, AD: Architectural Design – Digital Cities, 79 (4): 14–23. ——— (2015) “The Historical Pertinence of Parametricism and the Prospect of a Free Market Urban ­Order”, in Matthew Poole and Manuel Shvartzberg (eds.) The Politics of Parametricism, Digital Technologies in Architecture, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 19–44. Sheldon, George W. (1883) Artistic Houses: Being a Series of Interior Views of a Number of the Most Beautiful and Celebrated Homes in the United States: With a Description of the Art Treasures Contained Therein, New York: D. Appleton. Somol, Robert E. and Sarah Whiting (2002) “Notes around the Doppler Effect and Other Moods of ­Modernism”, Perspecta 33: 72–7. Speaks, Michael (2002a) “Design Intelligence. Part 1: Introduction”, A+U: Architecture and Urbanism, 387 (12): 10–18. ——— (2002b) “Design Intelligence and the New Economy”, Architectural Record, 190 (1): 72–6. ——— (2005) “Intelligence after Theory”, Perspecta, 38:101–6. Szczucki, Lech (1993) Nonkonformiści Religijni XVI i XVII Wieku: Studia i Szkice, Warszawa: Polska Akademia Nauk, Instytut Filozofii i Socjologii. Tallis, J., Strutt, J. G., Beard, R., & Mayall, J. E. (1852) Tallis’s History and Description of the Crystal Palace, and the Exhibition of the World’s Industry in 1851, London, J. Tallis and Co. Talvacchia, Bette (1999) Taking Positions: On the Erotic in Renaissance Culture, Princeton, NJ: Princeton ­University Press. Tazbir, Janusz ( [1967] 1973) A State without Stakes: Polish Religious Toleration in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, New York: Kościuszko Foundation. ——— (1980) Tradycje tolerancji religijnej w Polsce, Warszawa: Książka i Wiedza. Verheyen, Egon (1977) The Palazzo del Te in Mantua: Images of Love and Politics, Baltimore, MD: Johns ­Hopkins University Press. Vidler, Anthony (ed.) (2008) Architecture Between Spectacle and Use, Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute and Yale University Press. Wylie, Christopher (2019) Mindf*Ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America, New York: Random House. Załęski, Stanisław (1908) Jezuici w Polsce: w skrόceniu, 5 tomόw jednym, z dwoma mapami, Krakόw: Drukarnia W. L. Anczyca i Sp.

285

16 Architecture and Phenomenology David Seamon

Arising in continental Europe at the start of the 20th century, phenomenology is a way of understanding that emphasizes the description and interpretation of human experience, awareness, and meaning, particularly their unnoticed, taken-for-granted dimensions (Moran 2000; van Manen 2014). The German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) was the founder of phenomenology, which he envisioned as “the descriptive, non-reductive science of whatever appears, in the manner of its appearing, in the subjective and intersubjective life of consciousness” (Moran 2005: 2). Over time, other European philosophers, including Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61), shifted their phenomenological explications beyond “consciousness” toward related philosophical topics such as the nature of human being, the various modes experientially by which human meaning arises, and the central role of bodily presence and action in human life. Examples of questions relevant to architecture that might be explored phenomenologically include the following: • • • •

• •

In what ways does architecture nurture or disrupt human life, whether via everyday, ordinary experience or via intense, extraordinary encounter? How do qualities of the designable world—materiality, spatiality, tectonics, aesthetic qualities, and so forth—contribute to human well-being and aesthetic sensibilities? How does the design of a particular building play a role in sustaining or undermining the lives, actions, and needs of that building’s users? Have the everyday uses, experiences, and meanings of specific buildings and building types (e.g., places of residence, work, education, worship, and incarceration) changed over historical time? How are those uses, experiences, and meanings alike or unlike for different places, cultures, lifeways, social groups, and historical eras? What impact do advances in digital technology and virtual reality have on the lived nature of architecture and real-world places? If virtual reality is eventually able to simulate “real” reality entirely, will this shift radically transform the lived nature of places, buildings, and everyday human life?

In this chapter, I encapsulate the complex, shifting relationship between phenomenology and architecture by speaking of an architectural phenomenology, which I tentatively define as the descriptive and interpretive explication of architectural experiences, situations, and meanings as constituted by qualities and features of both the built environment and human life (Otero-Pailos 2012; Seamon 2017). In demonstrating that architectural phenomenology has significant research 286

DOI: 10.4324/9781315674469-18

Architecture and Phenomenology

and design value today, I first describe the phenomenological approach more fully, highlighting two key phenomenological concepts relevant for architectural understanding—lifeworld and n­ atural attitude. Second, I overview the thread of theoretical and practical events whereby architects and architectural thinkers became interested in phenomenology. Third, I discuss two phenomenological topics that have come to have value for architecture and architectural theory: (1) lived ­embodiment and (2) architectural atmospheres. Last, I suggest what value phenomenology might have for the future of architecture, particularly in regard to the imminent arrival of virtual reality, virtual places, and virtual buildings.

The Nature of Phenomenology The phenomenologist’s primary aim is to strive for a mode of openness whereby the phenomenon studied can be understood and described in an accurate, comprehensive way unencumbered by any pre-given theoretical, speculative, or common-sense points of view. One of Husserl’s descriptions of phenomenology was “back to the things themselves,” by which he meant setting aside personal, societal, ideological, and conceptual understandings, assumptions, and prejudices so that one might offer the phenomenon a supportive venue in which it can be known most clearly, appropriately, and thoroughly (Moran 2005: 9–17). Most broadly, phenomenologists direct this mode of openness toward generating clear-sighted explications of concrete human experience and the lived reality of everyday life. Using the word “lived” in phrases like “lived reality” or “lived experience” may seem tautological, since, obviously, experience is always lived. For phenomenologists, however, “lived” is an integral descriptor because it “announces the intent to explore directly the originary or prereflective dimensions of human existence: life as we live it” (van Manen 2014: 28). “Lived” in this sense refers to the wide-ranging spectrum of human experiences, meanings, situations, and events—the mundane or exotic, the dull or penetrating, the unquestioned or surprising. How, for example, do we experience the everyday buildings of our ordinary lives, and are there moments when we experience those buildings in a deeper, more memorable way (Pallasmaa 2005)? What delineates experientially the special moment when we encounter a great architectural work, and might such exhilarating moments of architectural engagement be better understood by drawing on phenomenological principles and methods (Bermudez 2015)? Phenomenologists claim that human consciousness, experience, and action are always ­intentional—i.e., necessarily oriented toward and finding their significance in a world of emergent meaning. Human beings are not just aware but aware of something, whether an object, living thing, idea, feeling, environmental situation, or the like. As described by Merleau-Ponty (1962: xvii), the distinguishing feature of intentionality is that “the unity of the world, before being posited by knowledge in a specific act of identification, is ‘lived’ as ready-made or already there.” The concept of intentionality leads to a central phenomenological claim crucial for understanding human experience: that human beings are always already inescapably immersed and entwined in their worlds (Casey 2009; Moran 2011; van Manen 2014). How, phenomenologically, do we describe the way in which, existentially, selves and world are reciprocally related and mutually dependent? How, phenomenologically, do we locate and understand the complex, multivalent ways in which we, as human beings, are intertwined, intermeshed, entrenched, and submerged in the worlds in which we find ourselves? The everyday, intentional structure through which human-immersion-in-world unfolds is what Husserl identified as the lifeworld—a person or group’s day-to-day world of taken-for-­g rantedness normally unnoticed and, therefore, concealed as a phenomenon: “As conscious beings, we always inhabit—in a pre-theoretical manner—an experiential world, given in advance, on hand, and always experienced as a unity” (Moran 2005: 9). One aim of phenomenological study is to identify and 287

David Seamon

describe the various lived structures and dynamics of the lifeworld, which always includes spatial, environmental, and place dimensions. Unless it shifts in some unusual way, we are almost always, in our typical human lives, unaware of our lifeworld, which we assume is the only way that life can be. This typically unquestioned acceptance of the lifeworld is what Husserl called the natural attitude, a mode of awareness “that obscures itself and remains unknown to itself. It is an attitude with blinkers on, as Husserl often said” (Moran 2011: 69). Because of the natural attitude, any lifeworld is transparent in the sense that it is normally tacit and just happens, grounded in spatial-temporal situations and events more or less regular (Moran 2005: 9–17; 2011; van Manen 2014). In applying the concept of lifeworld to architecture, one realizes that there are the individual lifeworlds of all users associated with a building as, at the same time, there is the more complex lifeworld of the building itself generated by those individual lifeworlds. The lived dynamic and character of the building’s lifeworld may support or interfere with the individual lifeworlds housed within that building (Seamon 2017). Later in this chapter, I make further reference to architectural aspects of lifeworlds, but first I delineate how, beginning after World War II, phenomenology came to have significance for architects and architectural thinking.

The Development of Architectural Phenomenology The progressive influence of phenomenology in architecture is a complex narrative involving several different disciplines, professional efforts, and intellectual events. Beginning in the 1940s, philosophers working phenomenologically explored a wide range of themes implicitly relevant to architecture. Merleau-Ponty (1945/1962) demonstrated how the lived body plays a key role in human spatiality (Hale 2017; McCann and Locke 2015), and Heidegger (1952/1971) contended that human-being-in-the-world is always human-being-grounded-in-place, especially as that place sustains and is sustained by engaged caretaking—what Heidegger identified as dwelling (Malpas 2006; Mugerauer 2008; Sharr 2007). Other thinkers produced phenomenological studies that incorporated architectural topics directly. In Poetics of Space, philosopher Gaston Bachelard (1957/1964: 8) delineated a research focus he called topoanalysis, “the systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives.” In Sacred and the Profane, phenomenologist of religion Mircea Eliade (1957/1961) examined hierophany, the lived ways that spiritual reality can break through into lifeworlds, including through place and architecture. In Human Space, phenomenological philosopher Otto Bollnow (1963/2011) developed a phenomenology of space as experienced, including the lived dialectic between “the wide world” and “the security of the house.” In the late 1940s and 1950s, architects became interested in phenomenology directly. In his book-length historiography of architectural phenomenology during this postwar period, architectural theorist Jorge Otero-Pailos (2010) highlighted several key figures, beginning with the Italian modernist architect Ernesto Nathan Rogers (1909–69), who promoted “some of the earliest contacts between architects and phenomenologists” and gathered around himself “a small but influential group of young European architects… who explored phenomenology as an intellectual framework for rethinking modernism” (2010: xxiv). Another key figure discussed by Otero-Pailos is the French-American architect Jean Labatut (1899–1986), who saw phenomenology as a conceptual tool for envisioning innovative designs arising from and aiming to enhance human experience (2010: 35–40). For example, Labatut designed a series of architectural and environmental works that generated a sense of participatory exhilaration and architectural sacredness through visual, acoustic, and tactile encounter. One such effort was Labatut’s “Lagoon of Nations,” a 1,400-nozzle fountain designed to create a nightly spectacle for the 1939 New York World’s Fair (2010: 40–57). As founder of the first American architecture doctoral program at Princeton in 1949, Labatut played a critical role in promoting architectural phenomenology academically (2010: 95–9). One of the most influential doctoral students under his direction was American architect Charles 288

Architecture and Phenomenology

Moore (1925–93), who completed in 1957 one of Princeton’s first architecture dissertations, which focused on a Gaston-Bachelard-inspired “Water and Architecture.” Frustrated that, at the time, architectural scholarship was largely controlled by architectural historians, Moore (and Bloomer 1977) worked “to legitimatize a notion of intellectuality based on different standards of competency, including visual proficiency and the ability to grasp the historical essence of buildings experientially” (2010: 100). In the transformational 1960s, academic and professional interest in architectural phenomenology continued, partly via the development of “environment-behavior studies” (“EBS”), an interdisciplinary research and design field that became an important component of many ­A merican, Canadian, and British architecture programs in the 1970s and early 1980s (Sachs 2013). Identified variously as “architectural psychology,” “behavioral geography,” “environmental psychology,” or “human factors in design,” this movement was driven by the work of such innovative thinkers as architects Christopher Alexander (1964), Kevin Lynch (1960), and Oscar Newman (1973); anthropologist Edward Hall (1966); psychologist Robert Sommer (1969/2007); and urbanists Jan Gehl (1987), Jane Jacobs (1961), and William Whyte (1980). Though much of the EBS research was positivist, quantitative, and limited to the cognitive dimensions of architectural and environmental behavior, thinkers like Alexander et al. (1977) and Jacobs (1961) produced work that was qualitative, interpretive, and implicitly phenomenological. Also appearing during this time were the writings of so-called humanistic geographers like Edward Relph (1976) and Yi-Fu Tuan (1974). Strongly influenced by EBS but drawing directly on phenomenological concepts like place, rootedness, dwelling, and placelessness, these geographers provided one academic reference point for later phenomenological efforts examining architectural embodiment, environmental atmospheres, and architectural design as it might facilitate place and placemaking (Casey 2009; Malpas 2018; Mugerauer 1994; Shatzki 2007). One important architectural theorist considerably influenced by EBS was the Norwegian Christian Norberg-Schulz (1926–2000), who, during the 1970s and 1980s, played a crucial role in keeping phenomenology in sight for architects. Like Rogers and Labatut before him, Norberg-­ Schulz sought to re-conceptualize how architects understood architecture, partly through phenomenological reformulations of the work of EBS researchers like Kevin Lynch and Edward Hall. Norberg-Schulz aimed for “a return to the roots of modernism by visualizing the self-­renewing origin of architecture,” which he located in foundational lifeworld patterns and structures such as lived-space, home, at-homeness, and environmental ambience (Otero-Pailos 2010: 146). In his first major phenomenological work, Existence, Space and Architecture (Norberg-Schulz 1971: 14, 37), he contended that a comprehensive architectural understanding requires “a theory where space is really understood as a dimension of human existence…” Architectural space, therefore, is best envisioned as “a ‘concretization’ of existential space.” In his many later books and articles, he explored the architectural and environmental dimensions of human “lived space,” including place (Norberg-Schultz 1988, 2000a), dwelling (Norberg-Schulz 1985), and sense of place and genius loci (Norberg-Schulz 1980). Particularly because of Norberg-Schulz’s work, architectural interest in phenomenology continued through the 1990s into the 2000s, though the perspective began to be challenged in the 1980s by newer conceptual approaches, including poststructuralism, deconstruction, and feminist and critical points of view (Mugerauer 1994; Otero-Pailos 2010, 2012; Perella 1988). Although these and other “cutting-edge” perspectives have come to dominate architectural theory today, consequential phenomenological work continues to appear, including the writings of philosophers Edward Casey (2009), Karsten Harries (1997), Jeff Malpas (2006, 2018), and Robert Mugerauer (1994, 2008); and architectural theorists David Leatherbarrow (2002), Rachel McCann (­ McCann and Locke 2015), Juhani Pallasmaa (2005, 2009, 2015), Alberto Pérez-Gómez (2016), Jorge ­Otero-Pailos (2010, 2012), Thomas Thiis-Evensen (1989), and Dalibor Vesely (2004). At the same 289

David Seamon

time, the design work of such eminent architects as Alvar Aalto, Tadao Ando, Stephen Holl, Louis Kahn, Aldo Van Dyke, and Peter Zumthor has come to be associated with an explicit or implicit phenomenological sensibility (Hale 2017; Holl, Palasmaa, and Pérez-Gómez 1994; Malgrave and Goodman 2011: 210–14; Norberg-Schulz 2000b; Rush 2008; Sharazi 2015; Sharr 2007). In describing architectural phenomenology as it is practiced today, architectural theorists John Macarthur and Naomi Stead (2012: 127) wrote that the approach “proposes to explain directly how the spaces we inhabit make us feel.” Otero-Pailos (2012: 136) extended this understanding when he defined architectural phenomenology as “the study of architecture as it presents itself to consciousness in terms of so-called archetypal human experiences, such as the bodily orientation of up and down, the perceptions of light and shadow, or the feelings of dryness and wetness.” Highlighting the perceptual, sensuous, and affective aspects of buildings and architectural experience, these two definitions of architectural phenomenology are a useful starting point, though it is important to recognize that phenomenological research can probe other relevant dimensions of architectural experience. For example, other recent phenomenological studies have examined such topics as environmental wholeness (Alexander et al. 1977); pre-reflective and symbolic languages of architectural experience and meaning (Alexander 2002–05; Harries 1997; Janson and Tigges 2014); and the phenomenological contribution to cognitive science, particularly in relation to architectural behaviors, aesthetic sensibility, and environmental wayfinding (Hale 2017: 50–4; Mallgrave 2013; Mallgrave and Goodman 2011: 229–30; Robinson and Pallasmaa 2015). In short, phenomenology continues to be an important conceptual and practical force in contemporary architecture and architectural theory. To illustrate this claim, I highlight two phenomenological topics often drawn upon in architectural thinking today—environmental embodiment and architectural atmospheres.

Environmental Embodiment and Architecture Environmental embodiment refers to the lived body in its unself-conscious perceptual awareness as it encounters and coordinates with the world at hand, especially its environmental and architectural aspects (Casey 2009; Mallgrave 2013; McCann and Locke 2015; Pallasmaa 2005, 2009). ­Merleau-Ponty (1945/1962) contended that the taken-for-granted foundation of human experience is perception, which he interpreted as the typically unnoticed, immediate givenness of the world undergirded by a lived body that is conscious of, acting in, and experiencing a world that automatically reciprocates with familiar pattern, meaning, and contextual presence. Merleau-­ Ponty argued that perception incorporates a lived dynamic between the body and world such that aspects of the world are understood because they instantaneously evoke in the lived body their corresponding experienced qualities. For example, one “sees the springiness of steel” or “hear[s] the hardness and unevenness of cobbles in the rattle of a carriage” (1945/1962: 229, 230). Through bodily perception, we immediately engage with and are aware of the world because it immediately engages with us to offer a reciprocating, pre-reflective sensibility and signification. In the last several years, there has appeared an expanding body of studies considering what Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of perception might mean for architectural thinking and design (Hale 2017; McCann and Locke 2015; Rush 2008). Central here is the work of Finnish architectural theorist Juhani Pallasmaa (2005, 2009), who drew partly on Merleau-Ponty to argue that much contemporary architectural design is dominated by sight with the result that buildings may be striking visually but have largely lost any expression of plasticity and multivalent sensuousness. For Pallasmaa (2005: 71), architects must aim to “create embodied and lived existential metaphors that concretise and structure our being in the world.” He argued that “Significant architecture makes us experience ourselves as complete embodied and spiritual beings” (2005: 11). He found 290

Architecture and Phenomenology

examples of such rich, afferent design in the buildings of architects like Alvar Aalto, Glenn Murcutt, Steven Holl, and Peter Zumthor (2005: 70–1). More recently, Pallasmaa (2009) examined the relationship between the lived body and the process of architectural design. He contended that architectural education today places too much emphasis on cerebral and verbal knowledge at the expense of embodied processes, particularly the importance of the hand in envisioning and actualizing design possibilities: Architecture is… a product of the knowing hand. The hand grasps the physicality and materiality of thought and turns it into a concrete image. In the arduous processes of designing, the hand often takes the lead in probing for a vision, a vague inkling that it eventually turns into a sketch, a materialization of an idea. (2009: 16–17) To argue for the continuing importance of the hand in architectural design and fabrication, Pallasmaa reviewed the lived quality of craft and the importance of manual tactility in architectural drawing whereby the hand is in a “direct and delicate collaboration and interplay with mental imagery. It is impossible to know which appeared first, the line on the paper or the thought…” (2009: 91). In this sense, the process of drawing is a “pulling out” in which the hand “feels the invisible and formless stimulus, pulls it into the world of space and matter, and gives it shape” (2009: 92). Pallasmaa contrasted this embodied way of designing with architecture’s current emphasis on digital technology, which differs from previous design instruments because it largely unfolds in an abstract, mathematized space that bypasses the “direct haptic connection between the object, its representation, and the designer’s mind” (2009: 95–6). Pallasmaa argued that computer-aided design is a valuable architectural tool but should not be introduced in design education until students have first mastered hand drawing and physical model making: “[T]he computer probably cannot do much harm after the student has learned to use his or her imagination and has internalised the crucial process of embodying a design task” (2009: 99).

Environmental Embodiment, Body-Subject, and Place Merleau-Ponty also demonstrated that, besides its more passive perceptual dimension, the lived body incorporates a more active, motor dimension of perception—what he termed body-subject, or pre-reflective corporeal engagement expressed via action and typically in sync with the spatial and physical environment in which the action unfolds (Merleau-Ponty 1945/1962). Emphasizing that everyday, taken-for-granted actions and behaviors are grounded bodily rather than cognitively, Merleau-Ponty (1945/1962: 138–9) wrote that Motility… is not a handmaid of [cognitive] consciousness, transporting the body to that point in space of which we have formed a representation beforehand. In order that we may be able to move our body towards an object, the object must first exists for it, our body must not belong to the realm of the ‘in-itself ’. Integrally related to the lived body, body-subject, and environmental embodiment is the phenomenological concept of place, which can be defined as any environmental locus that draws human experiences, actions, and meanings together spatially and temporally (Casey 2009; Malpas 2018; Relph 1976; Seamon 2013, 2018). In discussing the lived relationship between place and environmental embodiment, the phenomenological philosopher Edward Casey emphasized that “lived bodies belong to places and help to constitute them” just as, simultaneously, “places belong to lived bodies and depend on them” (Casey 2009: 327). Through corporeal actions and encounters, individuals 291

David Seamon

contribute to the constitution of a place as, at the same time, those actions and encounters contribute to the person or group’s sense of lived involvement and identification with that place. In short, lived bodies and places “interanimate each other” (2009: 327). This interanimation of lived bodies and places is significant because the habitual, unself-conscious familiarity of body-subject is one way by which individuals and groups actualize a taken-for-granted involvement with place. Drawing on the concepts of environmental embodiment and place-body interanimation, phenomenological researchers have considered the spatial and environmental versatility of the lived body as expressed in more complex corporeal ensembles extending over time and space and contributing to a wider lived geography (Casey 2009; Jacobson 2010: 223). One such ensemble is body routines—sets of integrated gestures, behaviors, and actions that sustain a particular task or aim, for example, preparing a meal, mastering the use of carpentry tools, and building a stone wall. Another such bodily ensemble is time-space routines—sets of more or less habitual bodily actions extending through a considerable portion of time, for example, a getting-ready-for-work routine, or a Sunday-afternoon-going-to-the-park routine (Seamon 2013). Particularly pertinent to architectural design is the possibility that, in a supportive spatial and physical environment, individuals’ bodily routines converge and commingle in time and space, thereby contributing to a larger-scale environmental ensemble identified as place ballet—an interaction of individual bodily routines rooted in a particular environment, which often becomes an important place of interpersonal and communal exchange, meaning, and attachment such as a well-used office lounge, a vibrant city plaza, or an exuberant urban neighborhood ( Jacobs 1961; Oldenburg 1999). A major phenomenological question is how environmental design might generate thriving place ballets, whether at architectural or wider environmental scales (Alexander et al. 1977; Jacobs 1961; Seamon 2018).

Atmosphere and Architecture In the last several years, the phenomenon of atmosphere has become a major topic in architectural and phenomenological research (Böhme, Griffero, and Thibald 2014; Borch 2014; Griffero 2014, 2017; Pallasmaa 2015; Pérez-Gómez 2016; Zumthor 2006). Atmosphere refers to the ineffable architectural presence and ambience of a building that make it unique or unusual as an environment and place. Several phenomenological philosophers have linked atmosphere with feelings and the tacit emotional tone of environments, spaces, or places. Gernot Böhme (2014: 43, 56), for example, explained that atmospheres involve “a spatial sense of ambience” and the “total impression that is regarded as characteristic” of an environment or place. Tonino Griffero (2014: 37) defined atmospheres as “spatialized feelings” and “the specific emotional quality of a given ‘lived space’.” One important lived aspect of atmosphere is its ambivalent, liminal quality: It belongs to neither the experiencer nor the situation experienced; it varies in its lived intensity, for different experiencers in the same moments and for the same experiencer in different moments. As Böhme (1993: 122) explained: [A]tmospheres are neither something objective, that is, qualities possessed by things, and yet they are something thinglike, belonging to the thing in that things articulate their presence through qualities…. Nor are atmospheres something subjective, for example, determinations of a psychic state. And yet they are subjectlike [and] belong to subjects in that they are sensed in bodily presence by human beings, and this sensing is at the same time a bodily state of being of subjects in space. Several architects and architectural theorists have examined the lived relationships between atmosphere and buildings. Alban Janson and Florian Tigges (2014: 26), for example, claimed that atmosphere is “the expressive force through which a situation that has been engendered by architecture 292

Architecture and Phenomenology

seizes us in affective terms all at once and as a totality.” In proposing atmosphere as a creative vehicle for an architecture that is more than “pictorial image,” Alberto Pérez-Gómez (2016: 21, 24) contended that “good architecture should be primarily concerned with creating the moods appropriate to positive emotions that support ethical human action….” In asking why some buildings seem more pleasurable, enticing, or comfortable than others, Peter Zumthor (2006: 13) argued that one defining feature is atmosphere: “I enter a building, see a room and—in a fraction of a second—have this feeling about it.” Zumthor (2006: 10, 19) described atmosphere as “a beautiful natural presence” and the “magic of things, the magic of the real world.” Juhani Pallasmaa (2014: 20) defined atmosphere as “the overarching perceptual, sensory, and emotive impression of a space, setting, or social situation. It provides the unifying coherence and character for a room, space, place, and landscape….” In proposing that all buildings, whether prosaic or monumental, project some degree of ambience and mood, Pallasmaa (2015: 132–3) went so far as to suggest that atmosphere, rather than visible building form, is usually the most important dimension of architectural experience for non-architects and the lay public: All buildings, monumental or commonplace, ritual or utilitarian, create atmospheres through which we experience the world and ourselves. This unconscious orientation and articulation of mood is often the most significant effect of a space or a building. I believe that non-­ architects sense primarily the atmosphere of a place or building, whereas attention to visible form implies a distinct intellectual and theoretical position.

Atmosphere, Natural Symbols, and Architectural Archetypes If architectural atmosphere is as important as Pallasmaa claimed, then two provocative questions arise, the first of which is whether there are heuristic means whereby one might become more sensitive to the ineffable qualities of architectural atmosphere. Can we, asked Pallasmaa (2014: 29), generate “a deepened sense of materiality, gravity, and reality?” A second related question is whether architectural atmospheres can be created directly. Can architects and other responsible parties “bring about the conditions in which atmospheres of a particular character are able to develop” (Böhme 2014: 58)? In answering these two questions, the phenomenological work of philosopher Karsten Harries (1988, 1997) and architectural theorist Thomas Thiis-Evensen (1989) offers helpful guidance. ­Focusing on the visceral, pre-reflective, bodily aspects of environmental experience and meaning, both thinkers developed revealing conceptual languages for becoming more alert to architectural atmospheres. Harries proposed a “natural language of space” (Harries 1997: 125) that draws on natural symbols—normally taken-for-granted, experiential qualities integrally associated with ­essential qualities of human nature and life, for example, lived qualities of materiality, of weight, of light, of temperature, of direction, of sociability, and of privacy. Harries suggested that the experiential structure of any natural symbol incorporates some manner of lived binary—for example, experiences of moving or resting, lying down or standing up, sensing lightness or heaviness, or feeling inside or outside. In his work, he explored such natural symbols as vertical and horizontal, up and down, light and darkness, and inside and outside. One example is Harries’ explication of how the lived binary between verticality and horizontality arises from the upright human body’s postural uprightness as it exists in lived relationship with the earth’s horizontal plane (Harries 1988: 40–5, 1997: 180–92). There is the vertical’s anchoring power of dwelling and rootedness existing in tension with the mobility and the horizon’s lure of open spaces. There is the vertical’s skyward movement toward sacredness and spiritual presence, which contrasts with the horizon’s expression of material extension and worldly success. Different 293

David Seamon

cultures, historical eras, and architectural styles express the vertical-horizontal tension in a wide range of ways but, whatever the particular manifestation, it “presupposes an understanding of the meaning of verticals and horizontals inseparable from our being in the world” (Harries 1988: 45). As an interpretive means for pondering Harries’ natural symbols as they might be actualized in specific buildings, one useful guide is Norwegian architect Thomas Thiis-Evensen’s Archetypes in Architecture, a phenomenology of architectural experience as encountered through the lived body and originally his doctoral dissertation done under the direction of Norberg-Schulz (Thiis-­ Evensen 1989). Thiis-Evensen’s aim is to understand “the universality of architectural expression”; his interpretive means is what he called architectural archetypes—“the most basic elements of architecture,” which he identified as floor, wall, and roof (1989: 8). He argued that the lived commonality of floor, wall, and roof is their making an inside in the midst of an outside, though in different ways: the floor, through above and beneath; the wall, through within and around; and the roof, through over and under. Thiis-Evensen proposed that a building’s relative degree of insideness and outsideness in relation to floor, wall, and roof can be clarified through what he called the three “existential expressions” of architecture: motion, weight, and substance (1989: 21). Motion refers to an architectural element’s lived sense of dynamism or inertia—i.e., whether the element seems to expand, to contract, or to rest in balance. In turn, weight refers to the element’s lived sense of heaviness or lightness, and substance involves the element’s lived sense of material expression—whether it seems hard or soft, fine or coarse, cold or warm, and so forth. Using examples from architectural history as descriptive evidence, Thiis-Evensen generated an intricate lived language arising from and describing the corporeal and sensory dimensions of architectural experience and meaning. For example, he discussed stairs as one kind of directed floor and explored how a stairs’ material and spatial qualities of slope, breadth, form, and relative connectedness to the ground contribute to varying sensuous and bodily experiences of motion, weight, and substance (1989: 89–113). Thiis-Evensen’s architectural interpretation offers one inventive heuristic means for detailing the tacit, pre-predicative perceptual relationship between experiencers and the built world (Seamon 2017). Both Harries’ natural symbols and Thiis-Evensen’s architectural archetypes provide perceptive architectural languages that offer discerning interpretive means to locate and understand less ­effable, unself-conscious, haptic qualities that contribute to a building’s architectural atmosphere. In turn, an awareness of these normally tacit, taken-for-granted architectural qualities might help architects better to envision an appropriate “fit” between what a building needs to be lifeworld-wise and what it might be as a field of ambient presence. As this discussion of architectural atmosphere indicates, a large portion of architectural experience is pre-cognitive, corporeal, and hidden from conscious awareness. In this sense, the insightful languages of Harries and ­Thiis-Evensen bring direct intellectual attention to architectural qualities and situations that are otherwise unspoken and concealed in the natural attitude of architectural experiences and meanings.

Architecture, Architectural Phenomenology, and Virtual Worlds For the future of architecture, the question of virtual worlds becomes increasingly pressing, both theoretically and practically. If virtual places, including virtual buildings, come to be experienced as “real” as their real-world counterparts, does this development mean the eventual demise of many “real” places and “real “buildings as we currently know them? On one hand, there is the optimistic argument that virtuality can extend real reality and improve and amplify the real world in ways impossible before its availability. In envisioning long-term trends that he claimed will revolutionize human life in the next 30 years, futurist Kevin Kelly (2016: 216) included virtual reality and suggested that, within a decade, virtual-reality displays will be so “real” that users will think they are “looking through a real window into a real world. It’ll be bright—no flicker, 294

Architecture and Phenomenology

no visible pixels. You will feel this is absolutely for sure real. Except it isn’t.” Kelly (2016: 229) contended that, in three decades, virtual reality will be as commonplace as cell phones and used to play “virtual sports,” perform in “virtual plays,” and visit “virtual places” and “virtual historic sites” that are so “real” that the user entirely forgets that they are not: Cheap abundant VR will be an experience factory. We’ll use it to visit environments too dangerous to risk in the flesh, such as war zones, deep seas, or volcanoes. Or we’ll use it for experiences we can’t readily get to as humans—to visit the inside of a stomach, the surface of a comet…. Or to cheaply experience something expensive, like a flyby of the Himalayas. On the other hand, there is the less sanguine argument that virtual reality too readily fabricates experiences that might seem real but could never fully happen in actual lifeworlds. For example, phenomenological philosopher Albert Borgmann (1992: 87–102) identified several lived qualities via which virtual reality facilitates distortions, reductions, or embellishments of real reality when recast virtually. One such embellishing quality is pliability, the ways that virtual reality can generate virtual objects and experiences impossible to be had in real reality (e.g., the virtual ability to fabricate, reshape, or destroy virtual buildings and places at will). Borgmann also highlighted brilliance, the facility of virtual reality to highlight and enhance an experience’s attractive features and de-emphasize or eliminate any uninteresting, unpleasant, or irrelevant dimensions (e.g., virtual places that are always “picture perfect” and never deteriorate, become soiled, or expose untoward or unkind aspects of human life). Borgmann (1992: 96) pointed out that, underlying these lived aspects of virtual reality is the more basic existential principle that the real world “encumbers and confines.” Though virtual reality may superficially seem real, it can readily escape from and replace the lived messiness of real lifeworlds with more convenient, vivid, or fantastical situations that require no stakes, answerability, or efforts of will. On one hand, virtual reality holds extraordinary promise in that it may become a welcome means for repairing a good number of the world’s problems. Who, for example, needs an automobile if she can simply put on her virtual headset and “go to” her virtual workplace, grocery store, or favorite recreation place? Who needs a real house, place of worship, or vacation destination if all these “places” and “experiences” might be produced virtually? On the other hand, virtual reality may involve potential risks and problems, including time-wasting, titillation, addiction, and withdrawal from most things real. Why make the efforts that an encumbering, confining real world necessitates if virtual reality can provide ease, pleasure, and enhanced vividness without the downside of demands, exertions, obligations, or consequences? I end this chapter with virtual reality because phenomenology offers singular insights as to its benefits, limitations, and experiential impacts. Phenomenological concepts like lifeworld, natural attitude, intentionality, body-subject, environmental embodiment, place, and atmosphere identify integral constituents of any human experience, whether of the past, present, or future; whether real or virtual. Human beings are always already immersed in their worlds, even if that immersion becomes virtual. Understanding the many lived dimensions of human-immersion-in-world, including its architectural aspects, is perhaps the most central aim, responsibility, and value of phenomenology broadly and of architectural phenomenology specifically.

Bibliography Alexander, Christopher (1964) Notes on the Synthesis of Form, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Alexander, Christopher (2002–05) The Nature of Order, 4 vols, Berkeley, CA: Center for Environmental Structure. Alexander, Christopher, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein (1977) A Pattern Language, New York: ­Oxford University Press.

295

David Seamon Bachelard, Gaston (1957/1964) The Poetics of Space, Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Bermudez, Julio (2015) Transcending Architecture, Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press. Bollow, Otto (1963/2011) Human Space, London: Hyphen Press. Borch, Christian (ed.) (2014) Architectural Atmospheres, Basil: Birkhäuser. Borgmann, Albert (1992) Crossing the Postmodern Divide, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Böhme, Gernot (1993) “Atmosphere as the Fundamental Concept of a New Aesthetics,” Thesis Eleven, 36, 113–26. Böhme, Gernot (2014) “Urban Atmospheres,” in Christian Borch (ed.) Architectural Atmospheres, Basil: Birkhäuser, pp. 42–59. Böhme, Gernot, Tinino Griffero, and Jean-Paul Thibald (eds.) (2014) Architecture and Atmosphere, Espoo: Tapio Wirkkala Rut Bryk Foundation. Casey, Edward S. (2009) Getting Back into Place, 2nd edition, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Eliade, Mircea (1957/1961) The Sacred and the Profane. New York: Harcourt Brace. Gehl, Jan (1987) Life between Buildings. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold. Griffero, Tonino (2014) “Atmospheres and Lived Space,” Studia Phaenomenologica, 14, 29–51. Griffero, Tonino (2017) Quasi-Things, Albany: SUNY Press. Hale, Jonathan (2017) Merleau-Ponty for Architects. London: Routledge. Hall, Edward (1966) The Hidden Dimension, New York: Doubleday. Harries, Karsten (1988) “Voices of Space,” Center, 4, 34–9. Harries, Karsten (1997), The Ethical Function of Architecture, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Heidegger, Martin (1952/1971) “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, Albert Hofstadter (trans.), New York: Harper and Row, pp. 145–61. Holl, Stephen, Juhani Palasmaa, and Alberto Pérez-Gómez (1994) “Questions of Perception: Phenomenology of Architecture,” A&U [special issue], 7. Jacobs, Jane (1961) The Death and Life of Great American Cities, New York: Random House. Jacobson, Kirsten (2010) “The Experience of Home and the Space of Citizenship,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 48 (3), 219–45. Janson, Alban and Florian Tigges (2014) Fundamental Concepts of Architecture: The Vocabulary of Spatial Situations, Basel: Birkhäuser. Kelly, Kevin (2016) The Inevitable, New York: Viking. Lane, Belden (2000) Landscapes of the Sacred, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press. Leach, Neil (1997) Rethinking Architecture, London: Routledge. Leatherbarrow, David (2002) Uncommon Ground, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lynch, Kevin (1960) The Image of the City, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Macarthur, John and Naomi Stead (2012) “Introduction: Architecture and Aesthetics,” in C. Greig Crysler, Stephen Cairns, and Hilde Heyman (eds.) The SAGE Handbook of Architectural Theory, London: Sage, pp. 123–35. Malgrave, Harry Francis (2013) Architecture and Embodiment, London: Routledge. Malgrave, Harry Francis and David Goodman (2011) An Introduction to Architectural Theory, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Malpas, Jeff (2006) Heidegger’s Topology, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Malpas, Jeff (2018) Place and Experience, 2nd edition, London: Routledge. McCann, Rachel and Patricia Locke (eds.) (2015) Merleau-Ponty: Space, Place, Architecture, Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1962) Phenomenology of Perception, New York: Academic Press. Moore, Charles and Kent Bloomer (1977) Body, Memory, and Architecture, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Moran, Dermot (2000) Introduction to Phenomenology, London: Routledge. Moran, Dermot (2005) Edmund Husserl: Founder of Phenomenology, Cambridge: Polity. Moran, Dermot (2011) “Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology of Habituality and Habitus,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 42 (1), 53–77. Mugerauer, Robert (1994) Interpretations on Behalf of Place, Albany: SUNY Press. Mugerauer, Robert (2008) Heidegger and Homecoming, Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press. Newman, Oscar (1973) Defensible Space, New York: Macmillan. Norberg-Schulz, Christian (1971) Existence, Space and Architecture, New York: Rizzoli. Norberg-Schulz, Christian (1980) Genius Loci, New York: Rizzoli. Norberg-Schulz, Christian (1985) The Concept of Dwelling, New York: Rizzoli. Norberg-Schulz, Christian (1988) Architecture: Meaning and Place, New York: Rizzoli.

296

Architecture and Phenomenology Norberg-Schulz, Christian (2000a) Architecture: Presence, Language, Place, Milan: Skira. Norberg-Schultz, Christian (2000b) Principles of Modern Architecture, London: Andreas Papadakis. Oldenberg, Ray (1999) The Great Good Place, 2nd edition, New York: Marlowe & Company. Otero-Pailos, Jorge (2010) Architecture’s Historical Turn: Phenomenology and the Rise of the Postmodern, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Otero-Pailos, Jorge (2012) “Architectural Phenomenology and the Rise of the Postmodern,” in C. Greig Crysler, Stephen Cairns, and Hilde Heynen (eds.) The SAGE Handbook of Architectural Theory, London: Sage, pp. 136–51. Pallasmaa, Juhani (2005) The Eyes of the Skin, London: Wiley. Pallasmaa, Juhani (2009) The Thinking Hand, London: Wiley. Pallasmaa, Juhani (2014) “Space, Place, and Atmosphere,” in Christian Borch (ed.) Architectural Atmospheres, Basil: Birkhäuser, pp. 18–41. Pallasmaa, Juhani (2015) “Place and Atmosphere,” in Jeff Malpas (ed.) The Intelligence of Place, London: Bloomsbury, pp. 129–55. Perella, Stephen (1988) “Editorial,” in Form; Being; Absence: Pratt Journal of Architecture, 2 (spring), pp. 84–88. Pérez-Gómez, Alberto (2016) Attunement: Architectural Meaning after the Crisis of Modern Science, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Relph, Edward (1976) Place and Placelessness, London: Pion. Robinson, Sarah and Juhani Pallasmaa (eds.) (2015) Mind in Architecture: Neuroscience, Embodiment, and the Future of Design, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rush, Fred (2008) On Architecture, New York: Routledge. Sachs, Avigail (2013) “Architects, Users and the Social Sciences in Postwar America,” in Kenny Cupers (ed.), Use Matters, New York: Routledge, pp. 69–84. Seamon, David (2013) “Lived Bodies, Place, and Phenomenology,” Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, 4: 143–66. Seamon David (2017) “A Phenomenological and Hermeneutic Reading of Rem Koolhaas’s Seattle Central Library,” in Ruth Conway Dalton and Christopher Hölscher (eds.), Take One Building: Interdisciplinary Research Perspectives on the Seattle Central Library, London: Routledge, pp. 67–94. Seamon, David (2018) Life Takes Place: Phenomenology, Lifeworlds, and Place Making, London: Routledge. Sharr, Adam (2007) Heidegger for Architects, New York: Routledge. Shatzki, Theodore R. (2007) Martin Heidegger: Theorist of Space, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. Shirazi, M. Reza (2014) Towards an Articulated Phenomenological Interpretation of Architecture, New York: Routledge. Sommers, Robert (1969/2007) Personal Space, updated edition, Bristol: Bosko Books. Thiis-Evensen, Thomas (1989) Archetypes in Architecture, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tuan, Yi-Fu (1974) Topophilia, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. van Manen, Max (2014) Phenomenology of Practice, Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Vesely, Dalibor (2004) Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Whyte, William (1980) The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, New York: Project for Public Spaces. Zumthor, Peter (2006) Atmospheres, Basel: Birkhäuser.

297

17 Critical Regionalism From Critical Theory to Postcolonial and Local Awareness Vincent B. Canizaro Introduction This chapter considers the multifaceted, variably defined, and continuously refined/revised theory and discourse of critical regionalism. Understood generally, it is a cultural critique of postmodern society, late 20th-century economics, postmodern architecture, and previous theories of regionalism that relies on “critical theory” in most manifestations for inspiration. That critical theory is identified by Kellner, as rooted in ‘critical activity’ which is oppositional and which is involved in a struggle for social change and the unification of theory and practice. ‘Critique,’ in this context, therefore involves criticism of oppression and exploitation and the struggle for a better society. (Kellner 1990) It is a social, textual, cultural process of questioning accepted norms, definitions, and cultural bias that are typically embedded and hidden. In architecture, it, likewise, concerns an approach to architectural production aimed at r­ esisting a number of physical, cultural, and social changes thought to limit the quality of modern life and architecture. It is a theory and practice of resistance that seeks to establish a dialectical relationship between an increasingly globalized civilization and the local traditions found in regions without resorting to romanticism or nostalgia. It is derived from the observation and analysis of built work that demonstrated unique local responses to larger political, cultural, and economic influences. More specifically, the buildings demonstrated resistance to the deployment of universal building technologies, universal styles (the international, the commercial), along with the ability to put these oppositions into either a dialectic (modern versus vernacular) or into resolution (vernacular modernism). In most cases, the buildings used to derive critical regionalism exhibit the best qualities of modern technology and expression, while being distinctive for their use of local/ regional strategies or being responsive to local conditions (quality of light, climatic conditions) (Figure 17.1). The rationale of developing these theories lay, curiously, on issues outside of the dayto-day concerns of architects. The exemplary buildings were praised because in their resistance to universal or nonlocal influences, they embrace a critique of larger social, political, and economic forces that shape practice and the way we live in and with the built environment. This is not to say that the theory/critique that is critical regionalism is not grounded in concerns of buildings. It is, inasmuch as the focus is on building design, site design, and the framing of daily activities 298

DOI: 10.4324/9781315674469-19

Critical Regionalism

Figure 17.1  R  enzo Piano – Menil Collection. The Menil Collection (Houston, Texas) by Renzo Piano. An institutional and technologically advanced building fit to its locale via attention to natural light, building scale, and materiality. Photo courtesy of the author.

housed in buildings as situated in sites or urban settings. As an architectural theory, it is unique for its attempt to bring such external concerns to the role buildings play in our lives and the extent to which they hoped would effect changes to those larger concerns. Critical regionalism is better understood as sets of observations, developed into theories or approaches about architectural design that are concerned about social, political, and economic issues surrounding architecture. These observations cum theories come in two dominant strains, the first being that derived and developed by Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre, via their analysis of Greek architecture. And the second, more dominant and well-known, is that of Kenneth Frampton derived as a part of his historical analysis of modern architecture. For both, the introduction of the word “critical” to the discourse of regionalism aims to bring aspects of critical thinking to bear on promoting regionally responsive architecture. For Tzonis and Lefaivre, the use of critical has evolved, beginning with “critical” in soft alignment with critical theory, and ending with the Kantian notion of the “critical,” which refers to the philosophical practice of examining one’s assumptions. This refers to the idea that all design professionals should question how they make decisions. Is the decision to clad a building in central Texas with limestone based on stylistic reference, cost, performance, or its status as a part of a meaningful local building tradition? The aim of such criticality is to guide design to be more responsive to its site, locale, and region without falling prey to regionalism’s negative tendencies, which can include provincialism, nostalgic replication, economic co-option, kitsch, and other negative or regressive social tendencies. For Frampton, the use of “critical” has stayed more closely aligned with the political implications of critical 299

Vincent B. Canizaro

theory – that of resistance to hegemonic forces of capitalism or power that would remain hidden and undermine the quality of life (Frampton 1987). This is criticality as resistance to negative influences in architectural experience. For example, buildings built only for economic expediency (cost per square foot) undermine key architectural qualities and the resultant experience for those who inhabit such buildings – the quiet logic of low capital investment trumps quality of life. The third and less dominant strain (inspired by the work of Frampton and Tzonis and Lefaivre) is a literature that uses the term “critical” in a more casual way straying from its critical theory roots. Critical here refers variously to approaches to architecture that are (a) more self-critical or aware of its influence on society, (b) more socially conscious, and (c) more inclined to work against the status quo in the current direction of the profession – critical here as in critical of present practice. In this chapter, I focus mostly on the work of Tzonis and Lefaivre and Frampton as they have been the most influential. It is important to add, that since 1981, when the term “critical regionalism” was coined, both have redefined and refined their formulations in important ways, sometimes responsive to critiques by others, and more importantly to changing circumstances and developing awareness of emerging priorities or trends in architecture generally. For Tzonis and Lefaivre, this development can be summarized as a broadening concern for global, non-western, and postcolonial architectures along with an abandonment of the methods of critical theory (Tzonis and Lefaivre 2003). For Frampton, it can be seen as a heightened focus on social and ecological issues, while remaining resolutely focused on cultural and political resistance. Their evolution and the work of others signal the future direction and potential of critical regionalism in the 21st century.1

Development of Critical Regionalism Critical regionalism is, first, a variant of regionalism, a concept, theory, and/or approach to design the origins of which lie in late 19th-century efforts at regional planning. Under Patrick Geddes, Vidal de la Blach, Le Play, among others and in various locales in Europe, regional planners sought to document (via regional surveys) and establish planning guidelines for growth (using those surveys) that were responsive to local/regional conditions. Architectural regionalism, relatedly, looks to local building traditions, available local materials, and local adaptive building strategies for inspiration in design. Regionalist architectural theories share a rough consensus aimed at establishing connections, through architectural means, between people and the places (or regions) in which they live, work, and play. This localization is the “alternative” offered by the theory taken as a whole. As theories about connectedness to place, it is situated among other theories of place such as contextualism, site specificity in art and design, landscape urbanism, and planning, and it is allied with other disciplines, which take account of spatial phenomena such as cultural geography, cartography, anthropology, and folklore and historical studies. Critical regionalism, coined in 1981, has roots that lay in the influential writing of Lewis Mumford earlier in the century. In The South in Architecture, the published version of his four Dancy lectures delivered amid the isolationist/interventionist debates prior to World War II, he promoted regionalism as informed by the positive and negative roles architecture can play in society and culture (Mumford 1941). He posited, rather assertively, that regionalism in architecture could resist the negative effects of megalopolitan and commercial development, but also had to remain wary of the potential for chauvinism or nationalism as demonstrated by the Nazi’s use of the notion of “heimat” (a term serving to connect people and their character to place) to promote their declarations of racial superiority.2 His strategy was multivalent, but had two distinct threads. First, he understood that through establishing direct connections to local places, including both culture and the land, lay the foundation for a quality life. But he was careful to point out that the 300

Critical Regionalism

relations must remain dynamic and reflective of everyday experience. “Regionalism is not,” he wrote, a matter of using the most available local material or of copying some simple form of construction that our ancestors used… Regional forms are those which most closely meet the actual conditions of life and which most fully succeed in making a people feel at home in their environment: they do not merely utilize the soil but they reflect the current conditions of culture in the region. Mumford’s example of this was characteristically historical. He spoke generally about how Americans adapted techniques of building design, material use, and climatic adaptation learned in their European past to the specific regions they inhabited in the USA. Where wood was abundant, wood construction was adapted over time resulting in characteristic local expressions – wood clapboard and shingle clad houses in New England being examples he cites, both of which have become part of codified regional styles there today. Second, he sought a balance between universal and local culture as a form of resistance, “It would be useful”, he wrote, “if we formed the habit of never using the word regional without mentally adding to it the idea of universal – remembering the constant contact and interchange between the local scene and the wide world that lies beyond it” (Mumford 1941: 30–31). On the one hand, it was a dialectic that resisted the penchant for chauvinism; that is, it would help resist against the tendency within regionalist thinking to see one’s place or region as superior to other places and for people to marry that association to those from that region. On the other, it made it possible to view modern technology as a potentially benign facet of modern life, rather than the de-regionalizing anti-place force he felt it had become. His was an optimistic view that held that the logic of a placeless universal technology would be resisted by well-informed place-based citizens. The political subtext of resistance and self-criticality are the features that lead into the work of Tzonis and Lefaivre.

The Critical Regionalism of Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre, in 1981, in an essay entitled, “The Grid and the Pathway,” would formalize the theory of critical regionalism and coin the term for the postmodern era, continuing the tradition of regionalism as resistance and regionalism as the universal and local set forth by Mumford (Tzonis & Lefaivre 1981).3 Their subject was Greek architectural history, and in particular the trajectory that appeared to lead away from many of the cultural, aesthetic, and political errors they perceived plagued, postmodern architecture generally, and Greek architecture specifically. This included the homogenization of the built landscape and the reckless or manipulative use of cultural symbolism for power and commerce. Their discussion of Greek architectural history, and particularly the work of the Antonakakis (Atelier 66) and Dimitris Pikionis, focuses on regionalism as that which “upholds individual and local architectonic features against more abstract and universal ones” (Tzonis & Lefaivre 1981: 164). They were also quick to point out that such features and spatial forms have social and political consequences, reinforcing architectural regionalism’s association with reform and liberation movements, aligning with Mumford. As they traced the phases of regionalism in Greece, historicist regionalism is put forth as an architecture “of autochthonous values and aspirations of freedom” (Tzonis & Lefaivre 1981: 166). It is characterized by a revival of the use of Greek classical elements (columns and orders) and in the works of Atelier 66 in the 1960s and 1970s was expressed in terms of a rational and expressed structural grid. It is a grid that functions psychologically like that of a typology, standing as a reference to classically “Greek” structures, and thereby signifying it. Against this, a “critical regionalism” is developed “from ideals of the singular and the local, of liberty and anti-authoritarianism 301

Vincent B. Canizaro

… [and in opposition to] the despotic aspects of the Welfare State and the custodial effects of modernism” (Tzonis & Lefaivre 1981: 172). Its expression is found in the spatial form of the pathway, best represented by Dimitris Pikionis’s pedestrian walk-up and around Philopappos Hill overlooking the Acropolis (Figure 17.2). The path is singular, place-specific, non-monumental but also subtly referential to Greek history. Its paving patterns, bridges, and platforms tell stories and provide settings or places “made for an occasion.” More generally, the pathway is a topographically generative element within a project, which enables “architecture to serve as a cultural object in a social context” (Tzonis & Lefaivre 1981: 178). To design in terms of the pathway, or better weaving together the grid and the pathway, was to privilege the framing of direct and local experiences found in local popular architecture over projected utopian visions, design abstractions, design according to generic formulas, and designs as the unconscious projection of nonlocal stylism. Two examples cited here are the works of Atelier 66. Their Archaeological Museum of Chios practically diagrams the concept, consisting of a series of multileveled concrete spatial frames that support the variable promenade taken by museum visitors (Figure 17.3). The museum has the spatial form more akin to a small Greek village than a typical institutional building. Perhaps more complex is Atelier 66’s apartment block on Benaki Street in Athens, a project also cited by Kenneth Frampton. There, four apartments are laid out across multiple levels, again within a modern concrete structural frame, with a great deal of openness to for climatic response as well as connection to the street. This way each apartment is both a unique place, but one woven into the city of which it is a part. Attention to such spaces made possible in and around buildings, lead, they suggest, to the possible recovery of a humanist architecture concerned with the actual conditions of local life. In this early account, the mechanism for that recovery was the use of recognizable elements found in “popular architecture” but rendered in modern form. This is an early strategy that would later become the strategy of “making strange.” It permitted the architect to focus on social life, direct experience, and use of local tectonic strategies, and not fall prey to the sentimentalism, historicism, or chauvinism. Later, they refined their position in their contribution to the Pomona Proceedings, which was perhaps the apogee of the theory in terms of its impact on architectural culture (Amourgis 1991). There Tzonis and Lefaivre present a “positive if not conservative” notion of critical regionalism, as one opposed to “the chauvinistic, atavistic, sentimental hallucinationist attitudes of regionalism of the recent past” (Tzonis & Lefaivre 1991: 3). It is also here where they introduce the device of “defamiliarization,” a tactic critically regional buildings should perform. By this, they refer to Victor Schklovsky’s concept of “ostranenie” from Russian literary theory, which suggested that,

Figure 17.2  D  imitris Pikionis – Philopappos Hill. Dimitris Pikionis’s pedestrian walk-up and around Philopappos Hill overlooking the Acropolis. Source: Photo courtesy of Chrysoula Papagianni.

302

Critical Regionalism

Figure 17.3  Atelier 66 – Archaeological Museum at Chios. Diagramming the Archaeological Museum at Chios spatial concept, consisting of a series of multileveled concrete spatial frames that support the variable promenade. Source: Photo courtesy of the A66 Architecture Office (Suzana & Dimitris Antonakakis).

303

Vincent B. Canizaro

in art, making something strange both heightens the experience of it and engenders attention rather than casual reception. An example cited by Schklovsky is Tolstoy’s use of a horse serving as narrator – a device causing the reader to “read” the story in a heightened sense of awareness. A subtle architectural application could be Walter Gropius’ “ostranenie” deployment of clapboard siding in a vertical orientation for his house in Concord, Massachusetts. Likely a nod to Mumford’s evocation of clapboard siding as an American regional response, Gropius’ non-traditional use puts a quietly familiar material and assembly in an unfamiliar situation devoid of nostalgic implication (Figure 17.4). Similarly, Sea Ranch borrows both forms and exterior materials (redwood) from the local vernacular sheep sheds and barns but deploys them in stark, almost prismatic buildings that both contrast and integrate with the coastal landform. Expressing their intent ­toward “ostranenie,” Bill Turnbull has said: “Ours is the pragmatism of simple indigenous construction, common sense, plus the poetry of traditional materials used in familiar ways to make very s­ pecial, albeit unfamiliar places.” (Turnbull 1976: 4). A more recent example is that provided by the Bedok Court Condominium (1985) by Cheng Jian Fenn in Singapore. There, in what looks to be a modern residential high rise, is internally and spatially organized as a kind of defamiliarized tropical village, exemplifying the qualities of openness to the sky, open courts and internal streets for social interaction (Philip 2001: 253). Tzonis and Lefaivre’s infrequent but impressive work on regionalism has always been informed by history and resulted from an analysis of existing practices and buildings. This has rendered their work uncommonly valuable within the discourse on regionalism. Over the years, their primary concern has remained the valuation of local culture and identity, the maintenance of diversity in architectural form, and, like Kenneth Frampton, a grounding of architecture in local experience. Their recent work has also broadened the scope of regional historiography by extending its history back to Ancient Greece and by embracing postcolonial historiographies of architecture and a wider array of non-western exemplars including tropical regionalisms.4 To do so, they revise their definition of critical regionalism in which “critical” is now allied with the Kantian notion “critique” along with less association with cultural and political critique (Tzonis & Lefaivre

Figure 17.4  M  oore Lyndon Turnbull Whitaker – Sea Ranch Condominiums. Local vernacular sheep sheds and barns influenced the modernist buildings that contrast and integrate with the coastal landform. Source: Photo courtesy of the author.

304

Critical Regionalism

2003: 10). They also appear to back off of the reliance on the strategy of defamiliarization due to its likely ineffectiveness in so many global (i.e., non-western) examples of architectural places. Lefaivre’s essay elucidates five “poles” identified in Mumford’s writings that guide this revised version of critical regionalism: The first is the necessity of rejecting historicism or the use of empty historical references. The second is an embrace of nature and ecology that counterbalances the overt focus on the appearance of buildings. Relatedly, the third is an acceptance of modern technologies as long as they serve well-being and connectedness to place rather than an abdication of it. Fourth is the importance of community in an understanding and definition of any place or region. Last is the necessity in architecture of bringing the universal and local into balance. That is, strategies, materials, and techniques that are global in origin are adapted and modified to and by local circumstances – as exemplified above in the aforementioned Benakis Apartments where modern reinforced concrete frames are used to support a local manifestation of spatial situations, cladding options, and climate control. The most salient examples of these points they cite include: Alvar Aalto’s Saynatsalo Town Hall (Finland) cited for its focus on community and the manner in which it establishes place in harmony with its surroundings; Ricardo Porro’s School of Plastic Arts (Cuba) cited for its synthesis of Afro-Cuban and Spanish colonial forms; Moshe Safdie’s Hebrew Union College (Israel) cited for its contextualism, establishment of places (courtyards) for interaction, and its use of local Jerusalem limestone cladding; and Renzo Piano Workshop’s Tjibaou Cultural Center (New Caledonia) for its synthesis of technological performance and vernacular references to local building methods and materials. To these, they add, in their 2010 writing, the work of Chinese architects: Wang Lu, particularly the Tiantai Museum for its adoption of the hutong courtyard type building as a reference and its use of local rough-hewn granite; Wang Shu for his work at the China Academy of Art which they praise for its reference to regional courtyard houses, its sensitive siting, and its reuse of reclaimed building materials from the surrounding province imbuing the new building with material reference to the historical; and Li Xiandong for the Bridge School which they cite for its unique and literal bridging of a spatial divide in the village as along with its community-oriented program consisting of a school, library, performance space, and bridge (Tzonis & Lefaivre 2010: 193–196). They summarize their proposal this way: The task of critical regionalism is to rethink architecture through the concept of region. Whether this involves complex human ties or the balance of the ecosystem, it is opposed to mindlessly adopting the narcissistic dogmas in the name of universality, leading to environments that are economically costly and ecologically destructive to the human community. What we call the critical regionalist approach to design and the architecture of identity, recognizes the value of the singular, circumscribes projects within the physical, social, and cultural constraints of the particular, aiming at sustaining diversity while benefiting from universality. (Tzonis & Lefaivre 2003: 20)

The Critical Regionalism of Kenneth Frampton In 1983, Kenneth Frampton adopted the concept and developed his own variations with his most recent re-visitation of the concept coming in 2014. His writing has been the most influential, complex, and numerous, resulting in more than a dozen iterations.5 It is characterized by a focus on the development of a “critical” and “resistant” practice of architecture for which critical theory and the approach of the Frankfurt school played a significant and lasting role. He has characterized his early motivations in two ways, one descriptive, the other reactionary. With the first, in his role as an editor and later author of Modern Architecture: A Critical History, as he sought to classify an 305

Vincent B. Canizaro

interesting set of projects, an important common denominator was that they were both modern and yet idiosyncratically responsive to some aspect of their locale or region, or urban milieu – the unique responses were what made the buildings significant. The second motivation was spurred by his reading of The Grid and the Pathway and Paul Ricoeur’s “Universal Civilization and National Cultures” (Ricoeur 1965). Together these writings underscored the possibility of a mode of criticism (for him) and a mode of resistant practice (for him to promote in the work of others). They did so by presenting the role buildings could play in cultural and political affairs (from Tzonis and Lefaivre) and more specifically the role they could play in resisting the negative effects of modernization and neoliberal capitalism, commercialization, and commodification (from Ricoeur). Buildings could do this by grounding us in places, by emphasizing what is real about the world that is accessible in direct experience – that is in their tectonic form. His was also a response to the tectonically vacuous, and superficiality of postmodern architecture. He understood postmodernism as linked to broader and more invidious changes: changes in production, distribution, and information that limit the range of choices and flatten experience; changes in financing that led to the economic optimization of all things, including architecture and architectural practice; and changes in how we as citizens engage each other and the natural world, in which we increasingly function as primary consumers. The return to tradition, offered by postmodernism, like other such returns, yielded little to lasting significance as the historicist facades fell away to reveal their economically optimized frames – they were less buildings and more typically merely square footage, retail or office “space” or office “space.” Further, postmodern eclecticism had effectively “burned out” the public’s capacity to read traditional detail and symbols as meaningful. Together, Frampton’s descriptive and reactionary stances resulted first in his vision of “critical regionalism,” which was later edited into “place-form and cultural identity,” “agonistic architecture,” and “liberative environmental practice… upon which a radically democratic environmental discourse could be based.”6 As such, regions, specific places, and specific topographies serve to support building design as sites of resistance against globalization and other centralized structures that fostered a decline in the quality of modern life. This he called “the resistance nature of the Place-Form” (Frampton 1991: 36). These notions of resistance and the positioning of architectural projects as contributing to social, political, and economic change are informed by Frampton’s embrace of critical theory and the ideas of the Frankfurt school. At the heart of the movement was the conviction that modern capitalist society would not realize the liberative goals of the Enlightenment (for a rational, just, and humane society) without significant reformation. In order to support that reformation, they insisted on the importance of critique, which took the form of seeking underlying or hidden motivations and structures of coercion, control, and power. To do this, first the problems needed to be identified. For Frampton, in architecture, the negative effects of modern capitalism were evidenced in buildings not being what they appeared to be, buildings that played with symbols and references devoid of context thus taking meaning out of cultural references, buildings used as symbols of power, buildings built by formulae or according to styles devoid of relation to place (such as the Hill Country Tuscan-style in central Texas), and buildings that degrade the cultural role of architecture. By contrast, he promotes an “architecture that is categorically opposed to the stylistic, hegemonic spectacularity of the neo-liberal worldview, that is to say falsely sensational and superficial aestheticism of our time” (Frampton 2013: 8). His adoption of critical theory also resulted in a characteristic feature of his proposals, the dialectical points. In critical theory, dialectics was an important feature of the critique and also the proposed solution to the problem. Put simply, a dialectic method is the identification of a thesis, its anti-thesis, with the aim of developing a synthesis. Adopting this, Frampton’s main five “points” of resistance have consisted of oppositional architectural concepts: space/place, typology/topography, scenographic/architectonic, artificial/natural, and visual/tactile. The set of these points 306

Critical Regionalism

has remained relatively stable from its first iteration as each serves to identify a universal, abstract, or undesirable quality, followed by the real, specific, local, and desirable or admirable quality in critical regionalist architecture. Buildings that demonstrate a response to place are preferred over those designed as only so much abstract “space.” Those that are derived in response to a specific topography rather than to the uncritical dictates of a typology are preferred, and so on with the others in which architectonic, natural, and tactile serve as the catalyst for preferred architectural responses. Richard Ingersoll in his “Critical Regionalism in Houston” provides a rather complete example of what could be described as a critical regionalist building that is more complete than many of the examples cited by Frampton himself. The Menil Collection by Renzo Piano is subtle relatively modest scale modernist building situated in a residential neighborhood in Houston, Texas (see Figure 17.1). It was the surrounding residential scale that suggested its modest height. As such, it is a topographically responsive building rather than a reiteration of more monumental museum typology. Yet it is also resolutely modern in structure and form rather than imitative of its surroundings. What it does take from its context is part of its exterior cladding. Within a rectilinear steel, structural frame painted white is residential scaled wood siding. It creates its presence and marks its place in the neighborhood with modern and formally evocative sun-shading system that permeates the whole of the museum. Designed to provide all galleries with natural light while also dealing with the harsh Texas sun, it also serves as the building’s most recognizable feature and allows natural light and its changing conditions over the day to play a central role in the experience. Taken together, it is squarely architectonic as its “ornament” or expression is by the presentation of building’s structure and its sun-control technology. What you see is (mostly) what you get. Lastly, the building is resolutely tactile in both its cladding, its scale, the character and shape of the sun shades, and in its floor treatment – it is painted black and allowed to weather over time, marking the passage of museum visitors. The examples cited by Frampton are considerably more partial, due mostly to the limits of space in his essays, but also because critical regionalism is proposal, a critical lens, and not a practice or style. Often cited are specific buildings, while Frampton is often speaking more to the architect’s approach rather than the resulting buildings, many of which embody aspects of the theory. Alvaro Siza, and the example of his Beires House in Porto, Portugal, is often mentioned for it and his demonstration of the use of local materials, the attention to natural light, modern expression, and tectonic expressive qualities. J. A. Coderch’s ISM Apartment block is also frequently mentioned, but primarily as an example of the architect’s role in the wider Catalan regional culture. The building itself is noted for its modernity and use of vernacular brick and architectonically expressive exterior shutter system (Figure 17.5). The case is similar to his mention of Gino Valle, who is regional because his practice has centered within a specific region, and critically regional due to his modernist and vernacular building designs. He has also cited the same exemplars as Tzonis and Lefaivre in Pikionis and Atelier 66. For these partial descriptions, he has been criticized for promoting architects and buildings that only superficially represent the tenets or agenda of his critical regionalism.

Criticizing Critical Regionalism Frampton’s influence has also drawn its share of scrutiny and critics. Most have decried what they see, in his focus on architectural practice, as an overtly aestheticized approach to ameliorating serious cultural, political, and social issues. Others have criticized his reliance on preexisting projects and architects as examples. Some have been dubious about particular features he has attributed to those projects and to the architects cited. Others find more serious contradictions within the theory itself. Alan Colquhoun, in his “The Concept of Regionalism,” finds even critical regionalism 307

Vincent B. Canizaro

Figure 17.5  J. A. Coderch’s ISM Apartment building. Modern and yet vernacular brick via the architectonically expressive exterior shutter system. Source: Photo courtesy of the author.

to engage in precisely the kind of nostalgia it purports to criticize. Regionalism is posited as a subset of historicism and located among the European post-romantic oppositional theories of zivilazation and kultur and gesellschaft and gemeinschaft. Colquhoun aligns regionalism within the traditions of kultur and gemeinschaft for which an organic and cultural authenticity is a primary requirement, one he feels can only be approached through irony, as that organic regional world no longer exists. As such, regionalism (whether critical or not) is something of a fool’s errand that even the critique of critical theory cannot penetrate. Similarly, Frederic Jameson scoffs at the possibility of resistance within a practice that must remain within the very systems it seeks to critique. Inasmuch as architects must practice they cannot avoid depending on the globalized and hegemonic systems of finance, transportation, or communication. Marshal Berman’s criticism regards the potential inappropriateness of critical regionalism in cultures that have not yet suffered the ravages of postmodernism. His fear is that the promotion of regional resistance could result in the exclusion of materials benefits and universal suffrage for those in lesser well-developed parts of the world.7 His is a critique that can also be found in Paul Ricoeur’s essay “Universal Civilization and National Cultures” so often cited by Frampton as an introduction to his own essays. Ricoeur is careful to point out that universal civilization has on the whole been beneficial. At the same time, its negative character “constitutes a sort of subtle destruction … of traditional cultures.” (Ricoeur 1965: 276). Nevertheless, his prescription is somewhat different than Frampton’s as he is careful to distinguish industrial from postcolonial or developing cultures. The oft-cited question “how to become modern and to return to sources” is directed at those striving to attain the benefits of modernity. For them, Ricoeur suggests an openness to universal civilization and its attendant benefits. Once these are in place, as Berman would hope, Ricoeur suggests something of a resistance within assimilation. 308

Critical Regionalism

Another important and distinctive critique is that leveled by Keith Eggener entitled “Placing Resistance” (Eggener 2002). In it, he provides an excellent and comprehensive example of ­substantive criticism. Using Frampton’s citation of Mexican architect Luis Barragan, he finds inconsistencies and contradictions that lead him to question the theory and its reception by architects, as Barragan does not appear to actually exhibit any of the qualities ascribed to him other than a penchant for evocative design. Eggener finds critical regionalism to be something of a postcolonialist strategy, and as such, is a process more interested in cultural conflict than resolution – that repeats a form of cultural hegemony from outside of those within the region. Additionally, the requirement of defamiliarization, more promoted by Tzonis and Lefaivre, is characterized as a potential debasement of local meaning. As such, defamiliarizing meaningful local referents is not any better than the postmodern misuse of historical references. In both cases, images, details, materials, and the like used in ways other than traditional can readily be interpreted as chauvinist, insulting, wrong, or scenographic rather than authentically architectonic. Such criticisms have served to propel the promotion of critical regionalism forward. As I noted, Tzonis and Lefaivre have quieted the promotion of the postmodern strategy of defamiliarization they so passionately promoted at the Pomona Conference. And they have done likely in subtle accord with Eggener’s critique. Further, their dogged pursuit of regionalist historiography has done much to place the contemporary theorizations of regionalism (including critical regionalism) on a firmer foundation. At a minimum, their globally aware regionalist analysis, including tropical regional architectures, has demonstrated many more ways in which local cultures and local identities can be preserved and progressively developed through architectural means. Their work inscribes one strand of the path forward for critical regionalism, that of a self-conscious, self-critical, and modestly ambitious approach to architecture specific to its place, people, and the construction of their identity and history. As for Kenneth Frampton, his work has been a modernist’s emancipatory project writ through architectural theory. He hopes that his “critical regionalism,” born out of analysis of existing architectural activities and formalized as a theoretical approach, can support a “significant, if marginal practice of architecture” capable of producing a “more sensitive and relevant” “self-­ conscious and local contemporary expression.” (Frampton 1988: 55). And it may still. The challenges that have arisen in the west are now global challenges as well. The corporatization of the financing, site selection, design, and contract award processes (among many activities) are mostly universal, and in the specter of star architecture and increasingly global practice, the threat to local cultures, knowledges, and meaning remain under increasing threat. Yet, Frampton’s writing while seemingly responsive to myriad developments remains firm in its basic promotion of resistance. He concludes his most recent essay in a defiant tone not unlike how it began. The possibility of critical regionalism as a kind of one-off, quixotic site of resistance. While it is not able to alter the dominant spectacular, technoscientific global corporate discourse, it is nonetheless still able to articulate a resistant place-form within a smaller society, which here and there, may maintain a dissenting cultural and political position. (Frampton 2014: 30) Along the way, he has broadened the scope of what is key to the ideals of “critical ­regionalism,” “resistant place-form,” and environmental or agonistic architectural practices. These include ­sustainability, landscape urbanism, as extensions of his dialectic points of “space/place” and ­“artificial/natural.” This development also happens to align with Tzonis and Lefaivre’s evocation of their second “pole” of Mumford’s thinking, which emphasizes the need to embrace nature and ecology in future architectural work. 309

Vincent B. Canizaro

Critical Regionalism 2.0 What of critical regionalism beyond Frampton and Tzonis and Lefaivre? First, beyond the limited postmodern inflections of “criticality,” its relevance has increased in recent years based on developments cited and with greater recognition of postcolonial/modernist architectural debates in developing countries (alternately referred to as “third world modernism”), and the role indigenous or local knowledges play in cultural (incl. architecture) and political affairs (Lu 2011). Perhaps the best example of critical regionalism 2.0 is that promoted by the Aga Kahn awards program and the journal Mimar. The goal of the awards has been to identify and encourage building concepts that successfully address the needs and aspirations of societies in which Muslims have a significant presence. The selection process emphasizes architecture that not only provides for people’s physical, social and economic needs, but that also stimulates and responds to their cultural and spiritual expectations. Particular attention is given to building schemes that use local resources and appropriate technology in innovative ways, and to projects likely to inspire similar efforts elsewhere. Over their 13 iterations, the awards have through increasingly sophisticated consideration promoted a variety of buildings, architects, situated in many places (but sharing a relation to Islam) that are seen to exemplify generally articulated principles specific to those places and peoples. As such, the recognition via the awards differs from the recognition provided by most critical regionalist literature because they do not carry the same baggage of western or postmodern bias that resulted in the promotion of resistance and/or the necessity of the inclusion of strangeness in architectural expression. The Aga Kahn awards, therefore, remain more open (albeit in the context of Islam) to the goods aimed at in critical regionalism, but with the necessity of dialectical opposition or other required confrontation with modernity or globalization. The soft criticality is relocated from “the agitated writings of the Frankfurt School” to the notion of significance as in use in “critical care” (Tzonis & Lefaivre 2001: 8). We can see similar examples of such a soft critical regionalism in architecture in India from the 1960s to the 1990s in the work and exhibitions by Rewal, Chatterjee, and Charles Correa (Srivastava & Scriver 2014: 392) and in China by the post-reform era architecture of Wang Shu (Amateur Architects), Wang Lu, Feng Jizhing, and other more questioning projects of Yung Ho Chang and Urbanus (Zhu 2014). So, while much distance existed between Tzonis and Lefaivre’s position and Frampton’s early on, in the end, they have become closer in emphasis and closer to this soft version of critical regionalism. And these commonalities likely provide a dependable set of tenets that are more crucial today and globally relevant, if critical regionalism is going to play the promising role intended by its proponents and woven within its construction in western architecture. These points of advice to architects practicing in their own community and more importantly abroad (as many firms now do) include: sensitivity and attention to needs of locales and local cultures, necessity of rejecting empty references only when “empty” is determined locally, embrace of the benefits of modern technology with a keen eye to how it may disadvantage or disengage people from their places, focus on the ecological substrate of cities, buildings, and regions that supports each place we inhabit, and a continued vigilance on maintaining the vital real and unique experiences available in each and every place. Most importantly, the future of critical regionalism likely lies in the construction of spaces for dialogue for those who will inhabit the new places designed by architects and built by builders or the inhabitants themselves. This requires willingness on the part of developers, bankers, and local municipal officials to engage in this dialogue as well, or at least support practices that will in turn 310

Critical Regionalism

support place-based yet globally aware citizenry – a practice that legitimizes local knowledges rather than rejecting, ignoring, or appropriating them for predominantly aesthetic, commercial, or chauvinistic aims. Doing so demands architects also recognize the “endemic outsideness of theory and professionalization,” and resist its negative tendencies (Canizaro 2007: 25–26). In response, we should foster practices guided by an empathetic outsideness, as it is we, who in the service of clients and the public, design and guide construction of our shared built environment.

Notes 1 In particular, the perspective of postcolonial and “third world” architectures as they have encountered, adopted, and moved beyond European modernism. (See Lu 2011). 2 Lefaivre states that “Mumford’s regionalism is critical in a second, more important sense … it is critical of regionalism.” See (Lefaivre 2003: 34). 3 Lewis Mumford’s regionalist vision is central to most of Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre’s writings on regionalism. Beginning with their first, “Die Frage des Regionalismus,” (Tzonis et al. 1981). 4 They make this shift across three books from 2001 to 2010. (See Tzonis and Lefaivre 2001, 2003, 2010). 5 About Frampton’s influence, Keith Eggener writes: “No one has written of critical regionalism more often or with greater effect than Frampton. His definition is the best known, the most complex, and astute, and the one most often adopted by other writers and architects.” (See Eggener 2002: 229). 6 The term “place-form” is first used in Frampton, 1988. His reference to “Agonistic” is used in Frampton 2013. By choosing the term agonistic, he positions architectural practice as a site of political conflict, which for him involves promoting a “pluralist architecture that is opposed to [or in conflict with] the stylistic, hegemonic spectacularity of the neo-liberal worldview … and superficial aestheticism of our time.” p. 8. “Liberative environmental practice” comes from Frampton (2003). 7 All of these are reported by Richard Ingersoll in his review of a conference held in Delft in 1990. (See Ingersoll 1991).

References Amourgis, Spyros., ed. (1991) Critical Regionalism: The Pomona Meeting Proceedings, Pomona, CA: California State Polytechnic University. Canizaro, Vincent B. (2007) Architectural Regionalism: Collective Writings on Place, Identity, Modernity, and ­Tradition, New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Eggener, Keith L. (2002) “Placing Resistance: A Critique of Critical Regionalism,” Journal of Architectural Education 55 (4): 228–237. Frampton, Kenneth (1983) “Prospects for a Critical Regionalism,” Perspecta 20: 147–162. Frampton, Kenneth (1987) “Ten Points of an Architecture of Regionalism: A Provisional Polemic,” Center 3 (New Regionalism): 20–27. Frampton, Kenneth (1988) “Place-Form and Cultural Identity,” in John Thackara, ed., Design After Modernism: Beyond the Object, New York: Thames and Hudson, pp. 51–66. Frampton, Kenneth (1991) “Critical Regionalism Revisited,” in Spyros Amourgis, ed., Critical Regionalism: The Pomona Meeting Proceedings, Pomona, CA: California State Polytechnic University, pp. 34–39. Frampton, Kenneth (1992) Modern Architecture: A Critical History, 3rd edition, New York: Thames & Hudson. Frampton, Kenneth (2003) “Critical Regionalism Revisited: Provisional Thoughts on the Future of Urban Design,” Agglutinations (October 27) Internet source: http://agglutinations.com/archives/000012.html (Accessed 07–17–2005). Frampton, Kenneth (2013) “Towards and Agonistic Architecture,” Domus 972: 1–8. Frampton, Kenneth (2014) “Critical Regionalism Revisited,” in Brian Mackay Lyons and Robert McCarter, eds., Local Architecture: Building Place, Craft, and Community, San Francisco: Chronicle Books, p. 30. Ingersoll, Richard (1991) “Conference Review: Context and Modernity, Delft, June 12–15, 1990,” Journal of Architectural Education 44 (2): 124–125. Kellner, Douglas (1990) “Critical Theory and the Crisis of Social Theory,” Sociological Perspectives 33 (1): 11–33. Lefaivre, Liane. (2003) “Critical Regionalism. A Facet of Modern Architecture since 1945,” in Liane ­L efaivre and Alexander Tzonis, eds., Critical Regionalism: Architecture and Identity in a Globalized World, New York: Prestel, pp. 22–55.

311

Vincent B. Canizaro Lu, Duanfang. (2011) Third World Modernism: Architecture, Development, and Identity, London: Routledge. Mumford, Lewis. (1941) The South in Architecture, New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, reprint: New York: Da Capo Press (1967). Philip, Bay Joo Hwa. (2001) “Three Topical Design Paradigms,” in Tzonis, Lefaivre, and Stagno, eds., Tropical Architecture: Critical Regionalism in the Age of Globalization, Chichester, GB: Wiley-Academy, pp. 229–265. Ricoeur, Paul. (1965) “Universal Civilization and National Cultures,” in Charles A. Kelbley, trans, History and Truth, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, pp. 271–284. Srivastava, Amit and Peter Scriver. (2014) “Internationalism and Architecture in India after Nehru,” in Elie Haddad and David Rif kind, eds., Critical History of Contemporary Architecture, Ashgate, pp. 379–417. Turnbull, William and Yukio Futagawa. (1976) Global Architecture Detail: The Sea Ranch, A.D.A. Tokyo: A.D.A. EDITA. Tzonis, Alexander. (2003) “Introducing an Architecture of the Present. Critical Regionalism and the Design of Identity,” in Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre, eds., Critical Regionalism: Architecture and Identity in a Globalized World, New York: Prestel, pp. 8–21. Tzonis, Alexander and Liane Lefaivre. (1981) “The Grid and the Pathway,” Architecture in Greece 15: pp. 164–178. Tzonis, Alexander and Liane Lefaivre. (1991) “Critical Regionalism,” in Spyros Amourgis, ed., Critical Regionalism: The Pomona Meeting Proceedings, Pomona, CA: California State Polytechnic University, pp. 3–23. Tzonis, Alexander and Liane Lefaivre. (2003) Critical Regionalism: Architecture and Identity in a Globalized World, New York: Prestel. Tzonis, Alexander and Liane Lefaivre. (2010) Architecture of Regionalism in the Age of Globalization: Peaks and Valleys in the Flat World, London: Routledge. Tzonis, Alexander, Liane Lefaivre, and Anthony Alofsin. (1981) “Die Frage des Regionalismus,” in Michael Andritzky, Lucius Burckhardt, and Ot Hoffman, eds., Fur eine andere Architektur: Bauen mit der Natur und in der Region, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, pp. 121–134. Tzonis, Alexander, Liane Lefaivre, and Bruno Stagno (2001) Tropical Architecture: Critical Regionalism in the Age of Globalization, Chichester: Wiley-Academy. Zhu, Tao (2014) “Architecture in China in the Reform Era: 1978–2010,” in Elie Haddad and David ­R if kind, eds. Critical History of Contemporary Architecture, Ashgate, pp. 401–417.

312

18 Vernacular Architecture Marcel Vellinga

Although vernacular architecture has emerged as a popular and significant field of research during the twentieth century, the concept itself is rather intangible and difficult to delineate. To many people, vernacular architecture refers to indigenous, “primitive”, folk, or popular building traditions that are rooted in place, culture, and history, and that have come about without the involvement of professional architects. Southeast Asian longhouses, West African family compounds, Chinese courtyard houses, or American log cabins epitomize vernacular architecture as culturally distinctive, traditional, common, and everyday forms of building made by ordinary people in response to local needs and environments (Figure 18.1). To others, however, the term vernacular architecture is more extensive and also includes very different forms of architecture, architecture that is not necessarily rooted in place and tradition, but that is nonetheless commonly made by anonymous builders and that forms a significant part of contemporary everyday built environments around the world. To those people, the term vernacular architecture may refer to roadside diners in the USA, suburban developments in Australia, retail shopping malls in Europe, or highrise housing estates in Singapore, in addition to the more traditional building forms noted above (Figure 18.2). But it may sometimes also include the contemporary informal squatter settlements that can be found in so many of the fast-growing megacities around the world, or the alternative forms of architecture using traditional materials like bamboo or earth that have emerged during the last decades in response to growing social and environmental concerns. Over the years, those differences in interpretation of the term vernacular architecture have led to academic debates about what the concept actually means, how it should be defined, and what forms of architecture should be included in it. In recent years, these debates have intensified. Calls for the abandonment of the term have been issued, while arguments for its continued validity and usefulness have also been put forward (Vellinga 2011; Hourigan 2015). Regardless of these academic debates and of what interpretation is favored, it is clear that vernacular architecture makes up a significant part of the world’s built environment. Fifteen years ago, the President of the International Union of Architects estimated that only about two per cent of buildings in the world had been made with the involvement of architects (Rapoport 2006: 181). With increased urbanization and the rapid growth of informal settlements this has entailed in many parts of the world, this number is unlikely to have increased. At the same it is also clear that the concept, however defined, can potentially comprise an enormous variety of building traditions, ranging from ordinary everyday structures like houses and diners, to ceremonial ancestral homes and religious buildings, to commercial shopping venues and agricultural complexes. In some cases, such traditions have played a central role in processes of cultural, national, and political identification. At the DOI: 10.4324/9781315674469-20

313

Marcel Vellinga

Figure 18.1  Riparian settlement, Kampuchea, Cambodia. ©Paul Oliver, 2007.

Figure 18.2  Suburban house, Toowoomba, Australia. © Marcel Vellinga, 2009.

same time, they have sometimes served as an inspiration for contemporary architectural design, while at times they have found themselves subject to processes of appropriation, folklorization, and commercialization. The fact that vernacular architecture makes up a significant part of the world’s built­ environment constitutes a powerful argument as to why its study should be a fundamental part of architectural history curricula. At a time when the historical and contemporary boundaries of architectural history have been renegotiated and opened up (Arnold et al. 2006), an inclusive architectural historiographical discourse must acknowledge the existence and importance of such large parts of the world’s architectural heritage as represented by vernacular architecture, even if 314

Vernacular Architecture

the authorship, date, and provenance of the buildings concerned may be difficult or sometimes impossible to establish. If architectural history did not acknowledge the vernacular architecture of the world, its validity would be significantly reduced. As Bernard Rudofsky, one of the pioneers of the study of vernacular architecture wrote in his characteristic rhetorical style: “Would we call botany a science if it dealt exclusively with lilies and roses?” (1977: 13). To remain credible, architectural history must acknowledge the ordinary, everyday buildings made without architects. The fact that vernacular architecture is often intricately linked to the architectural forms that have traditionally formed the subject matter for architectural history (with the one not infrequently inspiring the other) only strengthens the argument that vernacular traditions should be taken seriously as a study subject. However, the fact that vernacular architecture may comprise an enormous diversity of building traditions simultaneously exemplifies the difficulties inherent in the use of the concept. It has been argued that the term vernacular is a residual category that includes all those building traditions that do not form part of the conventional architectural canon (Upton 1990). If a building is not iconic or monumental and if it has not been designed by an architect, it is very likely to end up being classified as vernacular architecture rather than as architecture per se, especially when it is found in countries outside of the developed world. In assuming this residual position, the concept of vernacular architecture has been able to validate building traditions like Indonesian longhouses, roadside diners, and informal settlements as forms of architecture (albeit vernacular ones), rather than as simply buildings. Without the concept, such building traditions would most likely have been continuously ignored by architectural historians (like they were in the not too distant past). In the words of Henry Glassie, another pioneer in the field: “When we isolate from the world a neglected architectural variety and name it vernacular, we have prepared it for analysis” (2000: 20). However, in the process of categorising architectural traditions that do not fit in the architectural canon as vernacular architecture, what are in effect very distinct and disparate building traditions from all around the world have become generalized and essentialized into one distinct type. And in defining the category of vernacular architecture as being essentially different from architecture more generally because of its everyday, common, traditional, and anonymous (in terms of authorship) characteristics, it exposes some problematic assumptions about the cultural distinctions (“us” and “them”, modern and traditional, authored and anonymous, complex and simple) that underlie it (Upton 1993; Vellinga 2006). Although the concept of vernacular is by now well-established in architectural circles, it thus remains rather ambiguous, contentious and challenging. This chapter will explore the history and development of the architectural discourse on vernacular architecture, taking this ambiguous, contentious, and challenging status of the concept as a starting point. The chapter will indicate some of the ways in which the vernacular has been defined, studied, and used, and will outline how the discourse on vernacular architecture has evolved in response to wider social, economic, and environmental developments. It will also show how it continues to evolve by drawing attention to some current and newly emerging areas of research in relation to vernacular architecture. A central assertion of the chapter is that vernacular architecture is a concept that serves to define a category of architecture in opposition to “capital A” architecture, in order to help define, validate, and aggrandise the latter. In this respect, it is not unlike other academic categories like “primitive art” or “traditional society” (Price 1989; Kuper 2005). The concept remains useful in drawing attention to a large variety of building traditions that would not have received serious attention without the label “vernacular”. However, it is important to recognize that its continued use in architectural discourse raises important questions about the way in which the latter values and represents the architectural traditions of other peoples and cultures in a time of increased globalization and multiculturalism. 315

Marcel Vellinga

Definitions In architectural discourse, the term vernacular has been borrowed from the field of linguistics, where the term has long been used to identify the native dialects of a specific country, region, or group of people. A dialect or vernacular is a form of language that is spoken by a specific social class, ethnic group, or local community in a particular region, and that is derived from (and sometimes defined in opposition to) a standard language (Oxford Dictionary of English 2003). A well-known example of such a vernacular language would be cockney, which is spoken by members of the working-class population in the East End of London and may be said to form an English vernacular. In many cases, though not all, the distinction between a standard language and its various vernaculars may have status implications, with the vernacular identified as a “low” or “subordinate” variant of the standard language. The fact that written records have often been drawn up in standard languages like Latin or Sanskrit reflects and strengthens those implicit status distinctions, as does the etymological origin of the adjective vernacular in the Latin verna, which means “home born slave” (Oxford Dictionary of English 2003). As a dialect, a vernacular language is the common language shared and used by ordinary people in a specific region of the world. It is often not written down or formally taught, and although it may be the everyday language for most people, it is normally not used in written records or during official or ceremonial occasions. In popular perception, vernacular dialects are sometimes associated with rural rather than urban areas, even though (as the cockney example shows) they do exist in the latter as well. It is those associations with notions of the common, the everyday, the regional, the shared, the informal, and the rural that made the adjective vernacular an attractive one to apply to the forms of architecture commonly associated with it. AlSayyad and Arboleda (2011: 135) trace the use of the adjective vernacular in relation to dwelling and settlements back to Thomas Blount’s Glossographia Anglicana Nova (1707), in which he refers to vernacular as “Proper and peculiar to the House or Country one lives in”. Green (2007: 4) refers to a more recent first known use in England, quoting an anonymous contributor to The British Critic who in 1839 wrote that “(…) the present age has no vernacular style of architecture”. Although the term was regularly used since the nineteenth century, its use became firmly established from the late 1960s onwards, when various authors argued for its appropriateness in comparison with other frequently used terms like “traditional”, “primitive”, “folk”, or “anonymous” (Rudofsky 1964; Oliver 1969; Rapoport 1969a). Nowadays, the term is frequently used in academic and professional discourses, although “traditional” is equally common (AlSayyad 2014) and the popularity of the term differs per discipline (in anthropology, for instance, it is much less common than in architecture or architectural history). Nor, indeed, is it in use in all languages. Although a direct translation exists in French, there are none in Spanish, Chinese, German, or Arab, for instance. In those languages, other terms like “popular” may be used instead. As noted above, despite its common use in English language academic and professional discourses, there are various interpretations of what the term means. Each of those has different emphases, entails different levels of architectural inclusivity, and raises important questions of definition. One common interpretation, the one that is probably best known and most used in architectural circles, is that of the vernacular as “architecture without architects”. Popularized most famously and effectively by Rudofsky (1964), this notion conceptualizes any building that has not been designed by architects (or that, in the case of Rudofsky’s writings, has no known architect) as vernacular architecture. It takes its cue from the notion that vernacular dialects are informal and not explicitly taught or written down, but it does of course raise the question of what an architect actually is and when a builder may be said to have become one? For instance, in some parts of the world like the USA, builders often used pattern books that drew on the work of professional architects, blurring the line between the vernacular and formal architecture (Reiff 2001). In other 316

Vernacular Architecture

places, such as Indonesia, master builders commonly take on the design task of modern architects, in addition to other roles (contractor, builder, ritual expert) not normally performed by the latter (Vellinga 2004). Another common conceptualization is that of the vernacular as architecture that is regional or local, and distinctive or indigenous (native) to a place (e.g. Brunskill 1987; Carter and Cromley 2005). This interpretation places the emphasis on the regionality of dialects rather than their informality, but in turn it raises questions about what a locality or region is, how its boundaries may be defined, and how different regions interrelate to one another? A third common interpretation of vernacular architecture is that of the architecture of the people (Oliver 1997: Oliver 2006). This notion emphasizes the common and everyday nature of the vernacular, as well as the status distinctions that are implied in the concept, and of course raises important questions about who “the people” actually are, and what the relationship is between the people and the everyday, and their implied antonyms like elite, extraordinary, or exceptional? In practice, many publications simultaneously use a combination of all those interpretations to define vernacular architecture, along the lines of “self-made buildings constructed by ordinary people using local materials”. A common thread in all interpretations, conceptualizations, and definitions of vernacular architecture is its assumed normative opposition to other forms of architecture. When vernacular architecture is defined as informal, regional, or popular, it is invariably done in opposition to a mainstream architecture that is seen to be formal, international (and thus non-distinctive), or elitist. Vernacular architecture is often seen to represent values that are opposite to those manifested by the architectural canon: it is traditional rather than innovative, communal rather than individual, authentic rather than artificial, humane rather than imposing, natural rather than cultural. In some instances, it is also seen to be more culturally and regionally appropriate than other forms of architecture, a tendency that has not infrequently led to the appropriation of vernacular forms of architecture for ideological, political, or ethnic purposes (see below). Another common thread in those interpretations, conceptualizations, and definitions is the emphasis on what may be called the production of buildings. It is the role and position of the builder, as well as the design, materiality, technology, and form of the buildings that tend to define vernacular architecture. In line with more common tendencies to associate the meaning of objects with their makers, it is the authorship of a building (or rather, the presumed lack of it) that determines whether it is vernacular or not (Upton 1993). What happens after a building has been made, when it is inhabited or otherwise used and given meaning by people is often not taken into account. Perhaps it is this perceived lack of authorship that has meant vernacular buildings have often been ignored in architectural historiography and that has allowed them to be placed in an anonymous and undifferentiated residual category.

Histories The history of the study of vernacular architecture remains to be written. As noted, the use of the term in (English language based) architectural discourse dates back to the mid-nineteenth century. Both in the UK and the USA, the interest in vernacular architecture to an extent emerged in response to the prevalence of neo-classicism as an architectural movement, which was seen to erode the authenticity of British and American architecture because of its international style and thus ignited interest in regional forms of building. Perhaps more importantly, the rapid industrialization and urbanization in both countries also played a major part, as both developments resulted in large-scale social, economic, and political changes that together seemed to erode long-established and familiar local and regional identities. The farmhouses, cottages, and barns of common people in rural areas like the Cotswolds or New England came to be seen as places where architectural 317

Marcel Vellinga

authenticity and craft could still be found, as opposed to the overcrowded cities that housed people from all across the country, and thus, they became a subject of architectural interest (Upton 1990; Green 2007). This interest in regional forms of architecture built on earlier nineteenth-century interests in folk traditions that emphasized the ways in which the traditions of the common people represented the true and authentic culture and spirit of countries and regions (Burke 1978). From the earliest beginnings, then, the study of vernacular was thus used to criticize (and in some cases reject) contemporary architectural practice. The vernacular was traditional, authentic, natural, and the result of craftsmanship and skill, whereas the contemporary architecture found in the fast-growing cities was seen to be international, industrial, inauthentic, and ugly. The study of vernacular architecture received an impetus at the beginning of the twentieth century, when the emerging Modernist movement in Europe turned its attention to it. Building on the nineteenth-century ideas about its supposed authenticity and craftsmanship, vernacular architecture was seen to represent many of the qualities that were central to the new Modernist notions of design: functionalism, for example, and a truthful use of materials. But rather than continuing to just use vernacular architecture to criticize contemporary design, the architects of the Modernist movement now turned to vernacular architecture as a source of inspiration and wisdom. Across Europe, Modernist architects drew on examples of vernacular architecture to help formulate their visions for a new and contemporary form of architecture. Le Corbusier’s (1987) interest in the vernacular traditions of the Balkans has of course been well-documented, but he was not the only Modernist architect to focus his attention to vernacular architecture. In Germany, for example, architects like Schultze-Naumburg investigated German vernacular traditions to help develop a new way of building (Gutschow 2010). Others, like Bruno Taut, looked further away and studied non-European forms of vernacular architecture, most especially in Japan (Akcan 2010). A similar interest in vernacular architecture was shown during this period in other parts of Europe. In many respects, Rudofsky’s seminal Architecture Without Architects exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1964), although often hailed as the first work to draw attention to vernacular traditions, was thus part of an established Modernist tradition of using vernacular architecture to critically comment on and inform contemporary architectural practice. Nonetheless, Rudofsky’s work was probably the most effective in drawing the attention of both architects and the general public to the existence of the vernacular; most work before then had been scattered and rather hidden in academic and professional publications. No doubt influenced by the work of Rudofsky, the study of vernacular architecture really took off in the late 1960s, becoming at the same time more international, inclusive, and accepted into the architectural discourse. The end of the 1960s and early 1970s in particular saw the publication of a number of seminal works, like Oliver (1969), Rapoport (1969a), and, a few years later, Venturi, Scott-Brown, and Izenour (1972) and Glassie (1975). In contrast to earlier works like ­Moholy-Nagy (1957) and Rudofsky (1964), these publications were less romantic and more analytical in focus, and tried to understand vernacular forms of architecture within their social, cultural, and environmental contexts. Many of these publications dealt with western as well as non-western traditions, such as Norwegian farm buildings (Lloyd 1969) or Native American pueblos (Rapoport 1969b); some of them, like Venturi, Scott-Brown, and Izenour, who studied the Las Vegas strip, also expanded the term beyond the traditional and rural buildings that up till then dominated the discourse. The increased interest in vernacular architecture worldwide during this period appears to relate to the processes of nationalization, industrialization, and urbanization that took place in many parts of the non-western world at the time and that led to the same concerns about the loss of cultural identities and traditions as were found in Europe and the USA during the nineteenth century. But the social, political, and intellectual climate in the West during the 1960s, with its increasing demands for a more inclusive and democratic historiography, and the associated rise of popular culture, will no doubt have been of influence as well (Carter and 318

Vernacular Architecture

Cromley 2005). As such, the period saw a combination of studies that tried to salvage and document traditions that were seen to be destined to disappear, and those that tried to draw attention to emerging and contemporary popular building forms that deserved more recognition from the architectural establishment. In the last decades of the twentieth century, the concept of vernacular architecture had become well-established and had come to comprise all those buildings that were not part of the increasingly global, modern, international, and elitist canon of architecture. It now included traditional (and often rural) forms of architecture from around the world, as well as contemporary popular, commercial, informal, and alternative forms of building. It had become more recognized in academic circles and had begun to be included in architectural encyclopaedias and dictionaries. It had also become more formalized, with the establishment of a number of academic forums and associations like the Vernacular Architecture Forum (VAF), the International Association for the Study of Traditional Environment (IASTE), and the ICOMOS International Committee on Vernacular Architecture (CIAV). The 1980s and 1990s in particular saw a lot of studies and publications about vernacular architecture, no doubt influenced by the increased manifestation of the processes of modernization, globalization, and urbanization, and the cultural, economic, and architectural changes and interconnections they entailed (e.g. Knapp 1986; Waterson 1990). The scope of the field of vernacular architecture expanded during this period to look more critically at the notions of tradition, locality, and authenticity that underpin the concept and to investigate the ways in which vernacular architecture may sometimes be manufactured, consumed, and appropriated, or serve as an inspiration for contemporary design (AlSayyad 2001). The publication of Oliver’s monumental Encyclopedia of Vernacular Architecture of the World (1997) a few years before the end of the twentieth century marked a milestone in the study of vernacular architecture and helped to validate it as a serious field of academic study.

Approaches Today, the academic and professional interest in vernacular architecture remains strong, but this does not mean that one can speak of a unified field of vernacular architecture studies, as sometimes seems to be suggested (Carter and Cromley 2005). It is more accurate to say that a number of different discourses exist, each of which has a somewhat different interpretation of what vernacular architecture is and a different approach to its study. To an extent, historical, national, and disciplinary backgrounds have an influence on those interpretations and approaches. The USA, for instance, has a more expansive and inclusive notion of vernacular architecture than the UK, while anthropologists, say, tend to approach vernacular architecture in a different way than architectural historians do. But on the whole, the different discourses are more aligned with the various academic forums and associations that have been established to study vernacular architecture, rather than with national or disciplinary affiliations. Organizations like the ICOMOS International Committee on Vernacular Architecture (CIAV) and the International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments (IASTE), for example, both comprise members of different disciplinary and national backgrounds, but there are distinct differences between the approaches they use. ICOMOS-CIAV focuses mainly on issues of documentation and conservation, whereas IASTE is more concerned with the academic analysis of the role of tradition in architecture and the ways in which this role evolves as a result of processes of globalization. Although individual scholars may contribute to the conferences and publications of more than one association, in general there is little communication and exchange between the various forums. Although vernacular architecture has sometimes been described as constituting in its entirety a distinct approach to the study of architecture (in the sense that it is possible to ask “vernacular” questions about popular use and meanings in relation to any kind of building) (Carter and 319

Marcel Vellinga

Cromley 2005: 7), the approaches used to study vernacular architecture have in fact always been varied and dynamic. During the nineteenth century, the study of vernacular architecture was in the main the focus of folklorists, antiquarians, and architectural historians. Broadly speaking, their interest was the collection and documentation of European or American pre-industrial building types like cottages, farmhouses, and barns, often in the context of nationalist movements and influenced by the notion that such buildings represented the “authentic” pre-industrial traditions of specific places and people, and thus warranted recording. During the twentieth century, architects began to turn their attention towards vernacular architecture, with a view to learn from vernacular design and apply its lessons to contemporary forms of architecture. This implied a somewhat different approach, one that was less concerned with recording building forms and was more focused on understanding how they functioned. The second half of the twentieth century saw an increased interest among anthropologists, geographers, environmental psychologists, and social historians, who turned their attention away from buildings as objects and looked more at the ways in which vernacular architecture was used and embodied cultural values, social relationships, economic structures, and religious meanings, not just in Europe and America, but all around the world. In recent years, in response to the challenges posed by climate change, a new discourse has emerged that looks at the environmental performance of vernacular architecture and that is mainly the terrain of architects and building engineers. Although it is possible, broadly speaking, to identify such historical phases and developments in the study of vernacular architecture, it is important to realize that all the above-mentioned approaches are still used today and that within those broad categorizations, there is considerable variety in the way the subject is actually studied by individual scholars. Back in the early 1980s, the architectural historian Upton (1983) identified four distinct approaches that were prevalent in the field until then: object-oriented studies, socially oriented studies, culturally oriented studies, and symbolically oriented studies. Around the same time, the anthropologist Lawrence (1983) classified the various approaches into aesthetic formalist studies, typological studies, evolutionary studies, diffusionist studies, social-cultural studies, and physical studies. Although these approaches do sometimes overlap, and evolutionary and diffusionist studies are a lot less common nowadays, both categorizations are on the whole still valid today. But they should now perhaps be supplemented with what AlSayyad (2006) has called an “activist oriented” approach that looks at how vernacular knowledge may contribute to the solving of problems. Regardless of what approach is followed, the methods that are employed by students of vernacular architecture tend to be various and drawn from established disciplines. In most cases, architectural surveys in the form of measured plans, drawings, and maps are part of the methodology used. Often, those are supplemented by photography and sometimes film to document building practices and forms. Historical plans, drawings, and photographs, as well as archival material, may often be studied to provide a historical perspective (Carter and Cromley 2005). Interviews with builders and users are commonly employed to record values, meanings, and oral histories of the buildings and their uses. As in most fields of study, writing is one of the main methods by which information tends to be disseminated and discussed. Maps are sometimes used to collect, analyse, and disseminate data, but the potential of cartography as a research method remains to be exploited (Vellinga 2003). More recently, the detailed monitoring and measurement of the environmental qualities and performance of vernacular architecture have become more prominent, using various in situ monitoring techniques that measure, for example, variations in temperature, wind velocity or direction, humidity, solar radiation, or illumination (see Vellinga 2013 for examples). This work sometimes includes computer simulations and modelling programmes. The use of digital modelling and 3D representations has also begun to emerge in relation to contemporary attempts to conserve and represent vernacular architecture (Treadwell 2015), indicating that the methodology used to study the vernacular continues to evolve. 320

Vernacular Architecture

Appropriations From early on, vernacular architecture has been of interest to the professional architectural community not so much because of its heritage value, but because it was seen to potentially offer lessons to contemporary design. Because the vernacular has commonly been seen to possess certain qualities that were missing from contemporary, formal forms of architecture (locality, for example, or communality, honesty, durability, simplicity, and self-sufficiency), architects have often turned to it for inspiration and wisdom. Already in the nineteenth century, Arts and Crafts architects like Philip Webb, Richard Lethaby, and Charles Robert Ashbee promoted the use of vernacular building crafts, forms, and local materials to create an alternative to the industrialized and mass-produced forms of architecture created by contemporary practice (Cumming and Kaplan 1991). As noted before, the Modernist movement similarly drew on vernacular architecture and the qualities it was believed to possess. Its emphasis was more on the perceived functionality and simplicity of vernacular architecture, however, rather than its specific materiality or form (Lejeune and Sabatino 2010). The postmodern period at the end of the twentieth century saw more formal and symbolical appropriations of vernacular forms in contemporary design, for example in the case of the Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Centre by Renzo Piano (Figure 18.3). Vernacular architecture became of importance not for its materiality or functionality, but because of the cultural meaning that it was seen to possess. This period also saw the emergence and popularity of so-called historicist or retro-design in relation to domestic forms of architecture (Harris and Dostrovsky 2008) (Figure 18.4), as well as the appropriation of vernacular materials and technologies in the search for more ecologically sustainable forms of contemporary architecture (Vellinga 2013). In all these cases, the vernacular has been appealing because it represented something that contemporary architecture lacked, be it local character, cultural distinctiveness, natural ambience, functionality, or sustainability. Alongside such professional appropriations, vernacular architecture has also been used for ideological, political, or commercial purposes. Because of their cultural distinctiveness and rootedness in place, vernacular buildings have frequently been employed to create, strengthen, and represent local, regional, or national identities. For example, during the mid-twentieth century, vernacular architecture often featured on the currency notes and stamps of newly independent nations in the developing world like Indonesia and Mali (Standish 2000), or acted as a source of inspiration for the design of new parliament or government buildings (as in Sri Lanka or the Philippines). In some instances, such as in Indonesia under President Suharto’s New Order government in the 1980s and 1990s, the appropriation of vernacular forms of architecture was part of a deliberate attempt to redefine ethnic relationships and to maintain an existing balance of power and domination (e.g. Schefold 1998). Similar uses of vernacular architecture have been noted in the case of other authoritarian regimes, such as the Argentinian and Portuguese dictatorships during the mid-­ twentieth century. In other cases, vernacular architecture has played an important role in attempts by ethnic or local communities (like the Sámi people in Scandinavia) to establish, maintain, or revive their independence or cultural identity in relation to neighbouring groups or encompassing social entities like nation states (e.g. Bjørklund 2013). Not infrequently, those processes involved the careful selection of specific building traditions or elements of them (a roof form, a particular material, or a specific type of decoration) to represent the group, as well as the conscious manipulation and exaggeration of those traditions or elements to augment their symbolic power. In all such cases, vernacular architecture has been actively “consumed”, or even wilfully “manufactured” and “invented”, to achieve the ideological or political goal in question (AlSayyad 2001). Such a consumption of vernacular traditions does not only take place for ideological or political reasons. Because of its distinctive character, vernacular architecture has also frequently been used for commercial purposes, for example to boost tourism or to help increase the sales of particular 321

Marcel Vellinga

Figure 18.3  Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Centre, by Renzo Piano, Nouméa, New Caledonia. © Renzo Piano Building Workshop, 1998.

(often locally distinctive) products. Thus, in many parts of the world, including in Turkey and Thailand, vernacular traditions have been promoted as a tourist destination (either in situ or in open-air museums), or have inspired the design of hotels and other tourist facilities. Once more, such cases have not just involved real buildings, but also contemporary interpretations of them (some of which have been quite liberal), using carefully selected traditions, buildings, or building elements (De Jong 1997). In some cases, dedicated theme parks or entire villages have been (re-) created with reconstructions or replicas (e.g. Hitchcock 1998). Perhaps not surprisingly, in the vast majority of cases such appropriations have involved the traditional, indigenous, or folk buildings 322

Vernacular Architecture

Figure 18.4  Historicist design, Stroud, Cotswolds, UK. © Marcel Vellinga, 2014.

from around the world that to so many people comprise the category of vernacular architecture (the Indonesian longhouses, the Native American tipis, the Chinese courtyard houses), rather than the everyday buildings that make up so many contemporary built environments (the retail parks, the motels, the suburban housing estates) or the informal settlements that are also sometimes included in the category (although examples of the latter do exist, for example in South Africa). This commercial appropriation may also take place through the use of imagery, rather than actual architecture. Thus, representations of vernacular architecture have often been used to create tourist souvenirs (e.g. key rings, fridge magnets, postcards, calendars); in some cases, they have also been part of the visual branding of regional or local products. In such cases, the vernacular is quite literally manufactured to be consumed.

Realities Early studies of vernacular architecture often emphasized the traditional, homogenous, and static nature of the building forms concerned. Frequently focused on rural and pre-industrial building traditions, many nineteenth- and twentieth-century studies tended to classify vernacular forms of architecture into distinctly bounded geographical, typological, and chronological categories: the Maasai house, the black tent, the colonial bungalow. In many instances, such vernaculars were seen to be traditional and unchanging, and part of (or survivals of ) a bygone pre-modern era where cultural traditions were pure and authentic, and rooted in place and history. Contemporary changes were commonly described or lamented in terms of the “loss” and “decline” of cultural distinctiveness and purity, and seen to be caused by outside forces (modernization, westernization, globalization) rather than by the builders, inhabitants, and users of the traditions themselves (Upton 1993; Vellinga 2006). Only in more recent decades has there been a recognition that cultural traditions are dynamic, active, and creative, and that many forms of vernacular architecture are the result of architectural and cultural borrowings, amalgamations, and changes that have taken place over (sometimes very long periods of ) time, owing to the active agency of those who build and use them (Upton 2001; Asquith and Vellinga 2006). As is the case with all forms of material 323

Marcel Vellinga

culture, the form, function, use, and meaning of vernacular architecture are continuously changing, in tandem with the wider environmental, economic, and social developments that inevitably take place. It is now more commonly recognized that such changes do not have to be described in terms of cultural damage, contamination, or inauthenticity, but that they represent new phases in continuously evolving living traditions. As such, the vernacular should no longer be seen as a survival of pre-modern times, but as an active and dynamic part of the contemporary modern world. Such a new perspective on the nature of vernacular architecture is all the more important given the many challenges faced by vernacular architecture today. In various parts of the world, rapid environmental, social, economic, political, and cultural changes and developments have had a major impact on vernacular traditions. Climate change, conflict, demographic change, technology transfer, and migration are only some of the processes that continue to influence vernacular forms of architecture and that increasingly challenge the ways they were seen to rather unproblematically relate to history, locality, culture, and identity by earlier generations of scholars (Figure 18.5). Of course, those processes and their impacts manifest themselves in different ways in different parts of the world. In developed countries like the USA, Europe, and Australia, a combination of demographic changes (most especially an ageing population), technological developments, policy regulations (health and safety, insurance, mortgage) and social dynamics (changing family and household relationships, de-ruralization, and counter-urbanization) have resulted in a variety of ways in which vernacular architecture is perceived and treated, ranging from neglect and abandonment (e.g. in parts of rural France) to appreciation and gentrification (e.g. in parts of rural England). In those countries, vernacular forms of architecture (in the sense of traditional buildings rooted in place, culture, and history) may be in high demand as (often, second) homes and act as inspirations for contemporary architectural design; or they may be perceived as historic remnants worthy of conservation. In all instances, they will be subjected to significant change and development. In large parts of the developing world, the realities and challenges faced by vernacular architecture are of equal importance, but they are usually of a different nature. An appreciation of vernacular architecture as cultural heritage or high-value housing, for example, is less common in most parts of Southeast Asia, Africa, or Latin America, as is (so far at least) the impact of government

Figure 18.5  A  bandoned and ruined vernacular architecture, Akcicek, Northern Cyprus. © Marcel Vellinga, 2008.

324

Vernacular Architecture

or industrial regulations. Instead, the traditional, indigenous forms of architecture that can still be found here and that may have such appeal to tourists are more often seen as obstacles on the road to progress and modernity by their builders, owners, and occupiers, and thus, they are frequently under threat of abandonment and demolition. In some parts of the developing world (e.g. Thailand or Brazil), international tourism may lead to the commodification and preservation of vernacular traditions, but in other parts (such as South Asia or Sub-Saharan Africa), natural disasters like earthquakes, hurricanes or floods, and man-made conflicts have calamitous impacts on vernacular buildings and, indirectly, the skills and knowledge they embody. Unprecedented population growth and urbanization have led to the abandonment of much traditional rural vernacular architecture (e.g. in China), while at the same time they continue to feed the rapid expansion of the informal settlements that are sometimes defined as contemporary forms of vernacular architecture. Further changes are caused by the introduction of new technologies and the new labor relationships that are formed as part of the expansion of cash economies and the global market. Those often give rise to new everyday built environments (suburbs, high-rise housing estates, shopping malls) that may be very different from traditional forms of vernacular architecture and that may be more akin to what can be found in many other parts of the world. Perhaps because of the enduring and profound tendency among scholars of vernacular architecture to focus on pre-industrial, pristine, and rural traditions, a lot of those contemporary realities and challenges, and the manifold ways in which they impact on vernacular architecture, have not been subject to much study yet and are only now beginning to emerge as areas for research. To study them is indeed of great interest and significance, as they show very clearly that vernacular building traditions are never static or homogenous, but are always developing as a result of their intricate relationship to dynamic environmental, social, and economic contexts. The contemporary realities and challenges remind us that the great variety of building traditions that come under the analytical umbrella of vernacular architecture are today still fundamentally linked to cultural contexts, but in different and much more dynamic and creative ways than used to be thought and imagined during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Paying more attention to the contemporary manifestations of vernacular architecture (be they traditional, popular, everyday, or informal) will teach us much about their position and value in the twenty-first century, but perhaps more importantly will also provide us with better insights into the nature of architectural traditions more generally and how they actively, by means of human agency, relate and respond to challenges, opportunities, and new realities. It will expand an already varied and exciting field of research into one that looks at enduring and new building traditions and at the ways in which they continue to come together in creative and new ways.

Futures Paradoxically, although the concept of vernacular architecture emerged from a desire to establish a more inclusive architectural history, in emphasising the pre-modern and “Other” nature of the vernacular in relation to contemporary “capital A” architecture, the concept has become rather exclusive in that certain forms of architecture are accepted as truly vernacular, while others are not recognized or only by some because of their supposed “contamination” by modernity. The cultural distinctions that underlie the decision to accept a building as vernacular or not (“us” and “them”, modern and traditional, authored and anonymous, complex and simple) are problematic and indeed sometimes uncomfortable. The reality today is that buildings that are truly local, traditional, or rooted in place are difficult and increasingly impossible to find. Similarly, it will be hard to find buildings that are truly modern or contemporary and that are not in one way or another influenced by tradition and the past. All forms of architecture are distinctive cultural expressions of people who attempt to create a sense of place in a particular locality and present. All are the 325

Marcel Vellinga

result of unique amalgamations of ideas, beliefs, technologies, materials, and values. All will be unique responses to their particular natural and human environments and adapt over time. In this respect, to separate one category of architecture (vernacular, in this case) from another (“capital A”, “modern”, or “contemporary”) makes no sense. It is the tendency on the part of a small group of academics and professionals to distinguish a small and select group of buildings from all others on the basis of one criterion (authorship) that gave rise to the concept of vernacular architecture. As long as this tendency persists in architectural and architectural history discourse, the vernacular concept remains a necessary and important, if ambiguous, contentious, and challenged tool to draw attention to all those other forms of architecture that make up the world’s built heritage, but that are not deemed worthy of attention by a privileged few. It is only when the vernacular is no longer needed, that architectural history will be truly inclusive.

References Akcan, Esra (2010): ‘Bruno Taut’s Translations out of Germany: Toward a Cosmopolitan Ethics in Architecture’. In: J-F. Lejeune and M. Sabatino (eds.), Modern Architecture and the Mediterranean: Vernacular Dialogues and Contested Identities, pp. 193–212. London: Routledge. AlSayyad, Nezar (ed.) (2001): Consuming Tradition, Manufacturing Heritage: Global Norms and Urban Forms in the Age of Tourism. London: Routledge. AlSayyad, Nezar (2006): ‘Foreword’. In: L. Asquith and M. Vellinga (eds.), Vernacular Architecture in the ­Twenty-First Century: Theory, Education and Practice, pp. xvii–xviii. London: Taylor & Francis. AlSayyad, Nezar (2014): Traditions: The “Real”, the Hyper, and the Virtual In the Built Environment. London: Routledge. AlSayyad, Nezar and Arboleda, Gabriel (2011): ‘The sustainable Indigenous Vernacular: Interrogating a Myth’. In: Sang Lee Sang (ed.), Aesthetics of Sustainable Architecture, pp. 134–51. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers. Arnold, Dana, Elvan Altan Ergut and Belgin Turan Özkaya (eds.) (2006): Rethinking Architectural Historiography. London: Routledge. Asquith, Lindsay and Vellinga, Marcel (eds.) (2006): Vernacular Architecture in the Twenty-First Century: Theory, Education and Practice. London: Taylor & Francis. Bjørklund, Ivar (2013): ‘The Mobile Sámi Dwelling: From a Pastoral Necessity to an Ethno-Political Master Paradigm’. In: D.G. Anderson, R.P. Wishart and V. Vaté (eds.), About the Hearth: Perspectives on the Home, Hearth and Household in the Circumpolar North, pp. 69–79. New York and Oxford: Berghahn. Blount, Thomas (1707): Glossographia Anglicana Nova: Or, a Dictionary, Interpreting Such Hard Words… as Are at Present Used in the English Tongue, with Their Etymologies, Definitions, etc…. London: Printed for D. Brown. Brunskill, Ronald William (1987): Illustrated Handbook of Vernacular Architecture. London: Faber. Burke, Peter (1978): Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. London: Temple. Carter, Thomas and Cromley, Elizabeth Collins (2005): Invitation to Vernacular Architecture: A Guide to the Study of Ordinary Buildings and Landscapes. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Cumming, Elizabeth and Kaplan, Wendy (1991): Arts & Crafts Movement. London: Thames & Hudson. De Jong, Adriaan (1997): ‘Museological’. In: P. Oliver (ed.), Encyclopedia of Vernacular Architecture of the World, pp. 49–52. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Glassie, Henry H. (1975): Folk Housing in Middle Virginia: A Structural Analysis of Historic Artifacts. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Glassie, Henry H. (2000): Vernacular Architecture. Bloomington: Indiana University. Green, Adrian (2007): ‘Confining the Vernacular: The Seventeenth-Century Origins of a Mode of Study’. Vernacular Architecture 38: 1–7. Gutschow, Kai K. (2010): ‘The Anti-Mediterranean in the Literature of Modern Architecture: Paul ­Schultze-Naumburg’s Kulturarbeiten’. In: J-F. Lejeune and M. Sabatino (eds.), Modern Architecture and the Mediterranean: Vernacular Dialogues and Contested Identities, pp. 149–74. London: Routledge. Harris, Richard and Dostrovsky, Nadine (2008): ‘The Suburban Culture of Building and the Reassuring Revival of Historicist Architecture since 1970’. Home Cultures 5(2): 167–96. Hitchcock, Michael (1998): ‘Tourism, Taman Mini and National Identity’. Indonesia and the Malay World 26: 124–35. Hourigan, Neasa (2015): ‘Confronting Classifications: When and What Is Vernacular Architecture?’ Civil Engineering and Architecture 3 (1): 22–30.

326

Vernacular Architecture Knapp, Ronald G. (1986): China’s Traditional Rural Architecture: A Cultural Geography of the Common House. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Kuper, Adam (2005): The Reinvention of Primitive Society: Transformations of a Myth. London: Routledge. Lawrence, Roderick J. (1983): ‘The Interpretation of Vernacular Architecture’. Vernacular Architecture 14: 19–27. Le Corbusier (1987): Journey to the East. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lejeune, Jean-François and Sabatino, Michelangelo (2010): Modern Architecture and the Mediterranean: Vernacular Dialogues and Contested Identities. London: Routledge. Lloyd, John (1969): ‘The Norwegian Laftehus’. In: P. Oliver (ed.), Shelter and Society, pp. 33–48. London: Barrie and Cresset. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl (1957): Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture in North America. New York: Schocken Books. Oliver, Paul (ed.) (1969): Shelter and Society. London: Barrie and Cresset. Oliver, Paul (ed.) (1997): Encyclopedia of Vernacular Architecture of the World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Oliver, Paul (2006): Built to Meet Needs: Cultural Issues in Vernacular Architecture. Oxford: Architectural Press. Oxford Dictionary of English (2003). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Price, Sally (1989): Primitive Art in Civilized Places. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Rapoport, Amos (1969a): House Form and Culture. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Rapoport, Amos (1969b): ‘The Pueblo and the Hogan’. In: P. Oliver (ed.), Shelter and Society, pp. 66–79. London: Barrie and Cresset. Rapoport, Amos (2006): ‘Vernacular Design as a Model System’. In: L. Asquith and M. Vellinga (eds.), Vernacular Architecture in the Twenty-First Century: Theory, Education and Practice, pp. 179–98. London: Taylor & Francis. Reiff, Daniel D. (2001): Houses from Books: Treatises, Pattern Books, and Catalogs in American Architecture, 1738–1950: A History and Guide. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Rudofsky, Bernard (1964): Architecture Without Architects: A Short Introduction to Non-Pedigreed Architecture. London: Academy Editions. Rudofsky, Bernard (1977): The Prodigious Builders: Notes Toward a Natural History of Architecture with Special Regard to Those Species that are Traditionally Neglected or Downright Ignored. London: Secker and Warburg. Schefold, Reimar (1998): ‘The Domestication of Culture: Nation-building and Ethnic Diversity in Indonesia’. Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 154 (2): 259–80. Standish, David (2000): The Art of Money: The History and Design of Paper Currency from Around the World. San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books. Treadwell, Jeremy (2015): ‘Unexpected Gusts and Digital Reconstruction: The Re-buildings of Ta¯ne Whirinaki’. Fabrications: The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand 25 (1): 26–47. Upton, Dell (1983): ‘The Power of Things: Recent Studies in American Vernacular Architecture’. American Quarterly 35(3): 262–79. Upton, Dell (1990): ‘Outside the Academy: A Century of Vernacular Architecture Studies, 1890–1990’. In: E.B. MacDougall (ed.), The Architectural Historian in America. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art. Upton, Dell (1993): ‘The Tradition of Change’. Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review 5 (1): 9–15. Upton, Dell (2001): ‘Authentic Anxieties’. In: N. AlSayyad (ed.), Consuming Tradition, Manufacturing Heritage: Global Norms and Urban Forms in the Age of Tourism, pp. 298–305. London: Routledge. Vellinga, Marcel (2003): ‘Drawing Boundaries: Vernacular Architecture and Maps’. Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review 14 (2): 21–31. Vellinga, Marcel (2004): Constituting Unity and Difference: Vernacular Architecture in a Minangkabau Village. Leiden: KITLV Press. Vellinga, Marcel (2006): ‘Engaging the Future: Vernacular Architecture Studies in the Twenty-First Century’. In: L. Asquith and M. Vellinga (eds.), Vernacular Architecture in the Twenty-First Century: Theory, Education and Practice, pp. 81–94. London: Routledge. Vellinga, Marcel (2011): ‘The End of the Vernacular: Anthropology and the Architecture of the Other’. Etnofoor 23 (1): 171–92. Vellinga, Marcel (2013): ‘The Noble Vernacular’. The Journal of Architecture 18 (4): 570–90. Venturi, Robert; Scott-Brown, Denise; and Izenour, Steven (1972): Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Waterson, Roxana (1990): The Living House: An Anthropology of Architecture in South-East Asia. Singapore: Oxford University Press.

327

19 Heritage Conservation The Rise and Fall of a “Grand Narrative” Miles Glendinning

Within architecture, the respectful safeguarding of old structures is as long-established an idea as one could imagine. However, in previous centuries and millennia, the motives and values underlying it were very different from those today, including such varied motives as polytheistic Roman “pietas” towards ancestral relics, or the medieval celebration of feudal power. From the late 18th century, however, our own very different, modern value system of respect for old buildings began to emerge, a system that goes under a diversity of different names, even within the same languages – conservation, historic preservation, restoration, Denkmalpflege, restauro, patrimoine, and so forth. The British expression, “The Conservation Movement”, sums up its essence especially clearly: the idea that the “protection” of old buildings is not just a technical or antiquarian doctrine but an ideological and ethical world outlook – like the “socialist movement” or the “environmentalist movement” – linked into wider political ideas, and featuring its own complex internal discourses, which have fluctuated constantly and radically even during the past half-century. Its initial stimulus was the French Revolution, with its driving, teleological Enlightenment ideas of secularism, collectivism and nationalism, all involving high ideals alongside more negative values of dominance or exploitation, including nationalist confrontation within Europe, and colonialism elsewhere. Pride in a nation’s own culture and “civilizing mission”, and curiosity about the “other”, were mingled with impulses of domination – an inter-mixture of heritage with politics, commercialism and militarism, initially exemplified most memorably by Napoleon’s “adventure savant” in Egypt in 1798–1801. But the emergence of the Conservation Movement had a rather special relationship to all this, as it reflected it not directly but in a mirror-like form. Heritage functioned chiefly as one of many stabilizing devices that co-opted, and gave voice to, those who were uneasy with the wilder excesses of modernity, whether political or cultural. Within this framework, the preservation of old buildings had an obvious place. From the beginning, conservation was often backed by “conservative” forces: French conservatives and monarchists provided the backbone of the precocious government Monuments Historiques system, while in Germany, the driving force was a more straightforward nationalism, initially provoked by Napoleons depredations. Among nationalists in general, heritage was increasingly valued as a kind of collective memory of the modern nation (Glendinning 2013: 12, 24, 65–74). The intrinsic “modernity” of conservation has ensured that its relationship to new architecture has always been complex. They were quite close during the 19th century, when, within new architecture, modernity was expressed through the historic styles: it was taken as read that meaning and innovation would be channelled via forms related to the past. “Historicist” later became a term of abuse in the 20th century, in the polemic of writers like Nikolaus Pevsner demanding 328

DOI: 10.4324/9781315674469-21

Heritage Conservation

“honesty” – but “historicist” forms were really just as modern as “modernist” ones. For heritage, the implications of this were positive: if new architecture was inspired by historic buildings, then preserving those buildings was obviously also desirable. Even more desirable still, though, was to “restore” monuments whose unity had been obscured by later additions. Especially in mid19th-century France, these restorations took on a hyper-confident, scholarly form. “Authenticity” for the leading French preserver, Eugene Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, involved the recovery of a past ideal form, and in France, this was guaranteed by the authority of the state and by scientific scholarly accuracy. Ideal historical authenticity became a way of representing the ideal essence of the nation. In the “Anglo-Saxon” countries, by contrast, heritage was also closely integrated from the beginning with tourism and commercialism (Viollet-le-Duc 1875; Glendinning 2013: 91–7).

A New Kind of Empire? From “Heritage Militant” to “World Heritage” From the mid-19th century, this new and drivingly teleological discourse of national heritage started to take on an oppositional attitude towards “modern civilization” in general, as well as towards some heritage practices, especially restoration. This new, anti-modern fervour partly stemmed from the long-standing “Romantic Movement”, within which antiquarians and ­w riters such as Sir Walter Scott had deplored destruction of the “old ways” and appreciated the decayed sublime of ruins, with their symbolism of transience. To be sure, there was potentially a self-contradiction in this love of old decay, as the venerated ruins, if “saved” from demolition or restoration, would end up ultimately disappearing altogether. But that did not stop these critiques from growing in sharpness during the mid-19th century, taking on an ever sharper moral and para-religious focus. In the rhetoric of people like A. W. N. Pugin and John Ruskin, restoration was increasingly seen as an arch-enemy, as only what already existed materially was authentic, through the cumulative “life” that had accumulated in its substance. And in the work of William Morris, this approach was channeled into a strong structure of polemical voluntarism – the start of the “Anglo-Saxon” heritage system (Ruskin 1849; Glendinning 2013: 116–28). All this laid the groundwork for the “Heritage Militant” – the morally impassioned and increasingly aggressive and “politicized” conservationism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which adapted the rhetoric of life force above all, in Europe, to nationalist competition between countries. Some writers, such as Georg Dehio, combined this militancy with anti-­restorationism. More common was a combination of teleological language of national destiny and massive g­ olden-age restoration projects such as the Marienburg or Hoh-Konigsberg in Germany – or the many interwar schemes in Mussolini’s Italy. The grandiose rhetoric was tied into an ever-broader scope of heritage, taking in entire landscapes under names such as Altstadt or Heimat – although the latter was, at the same time, a harbinger of the looser concepts of cultural landscape later in the 20th century. It was also comprehensively bound up with colonialism and imperialism, with their concept of “civilizing mission” and fascination with the “other”, as exemplified in the preservation efforts of Lord Curzon in India (Dehio 1905; Glendinning 2013: 138–61) (Figure 19.1). At just this time, the writings of Alois Riegl in Vienna painted a very different picture to all this, setting out a very diverse range of heritage values which, he argued, stemmed not from some intrinsic “national essence” or “life force” but from modern “reception”, and that monuments should be seen as symbols of transience and universality rather than durability and national power (Riegl 1903). These ideas would eventually re-emerge in the late 20th century, but for the moment they were swamped in the century’s tidal wave of nationalistic hatred and destruction; the other great ideology of the age, socialism, had an altogether more distant relationship with heritage, as evinced, for example, in the aggressive demolitions of Stalin’s remodelling of Moscow. By 1945, however, the “Heritage Militant” was discredited, and in place of the old, forceful certainties, a new and more complex combination was emerging in the West. Its ingredients were, 329

Miles Glendinning

Figure 19.1  T  he famous Nuremberg “City Model” commissioned in 1935–39 by the Nazi city authorities to celebrate the “restoration” of the Altstadt as a setting for the Reichparteitage (seen in its present-day setting in the Fembohaus Stadtmuseum). (2011 photo © M Glendinning).

firstly, a softer type of nationalism, emphasizing administrative and domestic structures; secondly, a new empire of heritage internationalism, perpetuating the old ethos of “civilising mission” in a milder, but still top-down Eurocentric form, through the agency of an elite international mandarinate and an array of “charters”; and finally, a growing emphasis on the fostering of commercial and tourist exploitation of heritage, as already adumbrated in such US setpieces as Colonial Williamsburg (Colonial Williamsburg 1951; Glendinning 2013: 259–65). Conservation’s relationship with contemporary architecture now became far more complex. An initial period (1940s–1960s) of collaboration with the hegemonic Modern Movement, celebrated especially in the 1964 Charter of Venice with its calls for “honesty” and differentiation of old and new, was followed in the 1970s by architecture’s violent rejection of all these values and a period of intense closeness between heritage and new “postmodernist” design, as exemplified in the parallel “Alt” and “Neu” strands of the IBA (Internationale Bau-Ausstellung) demonstration urban renewal programme in Berlin, 1979–87 (Hardy 2009). Yet even then, the overwhelming sense of driving historical force and ideological self-definition as a narrative that had fuelled the early growth of the “Conservation Movement” was still distinctly perceptible, complete with its constantly self-reinforcing internal concepts of authentic essence and “life”, and its strong external ideological borders and front line of perpetual advance. For conservation, the 1970s were years of triumph and of a renewed teleological sense of mission, celebrated especially in the 1975 European Architectural Heritage Year (EAHY), and in the setting up by UNESCO of the “World Heritage” system from 1972 onwards (Pressouyre 1993; Glendinning 2013, 405–12). The newly victorious Conservation Movement still seemed inextricably bound up with ideals of Enlightenment progress, national identity, international “imperial” prestige and historical destiny. Yet by at least the 1980s, this vast structure, with its confident, cosmopolitan spokesmen such as Raymond Lemaire or Bernard Fielden, was beginning to show subtle hairline cracks everywhere. 330

Heritage Conservation

Post-1989 Conservation: End of the “Grand Narrative”? During the late 20th century, however – the very time when the Conservation Movement appeared to be finally victorious – its ethos of authoritative destiny began to atrophy significantly. Its forceful aggressiveness during the interwar years had given way to less confrontational, soft-­ nationalist proselytizing and protest-led campaigning, and while its new victories were made possible by governmental power, they also helped to undermine the latter. Postmodernity’s strongly relativistic character, together with political and economic globalization in the wake of the fall of the Soviet “empire”, contributed to a further shift in conservation thinking during the 1990s. The old, ever-expanding frontiers and the cohesiveness of conservation now seemed to be under threat, as the movement became less unified and less dynamic. In the following pages, we will highlight a number of significant strands within this growing cultural and ideological shift in values. Arguably, the most fundamental of the new challenges to heritage was posed by the postmodern ethos of relativism – by the idea that no aspect of heritage was of any more importance than any other. One of the chief driving forces of heritage had been its constantly expanding scope. This expansion was partly chronological, but also partly one of category, encompassing individual monuments alongside entire towns and landscapes. Now, it had gone so far, though, that it was beginning to undermine the ideas of rarity and threat that had given conservation its unique public appeal during the 19th and 20th centuries. When anything at all could become heritage, how could one single out anything as meriting special protection? In 2006, Jukka Jokilehto went so far as to argue, “If all values are equal, then there’s no real value any more” ( Jokilehto 2006a). It was not only postmodern relativism, but also the novel field of intangible heritage, that were decisive in radically broadening the definition of what could constitute a monument. Around 1900, Alois Riegl had highlighted the central role played by reception in shaping some heritage values, but reception now seemed to have swallowed up everything else, and any heritage object began to derive its value solely from today’s host culture. Decisive here was the notion of the cultural landscape, a concept first invented in the 1920s in connection with natural, not built landscapes (Harvey 2001; Ashworth 2006), but now used in a context of limitless cultural diversity of multiple groups. Following the precepts of the Burra Charter, from the 1980s built landscapes, too, began to be envisaged as a field of constant making and remaking, nimbly reflecting society’s shifting cultural values. A more extreme offshoot of the cultural landscape from the 1990s onwards was the “memory landscape”, with its multiple conflicting associations – an individualistic replacement for the earlier 20th-century requirement for disciplined, collective commemoration. Of course, in this context, the word “memory” is really just a metaphor, and not directly equivalent to either the actual memory of any individual person or the “facts of history” – as contended by earlier 20th-century theorists of collective memory such as Maurice Halbwachs. Indeed, Proust had argued in the 1920s that memory and forgetting were completely intertwined (Gillis 1994; Halbwachs 1950; Crinson 2004). And the idea of “collective memory” and myth-making supported all ideologies of nationalism, as highlighted in Benedict Anderson’s 1991 concept of “imagined communities”. The process was taken decisively further in the postmodern memory landscape concept, where all authoritative narratives dissolved and everything became provisional. Like contemporary digital architecture, the memory landscape is often structured through a branded approach, which makes possible an amalgam of elite and popular narratives, relegating “authentic architectural heritage” to an optional extra (Anderson 1983; Choay 1999; Kaufman 2009). These characteristics were seen at their most exaggerated in the landscapes of “hurtful” memory, especially those focused on the European genocide of World War II and on the promotion of “dark tourism”. For this, task designers such as Daniel Libeskind evolved a new, more free-flowing postmodern formula, mixing poetic minimalist art and jaggedly modernist 331

Miles Glendinning

gestures – as seen in an exaggerated form in Berlin, where it has more or less swallowed up the entire city center, lending it something of the atmosphere of an expo or even a historical theme park (Gutman, Bernbaum and Gutman 1998; Ashworth and Hartmann 2005). The old doctrinal certainties on which the international empire of conservation was founded were increasingly ruptured from the 1990s onwards, and the predictable response of the conservation establishment was to produce yet another charter: the 1994 Nara Declaration, issued after a conference in Japan, and concerned to update the idea of authenticity, which had underpinned all conservation charters from Venice in 1964 to the World Heritage Convention (from 1972). The Nara Document accelerated the onward march of relativism, arguing that “authenticity appears as the essential qualifying factor concerning values”, but that it was a purely subjective “value judgement”, and that all “heritage properties must be considered and judged within the cultural contexts to which they belong” (Larsen 1995; Larsen and Marstein 1994; Stanley-Price and King 2009: 151). This led to a growing tension between the authenticities of tangible and intangible heritage. Tangible heritage still fundamentally presupposed an element of traditional historical or material authenticity, whereas the latter involved constant “remaking”. The effect on the vast structure of international conservation was one of subtle destabilization: one commentator contended in 2010 that the proliferation of different heritage charters leads to a sense of confusion and repetitiveness: “the existence of the many documents leads to devaluation of their contents, weakens their position or undermines their sense altogether” (UNESCO 2003; Jokilehto 2006b; Stanley-Price and King 2009: 7, 151–2). Within the UNESCO World Heritage organization, for example, the shift from authoritative Eurocentricity towards a polycentric, competitive globalization was an important destabilizing factor – especially after 1992, when cultural landscapes became accepted as eligible for World Heritage status. Now, developing countries started to exploit the much wider criteria of cultural landscape to make unconventional inscription bids. In 2003, a UNESCO Convention for Safeguarding the Intangible Cultural Heritage defined the intangible heritage in sweeping, wide-ranging terms, calculated to take in just about any cultural practice. But all these theoretical debates on values and definitions, although cherished by the international heritage leadership, were increasingly overshadowed by the practical reality of the politicized World Heritage Committee, dominated by “horse-trading” and manipulation of the nominations process. As a result, the outcomes on the ground often ran diametrically opposite to the supposed objectivity of the “outstanding universal values” (McCleery 2008).

The Globalization of Heritage The new polycentricity of heritage values was also reflected geographically, in a new spatial or geographical widening of horizons. A mature international heritage network had already begun to emerge from the elite conservation values of the post-war years. That process only gathered pace further in the 1990s, as internationalism broadened into globalization. Geographically speaking, the most obvious victim of this trend was conservation’s old identification with, and addiction to, different national traditions. These were increasingly squeezed out between the two extremes of the heritage world – between the extreme individuality of market choice on the one hand, and the globalizing network of World Heritage and its value system on the other. One of the most prominent elements within this value system, and of the globalizing shifts of the 1990s in general, was the mounting commercialization of the heritage. This process was described by Francoise Choay as one of “industrialization” – a term which perhaps reflected the growing popularization of the idea of the “heritage industry” within western countries since the 1980s. Now, in the wake of the disintegration of the socialist bloc after 1989, that process became infinitely more pervasive (Choay 1999: 144–5, 159, 222–4; Stubbs 2009). Previously, however much the heritage

332

Heritage Conservation

world had depended in practice on tourism, commercialization had always been ultimately seen as “the other”, and kept at arm’s length. Now, it started to infiltrate the values of the Conservation ­Movement itself – just as nationalism had done in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Some of the most dramatic of these episodes of commodification took place within Europe, as part of the post-1989 erasure of the built environments of socialism and the subsequent emergence of new, post-communist landscapes. This shift in dominant ideology had both positive and negative aspects. For instance, World Heritage status could serve as a benign spur to economic growth and, in the political arena, could help neutralize old passions and focus people”s attention on the values that they shared in common. But the same process of unification under the umbrella of the market also had potentially adverse consequences – for example, in the very area of authenticity and identity that formed a foundation of much urban conservation thinking. The more that “tourist World Heritage cities” competed with each other to be unique and distinctive, in many ways the more they became alike, in view of their reliance on a standardized formula of tourist branding and “facile semanticization” (Choay 1999). The “neo-modernist” architect and critic Rem Koolhaas went so far as to pose the rhetorical question in 1995, “Is the contemporary city like the contemporary airport – “all the same”?” If the answer to that question was “Yes”, then, arguably, it had to be admitted that heritage environments had played an integral part in the “generic” process of homogenization that had brought this situation about (Choay 1999: 145–8, 158–9, 163; Jokilehto 2006a; Stanley-Price and King 2009: 138; Maitland 2010; Harris and Williams 2011). But the commodification of heritage now extended far beyond the circumscribed world of the European Old Town. In towns and cities everywhere, heritage was now expected to “do” more and more, whether at a national, European or global level: the prime example of this role was the part played by World Heritage sites as hot spots of tourism and inward investment. Heritage was expected not just to be an architectural, social or cultural catalyst but also to play a central part in managed strategies of economic regeneration. Here, the most usual aim was that of re-inventing de-industrialized cities, with the assistance of a wide diversity of governmental and private bodies (Bianchini and Parkinson 1994; Stratton 2000; Madgin 2010). Beyond the “regeneration” zones of urban Europe, however, the Western values of the Conservation Movement were pushed rather more brusquely to one side in parts of the world which were experiencing development as rampant as any in 19th-century “Victorian Britain” or “Gründerzeit Germany”, but which did not necessarily share the Western preoccupation with material permanence. In the booming cities of Mainland China, for example, a heritage-island approach was pushed through in many cities at once. Driven by the competing but separate agendas of different ministries and municipalities, the gigantic engine of state-sponsored redevelopment and modernization increasingly incorporated pockets of lavishly “restored” monuments – an approach reminiscent of the 19th-/early 20th-­ century narratives of Georges-Eugene Haussmann or even Mussolini, but on a far wider scale. In Beijing, for example, after 40 years of socialist neglect or active destruction of old areas (including the city walls felled under Mao), and a decade of rampant capitalist development and “hutong” clearance in the 1990s, 2002 saw the designation of 25 historical areas in the inner city. But the conservation work here was sometimes of a radical, invasive kind, motivated by city-branding agendas and events such as the 2008 Olympic Games – as exemplified in the Qianmen “heritage district” to the south of Tiananmen Square, radically reshaped from 2008 by a Tsinghua University design team as an assemblage of replica heritage structures in relentlessly homogeneous grey brick (and complete with “tourist tramway”). The new emphasis on relativism and pluralism within international conservation guaranteed that there would be no doctrinaire obstruction to these kinds of campaigns from organizations like UNESCO (Lu 2006; Abramson 2007: 126–66) (Figure 19.2).

333

Miles Glendinning

Figure 19.2  B  eijing, Qianmen tourist zone, developed from 2008.  This view shows an entirely new built back street. (2016 photo © M Glendinning).

Heritage in the Postmodern Age: “Old” or “New”? Perhaps the most fundamental of the special characteristics of the Conservation Movement – the idea that really made it a “movement” – had been its insistence on making a sharp distinction between the old and the new. This was an idea that originated both in the general Western ­Enlightenment idea of the inexorable march of History and in the specifically architectural (Ruskin/modernist) love of “honesty” and hatred of “pastiche”. At first glance, the 1990s years actually exaggerated that approach further, especially after conservation-orientated postmodernism was supplanted from the middle of the decade by a new and more aggressive “neo-modernism”, and a new fashion began for aggressively iconic, tall, “gestural” buildings which perpetuated the sharp old–new separation, and provoked fierce confrontations between modernizing developers and protesting conservationists (English Heritage 2001). Seen from close-up, however, this apparent confrontation of new and old begins to seem more a matter of a contrast of images, than of a genuine gulf in hard realities – a position that is very typical of postmodern culture. In that way, the new iconic modernism seems to exemplify what Guy Debord, back in 1967, had called “la societé du spectacle” – in other words, a culture whose authenticity stemmed from images and “empty signifiers” rather than from grand narratives of social progress. In 1991, the cultural critic Fredric Jamieson argued powerfully that the postmodern era was permeated by a crisis of historicity, with everything reduced to “pastiche” (Debord 1967; Jamieson 1991). At the same time, conservation also logically moved to finally block its own internal narrative of historical progress, by beginning to shift around 1990 towards incorporating the “original” Modern Movement within the scope of heritage. The new linking for modernist heritage was a natural ally of image-led branding, not least because of the intrinsic tendency of modernist restorations to assume a state of immaculate visual perfection often based on iconic photographs. This movement was led by DOCOMOMO, a highly diverse global association of individual historians and architects in different countries, first formed in 1988 by Dutch architects Hubert-Jan Henket and Wessel de Jonge, and expanding by 2010 to encompass over 60 national and regional working parties across the world. DOCOMOMO successfully set the Modern Movement itself in history, and this move to embrace modernism as heritage, in combination with contemporary “iconic” architecture’s revival of modernist “style”, gave a final death blow to the old separation of old and new. This implicitly headed off the possibility of any further dynamic chronological evolution on the part of conservation, as the latter no longer had any significant campaigning front line towards 334

Heritage Conservation

which it could push. In an iconoclastic piece in 2004, designed to highlight this predicament, Rem Koolhaas even argued rhetorically that city zones in rapidly developing Beijing might as well be designated as potential heritage areas even before they were built! (DOCOMOMO 2002; Canzani 2004; Koolhaas: 454–65) (Figure 19.3). The convoluted outcomes of this mixture of old and new were seen at their most extreme concerning the question of how to reconcile modern interventions and historic urban fabric. Here, it was the advocates of a sharp separation who were increasingly forced on the defensive. The old “Venice Charter” philosophy of refined differentiation was appropriated by iconic modernism for its own very different purposes. New iconic projects in historic contexts now most usually aspired to achieve a dialogue of old and new built elements, within an overall framework shaped by intensely “poetic”, instinctive visions. The new generation of modernist architects often cited 1950s–1970s museum or gallery conversion projects by Carlo Scarpa as an “original modernist” inspiration. Carried to extremes, this poetic mixture of preserved fragments and iconic interventions could become incoherent or incomprehensible, as in the case of the jabbing melange of Enric Miralles’s Scottish Parliament project of 1998–2004, or Herzog & de Meuron’s Caixa Forum art gallery in Madrid (completed 2008), featuring a massively gestural block perched on a hollowed-out former power station shell (Glendinning 2010: 124). In parallel with this iconic contextualism, a rather more thoroughgoing type of “new/old heritage” gained in popularity, namely the construction of completely new facsimiles of vanished individual buildings or even of whole streets or ensembles. In some respects, this represented an updating of Viollet-le-Duc’s concept of restoration to a hypothetical “ideal” state, an approach that had been subsequently expanded to the scale of an entire town in post-1918 Ypres and post-1945 Warsaw. Late 20th-century Europe had seen the beginnings of a modest revival of popularity of this idea, often hovering on the borderline between restoration and recreation. The expansion of the Athenian Acropolis anastelosis programme from the 1970s onwards began to stray significantly into recreation rather than restoration, as the Temple of Athena Nike was once more dismantled and rebuilt, the Propylaea partly re-roofed, and the colonnades and entablature of the Parthenon substantially re-formed, all in the 2000s. The project’s official reconstruction bulletins argued that through this approach, “some of the structural and formal authenticity of the monuments is regained” (Acropolis Restoration News 2009).

Figure 19.3  T  he DOCOMOMO-International 2018 Conference in Ljubljana: closing ceremony. (2018 photo © M Glendinning).

335

Miles Glendinning

It was only when linked up to the wider processes of globalization, city-branding and memorylandscape emotionalism that facsimile building could realize its full potential. Within the core European countries of conservationism, it was the former East that exploited this to the full, in the radical recycling processes witnessed in post-socialist cities. Under its powerful mayor (1992–2010), Yuri ­Luzhkov, Moscow witnessed a startling proliferation of projects for recreation of c­ ommunist-destroyed buildings, but the real causes celebres of the mixed-up, “new-old” world of European urban conservation debate were located in Germany. These included the long-running Berlin controversy about the demolition of the 1970s Palast der Republik (finally forced through in 2009) and its replacement by a facsimile Stadtschloss containing a shopping complex; and the many-headed reconstruction effort in the historic center of Dresden, taking in the entire old-town zone between the remains of the Frauenkirche and the ruins of the Schloss. The Frauenkirche restoration was in itself fairly s­traightforward – a traditional-style reconstruction of a very heavily devastated public building, in the tradition established by the Ypres Cloth Hall in Belgium. The surviving remains, the ruined stump and other salvaged masonry blocks, were doubtless more substantial than in some other prominent cases such as the Warsaw Royal Palace – which had, after all, been completely demolished. But the Frauenkirche was only the tip of a very large facsimile iceberg. It formed the centrepiece of an area reconstruction project in inner Dresden, in which the forces of image-led, branded globalization were seen far more openly at work. This project had the architectural aim of restoring the historic silhouette of Dresden as the “Florence of the Elbe”, recreating an ideal image of pre-industrial harmony modelled on the 1740s paintings of Bernardo Bellotto. This required the vast spaces between the surviving public monuments to be filled up with an “instant Altstadt”, here comprising not medieval-style gables but Baroque-style facsimiles of the pre-1945 streets, all built up quickly with rough brick carcasses and imitation plaster facades. At first glance, all this seemed a straightforward echo of the 1940s/1950s reconstruction of Warsaw. In fact, however, diametrically opposite economic forces were already at work here, forces of city-marketing that had identified Dresden as a potential economic growth node in the depressed east (Falser 2008) (Figure 19.4).

Figure 19.4  Dresden, “new Altstadt” developments of c.2010 adjoining the rebuilt Frauenkirche. (2013 photo © M Glendinning).

336

Heritage Conservation

In Germany, the years around the 2005 completion of the Frauenkirche witnessed the upsurge of an increasingly stormy debate about the ethics of facsimile building. In 2011, Georg Mörsch and other historians went so far as to condemn facsimile building as an Attrappenkult (dummy cult) (Moersch 1998: 62–73; Hassler and Nerdinger 2010; Habich et al. 2011: 19–41, 57). In some ways, this controversy echoed the polemics about restoration in the 19th century. But it also emphasized the growing uncertainty within the Conservation Movement about the fundamental direction of its values, even in its traditional European heartland. Correspondingly, within booming Eastern Asia, this new trend has assumed a far more exaggerated form. In cities such as Dubai or Shanghai, new iconic architecture and heritage-themed ensembles often proliferate in parallel with each other. Some especially radical projects, promiscuously intermingling tourist city-marketing, facsimile building, cultural globalization, and memory-landscape commemoration, and equipped with all modern facilities and infrastructure, have mushroomed in South Korea, where the demands of city-marketing have interacted with nationalist “correctives” of past centuries of external oppression. Thus, the project of 2005–09 to reconstruct the Gyeongbokgung Palace in Seoul, a 14th-century courtyard complex destroyed twice over by Japanese invasions, required demolition of a monumentally classical Japanese government building that had stood on the site since the 1920s (Choi 2010: 193–213). In parts of the world like these, history is still very much “on the march”, and heritage is still very much in the process of being shaped. It is, however, far from clear what role, if any, can be played here by the traditional values of the Conservation Movement.

Conclusion: “A Future for the Past”? Has the Conservation Movement, then, succeeded in reshaping and reinvigorating itself again in today’s age of globalization and postmodern subjectivity? If conservation has always essentially been an offshoot of Progress and Enlightenment modernity – a strongly defined “grand narrative” dedicated to exploiting the past for useful modern purposes, then where does it fit into the contemporary period of postmodern relativism and “deconstruction”? (Rodwell 2007: 205–6) Maybe conservation can only survive and advance effectively into the new age by surrendering its core identity as a specific, unique discourse, giving up its primary concern with the historic built fabric, and instead yielding itself up to be absorbed into a range of nebulous overarching causes. And as we saw earlier in this chapter, the Conservation Movement over the past two decades has indeed started to display signs of a movement in a state of disorientation, both in its ideas and in its built forms – as exemplified in the perplexity stirred up by the boom in facsimile building. In 1903, Alois Riegl contended that old buildings were “a mere perceptible substratum whose task is to stimulate that feeling which is evoked in modern people by the inexorable ritual of being and passing away, of the arising of the particular out of the general and its inevitable re-absorption back in the general” (Riegl 1903; Huse 2005, 124–49). Maybe what Riegl said of old buildings might now be applicable equally to the entire Conservation Movement. Perhaps the latter’s highly defined, assertive character might be beginning to blur and fade back into the “general”, following the rise of a value system in which the strong distinction between original and copy becomes all but meaningless – only time will tell!

References Abramson, D. B. (2007) “The aesthetics of city-scale preservation policy in Beijing”, Planning Perspectives, April 2007, 129–66. Acropolis Restoration News (2009), vol. 9, July 2009. Anderson, Benedict (1983), Imagined Communities, Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London. Ashworth, Gregory (2006) “Pluralising the past – heritage policies in plural societies”, Edinburgh Architecture Research, 30, 2006.

337

Miles Glendinning Ashworth, Gregory and Hartmann, Rudi (2005), Horror and Human Tragedy Revisited: The Management of Sites of Atrocities for Tourism, New York: Cognizant Ltd. Bianchini, F. and Parkinson, M. (1994) Cultural Policy and Urban Regeneration: The West European Experience, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Canzani, Andrea (2004) “La pellicola dell’ analogia”, Scienza e beni culturali, 20, 2004. Choay, Francoise (1999) The Invention of the Historic Monument, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Choi, Jong-Deok (2010) “The palace, the city and the past”, Planning Perspectives, April 2010, 193–213. Colonial Williamsburg (1951) The Official Guidebook of Colonial Williamsburg, Williamsburg: Colonial Williamsburg Inc. Crinson, Mark (2004) Urban Memory: History and Amnesia in the Modern City, London: Routledge. Debord, Guy (1967) La Société du spectacle, Paris: Champ Libre. Dehio, Georg (1905) Denkmalschutz und Denkmalpflege im 19. Jahrhundert, Strasbourg: Universitat Strassburg. DOCOMOMO (2002) DOCOMOMO-International Journal, 27 (“The History of DOCOMOMO”), 8–9. English Heritage (2001), Building in Context: New Development in Historic Areas, London: English Heritage. Falser, Michael (2008) Zwischen Identität und Authentizität, Dresden: Thelem. Gillis, J. R. (1994) Commemorations, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Glendinning, Miles (2010) Architecture’s Evil Empire? London: Reaktion. Glendinning, Miles (2013) The Conservation Movement – A History of Architectural Preservation, London: Routledge. Gutman, I., Bernbaum, M. and Gutman, Y. (1998) Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Habich, J. et al. (2011), Denkmalpflege statt Attrappenkult, Basel: Birkhauser. Halbwachs, Maurice (1950) La memoire collective, Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Hardy, M (ed.) (2009), The Venice Charter Revisited, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Harris, J. and Williams, R. (eds.) (2011), Architecture, Art and Urban Style within the Global Politics of City Branding, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Harvey, D. C. (2001) “Heritage pasts and heritage presents”, International Journal of Heritage Studies, December 2001, 319–38. Hassler, U. and Nerdinger, W. (eds.) (2010), Das Prinzip Rekonstruktion, Munich: Prestel. Huse, Norbert (2005) Denkmalpflege, Munich: Beck. Jamieson, F. (1991). Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Jokilehto, Jukka (2006a) Masterclass lecture, Edinburgh College of Art, 16 March 2006. Jokilehto, Jukka (2006b) “Considerations on authenticity and integrity in the world heritage context”, Edinburgh Architecture Research, 30, 2006, 7–12. Kaufman, N. (2009) Place, Race and Story: Essays on the Past and Future of Historic Preservation, New York: Routledge. Koolhaas, Rem (ed.) (2004), Content, Cologne: Taschen. Larsen, Knut (ed.) (1995), Nara Conference on Authenticity, Japan 1994, Trondheim: Tapir. Larsen, Knut and Marstein, Nils (eds.) (1994), Conference on Authenticity in Relation to the World Heritage Convention, Preparatory Workshop, Bergen, Norway, Trondheim: Tapir. Lu, Duanfang (2006) Remaking Chinese Urban Form, Abingdon: Routledge. Madgin, Rebecca (2010) “Reconceptualising the historic urban environment”, Planning Perspectives, January 2010, pp. 29–48. Maitland, R. (2010) “Tourism and changing representation in Europe’s historic capitals”, Revista di Scienze del Tourismo, 2, 73–119. McCleery, Anne (2008), Intangible Cultural Heritage in Scotland, Edinburgh: Napier University. Moersch, G. (1998) “Ist Rekonstruktion erlaubt?”, in Jakubeit, Barbara, and Hoidn, Barbara (eds.), Schloss, Palast, Haus Vaterland, Berlin: Birkhauser, pp. 62–73. Pressouyre, L. (1993) The World Heritage Convention, Twenty Years Later, Paris: UNESCO. Riegl, Alois (1903) Der moderne Denkmalskultus, sein Wesen, seine Entstehung, Vienna: Braumuller. Rodwell, Dennis (2007) Conservation and Sustainability, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Ruskin, John (1849) The Seven Lamps of Architecture, Orpington: George Allen. Stanley-Price, J., and King, J. (eds.) (2009), Conserving the Authentic, Rome: ICCROM. Stratton, Michael (2000) Industrial Buildings: Conservation and Regeneration, London: Spon. Stubbs, J. H. (2009) Time Honored: A Global View of Architectural Conservation, Hoboken: Wiley. UNESCO (2003) Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, Paris: UNESCO. Viollet-le-Duc, Eugene (1875) On Restoration (translation), London.

338

20 Power, Empire, and Nation Anoma Pieris

Baron Haussmann’s transformations of Paris for Emperor Napoleon III, and the Forbidden City of Beijing, built for the Ming Dynasty Emperor Chengzu, both express the absolute power of empires through the built environment because their rulers and their governments invested enormously in transforming the territories under their control. The urban grandeur of government precincts, political or cultural institutions, boulevards, parks and gardens, and monuments and memorials were likewise designed to aggrandize imperial power. Such strategies were most apparent in imperial outposts where territories captured through military violence were established as colonial cities. The colonial port cities in Asia, for example, created primarily to serve mercantile interests, became entry points for ambitious schemes of imperial expansion and resource extraction. The colonial city was a nodal point in a complex maritime network that opened up the hinterland for industrial-scale agriculture, and financed and was ruled over from an imperial metropolitan center far away in Europe. Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta, Colombo, Singapore, Penang, and Melaka, Hanoi, Jakarta, Hong Kong, and the Chinese concessions like Shamian, Shanghai, and Tianjin are a few among many cities that follow this pattern and are associated with the growing power of British, French, and Dutch colonialism from the 17th century onwards. The troubling imposition of European imperial power on racially and culturally different populations saw the most radical transformations of built space. Arguably, this form of imperialism is specific to the 19th century and early 20th century when European systems of knowledge and politics were introduced to colonized populations as pathways to modernity. Across Europe’s Asian colonies, both violent systems of racialized oppression and exploitation, and unique innovations in science and industry were encoded in the built environment and substantially altered urban form. Colonial administrators, intent on producing a class of indigenous elites supportive of colonial rule, schooled selective groups from among the colonized in an “Enlightenment” world view. But these elites, once politicized sufficiently to understand their own subjection, fought to relieve themselves of their colonizers. In doing so, they grappled with innate contradictions between imperial and indigenous entitlements caused by fundamental forms of inequity. These inequities divided the populations of Asian colonies into European colonists and colonized Asian subjects, the latter including First Nations peoples, indigenous settler and regional immigrant communities and in some cases indentured laborers, convicts, and slaves. Two forms of sovereignty exemplify this political process, which was spatially inscribed. The first form, of imperial sovereignty, relates to imperial expansion and rule from afar over vast culturally different colonial territories originating in many cases in private mercantile interests. Absolute power is eventually assumed, but boundaries are ambiguous and shifting. The second form, of DOI: 10.4324/9781315674469-22

339

Anoma Pieris

national sovereignty, relates to colonized populations’ struggles to break away and form distinct and bounded geographies that are spatially fixed as nation states. The progress of a society across these two political systems, from colonial to national, or their territorial transformation from a colony to a nation, has been described in political theory as “decolonization”. The term describes a process whereby the colonial attributes of a social and governmental system are dismantled. The processes of “decolonization” have attracted a specific body of Postcolonial theory, concerned with how, while colonial power changes hands, its inequities linger past political independence to produce new power hierarchies. These in turn provoke new social struggles and challenges to power. A group of largely South Asian scholars, inspired by Marxist ideas of the class struggle, have expanded these ideas to discussions of racial, ethnic and other forms of oppression, and have constructed an alternative historiography of colonialism and nationalism (e.g. Partha Chatterjee, Ranajit Guha, Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak, Homi Bhabha and Dipesh Chakrabarty). Their scholarship is significant for challenging the Eurocentricity of the humanities and questioning embedded elitism within the academe (Ashcroft et al. 1995). Their influence has opened up similar questions regarding the place of colonial cities, institutions, and buildings in architectural and urban design pedagogy and practice (Baydar Nalbantoğlu and Wong 1997). Postcolonial thinking has been particularly useful for understanding the colonial city as the foundational context for many contemporary political questions. Since power is embedded in the colonial built environment, its inequities linger past political independence to delay processes of democratization. These social and spatial tensions are identifiable in histories of the colonial city. Literature on Asia’s colonial cities and architectures appears to settle into two streams. The first stream examines the architecture of imperialism across various colonies. This approach is useful for understanding how imperialism shaped the home country and how the specificities of each colony responded to European impositions of power. But such studies unwittingly raise the spectre of empire even as they critique it. The second stream is contained as histories of individual cities or colonies that see empire from a distance as a figure from the past. Such studies are capable of uncovering details of the reception of imperialism by the colonized. However, their retroactive view from revisionist national histories often limits such studies. Some of the most interesting anthologies on imperial or colonial built environments combine these viewpoints (Bremner 2016; Rajagopalan and Desai 2012; Prakash and Scriver 2007).

Empire, the Colonial City, Institutions and Environment While imperial power was essentially hierarchic, in the colony it divided along racial lines. In settler colonies or dominions like Australia or North America, where European colonists were in the majority, First Nations peoples were excluded from colonial cities. Violent confrontations, expulsion and genocide accompanied the expropriation of their lands. These “New World” urban environments approximated the built form of the settlers’ home countries. Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide in Australia appear to be simulations of European cities, although a closer study reveals material attributes specific to the colonial context. Racially non-white indentured laborers or immigrants were treated as subordinate. In colonies where former inhabitants were in the majority and had their own complex urban and political systems, urban zoning segregated races according to their functions in the colonial system. In India or Africa, these divisions were described as “black” and “white” cities, whereas in the plural immigrant societies of Southeast Asia the “black” city spread across several ethnic quarters (Abu Lughod 1965: 429–57; Fanon 1965: 39) (Figure 20.1). However demarcated, the asymmetrical spatial divisions were legible in the urban morphology with the generously laid out European Town with its functional zoning and detached houses starkly contrasted to the cramped contiguous urban dwellings of indigenous inhabitants. Although these divisions were caused by 340

Power, Empire, and Nation

Figure 20.1  Singapore’s Indian cultural heritage precinct along Serangoon Road where the Indian community was concentrated during the late 19th century. Photographed by author.

racial covenants governing land tenure, the segregation of Asian indigenous and immigrant populations and their confinement to the cheaper, less salubrious environs produced the pejorative associations of native quarters, found in many colonial accounts. They appeared as the architectural content of the “orientalist” scholarship famously critiqued by Edward Said (1978). Said describes Orientalism as an intellectual, moral and political project whereby the ‘East’ and ‘West’ were constructed as different and unequal categories through a geo-political awareness that was distributed across the field of intellectual and aesthetic production (1978: xvii, 12). In short, imperial authoritarian and territorial sensibilities were internalized across diverse modes of production including literature, art and architecture. Orientalist scholars depicted colonized subjects as culturally inferior and available for domination and reform. Architecture provided the physical context for juxtapositions of colonial power and native disempowerment, as illustrated by numerous scholars writing on former colonies (AlSayyad 1992). They describe how the architectural discipline too has internalized these associations in attributing authority to western styles and sources. For example, scholars critique the historian Banister Fletcher’s “Tree of Architecture”, published in his early canonical surveys of architectural history, for placing European civilizations on the main branches of the architectural tree (Walker 1999; Baydar 1998; Fletcher 1896). This places European civilization as teleologically central to a narrative of progress as exemplified in the culture of building, a hierarchy that was disseminated to and internalized by students who studied Fletcher as a required text. Revising Banister Fletcher’s A History of Architecture to offer a more inclusive survey has seen the production of many subsequent editions, in itself an exercise in decolonizing knowledge. Analyses of the colonial city and its architecture have contributed positively to countering the hegemony of a western-centric history. Scholars have highlighted how detailed studies of planning schemes, institutional and residential building typologies and the architects and the colonial institutions engaged in building them provide insights into the place of colonialism in architectural and urban historiography. Not only have they exposed the inherent racism of colonization, but 341

Anoma Pieris

have opened up other topics of class, politics and culture to intellectual scrutiny. They show that imperialism is a contested field with challenges from the Ottomans during the early period before European hegemony (AlSayyad et al. 2005; Çelik 1993; Abu-Lughod 1989) and that European nations like Britain or France were reciprocally shaped by their projects of imperialism (Crinson 1996). Due to their distance from Europe in an era of maritime travel, the central colonial administrative apparatus was often located in cities like Calcutta and New Delhi which emerged as alternative imperial centers for the Asian region (Metcalf 2002; Evenson 1989; King 1976). That French colonies were laboratories for experiments in governance and social planning before the introduction of these systems to France (Rabinow 1989; Wright 1991). More significantly, scholars demonstrate how colonial artefacts traveled and influenced European metropolitan culture producing aesthetic genres like Chinoiserie and the Moorish style. Despite their political relationship of dominance and dependency, cultural influences flowed in both directions. These cultural cross-fertilizations led to the parallel development of aesthetic styles, for example, the Mughal or Indo-Saracenic features of both the Royal Pavilion in Brighton and the railway administration building in Kuala Lumpur. Similarly, just as the colonial city becomes a remote stage for imperial events, such as the imperial durbar in New Delhi in 1877, proclaiming Queen Victoria Empress of India (Hosagrahar 2005: 101–2), aspects of the colonies and even colonial subjects were transported to colonial expositions in metropolitan London or Paris and put on display to European visitors. Such sites reproduced the orientalist social hierarchies and racist representations discussed by Edward Said. Patricia Morton describes these displays, which combine aspects of the modern and the archaic, as presenting hybrid forms of modernity (2000). This notion of hybridity allows us to recognize how colonial materialities became complex due to cultural mixing. Both colonizer and colonized were transformed by contact. Mary Louise Pratt describes colonial social spaces as “contact zones”… “where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination” (Pratt 1992: 7). Approaches that focus on multiple social interactions erode the absolute power historically attributed to imperial sovereignty. The ability of empires to influence subjects is evident in institutions that act as pedagogical instruments of sovereign power. Among those metropolitan museums and their equivalents in the colonies were effective for shaping the colonial imagination and conveying its racial hierarchies to colonized populations. By comparing the cultural production of various colonized groups and juxtaposing these to the achievements of European civilization, museums asserted European cultural superiority and right to rule. Their designs deviated from the cellular institutions like schools, prisons or hospitals used to discipline colonial subjects. Visual and material constructions of knowledge expanded their natural audiences conveying social modernity outside elite educational institutions (Bennett 1995). Pre-colonial histories were presented as archaic, anachronistic episodes, and colonized subjects were depicted as primitives. But entwined in these representations was the added desire to prove the effectiveness of colonial Enlightenment ideology through reform and progress. Museums were additionally linked with colonial archaeology as spaces that conveyed ideas of cultural decline, and organized ‘civilizational’ hierarchies that benefitted European imperialism (Anderson 1983: Chap. 10). Their scripts were founded on Social Darwinism – an ideology that organized humans according to racial hierarchies – a form of racism that was internalized (and also resisted) by colonial subjects. Museums were spaces for the collection of cultural objects extracted through fraud or violence from subject populations, and their subscription to racialized values was evident in their dispassionate displays of human bodies. The field of archaeological practice extended metropolitan culture to the colonial periphery and to the ruined sites of former indigenous cities. There they were excavated and preserved as aspects of a lost indigenous past. Archaeology was enabled by the construction of roads and 342

Power, Empire, and Nation

railways for opening up the hinterlands for colonial plantations and industries. These expansive infrastructure projects, built by convicts or indentured laborers, paved the way for forms of resource extraction that financed the empire. The fecundity of tropical environments was beneficial for large-scale agricultural production, but the introduction of industrial crops deforested virgin jungle displacing indigenous communities. Colonial attitudes to these forcibly expropriated lands were consequently infused with orientalist ideas of savage or paradisiacal tropical nature (Figure 20.2). Scientific approaches were developed to counter their adverse impacts. Colonial climatic preoccupations have informed building design and how building science emerged as an architectural specialization for testing scientific discourses in health, hygiene and sanitation (Chang 2016). These architectural experiments and their functionalist rhetoric would underwrite modernism in the tropics. Such ideas were accompanied by parallel experiments in agriculture, forestry and landscape design, aimed at producing resilient and productive species. Botanical gardens gathered the empire’s diverse foliage repeating it in each imperial territory. Benedict Anderson has described this phenomenon as the “spectre of comparisons”, where similar experiences are simulated across colonial contexts (1998: 2). Colonists often used garden designs as nostalgic referents to the home country and signs of their cultural influence over the colonized. As discussed in the introduction, these two forms of sovereignty that are intimately connected divide architectural scholarship on colonialism producing broad views of former imperial territories and contained analyses of the colonial pasts of specific national contexts; both approaches equally rich in content. The broad view, which is comparative, also acknowledges the impact of imperialism in the imperial metropole, and the resultant hybrid and reciprocal postcolonial environments caused by cultural migration from colonies to imperial centers (see Bremner 2016; Crinson 2003). There are research affinities between settler colonies like Canada, Australia,

Figure 20.2  T  he tropics as danger and paradise as depicted in Alfred Russel Wallace’s The Malay Archipelago showing (left) Orang-Utan attacked by Dyaks and (right), Natives shooting the Great Bird of Paradise being illustrations by Joseph Wolf and TW Wood respectively (Wallace, 1869, plates 1 & 2). [public domain via https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:T._W._Wood].

343

Anoma Pieris

New Zealand and South Africa where the nostalgic simulacra of European homelands mark cultures of assimilation or self-determination, and the deliberate effacement of First Nations peoples and places leave uncanny traces in the geography (Banivanua-Mar and Edmonds 2010). This scholarship examines settler imperialisms, the constructions of whiteness and the late 19th- to mid-20th-century New Imperialisms to interrogate the ways in which imperialism is framed. Such studies are uniquely placed to recognize immigrant and postcolonial cultural diversity in former centers of imperial power ( Jacobs 1996). A generation of scholars from former Asian colonies have opened up the field to new types of knowledge of how local populations contested, resisted or indigenized oppressive colonial legacies (Chopra 2011; Chattopadhyay 2005; Hosagrahar 2005; Perera, 1998; Yeoh 1996). They argue that colonization produced hybrid cultures that countered the divisive structure of the colonial city and that local populations found alternative forms of political agency. Many of these analyses highlight the racialized nature of colonial modernity, its appropriation and transformation by local elites as evident in housing, institutional architecture and urban form. They focus on gender relations, cultural miscegenation, labor, criminality or anti-colonial political resistance to uncover the colonial city’s social dynamism and political volatility (e.g. Masselos 2007). In these examples, both the city and architecture form the backdrop to approaches that are explicitly interdisciplinary and stretch the limits of architectural thinking. But in many of these studies, their focus on the colonial past of either a city or a nation state artificially narrows their exploratory scope. While firmly within the ambit of postcolonial approaches, they reference geographic delineations that took place after decolonization during the 20th century. This retroactive lens proves particularly problematic for nations that share common colonial pasts like India, Pakistan and Bangladesh or Singapore and Malaysia. The rubric of colonialism does not apply to relationships between Asia and the West. The European Concessions in China that are indirectly linked to histories of 20th-century social modernity are less researched (Victoir and Zatsepine 2013). Such cities, shaped by trade and violence – in the case of China the infamous Opium Wars which forced unequal treaties on the Qing Dynasty – while never regarded colonies enabled colonial forms of contact. Meanwhile, both Chinese and Japanese imperialism produce distinctive and complex urban histories with grid plans, urban zoning and cultures of oppression quite different to those of European imperialism. These empires clashed with each other and with European colonial powers during the Second World War. From 1942 to 45, Southeast Asia and the Pacific became an imperial battleground, and the Japanese military occupied former European colonies. The European colonies of Southeast Asia were temporarily drawn into a Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere which included Japan’s colonies: Manchuria, Korea and Taiwan (C.H. Lin 2015: Chap. 1, 14–28). This period is fundamental to decolonization in Southeast Asia, because Japan by subjecting and incarcerating European colonizers inverted the racialized power hierarchy. They are consequently regarded as both oppressors and liberators by postcolonial publics. Although the architecture of this wartime period is yet to be understood, war reparation infrastructure, and memorials and peace parks indelibly mark post-war nation building, most particularly in post-war Japan (Z. Lin 2010). The war proved fundamental for forging Cold War power blocs that would split national loyalties in the Asia Pacific region, but also by escalating decolonization give rise to resistant political collaborations based on “Third World Solidarity”, notably, the Non-Aligned Movement.

Architecture, Nation Building and the Politics of Identity Decolonization occurred in Asia during a 20-year period beginning with Indonesia’s independence in 1945 up to Singapore’s separation from Malaya and subsequent autonomy in 1965. Some colonial outposts like Macau or Hong Kong would remain European colonies until the late 20th century. These first decades were turbulent, as territorial secession and political contestation 344

Power, Empire, and Nation

produced diverse forms of governments, some totalitarian and others democratic. The dominant role played by political elites in national governments perpetuated social hierarchies and institutional systems were not adequately decolonized. Although the sentiments of this era were expressed in national architectures that manifested decolonization’s goals. But the aesthetic choices for government buildings had their genesis in prevalent attitudes to colonial pasts. At first, the responses were accepting of colonial pathways to modernity, but later, there were reactionary efforts at recovering lost cultural dignity through forms of indigenization. The indigenization of postcolonial architectures has roots in the colonial architectural cultures of the late 19th century and early 20th century, when many colonial government buildings influenced by emerging arts and crafts movements were embellished with indigenous motifs in, for example, the Indo-Saracenic or Buddhist revivalist styles. European spatial templates for institutional programs were combined with indigenous forms and elements to produce complex architectural hybrids. Built with permanent materials and labor-intensive construction practices, their formal attributes and decorative symbolism were suggestive of a new moral and political authority, intent on secularizing local cultures and reducing religious conflict. These revivalist architectures elaborated and perpetuated the orientalist discourses of colonial archaeology that magnified moribund imperial pasts. They also become important sites for testing hybrid technologies and training grounds for local, government architects. The impressive scale and urban prominence of colonial institutions prompted their adaptation by postcolonial administrations, despite the anti-colonial sentiments they provoked. Their aesthetic styles, which were also applied to commercial or domestic architecture, were early formulas for indigenization and expressed resilient features of a colonized culture’s built heritage. They were often dismissed as dehistoricized misappropriations of embedded cultural signs. The tensions caused by adaptation or rejection of colonial architectural traditions impacted architectural and urban planning schemes, particularly those designed to represent postcolonial authorities. Capital cities and capitol buildings that either simulate or reject imperial architecture have under divergent circumstances become iconic symbols for identity politics. The Indo-­Saracenic architecture of New Delhi (Figure 20.3) and modernist design for Chandigarh, the state capital

Figure 20.3  S ecretariat building New Delhi, India, designed by Herbert Baker and completed in 1931.  © Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Photograph by Peter Serenyi.

345

Anoma Pieris

of post-Partition Punjab (both attributed to European architects but built before and after Indian independence, respectively) are evidence of these tensions and contrasts (Prakash 2002; Nilsson 1973). Sri Lanka’s new administrative capital, Sri Jayewardenepura, is spatially distinct from the former colonial capital, Colombo and Geoffrey Bawa’s design for its parliament explicitly references regional aesthetics (Figure 20.4). But its location and choice of design features inadvertently asserted the cultural hegemony of the dominant Sinhala Buddhist ethno-religious community. In the example of the Malaysian capital at Putra Jaya, the onion domes on buildings impose the global aesthetics of Islam on a multicultural society testifying to the increasing economic influence of the Middle East on Asian Muslim communities. Given the histories of communal violence and suppression of minority entitlements in both these nations, their use of monocultural architectural expressions for public architecture is problematic. There are other ways to interpret such iconic projects. The Bandaranaike Memorial International Conference Hall, gifted by the Chinese to Sri Lanka’s ­socialist-leaning government during the 1970s, and the Japanese gift of the Sri Lankan Parliamentary complex to their pro-capitalist successors, a decade later, occupy two sides of the Cold War divide. Whereas official architecture has been largely unsuccessful in democratizing identity, ordinary vernacular buildings have had greater success. While representative of their cultural origins, their disassociation from power structures makes them more accessible to popular audiences. Nevertheless, they too have frequently been elevated as the authentic counterpart to colonial urbanism and as evidence of the uncontaminated culture and continued agency of the colonized. Such projections are dependent on ethnographic methodologies which recognize the symbolic and social role of architecture and its embodiment of local cultural practices and belief systems (Waterson 1990: xv–xix), rather than fixing on iconic value. The Indonesian archipelago provides a great diversity of examples, where villagers and craftsmen, rather than architects, are the purveyors of built form. However, representations of these vernacular spaces can also be problematic, due to the tendency of orientalist scholarship to essentialize, naturalize, or primitivize these forms. Some of the most detailed sources for historical patterns of rural architecture are from that colonial record. Their subsistence material culture was used as evidence of “native” backwardness and need for upliftment through colonization. Disregard for the social value of vernacular architecture before colonization and colonial architects’ exaggerated interest in it has resulted in derivative styles being appropriated uncritically in contemporary architecture. Vernacular architectures have other forms of agency, due to their appropriation, adaptation, and subsequent proliferation across the imperial network through typologies like the bungalow and the colonial mansion. As discussed by Anthony King, these became a global phenomenon, a sign of modernity’s many entanglements and cross-currents (King 2004, 1995). Architectural cultures flow both in and out of both the colony and the empire, and the resultant spatial and aesthetic outcomes have their own dynamic trajectories. This energetic cultural cross fertilization has produced alternative sites of modernity, and counter forces of indigenization that deploy the vernacular critically against colonial legacies (Perera 1998: 147). Postcolonial nations use regionalist architectures that combine these two approaches (Tzonis et al. 2001: 1–13) for government buildings and cultural institutions. Domestic forms and vernacular elements are enlarged and elaborated to satisfy official representations of local culture. Such buildings, like those of the Sri Lankan parliament discussed above, are architectural hybrids where modern programs and indigenous aesthetics, derived in this example from the local village vernacular, are enlarged to the scale of a monastic or palace complex. Regionalist architects were the strongest advocates of identity politics towards the end of the 20th century, when many official buildings deliberately adopted culturally regional styles. Museums in particular were transformed by this revisionist practice. Displays within former colonial buildings were redesigned to express national narratives, and designs for new buildings were derived from 346

Power, Empire, and Nation

Figure 20.4  S ri Lanka Parliament designed by Geoffrey Bawa and completed in 1982.  Photographed by author.

regional cultural forms. The national museum of Kuala Lumpur designed by Ho Kok Hoe was inspired by features from Malay palaces and audience halls (Crinson 2003: 167–71). Domestic architectures were museumized at President Suharto’s Taman Mini Indonesia Indah (Beautiful Indonesia Miniature Park) providing a taxonomy of provincial architectural styles (Kusno 2000: 74–8). When compared with their equivalents in colonial expositions, such buildings rearranged diverse local cultures within a national power hierarchy. In the case of Indonesia, the former colonial city, Batavia, renamed Jakarta during the Japanese occupation, remained at its head. Their design by local practitioners and use of local material and craft traditions emplaced such buildings as indigenous artefacts. Their location in what were often tropical environments allowed them to apply innovative passive cooling systems, developed through colonial building science and increasingly popular in a global discourse on environmental sustainability. For these many reasons, regionalist architecture appeared politic on all counts. But the tourism industry would depoliticize their aesthetics. Regionalist resort environments throughout Asia market colonial experiences for high-end consumers: local elites, expatriates and Western tourists, creating architectural hybrids with vernacular aesthetics and western-style amenities. The most familiar example of this phenomenon is the Bali-modern aesthetic which recreates village settings with vernacular-style tourist cabins that simulate orientalist material affects. Amanda Achmadi (2008) argues that these associations were cultivated across centuries of colonial travel writings that exoticize Bali. Within these resort environments, the servility of service staff and relative luxury of tourist accommodation reproduce colonial inequalities as tourism experiences. The style is reproduced uncritically across the tourism industry with similar pseudo-colonial cultural responses in Galle, Sri Lanka, or even in Phuket, Thailand – a country that was never colonized. This see-saw of political positions around architectural responses that originate or have been transformed by colonization highlights critical stakes in identity politics. They reveal how past histories are continuously reinvented for political or commercial ends. While parliaments and museums legitimize cultural identities by dressing modern institutions in indigenous aesthetics, tourism environments indiscriminately adapt local cultural pasts for transnational consumers. By abstracting elements of local architecture with little regard for their origins or their meanings, they commodify local cultural practices.

The Shifting Geometry of Power The close of the 20th century can be viewed as the end of the postcolonial era, following China’s incorporation of Hong Kong and Macau, during the late 1990s, and the end of the Cold War in Europe. These political events have shaped new transnational alliances and shifted academic 347

Anoma Pieris

interest towards globalization, a condition best reflected in urban studies. Global city networks and mega region developments enable the rapid spread of liberal democracy and neoliberal economic change. They play host to western forms of cultural imperialism producing a range of imitative supermodern spaces, such as mega malls, hotel chains and industrial campuses recognizable for their spatial homogeneity and repudiation of place. These new economies of trade and capital are accompanied by forms of social inequity that redistribute social privileges at a global scale (Spivak 2000). An affluent few seize global opportunities across nation-state borders for professionalization or commerce. For them, global cities and regions fulfil their promises. But the vast majority of guest workers, immigrants or refugees may encounter these new territorial delineations very differently as exploitative and “neo-colonial”. The term neo-colonial is often used to describe indirect means of exerting control through markets, investments or cultural influences that perpetuate asymmetrical relationships between powerful and less powerful states. This is evident in the kinds of relationships former colonies have with their former colonizers after decolonization. But the term is also applied to describe colonial forms of exploitation within developing economies. These relationships, although not political, perpetuate dominance and dependency at an international or national level. The forms of imperial and national sovereignty discussed in this chapter coalesce in such ­scenarios transforming the meanings of built space. Cities within a nation are reconfigured across a network of global competitors for investment, population and labor. New restrictions at ­nation-state borders govern who has access or egress. As human populations cross national boundaries as refugees and immigrants, they accumulate identities and transform spaces to reflect their own cultures. These various pressures fashion cities into eclectic and uneven transnational landscapes that reflect the shifting geometry of power. They produce competing and often dissonant forms of heritage. The global city’s porosity to transnational labor, immigration and information networks thus increases its social dynamism while eroding its national character. It is host to intersecting and overlapping forms of sovereignty. The growth and multiplication of World City networks outside Europe and North America during the 21st century extends these hybrid configurations across Asia (Roy and Ong 2011). Nations are forced to address and engage with global systems, and new forms of governance pressure national solidarities. In land-scarce city states like Singapore or Dubai that are driven by fiscal imperatives, governments manage these tensions by exerting extraordinary forms of spatial control. Cities such as these that are independent of hinterlands become models of rapid development and magnets for commercial tourism. Such nation-city-state territories partly owe their meteoric rise to their management of ethnically differentiated and depoliticized guest workers, particularly those in the construction industry. Such processes replicate the opportunities and modes of exploitation honed during the colonial era, now redistributed across regional economic competitors. Capital cities throughout the Asian region emulate these models. Globalization has traditionally been studied as spreading from Europe to its former dependencies and from North America to the rest of the world. Its processes are often informed by prior colonial relationships and reproduce colonial cultural hierarchies along new vectors of financial aid provision, and through developmental ideologies and the exportation of expertise. Colonial affinities that have been internalized in postcolonial societies encourage enthusiasm for these transnational patterns and influences. Despite decades of anti-colonial sentiment, the West is still regarded as a model for progress, evident, most recently, as neolibreal economic systems become pervasive, in the structural divisions of Global North and South. Western institutions and intellectual cultures assume world leadership and are perceived as trend setters, as evident in the number of Euro-American star architects with commissions for buildings in Asia and the habit of duplicating western designs for skyscrapers (Marshall 2003). It is also evident in the global division

348

Power, Empire, and Nation

of labor through the outsourcing of design documentation, and the unequal international architectural collaborations that maintain the western partner’s privileges. The uncritical celebration of the resultant commissions magnifies the global dimension of the neo-colonial relationship. Whereas in Asia anti-Western sentiment was pronounced during the Cold War, when many nations embraced socialist policies, market leadership by China and India has reoriented the region to these new centers of power and capital, as mediators of western models of progress. Local populations combine bourgeois aspirations, most evident in the proliferation of suburbs or condominiums, with deep anxieties regarding western individualism versus communal values. Global commercial cultures navigate this dialectic more fluidly, evident in the multinational companies, free trade environments and tourism and labor economies that reinforce neo-colonial spatial relationships across borders. But neo-colonialism is not necessarily a one-way predatory pathway from West to East. The economic rise of Asia, its growing architectural expertise and aesthetic potential, the wide dissemination of its popular media and commercial cultures have comparable colonizing power. Seismic cultural shifts are already evident as the nations in the region balance dependency and autonomy within Global South-South hierarchies and test or reject models of social democratization. These external pressures on previously insulated forms of national sovereignty may feed new imperial ambitions apart from traditional power blocs in Europe and America. They may create alternative world views that fashion distinct contemporary architectural cultures. Whatever the political outcomes, such shifts of cultural authority make room for a more balanced architectural historiography available and sensitive to its diverse audiences.

References Abu Lughod, Janet L. (1965) “Tale of Two Cities: The Origins of Modern Cairo,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 7 (4): 429–57. Abu-Lughod, Janet L. (1989) Before European hegemony: the world system A.D. 1250–1350, New York: Oxford University Press. Achmadi, Amanda (2008) “The Architecture of Balinization,” in Architecture and Identity, eds., Peter Herrle, Erik Wegerhoff, Berlin: Technische Universität Berlin, Habitat Unit, pp. 73–90. AlSayyad, Nezar ed. (1992) Forms of Dominance: On the Architecture and Urbanism of the Colonial Enterprise, Aldershot: Avebury. AlSayyad, Nezar, Irene A. Bierman and Nasser O. Rabbat (2005) Making Cairo Medieval, Lanham: Lexington Books. Anderson, Benedict (1983) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso. Anderson, Benedict (1998) The Specter of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World, New York and London: Verso. Ashcroft, Bill, Griffiths, Gareth and Tiffin, Helen eds. (1995) The Post-colonial Studies Reader, London: Routledge. Banivanua-Mar, Tracey and Penelope Edmonds eds. (2010) Making Settler Colonial Space: Perspectives on Race, Place and Identity, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Baydar Nalbantoğlu, Gülsüm (1998) “Toward Postcolonial Openings: Rereading Sir Banister Fletcher’s ‘History of Architecture’,” Assemblage 35: 6–17. Baydar Nalbantoğlu, Gülsüm and Wong Chong Thai eds. (1997) Postcolonial Space(s), New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Bennett, Tony (1995) The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics, London and New York: Routledge. Bremner, G.A. ed. (2016) Architecture and Urbanism in the British Empire, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Çelik, Zeynep (1993) The Remaking of Istanbul: Portrait of an Ottoman City in the Nineteenth Century, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Chang, Jiat-Hwee (2016) A Genealogy of Tropical Architecture: Colonial Networks, Nature and Technoscience, London: Routledge. Chattopadhyay, Swati (2005) Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism, and the Colonial Uncanny, London: Routledge.

349

Anoma Pieris Chopra, Preeti (2011) A Joint Enterprise: Indian Elites and the Making of British Bombay, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Crinson, Mark (2003) Modern Architecture and the End of Empire, Burlington: Ashgate. Crinson, Mark (1996) Empire Building: Victorian Architecture and Orientalism, London: Routledge. Evenson, Norma (1989) The Indian Metropolis: A View toward the West, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Fanon, Frantz (1965) The Wretched of the Earth, New York: Grove Press, Inc. Fletcher, Sir Banister (1896) A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method, London: Athlone Press and University of London. Hosagrahar, Jyoti (2005) Indigenous Modernities: Negotiating Architecture and Urbanism, London: Routledge. Jacobs, Jane Margaret (1996) Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City, London: Routledge. King, Anthony D. (1976) Colonial Urban Development: Culture, Social Power, and Environment, London and Boston, MA: Routledge & Paul. King, Anthony D. (2004) Spaces of Global Cultures: Architecture, Urbanism, Identity, New York: Routledge. King, Anthony D. (1995) The Bungalow: The Production of a Global Culture, New York: Oxford University Press. Kusno, Abidin (2000) Behind the Postcolonial: Architecture, Urban Space, and Political Cultures in Indonesia, London: Routledge. Lin, Chia-Hui (2015) Heteroglossic Asia: The Transformation of Urban Taiwan, Hoboken: Taylor and Francis. Lin, Zhongjie (2010) Kenzo Tange and the Metabolist Movement: Urban Utopias of Modern Japan, Hoboken: Taylor and Francis. Marshall, Richard (2003) Emerging Urbanity: Global Urban Projects in the Asia Pacific Rim, New York: Spon Press. Masselos, Jim (2007) The City in Action: Bombay Struggles for Power, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Metcalf, Thomas (2002) An Imperial Vision: Indian Architecture and Britain’s Raj, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Morton, Patricia, A. (2000) Hybrid Modernities: Architecture and Representation at the 1931 Colonial Exposition, Paris, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. Nilsson, Sten (1973) The New Capitals of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, trans. [from Swedish] Elisabeth Andreasson and Lund: Studentlitteratur. Perera, Nihal (1998) Society and Space: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Postcolonial Identity in Sri Lanka, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Prakash, Vikramaditya, and Peter Scriver, eds. (2007) Colonial Modernities: Building Dwelling and Architecture in British India and Ceylon, London: Routledge. Prakash, Vikramaditya (2002) Chandigarh’s Le Corbusier, Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Pratt, Mary Louise (1992) Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, London: Routledge. Rabinow, Paul (1989) French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rajagopalan, Mrinalini and Madhuri Desai (2012) Colonial Frames, Nationalist Histories: Imperial Legacies, Architecture and Modernity, Farnham and Surrey: Ashgate. Roy, Ananya and Aihwa Ong (2011) Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global, Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Said, Edward (1978) Orientalism, London: Pantheon. Spivak, Gayatri Chakrovorty (2000) “Megacity,” Grey Room 1: 8–25. Tzonis, Alexander, Liane Lefaivre and Bruno Stagno eds. (2001) Tropical Architecture: Critical Regionalism in the Age of Globalisation, Chichester: Wiley Academy. Victoir, Laura A., and Victor Zatsepine (2013) Harbin to Hanoi: The Colonial Built Environment in Asia, 1840 to 1940, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Walker, Paul (1999) “The Invisible ‘East’: Fletcher and the Unseen Ho-o-den,” Self, Place and Imagination: Cross-Cultural Thinking in Architecture, Proceedings of the Second Symposium by the Centre for Asian and Middle Eastern Architecture, Adelaide: CAMEA, pp. 145–51. Waterson, Roxana (1990) The Living House: an anthropology of architecture in South-East Asia, Singapore and New York: Oxford University Press. Wright, Gwendolyn (1991) The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Yeoh, Brenda (1996) Contesting Space: Power Relations and the Urban Built Environment in Colonial Singapore. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press.

350

21 Architecture and Globalization Anthony D. King

Introduction How can we think about globalization and architecture together? What does each do to the other when appearing on the same page? In both cases, the answer depends on what we mean by each term. Given the common understanding of architecture as buildings designed by architects, I shall begin with “globalization”. This is a word that came into common use from the 1980s, but as geographer John Short states, “The word has come to mean and represent very different things and to evoke a variety of responses” (2001: 7). I shall therefore start with a few representative definitions, commenting briefly on those which have a particular potential for understanding architecture’s connection with globalization. According to political scientist, David Held, globalization refers to “a widening, deepening and speeding up of world-wide connectedness in all aspects of contemporary social life” (1999: 2) and, with this reference to “worldwide connectedness” and “all aspects of contemporary social life”, implicitly refers to the global nature of architectural knowledge and also of architectural practice. Held’s broad-ranging definition contrasts sharply with that of sociologist, Roland Robertson, for whom the idea of globalization means “the rendering of the world as a single place” (1992: 130). This is an understanding which, in the idea of “a single place”, is one that apparently suffices with a single boundary, defining the place, and eliminating any internal boundaries within this. Such a definition immediately raises questions about identity and the ways in which architecture has been used historically to mark, represent and express the identity of a nation, tribe, ethnicity, religion, class, gender, region and the like. Other scholars place particular importance on the historical dimension of globalization. For example, Pieterse (2004: 24–5) sees it as “a long term historical process involving ancient population movements, long distance cross-cultural trade, the spread of world religions and the diffusion and development of technologies due to inter-cultural contact”. Architectural historians and others would maintain that each of these socio-economic, cultural and technological processes have very clear architectural dimensions, the evidence for which is all around us. To take a relatively recent example from architectural history and connect it to population movements: what underlying explanations can we offer for the rapid growth in the number of mosques in Europe and especially in Britain (whether converted or architect-designed buildings), from seven in 1961 to almost 1,700 in 2007? (King 2016: 134). This historical interpretation of the term is the central theme of Hopkins’ edited collection, Globalization in World History (2002). Here, contributors show how

DOI: 10.4324/9781315674469-23

351

Anthony D. King

different forms of globalization (including those from the non-West) could take place at different times and also different places. Some of these historical ideas about the links between globalization and architecture can best be illustrated by reference to one or two case studies which trace how different building types have become transplanted around the world. Here, emphasis is placed on the distinctive economic, social and global political contexts in which developments occur. In the following, I sketch not the history of the glass-walled office block or high-rise office tower but a much more modest building type.

The Global Production of Building Form The earliest known reference to “bangla” (or bungalow) occurs in a late 17th-century report of a British East India Company official. The term, meaning “of or from Bengal”, refers to an indigenous form of pre-industrial peasant shelter, built on a mud plinth and with an overhanging roof of reed or grass. By the late 18th century, European colonists from the Netherlands and Britain had adopted both the form and the name to describe, first, a temporary, and then a permanent, construction, with veranda and mud walls, located in an extensive compound, and used as a substantial tropical house. By the 19th century, and strongly influenced by prevailing health regimes, the colonial bungalow had become the characteristic house form of British colonial officials in the suburbs of Indian civil and military stations and increasingly adopted in other colonial regions in Africa and Southeast Asia. Meanwhile, in an increasingly industrialized Britain, surplus capital and expanding imperialism help to explain the transplantation of the idea of the “bungalow”, to the West. As a ­single-storey leisure-oriented house form, suitable for seaside and emerging suburban locations, it began to spread around the coast. In early 20th-century North America, a similar though smaller version was introduced as an inexpensive but popular dwelling for the rapidly expanding automobile suburbs of California and then more widely in the USA. Similar developments took place in Australasia. By the mid-20th century, “bungalow” had entered the architectural vocabulary of all seven continents, generally describing not only a single-storey dwelling but any small, sometimes temporary house by the seaside, in the suburbs or the country (King 1984). Similar methodological approaches to the study of the global history of specific building types have been used to document the economic, social and global production of the so-called grand hotel, a distinctive building type which, in contrast to its predecessor, the simple “hotel”, is distinguished by the extent of its architectural design, interior luxury and degree of technological innovation. Developing from the mid-19th century, the “grand hotel” was to become, at the fin de siècle, a link in the international spatial network for a global sociopolitical elite (King: 2016). Other frameworks appropriate for examining the interrelationship between globalization and architecture together can be explored by shifting the centre(s) from which global flows arise. One such flow would be the increasing inter-regional references within Asia, with Singapore as a new point of reference for cities in China, India and Indonesia, as explored by Ong and Roy in Worlding Cities (2011). Other global architectural flows are represented, not by “starchitects”, but by the informal housing and built forms of migrant communities, as discussed in Stephen Cairns’ Drifting (2004) and Mirjana Lozanovska’s Ethno-Architecture and the Politics of Migration (2016). In these case studies, I follow the historical periodization of Robert Adam in his monograph, The Globalization of Modern Architecture (2013) which traces the adoption of a European “modern” architecture as a distinctive style by countries all over the world. This distinguishes between “The First Great Globalization” on the one hand (around the end of the 19th century), and on the other, “The New Global Era” (following the end of the Cold War in 1989).

352

Architecture and Globalization

My final definition of “globalization” is probably the one that is most frequently used, namely the way goods and services, or social and cultural influences, “gradually become similar in all parts of the world” (Cambridge Dictionaries Online 2016). This is one widely used in relation to architecture and especially, to sustain a charge about the increasing homogenization of architecture worldwide. According to many commentators, this is an effect of globalization and is discussed in Section X below. It is also a view at least partially held by Adam, who compares “How globalization makes things the same” with “How globalization keeps things different” (2013: viii).

Imperialism and Globalization What has often been understated in the debate on globalization is the historical and also contemporary role of imperialism and colonialism in laying the foundations of the postimperial and globalized world. As Mark Crinson points out, “Imperialism has figured hazily, if at all, in most surveys of modern architecture” (2012: 2), and in After Tamerlane: the Global History of Empire (2007), historian John Darwin has argued that empires are the rule not the exception in world history. This is not just those of Europe and the USA but also earlier empires in Asia (Qing Chinese, Korean), Central and South America (Inca, Aztec), as well as what Salvatore (2009: 21) has called the “the three major Islamic empires of early modernity, the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal”, dynasties bringing specific religious beliefs and different forms of civilizational modernity in architecture, planning and urban design. Important here is the work of Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony (1989), who argued that the modern world economy had its roots, not in the 16th century, as often supposed, but in the 13th-century economy. Imperial regimes have their own distinctive institutions – of governance, defence, commerce, law, education, culture, civic and local administrations and the cities, buildings, spaces and architecture in which they were accommodated. These connections between globalization and architecture raise interesting questions about the origins of nations, states, identities and ethnicities, questions like those explored in Zeynep Celik’s comparative study of the urban and architectural modernization of the French colonies of the Maghrib (the French had occupied Algeria in 1830) and Ottoman Arab provinces in the Middle East (Celik 2008). Imperialism brings both similarities and differences. First are the spatial and architectural marks of conquest, of political and military power, the construction of barracks, parade grounds, cantonments, armouries, prisons, fortresses, shipyards and the distinctive cultural assumptions manifest in the buildings and spaces of social control (Chang 2016). The architecture of French colonial urbanism in Algeria may have features in common with colonial Vietnam just as British building laws in South Africa (occupied from 1815) have something in common with those in the West Indies (occupied from 1605) (Home 1997). Not only are the indigenous cultures and landscapes of the colonized very different but the cultures and practices of imperial power are equally so. Such political and cultural influences, of course, were part of a two, three- or four-way traffic. They were accommodated, resisted, adapted and transformed over time by a host of local agents (Yeoh 1996; Alsayyad 2000; Kusno 2000; Chattopadyay 2012; Hosagrahar 2012). Particularly significant in the study of French colonial urbanism are the innovative conceptual and theoretical tools which have been developed to illuminate the specificities of colonial architecture and urbanism. I refer here particularly to Paul Rabinow’s French Modern (1989) and Gwen Wright’s Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism (1991) and their notions of “techno-­ cosmopolitanism” (bottom-up approaches) and those of the top-down, “middling modernism” (for Rabinow) and including Wright’s distinguishing between the “architecture of assimilation” and “architecture of association”. These distinctions bring out the inherent conflicts in colonial architectural strategies and the colonial tendency to universalize and/or to localize architectural

353

Anthony D. King

and urban design paradigms. Tensions such as these open up ways of thinking about the instability of colonial power and the resistances, subaltern strategies, and also the “invention of tradition”. The most obvious “legacy of imperialism” is that of language. This partly explains why, years after colonial rule, of the 59 major international architectural firms with projects distributed all over the globe, 51 have offices in anglophone countries, principally in the USA, the UK, and Australia, but also in Ireland, Hong Kong, Canada and India (Adam 2013: 92–3). Facts such as these help to explain the nature of the collaboration and also the design outcomes in the developed and developing world and also the contribution of such firms to the cultural nous and economy of postimperial London.

History In the following sections, I shall use “globalization” to refer to a speeding up in worldwide ­inter-connectedness, tracing when the most recent instance of globalization occurred, under what circumstances, and with what urban and architectural consequences. In late 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall was to become one of the most significant political, economic and cultural transitions of the 20th century. Of enormous symbolic importance, it was to foretell the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Following a series of crises in the late 1980s, within a few years, the worldwide popularity of neoliberalism, the breaking down of protectionist economic policies and the acceleration in world trade (Davies 2005: 98–9; Adam 2013: 75) accompanied the demise and various fortunes of east European communist regimes. This collapse of the “Second World” meant that the metaphor of the “Three Worlds”, introduced around 1953, was now no longer valid. Combined with economic reforms easing China and India into global market capitalism, the introduction of the World Wide Web in 1991, the development of advanced information technology and the introduction of electronic trading in financial markets were all to give an economic and ideological boost to the world economy. Elsewhere in Asia, the globalization of architecture was partially due to not only the expansion of the economy and liberalized trade but also the downturn in the Euro-American construction market which drove Euro-American architects and architectural firms to pursue new markets in Southeast Asia (Clifford 1994). These were the conditions of the late 1980s and early 1990s which “globalization” came to describe (Adam 2013: 77). A space opened up in the global marketplace for new developments in London, marked by the “Big Bang” of 1986, and the crash in the following year in the capital’s deregulated Stock Exchange. These were all part of the “speeding up in worldwide connectedness” as trading conditions generally were liberalized (King 1990: 90–7). Other major developments were to occur, although this time in the realm of the urban. As Friedmann and Wolff (1982) were to spell out in one of the most influential urban research papers of the time, their investigation was into “the spatial articulation of the emerging world system of production and markets through a global network of cities”, particularly, “the principal urban regions in this network in which most of the world’s active capital comes to be concentrated” (1982, revised 1986). These were the “world cities” in formation, major sites for the concentration and accumulation of international capital”. Such “world cities” functioned as the command and control centres in the capitalist world economy – New York, London, Paris, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Chicago, Rio and elsewhere. The extensive architectural projects which were to develop at this time such as Kuala Lumpur’s Petronas Building by Cesar Pelli, Jakarta’s Wisma Dharmala by Paul Rudolph and others by Kohn, Pederson, Fox were all part of the highly competitive market relationships between these cities. Parallel to Friedmann’s and Wolff’s research was Sassen’s more focussed interest in what has come to be known as the “Global City”(1991) a term already in circulation but which Sassen was to appropriate for her book of the same title to describe the three principal global financial 354

Architecture and Globalization

centres of New York, London and Tokyo. These were the “highly concentrated command posts in the organisation of the world economy; key locations for finance and for specialised service firms (these having replaced manufacturing as the leading economic sectors); and as sites for the production of innovations and as markets for the innovations produced” (Sassen 1991: 3). These were the principal global – and also national – urban conditions in which architectural developments were to take place. Appearing one year before Sassen’s account, King’s monograph on Global Cities: Postimperialism and the Internationalisation of London (1990) took a different turn in that its main focus was on the capital city’s one-time imperial role and, with postcolonial connections worldwide, the degree to which that role continued. Attention was also paid to the economic, social, cultural and, not least, demographic characteristics of a distinctive post-imperial origin including – as discussed – the presence in London of professional networks and the offices of major architectural, planning, urban design and engineering firms around the world. What Adam refers to as the “New Global Era”, 1989–92, was to see a major outburst of research and writing, not only on global cities but also on the linked notion of global culture developing in cities, also in relation to architecture, planning and urban design: Featherstone et al.’s Global Culture (1990), King’s Global Cities (1990), Sassen’s The Global City (1991), King’s Culture, Globalization and the World-System (1991), Robertson’s Globalization (1992), Boulding’s Building a Global Civic Culture (1990), Featherstone, Lash and Robertson, eds. Global Modernities (1995), AbuLughod’s New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: America’s Global Cities (1999), Pieterse’s Globalization and Culture (2004) as well as numerous articles. This shift from national and international to global frameworks and perspectives about this time and the introduction of a new theoretical language of globalization (Robertson 1992) including notions of the glocal, glocalism and glocalization were akin to pulling the cork out of a bottle, releasing new energies and opening up different frameworks through which to view the modern multicultural urban world. Adam’s monograph on The Globalization of Modern Architecture (2013) provides an innovative account of these developments; its subtitle, The Impact of Politics, Economics, and Social Change on Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, reflects the author’s objective of providing an overview of developments in the world economy and polity and their impact on the production of its modern architecture. It is also a rare case where an architect and critic draws on the theoretical work of contemporary social scientists writing about the production of the built environment.

Iconic Buildings This shift in the design focus from the various modernist approaches of architectural design to that of a totally new paradigm of architecture as “big sculpture” has also inflated the role of the architect, giving rise to the notion of the “star architect” or “starchitect”, as applied to global architectural practitioners such as Frank Gehry, the late Zaha Hadid, Richard Rogers, Norman Foster, Rem Koolhaas, Jean Nouvel, the firms, Kohn, Peterson, Fox, and Skidmore, Owings and Merrrill and also others (McNeill 2009). These and other prominent names, all part of the media’s “celebrity culture”, have lent their brand value to architectural projects and therefore given them immediate recognition and status. To qualify for “star status”, according to Adam, an architect has to have a recognized, memorable building to her or his credit, be well known and also in practice. In addition, increasing modes of documentation including Web magazines and social media further increase the status of such global architects so that their recognition extends beyond the realms of architecture. The number of such star architects recognized in this way varies according to who is doing the counting. As Turraine (2002: 270) suggests, the speeding up in worldwide connectedness may well be a result of “the triumph of capitalism” but, in the realm of architecture, it is most evident in the 355

Anthony D. King

basic capitalist principle of competition. Nowhere is this more visible than in the incestuous notion of the “iconic building”. In this section, I draw selectively on Adam’s account (2013) to explore how the architecture of a single building was able to change the image, and then the economic fortunes, of a city. Though Paris’s Eiffel Tower is frequently mentioned, it is Sydney’s Opera House which has usually been deemed to have all the attributes of the iconic building – distinctiveness, instant recognition, difference, and its function as a symbol of city, country and continent. However, in more recent times, the Guggenheim Museum at Bilbao and its American architect, Frank Gehry, have taken over Sydney’s role, best illustrating what Adam calls the “definitive building” of the emerging “New Global Era”. In his opinion, “all subsequent attempts to transform the image and boost the reputation and incomes of cities by using the imagery of architecture would refer to this project” (Adam 2013: 160). In the late 1950s, Bilbao was a rundown industrial city in Southern Spain. Badly in need of a facelift to restore the city’s fortunes, internationally known architects such as Cesar Pelli and Norman Foster were commissioned to design various projects in the city. Of these, Gehry’s design for the new Guggenheim Museum turned out to be a major success; according to London architect, David Taylor, in 2009, the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum was to become “the single most influential building of the last twenty years” (Adam 2013: 163). The success of the Guggenheim project was to illustrate a number of strategic successes in regenerating the city. Among other things, it demonstrated the importance of the local, city-based economy and within this, the contribution of tourism in that economy, drawn there by spectacular architecture. It also demonstrated how culture could be used to “brand” the city and the value of involving prominent architects from around the world. The Guggenheim project became so famous that it became better known than the city it was designed to promote. The “Bilbao Effect” (Adam 2013: 162) has meant that other cities have followed suit, using spectacular designs by internationally known architects to regenerate economically rundown cities but not necessarily guaranteed to produce the required result. Here, the role of the “Starchitect” or “global architect” has been crucial. In the words of a prominent design magazine in 2003, “Cities are competing against each other for icons and are using international architects to drum up that “something different”. In Guangzhou, China, for instance, a striking new opera house designed by the late “starchitect”, Zaha Hadid, was built in 2011; in Baku, Azerbaijan, a crescent-shaped hotel, designed by Heerim Architects, a Korean company, was described as “a gateway between the past and present … and also the East and West”; in Shanghai, Pudong’s 230 high rise towers competed with Manhattan’s 289 (Adam 2013: 163–6). In some cases, there has been an over-saturation of such “iconic” buildings, as any image of the skyline would confirm. The unorthodox form of the Guggenheim Museum was to open the door for any bizarre shape that the three-dimensional digital modelling was able to produce. As Dutch architect, Rem Koolhaas, stated in 2002, “It is really unbelievable what the market demands (from architecture) now. It demands recognition … difference and … iconographic qualities … The icons were not for local consumption” and “(t)he established character of the place was not of any consequence” (Ibid. 167). The long-held assumption that architecture (and architects) should pay respect to a building’s surroundings in terms of materials, cultural context or climate disappeared. According to one British architect, “Each image has to be more extraordinary and shocking in order to eclipse the last. All new designs have to be instantly memorable, more iconic”. It was “a fatuous and self-indulgent game” (Graham Morrison in Adam 2013: 173). Nonetheless, the practice of “city branding” through the commissioning of special buildings is now a distinctive feature of the “New Global Era” (ibid.).

356

Architecture and Globalization

Globalization and Homogenization The first prerequisite for the success of iconic architecture is the enormous increase in visuality in the public realm with our daily exposure to and absorption of images, whether in television, film, print, billboard advertising, photography, CCTV, smartphones and electronic devices of every kind. Each day, inside or out, we are bombarded with images. There is rampant competition to attract our attention. In this context, it could be argued that, as a viewable architectural icon, the gigantic tower is always going to be superior to the most imaginative design. The iconic building (or its image) has always to be seen and its merits evaluated; with the tallest building, we need only to be informed how much higher it is than the competition. Building the tallest tower has therefore become a frequently chosen form of iconicity, not least because the skyline is often used as the most important symbol portraying that a country has “arrived on the scene” (King 2004: 4–5; Adam 2013: 229). There can only be, at any one time, one “tallest building in the world” (or “in the town”, “the country” or “the capital”), even if it only holds that status for a day. Moreover, building the tallest tower is also relatively uncomplicated. The only requirements are sponsors with limitless power, resources, materials, a site, technological know-how and the tools of measurement. Judging the most spectacular iconic building, on the other hand, without reference to height, makes more demands, not least in choosing the judges and agreeing on the criteria by which the iconic building should be judged. The idea of some or all things becoming or being made the same (which is how we define homogenization) can be understood in various ways. For example, imitating or copying can be viewed as a form of flattery, of admiration for that which is copied. As mimicry, however, it can also be mockery, in which case what is copied is deliberately distorted, or made fun of. Imitation can also be used to create an equivalence, whether between buildings, cities or cultures. In regard to the shape of buildings or particular styles of architecture, imitation implies that they are of equivalent architectural or aesthetic merit. From the viewpoint of the “creative” designer, homogenization is often criticized as simply copying, taking the originality away from a particular word or object. Yet homogenization in the sense of making things similar can also be a way of reducing social conflict and creating harmony. Homogeneity, therefore, is not necessarily or inherently “bad”.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have endeavoured to broaden the debate on the relationship between architecture and globalization, not least by questioning some basic assumptions. One of these assumptions is that the central issue of that debate concerns the question of identity. Identity is, of course, important. What gives a place its own particular identity? What makes it distinct – historically, culturally, socially, economically, and how does it respond to globalization? As Robertson puts it in a neat enigma, “the contemporary concern with civilisational and societal uniqueness … largely rests on globally diffused ideas” (1992: 130). Especially since the 1980s, increasing attention has shifted from visual design to environmental issues and the damage done by the use of fossil fuels. In a sophisticated interpretation of the architectural practice of critical regionalism, Adam (2013) shows how architects have become increasingly sensitive, not only in designing for a particular location, but also in taking their inspiration from what is present, adapting buildings to local climatic conditions, and being inspired by local features. Contextual urbanism is another architectural strategy for promoting sustainability, care for the environment and recognition of the local culture and climate. Here, globalization has been seen as a positive force, the principles requiring that “the identity, diversity and full potential of the community must be supported, spiritually, physically and visually … seeking to enhance local 357

Anthony D. King

character and heritage … while simultaneously responding to current-day needs” (Adam 2013: 251). Contextual urbanism is seen as “a distinct response … to the “homogenising effects of globalisation” (ibid. 255). Yet in recent years, in addition to issues of identity, there has been increasing criticism of globalization and especially the role of multinational corporations in that process. Saskia Sassen’s book, Expulsion: Brutality and Complexity in the World Economy (2014), provides a searing critique of today’s socio-economic and environmental dislocations, linked to the power of multinationals. Spelling out the economic realities of the deprived populations of the world, Sassen documents the increase in disparities between rich and poor in the global world, highlighting grotesque income inequalities, homelessness, the expulsion of people from their own countries, predatory capitalism, environmental degradation, fracking, surface oil extraction, global land grabs by corporations and the growth of multinational corporations with incomes larger than the states in which they exist. Unemployment, the growing population of the displaced and imprisoned, the elimination of jobs and expulsion of people from their own countries, a global market in land acquisition. The world’s ten biggest corporations make more money than most countries in the world combined. With the increasing growth of agribusiness, the wealth and power of corporations are at the heart of many of the world’s problems – inequality, tax avoidance, the exploitation of water resources and impoverishment of populations. In many cases, there is state support of multinational. These are the contexts in which architecture and globalization relate to each other in our time.

References Adam, R. (2013) The Globalization of Modern Architecture: The Impact of Politics, Economics and Social Change on Architecture and Urban Design Since 1990, Newcastle on Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Alsayyad, N. (2000) Hybrid Urbanism: On the Identity Discourse and the Built Environment, Westport, CT: Praegar. Boulding, E. (1990) Building a Global Civic Culture: Education for an Interdependent World, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Cairns, S. ed. (2004) Drifting: Architecture and Migrancy, London: Routledge. Cambridge Dictionaries Online (http://dictionary.Cambridge.org/dictionary. Accessed 13 April 2016). Celik, Z. (2008) Empire, Architecture and the City: French-Ottoman Encounters, 1830–1914, Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Chang, J-H. (2016) A Genealogy of Tropical Architecture: Colonial Networks, Nature and Technoscience, London: Routledge. Chattopadyay, S. (2012) “Urbanism, Colonialism, Subalternity”, in Edensor, T. and Jayne, M. (eds.). Urban Theory Beyond the West: A World of Cities, London: Routledge, pp.75–92. Clifford, M. (1994) “The Lure of Asia”, Far Eastern Economic Review, Feb 3, 1994, pp.32–34. Darwin, J, (2008) After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405, London: Allen Lane. Davies, D. (2005) “Cities in global context: a brief intellectual essay”, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 29, 1, pp.92–109. Featherstone, M. (ed.) (1990) Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity, London, Newbury Park and New Delhi: Sage. Featherstone, M., Lash, S., and Robertson, R. (eds.) (1995) Global Modernities, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi: Sage. Friedmann, J. and Wolff, G. (1982) “World City Formation: An Agenda for Research and Action”, International Journal for Urban and Regional Research, 6, 3, pp.309–44. Held, D., McGrew, A., Goldblatt, D., and Perraton, J., (1999) Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture, Cambridge: Polity. Home, R. (1997) Of Planting and Planning: The Making of British Colonial Cities, London: Spon. Hopkins, A. (ed.) (2002) Globalization in World History, London: Pimlico. Hosagrahar, J. (2012) “Interrogating Difference: Postcolonial Perspectives in Architecture and Urbanism”, in Crysler, C.G., Cairns, S., and Heynen, H. (eds.). The Sage Handbook of Architectural Theory, London, Thousand Oaks, CA, New Delhi and Singapore: Sage. pp.70–84.

358

Architecture and Globalization King, A.D. (1984) The Bungalow: The Production of a Global Culture, London: Routledge. King, A.D. (1990) Global Cities: Postimperialism and the Internationalisation of London, London: Routledge. King, A.D. (ed.) (1991) Culture, Globalization and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity, London: Macmillan and Binghamton: State University of New York at Binghamton (second, North American edition, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1997). King, A.D. (2004) Spaces of Global Cultures: Architecture Urbanism Identity, London: Routledge. King, A.D. (2016) Writing the Global City: Globalization, Postcolonialism and the Urban, London: Routledge. Kusno, A. (2000) Behind the Postcolonial: Architecture, Urban Space and Political Cultures in Indonesia, London: Routledge. Lozanovska, M. (ed.) (2016) Ethno-Architecture and the Politics of Migration, London: Routledge. McNeill, D. (2009) The Global Architect: Firms, Fame and Urban Form, London: Routledge. Ong, A, and Roy, A. (eds.) (2011) Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global, London: Wiley. Pieterse, J.N. (2004) Globalization and Culture, Lanham MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Robertson, R. (1992) Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture, London: Sage. Salvatore, A. (2009) “From Civilisations to Multiple Modernities: The Issue of the Public Sphere”, in Sadria, M. (ed.). Multiple Modernities in Muslim Societies, London: Aga Khan Award for Architecture/I.B.Tauris, pp.19–26. Sassen, S. (1991) The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sassen, S. (2014) Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Short, J.R. (2001) Global Dimensions: Space, Place and the Contemporary World, London: Reaktion Books. Touraine, A. (2002) “The New Capitalist Society”, in Ben-Rafael, E. and Sternberg, Y. (eds.) Identity, Culture and Globalization, Leiden: Brill, pp. 265–276. Yeoh, B. (1996) Contesting Space: Power Relations and the Urban Built Environment in Colonial Singapore, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

359

PART III

Innovations Introduction

Part III, “Innovations”, charts novel developments in design strategies, technologies, materials, production systems, and modes of thinking whose history is still in the making. It starts with a chapter by Annmarie Adams on “Architectural and Medical Innovation in Hospital Design”. The hospital’s relationship with technological innovation, and its role as an instrument of healing, is a consistent theme in the architectural history of hospitals. Arguing that hospital architecture is itself a medical technology, Adams explores three revolutionary processes that shaped both architecture and medicine: ventilation, surgical intervention, and democratization. In each case, she shows that the architectural form of the hospital shaped ways of healing and was in turn shaped by medical ideals, implemented by a collection of related architectural and medical technologies. In the late 19th century, doctors and architects worked together to improve the pavilion-plan hospital. Both professions believed that maximizing fresh air would mitigate the spread of infection. After World War I, surgical suites in block-plan hospitals attracted patients for surgery. The surgical suite displaced the earlier surgical amphitheater, as surgery became more dependent on complex preparations and recovery. Postwar hospitals democratized healthcare through architectural design that expressed universality and accessibility. The end of the century saw the de-­ institutionalization of hospitals, especially in mental health. This architectural history of hospitals by Adams serves as a useful window on the history of medicine, with both doctors and architects contributing to the evolution of this ubiquitous building type. Since the close of the 19th century, the harnessing of electrons to produce electricity and light brought about radical new circumstances for architecture and associated media. Mitchell Schwarzer’s chapter “Electric City Land: Architecture and Media” examines the illumination technologies and associated buildings/sites that have carried forth this creation of a brilliant nocturnal built world. Attention focuses on the period from the 1980s to present, the era of outdoor electronic billboards, media-façades, and the now-ubiquitous and yet considerably varied displays of computer-controlled imagery displayed with digital, light-emitting-diodes (LEDs). Schwarzer distinguishes the network nature of electric illumination from the more site-oriented characteristics of media incorporated into architecture. Following this, Schwarzer looks into contemporary developments in the history of electric light display. He shows that the LED and its contemporary architectural manifestations at the turn of the 21st century grew out of earlier experiments with incandescent light bulbs and other devices to turn the walls and skins of buildings into something

DOI: 10.4324/9781315674469-24

Innovations

mutable, mobile, colorful, and, perhaps most of all, integrated into far larger media transmissions of power and information. Blaine Brownell’s chapter “Divergent Matter: The Problematic Search for Material Suitability in Architecture” examines the ever-shifting conflict between the concept of material suitability and its resulting applications in building construction – a productive tension that exemplifies the troubled search for contemporary architectural expression. It covers critical 20th- and 21st-­century developments including tectonic culture, mutant materiality, surface architecture, and material experimentation with a consideration of current debates and future implications regarding material use and meaning. The concepts of material suitability and honesty in material expression have long been common themes in architectural circles. These notions profoundly shaped the modern architectural project, inspiring, for example, Le Corbusier’s advocacy of material selection in the context of current technologies and Adolf Loos’ privileging of natural material expression over traditional ornament. Over time, advances in technology have delivered new material capabilities, and the adoption of these capabilities, in turn, influences material processing technologies. Material resources have also been in constant flux, with mercurial cultural preferences determining the popularity of particular materials and their commercial viability. By tracing the evolution of material thinking in architecture from the 19th century to today, Brownell argues that material technology has been a moving target, and material suitability has been limited by the particularities of its context. Differing conditions in different housing markets can create varied industry responses. Not all societies’ housebuilding industry is well-adapted to the local business environment. With a population slightly less than double that of the UK, for example, Japan builds almost six times the number of new housing units each year. James Barlow and Ritsuko Ozaki’s chapter “Building Mass Customized Housing through Innovation in the Production System” addresses the way Japanese housebuilders have developed innovative approaches to supplying highly customized housing. It draws on notions of “path dependency” to explore the evolution of Japan’s large-scale industrialized housing suppliers, the way they have differentiated themselves from local suppliers, and their possible future evolution. The chapter first outlines how structural conditions influence the business strategies adopted by housebuilders in general. It then considers the evolution of the Japanese mass customized housebuilding industry, the innovations it has introduced across its production system, and how these have been shaped by the structural conditions within which the industry operates. Barlow and Ozaki argue that the emergence of the mass customized suppliers was a unique response to the structure and condition of the Japanese housing market and its social circumstances in a period of rapid economic growth. The flexibility of local builders in terms of design and planning – and their local connections, especially in rural areas – is a huge advantage in the competition. The interaction and competition between large industrialized firms and small local traditional builders has helped the evolution of the industry. The verb “aided” in computer-aided design (CAD) is not always intransitive to a computer in digital architecture. There were times when the boundary between designing and computing was more permeable, and designer-aided computation prevailed. Rizal Muslimin’s chapter “The Programmable Architect” traces the way in which architecture had been embedded with digital traits long before the invention of the electrical computer. He suggests that part of architectural design was derived from a discrete-state thinking. As such, architectural design is not only computable, but the way in which an architect perceives the architectural problem is also programmable. Construed as calculating with discrete units, digital operation progressed in architecture through different embodiments, from human-computer to electrical-computer, and from visual to symbolic programming. Muslimin revisits a number of pivotal moments when digital thinking profoundly altered architecture design. He reviews the dawn of algorithmic design reasoning during the Renaissance, from around the 1400s to 1700s, prior to the invention of the first machine in 362

Innovations

1804. He then discusses the implications of Alan Turing’s vision of his universal discrete-states machine from the 1950s to the 1970s. He also explores the limits of thinking digitally by contrasting how machines and humans compute design differently and similarly. He suggests that recent developments such as machine learning in processing big data via social media and digital sensing will not replace the architect’s role, but rather reconfigure and expand it to facilitate a new kind of professional engagement that could solve complex issues in our built environment inventively. Climatic and ecological changes are already occurring and will continue to in the future, which will have significant negative impacts on human society. Given that these changes are largely caused by humans and in part by the built environments they create, part of a logical response may be to consider how buildings and urban areas can address the drivers of negative environmental changes. Maibritt Pedersen Zari’s chapter “Biomimicry for Sustainable and Regenerative Architecture” suggests that because of the global decline in the provision of most ecosystem services, the built environment must become “regenerative” and move towards providing resources and services. The practical task of how to create such built environments or enable them to evolve must be considered, particularly given the scarcity of built examples that are able to reach even a “neutral” status in terms of environmental impact. The chapter explores whether biomimicry could make a contribution to such an aim, and by devising a categorization system, explores which kinds of biomimicry may be more likely to result in increased ecological performance of the built environment. Pedersen Zari shows that while biomimicry is often described as a tool to increase the sustainability of human-designed products, materials, and the built environment, many biomimetic technologies or materials, however, are not inherently more sustainable than conventional equivalents. Ecosystem-based biomimicry may be the most effective kind of biomimicry to employ in moving towards a regenerative paradigm for built environments, but this is also the least explored aspect of biomimicry in built form. Marcos Cruz’s chapter “Design for Ageing Buildings: An Applied Research of Poikilohydric Living Walls” explores ways to increase vegetative growth in architecture, responding to the urgency of the current climate crisis by improving the environmental quality of cities. It investigates ways to promote self-regulated biological systems directly on building façades, infrastructures and walls, integrating poikilohydric species (algae, mosses, lichens) that switch on and off their photosynthetic activity without the need for additional mechanical irrigation and maintenance, thus creating a new design aesthetic for ageing buildings. Bioreceptive cementitious materials and novel fabrication processes were rigorously tested to increase water absorption and retention in order to form bio-material substrata that feed new types of living walls. Cruz reports on a seven-year project focusing on an applied research of poikilohydric living walls, which has been carried out in three phases that reflect different types of material explorations (MPC, Porous TecCast, Corkcrete) and applications (EPSRC-funded study, St Anne’s and East Putney, Merchiston Park). Qualitative and quantitative results were achieved via long-term observational studies of components and panels, indoors and outdoors; multiple substrate and material tests; and bacteriological and plant growth in the lab. The research demonstrates that the natural weathering process of buildings can be used as an effective planning strategy to encourage the proliferation of cryptogamic surface cover in cities, offering a long-term carbon offset for the initial carbon footprint of cementitious materials. This self-regulated greening process not only embellishes but also contributes through its poikilohydry to a more sustainable built environment. Using the New York High Line as an exemplary realization, Antoine Picon’s chapter “Nature, Infrastructure, and Cities” explores the changing relations between nature, infrastructure, and cities. Whereas infrastructure used to be located within nature, Picon suggests, it now appears as supportive of nature in multiple circumstances. This is especially the case in urban environments which have become a pervasive planetary reality today. This supportive character was already at stake in 19th-century realizations like Haussmannian Parisian plantations or Frederick Law 363

Innovations

Olmstead urban parks, which has intensified since then. Discussing the relation between nature and infrastructure in the contemporary urban context, Picon also relates projects like the High Line and the Seoul Cheonggyecheon river park to a change in our understanding of nature. In contemporary culture, nature is more and more often interpreted as fundamentally informational and event-based. The rise of the notion of emergence in discourses about nature is emblematic of this transformation. This event-based nature is threatened by human activities while having become in many instances inseparable from it to the point that one often refers to a “techno-nature” in order to convey this inseparable character. The High Line epitomizes this complex relation between the natural and artificial by fictionalizing it. Picon argues that gardens and parks not only bring nature to cities; they also fictionalize it. They tell us stories that may prove by the end closer to the truth than mere attempts to be realistic.

364

22 Architectural and Medical Innovation in Hospital Design Annmarie Adams

The 20th-century hospital is a significant site of architectural and medical innovation. To quote sociologist Lindsay Prior’s often-cited paper of 1988, “hospital plans are essentially archaeological records which encapsulate and imprison within themselves a genealogy of medical knowledge” (Prior 1988: 93). Hospital architects have pioneered, for example, ventilation and circulation systems, alongside medical colleagues who have commandeered the rise of safe surgery, antibiotics, and a host of other interventions that have revolutionized healthcare. Philosopher Michel Foucault has made us all aware of the link between the organization of institutions and structures of knowledge (Foucault 1965; Foucault 1977). The hospital’s relationship with technological innovation, and its own role as an instrument of healing (machine à guérir), is a consistent theme in the architectural history of hospitals. Does architecture shape medicine or does medicine shape architecture? My own position is that hospital architecture is itself a medical technology, accommodating and shaping modern medicine in dynamic interplay (Adams, Schwartzman and Theodore 2008: 912). This is in contrast to a traditional medical history that posits hospital architecture as an illustration (rather than evidence) of medical progress. Historian of medicine Guenter B. Risse says, for example, “Hospitals have always mirrored the collective values of their sponsors, staffs, and patients,” granting no agency whatsoever to their designers (Risse 1999: 677). Prior, like me, sees medicine and architecture in dynamic relation: The construction of children’s wards, for example, correlate with the rise of the child as a focus of medical practice; the birth of the asylum with the invention of madness; and the emergence of the Pavilion hospital with the diffusion of miasmic theories of disease. (Prior 1988: 93) Adrian Forty treads carefully, but calls for more research on the role of architects: “This lack of any clear causal relationship between scientific discovery and an innovation in building form suggests that more attention should be given to the motives of those who controlled hospitals than to the development of science” (Forty 1980: 61). In the interests of explaining this position over a century and bringing clarity to a very ­complex building type, this contribution focuses on three revolutionary processes different from Prior’s above-mentioned examples in the history of the 20th-century hospital, inspired by diverse ­healing technologies over about 100 years: ventilation, surgical intervention, and access to healthcare, finishing with the dissolution of the hospital or deinstitutionalization. In each case, the architectural

DOI: 10.4324/9781315674469-25

365

Annmarie Adams

form of the hospital shaped ways of healing and in turn was shaped by medical ideals, implemented by a collection of related architectural and medical technologies.

Ventilation Throughout the 19th century and into the 1930s, natural ventilation was the major factor that shaped hospital architecture. This is most evident in the hospital type known as the pavilion plan, which was a way to organize, separate, and categorize patients in buildings constantly flushed with fresh air. Built across and beyond the British Empire and largely inspired by the experiences of nursing reformer Florence Nightingale, the pavilion-plan hospital was constructed in India, Persia, Russia, Australia, Canada, and the United States. Architectural historian Jiat-Hwee Chang has interpreted the Singapore General Hospital, for example, as “the compensatory display of sovereign power that, together with the colonial rituals and spectacles, symbolized the colonial state’s commitment to the health and welfare of the native population” (Chang 2010: 139). Pavilion-plan hospitals were most often located on the edges of cities, or in a location associated with abundant fresh air, and comprised of nearly freestanding pavilions, minimally connected by bridges, walkways, and tunnels, which maximized natural ventilation and daylight (Adams 2008: 2, 6). They were often oriented on a north–south axis. A pavilion for administration was almost always at the center of the site, sometimes offering opportunities for surveillance but also expressing the complex and powerful bureaucracies required to organize staff and treat the patients during this time period. This central administrative pavilion served as a spatial hub, linking pavilions for patients in bed with rooms for special functions, such as surgery and the isolation of contagious diseases. These pavilions for patients had as their core the open or Nightingale ward, an unobstructed rectangular space designed to house large numbers of patients and to discourage the spread of infection by maximizing ventilation (Figure 22.1). Such wards resembled military barracks, which had been the focus of Nightingale’s experience from the Crimean War. In barracks and hospital wards, 30 to 40 beds were evenly spaced along a long wall with a regular rhythm of large windows. Doors along a short wall connected to a primary circulation spine that linked all wards and contained space for storage and services. The other short wall, in most instances facing south, defined a sun porch or some other outdoor area (Adams 2008: 2). Architects also located sun porches to take advantage of good views or prevailing breezes. Nurses were often

Figure 22.1  Royal Victoria Hospital, Montreal, typhoid ward. Courtesy: McGill University Health Centre.

366

Architectural and Medical Innovation

positioned at the interior, in the short end of the ward, at a desk, or sometimes in a special observation or monitoring room that looked onto the ward, allowing for general surveillance. Wards were dead-end spaces, offering no access to other rooms. Toilets were often in adjacent towers. Such cul-de-sac spaces presumably also offered nurses a sense of real control over these significant interior spaces, unrivaled, I would suggest, by subsequent hospital types. While we associate the pavilion-plan hospital with Victorian-era architecture—it became the standard in Britain after 1860 (Steadman 2014: 58)—the type was constructed long after 1900. This ventilation-driven hospital typology is often erroneously connected exclusively with the miasma theory of contagion, the theory that was popular just before the development of the germ theory, which purported that illnesses spread through bad smells (Prior 1988: 97). But even following the development of germ theory in the 1870s, it was still believed that abundant amounts of fresh air reduced the possibility of contagion. Well into the 1930s, the pavilion-plan hospital continued to be built according to the accepted hospital plans established in the 19th century by Florence Nightingale and highly specialized architects. And specialized hospitals for tuberculosis or other lung ailments continued to feature porches and natural ventilation well after the advent of antibiotics that cured these diseases (Adams, Schwartzman and Theodore 2008: 942). It is indeed one of the key attributes of hospital design that the cultural expectations of earlier healing technologies continue to shape the design of the building type even after their apparent usefulness (Adams, Schwartzman and Theodore 2008). “This architecture proved a lasting symbolic presence for ­physicians, surgeons, public health officials, and patients – even after the successes of chemotherapy, the first therapy to directly and specifically target the tubercle bacillus, augured the end of specialized ­t uberculosis-treatment settings” (Adams, Schwartzman and Theodore 2008: 913). Ventilation was what made the pavilion-plan hospital a machine à guérir. Hospital architects studied, debated, and designed innovative ventilation systems for fresh and artificial air, heating, and air-conditioning. The challenge was to surround each ward patient with fresh air when inside the hospital, to protect him or her from other patients and to prevent the wide spread of disease. Archival photos attest to the custom of opening all the windows in hospital wards of about 1900, in an effort to flush away vitiated air and germs and separate patients from each other in what must have seemed like a bubble of fresh air, even during cold winter months. We know this ­because wards were often photographed during the Christmas holidays, and for the most part show ­w indows open. Complex systems of tubes, hidden in the walls like plumbing, sucked out bad air and spewed it upward and outward (Adams 2008: 23). Sophisticated heating technologies warmed up air from outside in hospital basements and took advantage of its propensity to rise for its transport to the wards upstairs (Adams 2015). Architectural historian Alistair Fair has shown how hospital architects approached ventilation in an experimental way, learning from each precedent to improve the next iteration (Fair 2014). Pavilion-plan architects were familiar with the plans of many hospitals and worked in this iterative way generally, as Jeremy Taylor has shown, improving on the building type with each new hospital (Taylor 1997). Many Victorian hospital architects produced massive books on the subject, wrote descriptive and argumentative pieces for the influential architectural press, and traveled widely to see and discuss and show off new hospital designs (Taylor 1997: 8–9). By far the most comprehensive book publication was Henry Burdett’s four-volume Hospitals and Asylums of the World, 1892, which included plans of every London hospital in 1887 drawn to scale. Burdett was also the owner and editor of the influential journal The Hospital. In that periodical and others like it, architects showcased new hospital designs, allowing readers to undertake easy comparisons between and among the various floor plan arrangements and details. Evidence of the deep interest in the topic is the feisty debates that played out in the British architectural press, especially around the merits of forced or artificial ventilation versus natural ventilation (Taylor 1997: 47–60). The design and construction of the windowless wards of the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast, 367

Annmarie Adams

1900–03—what Reyner Banham called a “illogical and wasteful solution because the whole hygienic motivation for the use of separate pavilions had been to promote good natural ventilation between windows and other openings on sides of relatively tall narrow buildings” (Banham 1969: 76–7)—was a landmark architectural moment in this regard, as an early example of an artificially ventilated building. Its plan differed radically from other pavilion-plan hospitals, in that the wards were located next to each other, with no space between, almost like a warehouse. These had windows along their short ends and also relied on clerestory windows for daylight. Also distinctive was the absence of any coherent landscape plan. The Royal Victoria Belfast did not see many imitators. Doctors and architects collaborated on improving the pavilion-plan model, especially around issues in ventilation. Engaging a process that foreshadows today’s dependence on “evidence-based design” for hospitals, Victorian doctors and architects deliberated the appropriate volume of air space around each patient, measured for the most part by the distance between beds, the heights of ward ceilings, and the relationship between windows and beds. Several doctor–architect partnerships, for example, co-wrote texts on the subject of hospital design, publishing their views on the appropriate volumes of air. Henry Saxon Snell co-authored Hospital Construction and Management with physician John Mouat in 1883, purportedly the first textbook on the subject written in English (Stevenson 1993: 1511). Other physicians who were extraordinarily involved in the design of hospitals include Thomas Story Kirkbride, whose surname graces an entire type of psychiatric hospitals (Yanni 2007), and John Billings and John Niernsee at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, a particularly influential pavilion-plan hospital in the United States (Kisacky 2017: 173). Other game-changing hospitals would include Alfred Waterhouse’s University College Hospital (1897–1905) in London, England, which illustrated how the pavilion plan could occupy a crowded urban site, and the Rigshospital (1911) in Copenhagen. The Rigshospital innovated the pavilion-plan hospital type with wards that grouped three to four beds behind closed curtains within open space, foreshadowing the arrival of private patient rooms that occurred a decade later in the block-plan hospital (Kisacky 2017: 223–4). Single rooms would become the norm in North America by about 1980, as part of the rise of so-called patient-centered care. The design of hospital landscapes also contributed to the push for maximizing fresh air. Parklike surroundings encouraged patients not only to venture out on the sun porches at the ends of Nightingale wards, but also to ambulate as part of the recovery process. Victorian hospitals, for example, often included a range of landscape features such as gardens for perambulation, orchards, forested areas, pathways, and later in the century, swimming pools and tennis courts. Such ­landscape features were also appreciated by hospital staff, especially nurses, who lived in ­general hospitals until the 1970s. This emphasis on picturesque landscaping, however, ended rather abruptly in the interwar period, with the wide embrace of automobiles and the need for on-site hospital parking, an issue that continues to vex hospital design today. Sadly, the ubiquitous hospital corridor replaced the picturesque garden as a place for patients to ambulate, making the hospital stay a wholly “interior” experience after World War II.

Intervention (Surgery) Just prior to World War I and during the interwar period, the block-plan hospital usurped the ­pavilion-plan hospital as a model of cutting-edge design. Block-plan hospitals were compact, multi-story, and often contained in a singular rectangular volume, as the name implies. Gone were the stretching peninsular wards of the Nightingale hospital. For a couple of decades, h ­ ospitals ­featured cubicles made of glass partitions as a way of separating patients (Prior 1988: 97). Such buildings resembled dignified civic buildings such as schools and city halls. Wrapped in conservatively styled exteriors, new hospitals nevertheless contained state-of-the-art interiors and 368

Architectural and Medical Innovation

were built using modern construction methods and materials, such as reinforced concrete (Adams 1999). This paralleled concerns about acoustic privacy, fireproofing, and air quality that also shaped other public buildings during this time, such as schools and prisons. Furthermore, hospitals in this period were made to look luxurious in order to attract private patients. For example, they featured private rooms with accommodations for attending servants; patient rooms had fine furniture, call buttons, telephones, window views, and a host of features that mirrored the lifestyles wealthy patients might have at home; such hospitals also included spacious lobbies made of fine finishes, with luxurious furniture, and they also anticipated the arrival of patients and staff by automobile. In such ways, hospital architecture echoed residential and hotel architecture, including the utopian and escapist features we associate with hotels. This inclusion of upscale architectural features from domestic and hotel design sent a message to paying patients that the hospital was worth supporting, and as a result, middle-class and aristocratic patients opted to be admitted to hospitals, rather than be treated in their homes. In this way, hospital architecture of the 1920s functioned as an explicit tool of marketing, rather than of medicine per se. An especially alluring feature of the interwar hospital, and the second technology showcased in this contribution, is the appearance of the so-called surgical suite in the interwar hospital. In the early 20th century, antiseptic surgery is cited as one of the main reasons patients came to ­hospitals (Rosenberg 1987: 144). Surgical suites in block-plan hospitals differed dramatically from the ­surgical environments commonly included in pavilion-plan hospitals, in that they were clusters of function-inspired rooms (Figure 22.2), replacing the monumental and singular amphitheaters. As early as 1918, the preeminent hospital architect Edward F. Stevens asserted in his classic book The American Hospital of the Twentieth Century, “The day of the amphiteatre in the modern hospital, as an operating unit for teaching, seems to have gone” (Stevens 1918: 58). The switch from the surgical amphitheater to the surgical suite signaled a new public image for the general hospital. Whereas Victorian surgical amphitheaters were visible from the exterior of the hospital—they were often located on the edges of the site—the interwar surgical suite was embedded in a regular floor or ward, relatively invisible to passersby on the street or in the landscape (Adams in Schlich: 2018). The surgical suite was thus fully interiorized in this period—swallowed up by the hospital plan—and the special status of surgery was manifested through the subdivision of rooms and arrangement of function-specific rooms, rather than in the size of space occupied by surgery or its prominence in the hospital’s overall massing. In other words, the power of the surgical suite transformed from an earlier emphasis on the surgeon’s performance. In other words, the power of the surgical suite was to express the multiple and careful procedures necessary to perform modern surgery. For example, a typical interwar surgical suite designed by Edward F. Stevens’ firm would include the following spaces: dark room,

Figure 22.2  R  oss Memorial Pavilion, Royal Victoria Hospital, Montreal, fifth floor plan, from Stevens (1918), p. 54.

369

Annmarie Adams

X-ray room, plaster room, anesthetic room, ear and eye room, surgeons’ washroom, sterilizing room, instrument room, and nurses’ room, in addition to the requisite operating rooms. This separation from the wards ensured that the surgeon could “withdraw to this special space of control, where things can be separated and ordered and all distracting influences are shut out” (Schlich 2007: 234). In the cases of both the Victorian and interwar surgical spaces, then, the architecture enhanced the “prestige” of the surgeon. On the one hand, the surgical amphitheater did so by its size, location, accessibility, and legibility from the street. The surgical suite, on the other hand, did so by its architectural precision, with each room especially keyed to the steps necessary for safe, modern surgery. “Surgeons, like scientists, derive much of their power from the settings in which they work,” says medical historian Thomas Schlich (Schlich 2007: 237). Other purpose-built architecture for professionals with “special powers” is closely linked to those who use the spaces: courtroom, church, battlefield (Adams 2018). In the case of the interwar surgical suite (and beyond), the power of the 20th-century surgeon was closely associated with the surgical table and its powerful light. The special light fixture above the table, which offered bright and focused light, totally controlled by the surgeon, was but one feature of a larger “logic of control” (Adams and Schlich 2006: 319) specified by surgeons for their architectural surroundings. While architects like Edward F. Stevens preferred to design surgeries flooded by daylight, surgeons preferred the precisely controlled lighting that especially designed fixtures could give them. Not surprisingly, artificial lighting was considered more “scientific” than natural lighting (Adams 2008: 105–6). “Since the success of the operating surgeon depends to some extent on his dexterity, great attention should be paid to the quality and quantity of the light which pervades the operating room.” Control of the surgeon’s working environment was the first priority because “with human life at stake on every operating table in every hospital in the country, the best working conditions possible for operating surgeons are imperative” (“Natural daylight”: 36). Just as when we frame a special picture for display, we call attention to its subject and its significance, highly customized spaces like surgical suites in hospitals promoted the profession of medicine, by elevating the prestige of physicians. Designing elaborate rooms for the various steps for surgery, in this same way, spatialized the technological processes necessary for safe surgery in the interwar decades. Such room layouts choreographed modern surgery, illustrating Thomas Markus’ assertion that “Buildings house bodies in space doing purposeful things” (Markus 1993: 21). By the mid-20th century, spaces for operating are fully interiorized to “avoid all external influence on the working conditions inside the operating rooms” (Donzé 2004: 113).

Access to Healthcare In countries with universal medicare, such as Canada (1961 onward) and Great Britain (1948 onward), the postwar period was the era of the heroic public hospital, visible from a great distance, contributing to the distinctive skylines of large metropolitan areas, and monumental in both its aspirations and its footprint. But even as early as the 1930s, massive Art Deco urban hospitals occupied many city blocks, foreshadowing the “hospitals district” of later decades. Zoning ordinances in cities like New York meant that hospital massing stepped back dramatically from the street in order not to block daylight from streets, providing architects with opportunities to stack and combine medical specialties in creative combinations. Hospital mergers, too, meant that these hospitals were large in terms of the number of beds and generous accommodations for the growing number of medical specialties, many of which required special equipment for diagnosis and treatment. Many older hospitals, too, added modernist towers to their existing infrastructure in the 1950s and 1960s. Some of these looked like great white curtains, rising 370

Architectural and Medical Innovation

behind or in the midst of Victorian-era hospital campuses. In countries with national health coverage, such growth responded to the accessibility of the institution, but also expressed in architectural terms how the hospital was a corporation, following many of the same guidelines as modern businesses. Post-World War II hospitals offered far fewer benefits to their urban contexts than had the sprawling pavilion plans in magnificent, parklike settings. While block-plan hospitals of the ­interwar decades had looked like schools or city halls, hospitals after World War II echoed the forms of nearby office buildings, emphasizing verticality and efficiencies of labor. These isolated hospital towers were characterized by their minimal decoration, neutral colors, flat roofs, vertical circulation, controlled ventilation, and standardized floor plans. Huge parking lots, including multi-level parking garages, surrounded most postwar hospital buildings, replacing the parklike settings of earlier hospitals. Despite its resemblance to corporate skyscrapers, the architecture of the postwar tower hospital expressed a total democratization of healthcare. Its non-hierarchical architecture screamed equal access and good health for all, described by Jonathan Hughes as “a symbolic form expressive of the modernity of the healthcare to be found within” (Hughes 2000: 21). For example, the postwar hospital no longer sported separate entrances for paying and non-paying patients, as was common in the interwar era. Everybody used the main entrance. Although even in universal healthcare systems some patients could still pay extra for private rooms, there was a narrower range of difference in patients’ rooms in the postwar period. Hospital rooms thus became universalized, with railed beds, metal furniture, perhaps an armchair for a visitor, and a single window. Most hospital rooms in the postwar era in North America would include a bathroom for the occupants. Wide, long hospital corridors, with railings along the wall to aid in perambulation, were a signature feature of these buildings, with nurses’ stations located near the elevators, another important point of contact in the institution. The hospital’s bank of elevators and associated waiting spaces, as in high-rise office buildings, also became a significant meeting point for staff and patients, especially for the exchange of medical information. Elevators often opened directly onto nurses’ stations, the postwar equivalent to the lone nurse surveying her patients from a desk at the head of the Nightingale ward. The democratization of healthcare in the postwar hospital is legible in the elevations of these hospital towers, where repetitive windows and floors expressed the “everybody is equal” philosophy of universal healthcare (Figure 22.3). Every patient room had a window, often inoperable, which provided view and light if not fresh air. Many postwar hospitals were built on a so-called racetrack plan, whereby services and storage occupied windowless rooms in the center of the plan and patients’ rooms were on the outside of the corridor, which served as the “racetrack,” presumably for nurses and other healthcare providers to race around. Beyond this innovative planning, postwar hospital architects also experimented with the building’s section. In the 1960s, huge urban expansion projects were constructed in Europe as a response to the obsolescence of pre-World War II hospitals. These hospitals were conceptualized according to the “matchbox on a muffin” type, whereby patient towers sat atop a podium of hightech services (Hughes 2000: 33–5). This formal arrangement allowed for change to happen at the ground floor where it was frequently needed, while the upper floors were left undisturbed. This idea likely originated in another health-related building, the Salk Institute of Biological Studies (1960–62, Louis Kahn) in La Jolla, California, wherein a flexible service floor located between patient levels allowed for infinite flexibility and expansion. The system became a popular model for acute-care hospitals in England, Canada, and the United States. One of the first prominent examples of this interstitial system was the Health Sciences Centre (1966–72, Craig, Zeidler, and Strong) at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, touted by celebrated architectural theorist Reyner Banham as the “ultimate medical megastructure” (Banham 1976: 139, as cited in Strickland 2012: 4). 371

Annmarie Adams

Figure 22.3  Advertisement for Clerk windows, from Canadian Hospital (May 1956), p. 55.

Patients in the postwar hospital, not surprisingly, came from a broader swath of society than in the interwar period. Medicare and the National Health Service in England meant that poor, sick people were looked after, but also normal life events such as childbirth, which had always taken place at home, were by the postwar period absorbed into the hospital. Home births had been inconvenient for physicians, eating up valuable time and making it challenging to transport heavy equipment. Maternity wards in postwar hospitals centralized experts and equipment, offered custom aseptic delivery rooms, and kept husbands and other children out of the way. Hospital 372

Architectural and Medical Innovation

obstetrics also allowed experts to keep careful records, leading to a medical model of “normal” birth (Adams 2008: 49). A further democratization of the hospital came from the pharmaceutical revolution of the ­m id-20th century. In particular, the advent of antibiotics revolutionized medicine and led to the eradication or near-eradication of diseases which had long plagued patients (Greene, Condrau, Watkins 2016). Relatedly, the advent of drugs such as antibiotics meant that patients could be released from hospital much earlier than previously, when the risk of infections had been deadly. Needless to say, in principle this freed up hospital space for other conditions. The pharmaceutical revolution also diversified the sites of medical care. For example, for certain conditions doctors would see patients in offices, give them prescriptions as therapies, and expect them to follow through at home, making the hospital experience completely unnecessary. This period of intense democratization in the urban, general hospital was followed by intense deinstitutionalization in specialized hospitals for psychiatry. Nineteenth-century asylums, as they were called, had been massive institutions, isolated from urban centers and surrounded by high walls. Female and male patients in the asylum were housed in hospital wards that were mirror images in plan, with ubiquitous corridors that were sometimes so long they accommodated tiny train systems in order to deliver food and supplies to rooms that might be miles apart. The therapeutic benefits of such hospitals were notably unscientific from today’s perspective, including isolation, fresh air, regular food, and physical exercise. The large scale of some of these hospitals would suggest that healthcare was anything but individualized, that patients were treated like numbers and in some cases even housed like prisoners, including bars on windows. As architectural historian Leslie Topp has explained, a major challenge for architects of psychiatric hospitals in the early 20th century was to redesign the institutions so that patients could move freely, but still be safely contained within the limits of the place (Topp 2017). The 20th-century rise of psycho-pharmaceuticals for mental illness saw the release of huge numbers of patients who had previously been hospitalized and the rise of the so-called “day hospital” (Figure 22.4). The first psychiatric day hospital in the world was at the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal in 1946, under the administration of Ewen Cameron. The concept of outpatient care rose steadily during the 20th century, resulting in a huge percentage of psychiatric patients being discharged in the final two decades. The result was the closure and abandonment of many large mental health facilities. Today, mental health clinics are often “invisible,” located in community buildings or embedded in building types designed for other purposes. Whether or not this invisible architecture helps or hinders the continuing social stigma of mental health is an open question. When large-scale North American psychiatric hospitals began to shut down in the 20th ­­century—as part of a large and complex process of deinstitutionalization—the urge for homier and smaller facilities became strong. After World War II, communities built new hospitals that contrasted their predecessors in almost every way. The big idea was integration, rather than separation. While earlier hospitals had been large and on the edge of cities, new hospitals were smaller and located in the heart of cities. While the older ones, as we have seen, had emphasized ventilation and access to nature, new mental health facilities were artificially ventilated and were sometimes even contained within the limits of large urban general hospitals. In Montreal, for example, a famous home even became a psychiatric hospital. The 1863 dwelling of business magnate Sir Hugh Allan, Ravenscrag, had been a sumptuous 72-room mansion located on Mount Royal, with a magnificent view of the city and the Saint-Lawrence River. It became the department of psychiatry for the adjacent Royal Victoria Hospital in 1940. Experimental architecture in the post-World War II period also pointed to the hospital as a form of utopia. American architect Paul Nelson designed an extraordinary building in Saint-Lo, France, in 1954, including extensive outpatient facilities and egg-shaped operating rooms (Riley and Abram 1990). In the Canadian prairies, architect Kiyoshi Izumi was in charge of hospital 373

Annmarie Adams

Figure 22.4  “Activity is Emphasized in Modern Mental Hospital,” Montreal Star, May 7, 1957, p. 31.

renovations. Izumi (and several psychiatrists) famously took hallucinogenic drugs in order to experience the disorientation associated with schizophrenia. The resulting architecture was classic 1960s utopian design, with continuing associations with the home. The Yorkton Psychiatric Centre in Saskatchewan was inspired by so-called socio-petal planning. “The socio-petal design […] grew out of the belief that the environment for the schizophrenic should be the functional equivalent of a home,” writes F. H. Kahan in her history of the center (Kahan 1965: 62). In this ideal 374

Architectural and Medical Innovation

plan, patients could be completely alone, in small groups, or part of a larger group, with smooth transitions in between. Note Izumi’s complete abolition of the ubiquitous hospital corridor. Renovated hospitals of the mid-20th century also featured sleek, modernist interiors. ­Montreal’s Allan Memorial Institute, mentioned above, was thoroughly gutted at the time when it became a hospital. The Victorian exterior, stable, gatehouse, and garden, however, softened the image of the place where psychiatrist Ewen Cameron would perform controversial therapies on patients in the 1950s, in an attempt to de-pattern their brains. The link between the Allan Memorial Institute, however, and domesticity as a softening force in mental health is that Cameron developed the first day center hospital there in 1946, allowing patients to return to their own homes every night and severely diminishing the need for hospitalization, further blurring the lines between home and institution. This development of the day hospital changed the architecture of psychiatry in fundamental ways. Most psychiatric patients no longer needed a place to sleep. The hospital was thus released of its residential function. The advent of psycho-pharmaceutical drugs, too, encouraged patients to believe that mental health patients could be cared for by families and social networks located in the community, rather than in monumental institutions. According to Donald Wasylenki, from 1960 to 1975, the number of psychiatric patients in Canada dropped from 50,000 to 15,000 (Wasylenki 2001: 96). At the same time, mental healthcare moved into the units of general hospitals, and somewhat discreetly, back into the family homes of patients. The architectural prescription was thus at odds with what many mental health experts knew: home is often the source of hurt and pain. While subfields like mental health saw fewer patients hospitalized, high-tech therapies for illnesses such as cancer brought even more patients to hospitals. The rise of automobile and gun violence in the 20th century added to the number of patients arriving at the hospital via the emergency room. This “give-and-take,” push-and-pull effect of these forces called for a serious, neutral architecture, at least until about 1980. Finally, since about 1980, hospitals have come to resemble shopping malls and/or luxury hotels, normalizing illness through whimsical and colorful surface treatments, and blatantly acknowledging that most patients are now consumers. This newly found focus on patient-centered healthcare facilities of the final two decades of the 20th century rejected the tower hospital’s impersonal machinelike form, instead favoring homelike spaces and furniture, regional symbolism, increased access, and humanly scaled buildings. The Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center (1991, Shepley Bulfinch Richardson and Abbott) in Hanover, New Hampshire, was designed to resemble a mall by incorporating a skylit three-story galleria along its primary, way-finding axis (Sloane and Conant Sloane 2003; Adams 2017: 19). The architectural trend to look like hotels, too, rose in ­parallel with a transformation in the role of patients to healthcare consumers. Just as the pavilion-plan hospital allegedly removed patients from the grime and grit of the industrial city, the contemporary hospital suggests an “escape” from reality through its hotel-like, fantasy-based imagery. The final two decades of the 20th century were marked by unprecedented hospital mergers and the closure of many historic hospital buildings. Whereas some of these have been preserved as administrative adjuncts to new healthcare facilities or transformed to completely new uses, many historic hospitals have been simply abandoned and/or demolished—costly reminders of the swift pace of medical progress. As we have seen, the hospital has evolved hugely since the golden age of the pavilion plan in the late 19th century. Hospital architects revolutionized ventilation and circulation systems, in parallel with medical colleagues who pioneered new and safe ways to do surgery, prescribe antibiotics, and even release patients into the community, for them to heal at home. The hospital’s role in housing technological innovation, and its own self-conscious role as an instrument of healing (machine à guérir), is legible in the architectural history of hospitals, revealing how architecture and medicine operate in dynamic interplay. 375

Annmarie Adams

References Adams, Annmarie (1999). “Modernism and Medicine: The Hospitals of Stevens and Lee, 1916–1932,” ­Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 58(1): pp. 42–61. Adams, Annmarie (2008). Medicine by Design: The Architect and the Modern Hospital, 1893–1943. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Adams, Annmarie (2015). “Architecture that Breathes,” Harvard Design Magazine 40 (S/S): pp. 14–19. Adams, Annmarie (2017). “Decoding Modern Hospitals: An Architectural History,” AD Magazine 87 (2): pp. 16–23. Adams, Annmarie (2018). “Surgery and Architecture: Spaces for Operating,” in T. Schlich, ed., Palgrave Handbook of the History of Surgery, London: Palgrave, pp. 261–81. Adams, Annmarie and Schlich, Thomas (2006). “Design for Control: Surgery, Science, and Space at the Royal Victoria Hospital, Montreal, 1893–1956,” Medical History 50(3): pp. 303–24. Adams, Annmarie, Schwartzman, Kevin and Theodore, David (2008). “Collapse and Expand: Designing for Tuberculosis,” Technology and Culture 49(4): pp. 908–42. Banham, Reyner (1969, 1984). Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Banham, Reyner. (1976). Megastructures: Urban Futures of the Recent Past. New York: Harper and Row. Donzé, Pierre-Yves (2004). “L’ombre de César : les chirurgiens et la construction du système hospitalier vaudois (1840–1960),” PhD thesis, University of Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel. Fair, Alistair (2014). “A Laboratory of Heating and Ventilation: The Johns Hopkins Hospital as experimental architecture, 1870–90,” The Journal of Architecture 19(3): pp. 357–81. Forty, Adrian (1980). “The Modern Hospital in England and France: The Social and Medical Uses of Architecture,” in A. D. King, ed., Buildings and Society: Essays on the Social Development of the Built Environment. London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 61–93. Foucault, Michel (1965). Madness and Civilization. New York: Vintage Books. Foucault, Michel (1977). Discipline and Punish. New York: Pantheon Books. Greene, Jeremy, Flurin Condrau and Elizabeth Siegel Watkins, eds. (2016). Therapeutic Revolutions: ­Pharmaceuticals and Social Change in the Twentieth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hughes, Jonathan (2000). “The ‘Matchbox on a Muffin’: The Design of Hospitals in the Early NHS,” Medical History 44(1): pp. 21–56. Kahan, Fannie Hoffer (1965). Brains and Bricks. Regina: White Cross. Kisacky, Jeanne (2017). The Rise of the Modern Hospital: An Architectural History of Health and Healing, 1870–1940. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Markus, Thomas A. (1993). Buildings & Power: Freedom & Control in the Origin of Modern Building Types. ­L ondon: Routledge. ——— (1930). “Natural daylight not suited to operating room requirements,” Canadian Hospital 7(2): pp. 36–37. Prior, Lindsay (1988). “The Architecture of the Hospital: A Study of Spatial Organization and Medical Knowledge,” The British Journal of Sociology 39(1): pp. 86–113. Riley, Terence and Abram, Joseph eds. (1990). The Filter of Reason: Work of Paul Nelson. New York: Rizzoli. Risse, Guenter B. (1999). Mending Bodies, Saving Souls: A History of Hospitals. New York: Oxford University Press. Rosenberg, Charles E. (1987). The Care of Strangers: The Rise of America’s Hospital System. New York: Basic. Schlich, Thomas (2007). “Surgery, Science and Modernity: Operating Rooms and Laboratories as Spaces of Control,” History of Science 45: pp. 231–56. Steadman, Philip (2014). Building Types and Built Forms. London: Matador.­ Stevens, Edward Fletcher (1918). The American Hospital of the Twentieth Century. New York: Architectural Record. Stevenson, Christine (1993). “Medicine and Architecture,” in W. F. Bynum and R. Porter, eds., Companion Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 1495–519. Strickland, Thomas (2012). “Experimental Spaces: Megastructures, Medicine and McMaster,” PhD thesis, McGill University, Montreal. Taylor, Jeremy (1997). The Architect and the Pavilion Hospital: Dialogue and Design Creativity in England, 1850–1914. Leicester: Leicester University Press. Topp, Leslie (2017). Freedom and the Cage: Modern Architecture and Psychiatry in Central Europe, 1980–1914. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Wasylenki, Donald (2001). “The Paradigm Shift from Institution to Community,” in Quentin Rae-Grant, ed., Psychiatry in Canada: 50 Years, 1951–2000. Ottawa: Canadian Psychiatric Association, pp. 95–110. Yanni, Carla (2007). The Architecture of Madness: Insane Asylums in the United States. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

376

23 Electric City Land Architecture and Media Mitchell Schwarzer

Derived from the Latin medius, middle or indeterminate, media are defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “an intervening substance through which a force acts on objects at a distance or through which impressions are conveyed to the senses.” Media reshape form, translating a work into other modes or materials: as when an artist reimagines a poem as a sculpture, a journalist reviews a film as an essay, or a graphic designer brands a logo out of disparate product lines. ­Extending across the disciplines of art, entertainment, commerce, and commentary, media act at a distance from the reality that was shaped earlier. They add audiences. They forge off-site information (Ong, 1982: 171–3). German historian and theorist Friedrich Kittler understood information dissemination as their essence. Linking them to those industrial technologies that have set forth metropolitan, regional, and eventually international networks, he refined the definition of media to consist of the transmission, recording, and processing of relevant data or information (Kittler, 1990: 369). Included are books, paintings, newspapers, and computers as well as buildings and entire cities.1 By cities, Kittler meant most of all those modern networks that act from a distance and reshape “the here” – highways that speedily connect points, water/sewage systems that provide interior plumbing, and electric grids that power machines and cast light. Works of architecture relate to media in different ways. They are a media in their own right, reshaping nature as humanly constructed materiality and spatiality. They furthermore act as a framework for other media, a site for creation, storage, and display. Since the Renaissance, a considerable number of media have been invented – canvas painting, printed text and drawing, photographs, moving pictures – that appear more and more autonomous from any architectural venue. Amid the escalating formats of the mass and, of late, social media, and the equally accelerating malleability and urgency of digital images, architecture can appear beholden to other media. “Today,” Peter Eisenman comments, the production of a building has changed to the production of an image of a building. Media has become so all-consuming, with a rapacious barrage of daily updates featuring ever more problematic new images, it is little wonder that architects have time to work, much less think. (Eisenman, 2014: 163) True enough, architecture stands out among media. It is stationary, tied to site. One goes to a building; it doesn’t come to you or travel with you unless translated into other media. ­Compared to a building, mobile media possess considerable geographic reach, disseminated via business and ­infrastructural networks: book, newspaper, and magazine publishing; film production, DOI: 10.4324/9781315674469-26

377

Mitchell Schwarzer

distribution, and showing; broadcast radio and television; cable and satellite TV; and the servers, wires, and websites of the Internet. Yet something parallel and noteworthy has long been ­impacting buildings as well. It has to do with a networking of architecture’s role in signification, an expansion, so to speak, of aesthetic effects from single sites, buildings, and small ensembles to larger ensembles, streets, crossroads, and skylines under the agency of electric illumination. Since the close of the 19th century, the harnessing of electrons to produce electricity and light has unveiled an Electric City Land. This chapter examines the technologies, buildings, and ideas that have carried forth the creation of a brilliant, expansive, and artificially illuminated built world. Attention focuses on the period from the 1980s to the present, the era of outdoor electronic billboards, giant video screens, and media façades, those artistically designed wall displays of computer-controlled imagery shown with digital, light-emitting diodes (LEDs). It will be initially important to distinguish the network nature of electric illumination from the more site-oriented characteristics of media incorporated into architecture. Next, contemporary developments must be foregrounded in earlier 20th-century experiments with incandescent lightbulbs and other ­devices aimed at turning the walls and skins of buildings into something signifying, mutable, colorful, and, most of all, integrated into larger information flows.

From Site to Network In 1999, a new library for the Eberswalde Technical School opened northeast of Berlin. Designed by Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, the rectangular block is noted for its façade of photographs. A grid of panels, each hosting a photograph, takes up each of the four elevations. 2 The images come from Thomas Ruff’s collection of historical newspapers and magazines. His choices expose modern photography’s breath of subject matter, from daily life to the spectacular, from ordinary objects to works of art, from anonymity to celebrity: a father and his sons with a train set and an escape attempt at the Berlin Wall; women sitting on a lawn and Lorenzo Lotto’s Venus and Cupid; students studying in a library and Walter Gropius’s 1923 house in Weimar.3 Set onto a façade, the images recall the lengthy history of walls and windows playing host to other media: limestone bas-reliefs of the Sanskrit epics on Khmer temples; New Testament stories in the stained glass of Gothic cathedrals. Before the invention of printing at the turn of the 15th century, architecture served as repository and stage for weighty and prolonged societal communication. Literacy was uncommon and illustrated books bore exorbitant costs. Media carved, painted, or otherwise affixed onto the walls and windows of significant buildings provided an occasion for people to be informed about the sagas of their rulers and ancestors. Likewise, sculptures and paintings allowed them to visualize their Gods and religious doctrine. Such mediated walls accompanied societal rituals: the visit of dignitaries to a palace or the taking of communion within a church. Inasmuch as religious edifices were sacred compounds, associated media imagery, imbued with holiness, provided a permanent reminder and witnessing of the human endeavor to communicate with divinity.4 By contrast, the placement of photographs on the modern library façade exposes heterodox information flows. While some carry weighty themes, none of them pretend dogma. As a group, they speak of a time of cultural production where epic, hierarchical narration has given way to pluralistic communication – at least in certain parts of the world. The point of view is that of a team of architects working with a photographer who, in turn, has appropriated the work of other photographers reshaping aspects of modern life and representation. It is no wonder the selection appears idiosyncratic, even haphazard. Instead of reminding viewers of shared verities, the Eberswalde photographs expose the fast pace of progress and obsolescence. Robert Venturi described media in the electronic age as a condition where “computerized images can change over time, information can be infinitely varied rather than dogmatically 378

Electric City Land: Architecture and Media

universal, and communication can accommodate diversities of cultures and vocabularies, vulgar and tasteful, pop and highfalutin (Venturi, 1994: 51).” While raising the seminal role of “architectural signage,” Venturi nonetheless chose to downplay its mesmerizing, off-putting, or numbing characteristics. Such omissions begin to explain the critical aspect of the Eberswalde Library’s repetition of imagery – in the manner of Andy Warhol’s silkscreens of media figures and events. At the library, the recurrence of images around the façade demonstrates that information paths may be more important than image content. Reflected on the building’s surface are dramatic and routine encounters, events involving the public, and those concerning individuals. Seen alongside one another, we are reminded that tragedy becomes banality when repeated enough times, that high art reproduced ad infinitum sacrifices, as Walter Benjamin told us, its aura. In order to explore further the leveling, sprawling effects of the highly technological modern media, Herzog and de Meuron took a different approach for the façade of the 75,000-seat Allianz Arena in Munich, completed in 2005. Atop a steel framework, the outer surface of the elliptical structure is made up of 2,784 translucent plastic EFTE cushions,5 the foil only 0.2 millimeters thick, and inflated by a constant stream of warm air. A total of 5,344 lamps illuminate the stadium in bright colors, depending upon the football club in residence: red for Bayern, blue for the TSV 1860, white for the German national team, and combinations of these and other colors as desired (Metz, 2006: 238). At game times, the stadium appears as a luminous, yet standardized body, informed by the tens of thousands of equally standardized fans within – from their shirts down to their shoes. If the Eberswalde library’s façade photographs expose information overload and the exhaustion of significance, that experience nonetheless remains governed by site conditions. The building’s appearance day or night, year to year, depends on natural lighting and the local climate. We see it and its imagery as we have seen built materiality for millennia. The Allianz Arena’s light effects demonstrate media architecture operating in conditions closer to energy. The flick-a-switch transformation of the building’s color exposes its participation with one of the modern media’s paradigmatic developments – an infrastructural network, in this case electric generators, power grids, and lighting elements that produce flexible, fluctuating effects that are subject to artificial light and that institute new viewing protocols. The arena calls to mind the crucial relationship that has developed over the past century and a half between architecture and a set of technological and design innovations harnessing electricity to produce, store, and utilize light (and darkness) as reshapers of form.

Illuminating Building into Sign At the start of Understanding Media (1964), Marshall McLuhan explained electric light as pure information, “a medium without a message” until it is used to spell out some verbal statement or, by extension, a visual sign (McLuhan, 1994: 8). The light Thomas Edison brought forth in 1879, combining the energy of electrons with the illumination of photons, was miraculous. It produced no smoke or flame, consumed no oxygen, and was seemingly inexhaustible. In The Media City, published in 2008, historian Scott McQuire added that electric light and the related electrification of buildings and streets were the foundation for the modern media city. Its various ­methods – incandescent lightbulbs, high-intensity floodlights, neon tubing, cathode ray tubes (CRTs), and LEDs – have bifurcated architectural aesthetics ever since between day and night, mass and pattern, and stasis and flux (McQuire, 2008: 113–23). Electric lighting technologies have enabled architects, working with lighting designers, to reshape the nocturnal appearance of buildings, leaving whole areas in the dark, other areas in indistinct shadows, and certain features brilliantly highlighted. Electrification has turned the volumes and surfaces of the city into a visual text of simplified patterns, “suppressing some features of a site/building and emphasizing a few idealized essentials,” as noted by historian David Nye (Nye, 1990: 60) (Figure 23.1). 379

Mitchell Schwarzer

Figure 23.1  E  lectric Tower at Pan-American Exposition, Buffalo, New York, USA (1901). Source: Public Domain

World’s fairs were the first important venues for the electric illumination of architecture. At Chicago’s 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, super-bright arc lights blazed fountains and the bases of buildings, while 130,000 incandescent bulbs were hung as light necklaces along cornices, pediments, and domes. The Edison Tower of Light, as Dietrich Neumann tells us in Architecture of the Night (2002), was an 82-foot column of lights flashing on and off rhythmically to accompanying music; it may have been the first building ever designed primarily for the aesthetic effects of electric light (Neumann, 2002: 11). Eight years later, at Buffalo’s Pan-American Exposition, the bulb count rose to half a million, of which 35,000 alone were used on the Electric Tower to turn its outlines and surfaces into blinding radiance (Valance, 2015: 46–50). In 1903 and 1904, Luna Park and Dreamland, additions to the Coney Island amusement park, similarly employed electric lightbulbs to illuminate building profiles and features by night, creating a fantasy atmosphere conducive to lingering and spending.6 In these early ventures, electric lights could be a focus in and of themselves or they could concentrate attention upon certain architectural effects. Upon the completion of New York’s Singer Building in 1908, at the time the world’s tallest building, hidden floodlights illuminated the upper reaches of the tower. Similar programs to emphasize the crowns of tall buildings as gleaming sculptures against the darkness followed for the Woolworth (1913) and Empire State (1931) buildings, and later skyscrapers around the world.7 In a related development in the 1920s, architects associated with the Modern Movement, such as Erich Mendelsohn at his Rudolf Petersdorff Department Store in Breslau, Germany, exploited another aspect of electric lighting. By night, it became a means to turn interior voids into planar volumes of precisely calibrated intensity. As steel or reinforced-concrete construction technology freed up more of the building surface for windows, they could be composed in bands and stacks that, when lit from inside, presented a building as an elemental interplay of shaded and gleaming geometries. At a time when electricity was enabling homes and workplaces to emerge from the dimness long associated with the arrival of dusk, electric lighting was reshaping aspects of the equally dim night city. New York’s Broadway emerged as the Great White Way during the 1910s when block after block of advertising billboards, movie theater marquees, and stores were brightened by strings 380

Electric City Land: Architecture and Media

of incandescent bulbs – a horizontal band of illumination set between a semi-dark streetscape and black sky. Then, in 1928, an electric news ticker was installed at the Times Building at Broadway and 43rd Street. Thanks to 14,800 lightbulbs moving on an internal conveyor system, news bulletins marched around the perimeter of the building’s base.8 Built surface informed passersby of up-to-the-minute stock prices, sports scores, and noteworthy and notorious events. Information wasn’t fixed, as had been the case with traditional architectural ornamentation. Rather, it vacillated by the second, fed by a growing set of sources tied to the media and entertainment industries. By the 1930s, the light parade intensified. Colorful and bendable neon tubes turned Times Square into an amphitheater of shapely advertisements. Ad executive and lighting designer Douglas Leigh became the king of spectaculars, oversized and captivating neon displays: the giant Eight O’Clock coffee cup that let off steam (1933); the Camel cigarette sign (1941) that blew smoke rings.9 Instead of working in sync with other media to disseminate a shared message, building became a nearly invisible scaffold for an advertising blitz on the senses and pocketbooks. A century earlier, in a chapter of his novel Notre Dame de Paris, 1831, “This Will Kill That,” Victor Hugo had warned that the widespread dissemination of content via mechanized printing would relegate architectural signification to a sideshow. New York’s crossroads of electrified media appeared to be accomplishing that feat in architecture’s own domain. Out west, the 1946 opening of Bugsy Siegel’s Flamingo Hotel on Las Vegas Boulevard birthed The Strip, soon to become one of the world’s greatest neon playgrounds.10 Here, in the vast spaces of the desert, neon signage reoriented itself to the simplified patterns required of automobile ­perception – the words HOTEL and FLAMINGO framing a pink flamingo extended above the hotel’s cornice line so as to be seen from a long distance and at fast speeds. In 1953, an expansion and remodel by the architects Pereira and Luckman included a large cursive neon sign hovering along the cornice line, and a 60-foot-tall, cylindrical metal tower covered with neon rings in the shape of fizzing bubbles and topped with a rim of flamingos rimming to top (Neumann, 2002: 193). The freestanding tower signaled the potential for signs to be independent from buildings and, as argued a couple of decades later in Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour’s Learning from Las Vegas (1971), signs to function instead of “generic buildings” as the primary carriers of up-to-date information for motorists.11

Ambient Screens and Big TV By no means were electric light effects limited to North American cities. As architect Gerhard Auer writes, from the 1960s onward the Japanese city became “a bricollage of texts, ideogrammes and signs … adapted to the new qualities of light, transforming itself into a metastatic body of light and providing a rapid succession of new information (Auer, 1988) 43).” It may have been a ­Japanese architect who first seized upon the possibilities for using electrified light to create what were later called media facades.12 For the 1986 Tower of the Winds, in Yokohama, Japan, Toyo Ito took the renovation of a water and ventilation facility as an opportunity to use computer-­controlled lights as neither entertainments nor advertisements nor highlights of a building’s standout features. Ito’s lighting program displaced the diurnal building entirely. He covered the concrete shaft with mirrors, added a steel scaffolding of 30 floodlights, 12 horizontal neon bands, and 1,300 individual lights, and then screened the lighting system with a perforated aluminum sheathing to form an oval cylinder. The result has been described as a seismograph charting how light patterns – from streaks to sparks to strobes – form and change directions and intensities based on sensors recording winds, skylight, and street noises (Auer, 1988: 46). The Tower of the Winds allowed for a site-specific approach to architectural information, ­media that looped back into nature and city. In 1992, Christian Moeller took a similar approach for the media façade of the Zeilgalerie, a shopping mall in Frankfurt, Germany. Known as the 381

Mitchell Schwarzer

Figure 23.2  Zeilgalerie facade, Frankfurt, Germany (1992). Source: Christian Moeller

Kinetic Light Sculpture, it consisted of a screen of perforated aluminum under which 120 halogen floodlights alternated between blue and yellow clusters of light, depending upon the weather conditions and temperature. At zero degrees centigrade, the façade appeared monochrome blue. Increases in temperature caused yellow clusters to form and, depending upon the direction of the winds, adopt varied trajectories across the wall.13 Unlike the effects of most commercial light shows and signage, aimed at transporting a viewer’s consciousness to the off-site romance associated with a purchase, Moeller, like Ito, experimented with a non-commercial display of information whose goal was to enrich architecture’s production of site-oriented information. Alas, a small video billboard also occupied the top of the Zeilgalerie media façade, running news headlines by day, and light-oscillated street sounds by night.14 It was a harbinger of media effects refracted less by site conditions and more by vast and distant networks (Figure 23.2). The idea using an architectural support or stage for televisual effects had been brewing for some time. The Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, completed in 1977 by Renzo Piano and Richard Rodgers, is noted for its expression of infrastructural systems on the exterior of the huge loft building, their colors pointing out their identities for all to see: blue for air-conditioning, green for water and fluids, yellow for electricity, and red for circulation. Sometimes forgotten was the architects’ plan to include an electronic façade screen flashing images of the art world events inside. Dropped for budgetary reasons, that screen would have likely built upon contemporaneous efforts, largely in the world of sports, aimed at exploding television from a small box to an urban-scale billboard. Strings of lightbulbs emphasize building outlines or, in coordination with strobes and floodlights, generate independent geometric flashes and patterns within those outlines. A much more densely packed grid of lights, on the other hand, when coordinated by a sophisticated program, produces lifelike images – in the manner of a photographic halftone. Video billboards would be the result and sporting events their first testing ground. Under pressure from fans, enjoying instant replays on their home television sets and wanting the same augmentation of information from the stadium experience, owners of sports franchises worked to come up with a video scoreboard that could do more than list statistics. In 1973, giant, in-house, closed-circuit televisions, the Telscreen, debuted at both the Capital Centre in Landover, Maryland, and the Richfield Coliseum, outside of Cleveland. On the four-sided electronic screen, images taken from several television cameras were translated into a series of dots, as represented by incandescent lightbulbs.

382

Electric City Land: Architecture and Media

They showed rudimentary close-ups and instant replays. Three years later, a 20-foot-by-40-foot panel, called Spectacolor by its inventor George Stonbely, was mounted on the Allied Chemical (formerly Times) building in Times Square. Lit by over 8,000 bulbs, it displayed text, graphics, and animated imagery in full color – what may have been the world’s first electronic billboard (Sagalyn, 2001: 323). Far more compelling than the Telscreen or Spectacolor, however, were the images shown in 1983 on Ridley Scott’s science fiction film Blade Runner. Gigantic TV screens hung off the high stories of buildings and hovered on slow-moving blimps. They displayed Japanese advertisements where women ate enticing morsels as well as old school advertisements to “Enjoy, Enjoy, Coca Cola.” Inspired by the colorful, streetscape commerce in Japanese and American cities (Webb, 1996: 45), the film posited a futuristic urban space – the year was 2019 – under a night sky dotted not with balls of flickering plasma but with luminous graphics and phrases. A real-life solution was soon forthcoming, when Sony’s Yuji Watanabe unveiled the JumboTron at Expo '85 in Tsukuba, Japan. The 82-foot-by-131-foot screen substituted CRTs for incandescent lightbulbs, and outdoor video display transitioned to a finer-grain manner of pictorial display – six times as many pixels as prior electronic billboards (Fisher, 1985: 10). Regarded initially as a promotion for selling conventional TVs, the world’s largest television set hit a nerve and demand by sports arenas, mega-churches, and convention centers brought a steady stream of customers. The aim of the JumboTron and its successors, like Mitsubishi Electric’s DiamondVision, was to augment and modify the way people viewed mass events, indoors and outdoors. The giant screens could repeat sequences, pull in for close-ups, collage text and graphics, and provide closed-captioning when hearing was a problem.15 Large enough to occupy a person’s foveal field, or focused gaze, the state-of-the-art electronic billboards offered a compelling viewing accompaniment to an actual game, sermon, or speech. Indeed, in the back and forth glances between, say, a rock band on stage and its close-up images on a screen above, they epitomized in real time the ability of media to reshape the experience of reality. Television underwent a momentous expansion from small rooms to cavernous halls and outdoor stadiums, from tiny screens to giant screens. In 1986, the first large video screen was erected on the façade of a building at Tokyo’s Hachiko Shibuya Crossing (McQuire, 2009: 45). From 1990 to 1996, Sony operated a JumboTron atop the Times Building in Times Square. Brilliant at night, the electronic billboards were also bright enough to be seen in daylight. In their urban settings, moreover, they were no longer tied to live, on-site events and were free to broadcast changeable news, entertainment, and advertising content. In this sense, they harkened back to the off-site escapism of news tickers and spectaculars, neither augmenting an already visible event nor highlighting architecture: linked instead to faraway media campaigns. Like small-screen television, the images came from production sound stages and location settings around the world; yet, comparatively, the outdoor electronic images were far more likely to be occupied by ads. In the Internet age, television is more omnipresent than ever before. The number of sets in homes and bars has mushroomed, and screens are commonplace in restaurants, stores, office waiting rooms, airport lounges, and vehicles. Outdoors, electronic billboards plaster the highways and saturate important urban crossroads from London’s Piccadilly Circus to Toronto’s Dundas Square to Hong Kong’s Mong Kok District. The competition to dazzle and capture the world’s eyes brought the race for screen size and viewing clarity into overdrive. By 2014, a new screen in Times Square reached eight stories in height, stretched almost as long as a football field, and included nearly 24 million pixels. It all makes sense to Tim Tompkins, president of the Times Square alliance: “People go to the Grand Canyon to see the most visually stunning natural canyon in the world. They come to Times Square to see the most digitally striking canyon in the world” (Figure 23.3).16

383

Mitchell Schwarzer

Figure 23.3  T  imes Square, New York, New York, USA (2016). Source: Wikimedia Commons, Boris Dzhingarov

Mediatecture In 1996, Sony’s Times Square JumboTron was taken down and replaced by a 1,000-square-foot LED screen from its rival Panasonic. Further explosion of screen size and improvement of screen clarity was made possible by a shift to LED screens which, by this point, had acquired the requisite color balance and brightness for successful outdoor display. Compared to CRT technology, LED lights were lighter, slimmer, less power hungry, longer lasting, subject to minimal outdoor glare, and capable of a wider color range and sharper, higher-resolution images (Slavid, 1998: 59). Some LED screens and façade walls display content that attempts to go beyond a predominance of advertising. They have been called media facades.17 384

Electric City Land: Architecture and Media

In the waning years of the 20th century, downtown Las Vegas was dying. Strip casinos had seized the action and dollars. An architect with expertise in experience architecture and retail, Jon Jerde (working with Mary Kozlowski), came up with a plan to close Fremont Street to cars and erect the world’s largest outdoor screen – the Fremont Street Experience. Sixteen giant columns supported a 90-foot-high vaulted canopy that ran along a 1,500-foot-long pedestrian promenade. Upon its opening in 1995, 36 computers coordinated 12.5 million synchronized incandescent lights, 180 high-intensity strobe lights, and 220 audio speakers to produce an urban version of popular theater, where one walked instead of sat, and looked up all the while at a sky of animations themed, week to week, to periodic events like Christmas, Chinese New Year, and the Fourth of July, or to pop cultural phenomena such as Woodstock, “Kickin Country,” or “Nina Blackwood’s Absolutely 80s (Schumacher, 2004: 37–9).” Instead of designing buildings as fantasy sets that could be further illuminated, as at world’s fairs and amusement parks, the Fremont Street Experience was built to run past and atop adjacent buildings already plastered with signs. Regrettably, the combination of the overhead media screen and casino/street signage often dialed up exhilaration into exasperation. Since its completion, this district, like others worldwide, has waged a war of escalating luminary effects. By 2004, in order to keep the visuals as bright and compelling as ­possible, Fremont Street Experience updated to LED modules, incorporating live video feeds, split screens, and enhanced resolution and quality. There are two principal types of contemporary media facades: high-resolution installations for televisual broadcasting; and low-resolution programs that produce light patterns. In 2007, extensive renovations began on the fascist-era Palazzo dell’Arengario in Milan. For slightly over two years, while restoration proceeded, a media façade was erected on the scaffolding of one of the two identical buildings. It consisted of a 500-square-meter lightweight steel mesh integrated with LED modules. Across from the Duomo, where sculpted stone and stained glass have for 800 years brought messages from a singular, higher power to the masses, the giant television screen, at the time the largest media wall in Europe, broadcast 20 hours a day a stream of news, sports, films, concerts, advertising, and even papal messages.18 In 2016, across the globe, the dream of the Pompidou Centre was realized at the Berkeley Art Museum. Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s remodeling and expansion of an old printing plant into a new museum includes, on the northern side of its stainless steel blob-like enlargement, an outdoor LED screen. Intended to reflect the cinematic experience on its inverse side, it occasionally screens movies and exhibit-related programming. As historians Lyn Gorman and David McLean tell us of the contemporary mediascape, “convergence has blurred distinctions between different kinds of media delivery technologies: broadcasting, communications, electronics, computing, and publishing technologies and industries have merged (Gorman & McLean, 2003: 186).”19 This convergence is exemplified in the content of high-res media facades. Across the globe, content reflects the broad possibilities offered on worldwide cable or satellite television, repertory movie houses, and moving-image spectacles in museums, concert halls, and theme parks. Viewing conditions for outdoor media façades range from the concentration required of a serious film to the casual distraction of TV flipping and website scrolling and clicking. In any case, whether the show changes frequently or not, it does so, unlike a home television or smartphone, at someone other than the viewer’s behest – at least until the Internet of things allows screens to target more precisely their content to individual passing viewers. Lower-resolution projects orient their electronic displays toward animation and graphic light effects. In Rotterdam and Abu Dhabi, in Beijing and Jakarta, and in Hong Kong and Macao, the facades of tall buildings function as light sculptures, showcasing abstract motion art and sometimes global branding content. Yet like pre-LED media facades of the late 1980s and early 1990s, there is also greater attention to relating content to site. In 2009, a media façade was erected on the New Ars Electronica Center, in Linz, Austria, designed by Treusch Architects and situated along the 385

Mitchell Schwarzer

Figure 23.4  New Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria (2009). Source: Treusch Architects

Danube River (Boeckl, 2010: 25, 30). Using 44,000 LED modules to light 1,100 glass panels to an array of color, brightness, and intensity, the installation is used by outside researchers, designers, and artists, who write software that, in turn, sets forth interactive activities played out on the outdoor digital canvas.20 The exercises in light playing, pondering, and patterning include the following: solving a Rubik’s cube; tracking the heartbeats of the sleeping city; and weaving a tapestry. One implementation has the public simply turning the entire installation on and off (Figure 23.4). In Cheonan, South Korea, in 2010, Ben van Berkel’s UNStudio wrapped a media façade around the new Galleria CenterCity, a shopping mall. Although composed with technology similar to the Ars Electronica Center, the architects and lighting designers control the media façade’s programming. At night, computers animate 22,000 LED modules to generate shimmering waves and ripples of color at varying speeds across the surface of the doubled façade that are meant to refer to localized shopping conditions, like fashion, events, and public life (Figure 23.5).21 As likely, the wavy patterns integrated with occasional images and words, resulting from moire effects,22 lend an aura of out-of-body transcendence to the shopping mall’s outer surface, a fitting advertisement for the lost-in-desire consciousness appropriate for a temple to consumption. Projects with continuously changing surfaces exemplify media theorist Lev Manovich’s vision for an Information Age architecture, “a space whose shapes are inherently mutable and whose soft contours act as a metaphor for the key quality of computer-driven representations and systems: variability (Manovich, 2006).” Do either low- or high-res LED media façades relate to the buildings supporting them anymore than earlier iterations with CRTs of incandescent bulbs? Are their moving images anything like the bas-reliefs of old, carved onto a building wall and generally in harmony with the programmatic aims of the palace or temple? Or do they have more in common with paintings hung in a museum or movies shown in a theater, in sync with the architecture’s overall programmatic aim yet possessed of strikingly independent informational content? In the end, does architecture lose autonomy and potency by becoming a structure for installations of moving images (Fonio, 1992: 90)? The answers to these questions depend largely on whether one chooses to define architecture in its old sense as an independent artistic production or, in an industrial mode, as an element,

386

Electric City Land: Architecture and Media

Figure 23.5  Galleria CenterCity, Cheonan, South Korea (2010). Source: Christian Richters

especially regarding its lighting effects, of modern information networks. “In the present urban context,” artist Uta Caspary tells us, urban screens and architectural ornament have important aspects in common: the ambivalent link to function as they can be added to the building or they may be – and this is the desirable variant – fully integrated in architectural façade structures; their communicative role in urban space which is oscillating between dialogue, advertising function and artistic message; and their attempt to transform the rather static discipline of architecture into something moving and – due to the screening technique – even interactive.23 Rather than supporting media, architects have longed for buildings to function as site-specific smartphones or computers, infrastructure for bidirectional communication.24 But is the interactive aspect of media facades overstated? We hear much about the integration of smart or responsive digital information into the existing physical fabric via media facades in a coherent architectural and spatial context. Reviewing a host of media facades reveals they are rarely more than trivially responsive or reactive to human stimuli (Herr, 2012: 103–6). A twitter feed on a LED news ticker does not signify a major step beyond the mass media to a truly interactive, social media landscape.

The Media Infrastructure To critics, the volume and velocity of illuminated signification produced by media facades and electronic billboards threaten to overwhelm our ability to see and dwell on buildings. Architecture professor Malcolm McCullough describes that the proliferating fireworks threaten the ­stillness required to appreciate a work of architecture. “Embodied attention,” he writes, depends on the fixity and persistence of enough phenomena to provide cognitive building blocks for more expert cognition in action. From what is now known about activity theory

387

Mitchell Schwarzer

and attention, a totally fluid and endlessly reconfigurable environment would be counterproductive. Inhabitation needs fixity, like a river needs banks. (McCullough, 2013: 190) Books like Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows (2010) similarly castigate nearly simultaneous multi-­ viewing for reducing attention, memory retention, and productivity. Highway planners and ­officials agree, raising concerns for road safety in situations where moving-image billboards distract drivers to a far greater degree than fixed-image signs. While it may be possible to mitigate some of these deleterious effects, information overproduction and perceptual overload appear endemic to the trajectory of industrial modernity. In his 1988 essay, “The City is a Medium,” Friedrich Kittler wrote that media “can include old-fashioned things like books, familiar things like the city and newer inventions like the computer (Kittler, 1996: 722).” Regardless of whether they are old-fashioned or newfangled, he tells us that their status and function changed after the industrial revolution, from participation with crude and relatively simple and localized networks to participation within overlapping networks that operate across the globe and produce astounding information flows. With respect to architecture, we can add that networks earlier emanated from hierarchical sources of power, such as the castle or cathedral; the most prominent media were attached to those building types. These networks reached a small percentage of the population on an irregular basis and delivered relatively unchanging content. By the 19th century, however, the networks began to grow in size, sophistication, and reach, and by the 20th century, film, television, and the Internet standardized the delivery of mutable content. Compared to the past, the content became so varied and voluminous as to transcend any stable set of meanings or, as concerns architecture, site of viewing. In his calculations, Kittler included networks many would customarily identify with information, such as radio or television, but he also added networks of power, like electricity, and transportation linkages (Kittler, 1996: 718). Each of these networks has had the capacity to change the living circumstances of a vast proportion of the public on what has become, as countries industrialize, a regular and reliable basis. Nowadays, modernity equates with the state of a nation’s roads and airports, water and electric supplies, television, and Internet services – not the number of its churches, mosques, or mansions. As discussed in this chapter, electric illumination technologies express how modern media alike have been subsuming buildings within an information infrastructure for over a century. We have seen a progression from the lighting of building facades to the presentation of advertisements on or atop buildings to the creation of building surfaces as information screens that are as representational and networked as those of television or the Internet. At the turn of the 20th century, architectural outlines were augmented with parallel networks of lightbulbs, while towers were floodlight. From the 1920s through the 1960s, lighting designers working with advertisers and business interests realized that it was possible for lights-as-signs to convey autonomous messages. From the 1980s to 2000s, the JumboTron and electronic billboard have subsumed architecture as scaffolding for a realm of signification akin to that of representational motion pictures or more abstract animation. Each stage in the development of electric illumination has allowed the public to derive a greater quantity of information from the built environment. Each has feasted our eyes on surfaces changing color and pattern, masses dissolving into outline, walls dancing with graphics or motion pictures, and facades broadcasting news, sports, the weather, and advertisements. Moreover, by the late 20th century, a remarkable media convergence had occurred. Words and images, photographic representations, and abstract graphics were presented on screens ranging in size from a handheld device to a skyscraper-scaled façade. Media facades, electronic billboards, and other illumination skins epitomize architecture functioning nowadays as a large-scale presentation node within a sliding scale of media formats. 388

Electric City Land: Architecture and Media

But has the Electric City Land coopted architectural signification for purposes related less to the physical attributes of a building or site than to the virtual and variable nature of a national or global network? Certainly, in some of the works analyzed in this chapter, architects and/or artists and lighting designers have come up with remarkable ways to illuminate a building’s context-based environmental and social conditions, ways that recall the discipline’s lengthy h ­ istory of ornamentation or modernist orchestration of volume and materiality under conditions of natural light. But more often, technologies of electric illumination have dovetailed architecture into the experience economy, building walls functioning as atmospheres, and advertisements for h ­ eightened consumption.25 The Electric City Land operates unevenly in a socioeconomic sense, as privatized power and communications companies underwrite most electric illumination networks and account for the predominance of ads and content linked to consumption or amusement. It ­operates unevenly in a geographical sense, concentrating those spectacular, highly ­commercialized façade and screen effects on a relatively small number of buildings and places. The rapport between media and architecture, considered from the vantage point of illuminated and informational ­facades, mirrors, then, other networked media practices: a predominance of popular, commercialized content; transmission from a select number of financial/media centers; and, here and there, off beat instances of culturally focused content (through the agency of artistic and architectural intervention) that subvert media’s tendency to override our immersion in a physical site with a magic carpet ride elsewhere.

Notes 1 On the theoretical background for Kittler’s media histories, see Matthew Griffin, “Literary Studies =/Literature: Friedrich Kittler’s Media Histories,” New Literary History 27.4 (Autumn, 1996): 709–16. 2 For a detailed description of the library’s design, see Ben Pell, “The Articulate Surface: Ornament and ­Technology in Contemporary Architecture” (Basel: Birkhaeuser, 2010), 33–5. 3 These and other issues are brought up in an article on the library by Philip Ursprung, “I Make My ­Picture on the Surface: Visiting Thomas Ruff in Duesseldorf: Based on an interview with Thomas Ruff” in Jacques Herzog & Pierre De Meuron, Herzog & de Meuron: Natural History (Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2005), 157–65. 4 For a comparative analysis of such practices in antiquity, see Jan Assmann, “Ancient Egypt and the Materiality of the Sign” in Materialities of Communication, eds. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht & K. Ludwig Pfeiffer, trans. William Whobrey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 18–19. 5 Ethylene tetrafluoroethylene, a polymer that serves as a translucent coating for a building. 6 On the characteristics of illumination in these turn-of-the-century theme parks, see “Introduction, Coney Island Reader: Through Dizzy Gates of Illusion,” eds. Louis Parascandola & John Parascandola (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 15–17; and Christian Zapatka, “The History of Lighting the American City,” Lotus International 75 (1993): 65–8. 7 On the visual editing made possible by floodlighting, see John Jakle, City Lights: Illuminating the American Night (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 180–94. 8 See William Leach’s article for an analysis of historical attempts to create lighting spectacles at Times Square, “Commercial Aesthetics: Introductory Essay” in Inventing Times Square: Commerce and Culture at the Crossroads of the World, ed., William R. Taylor (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 235–42. 9 On the phenomenon of the spectaculars, see Robert Sellmer, “Douglas Leigh: The man whose gadgets brightened up Broadway now turns to Main Street,” Life Magazine (April 1, 1946): 47. See also Richard Poulin, Graphic Design and Architecture, A 20th Century History: A Guide to Type (Beverly Ma.: Rockport Publishers, 2012), 100–102; and Sandy Isenstadt, “New York,” in Cities of Light, 82–6. 10 For a history of the differences between incandescent bulbs and neon tubes, see Christoph Ribbat, Flickering Light: A History of Neon (London: Reaktion Books, 2011), 77–101. 11 For the unrealized National Collegiate Football Hall of Fame (1967) in New Brunswick, New Jersey, Venturi, Rauch, and Scott Brown also explored designing part of a building as an electronic billboard. 12 On the history of media interfaces and façade design, see M. Hank Haeusler, Media Facades: History, Technology, Content (Ludwigsburg, Germany: Avedition, 2009), 13–33.

389

Mitchell Schwarzer 13 For the specifications of this media façade, see “Interactive Urban Design as Event: Christian Moeller,” AD: Architectural Design 75 ( January/February, 2005): 65. 14 It has since been replaced by a new media wall, completed in 2011, composed of almost 20,000 light-emitting diodes. 15 See Mary Pilon, “Twilight of the Jumbotron,” http://www.sbnation.com/2015/11/11/9703912/ twilight-of-the-jumbotron. 16 Quoted in Emily Steel, “Times Square’s Biggest and Most Expensive Digital Billboard is Set to Shine,” New York Times (November 16, 2014). 17 For an international survey of media facades, see New Media Facades: A Global Survey, eds., M. Hank Haeusler, Martin Tomitsch, Gernot Tscherteu (Ludwigsburg, Germany: Avedition, 2012). 18 On the history of this display, see “Milan Elan,” Architectural Review 224 (October, 2008): 90–1. 19 See also the discussion of contemporary media transitions in William Uricchio, “Historicizing Media in Transition” in Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition, eds. David Thorburn & Henry J­enkins (Cambridge, Ma.: M.I.T. Press, 2003): 31–5; and Brian Hutton, “De Re/Media,” Lotus ­International 75 (February, 1993): 114. 20 On the programming, see “Extension of the Ars Electronica Center,” C3 Korea 308 (April, 2010): 129. 21 For the specifications of the project, see “Galleria CenterCity in Cheonan, South Korea: UNStudio,” L’Arca 274 (November, 2011): 70–3. See also Anke Jacob, “Digital Media and Architecture – An Observation” in The Mobile Audience: Media Art and Mobile Technologies, ed. Martin Rieser (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), 149–51. 22 Patterns created by the placing of one semitransparent screen over another. 23 These observations are part of a larger discussion on media’s significatory properties in Uta Caspary, “Digital Media as Ornament in Contemporary Architecture Facades: Its Historical Dimension” in ­Urban Screens Reader, 72–3. 24 Carlo Ratti, Matthew Claudel, “The Disappearance of Time Square: From Stone to Billboard to ­Smartphone,” A + U: Architecture & Urbanism 529 (November, 2014): 52–4. 25 On the use of digital architectural imagery to further ad and branding campaigns, see Monica D ­ egan, Clare Melhuish, Gillian Rose, “Producing Place Atmospheres Digitally: Architecture, Digital ­Visualization Practices and the Experience Economy,” Journal of Consumer Culture 17.1 (2017): 3–24.

References Auer, Gerhard (March 1988) “The Aesthetics of the Caleidoscope: Artificial Light in Japanese Cities,” Daidalos 27: 43–46. Boeckl, Matthias, ed. (2010) Treusch Architecture, Vienna: Springer Verlag. Eisenman, Peter (August 2014) “Eating Publicity: Architecture in the Age of Media,” Perspecta 47 161–165. Fisher, Arthur (May 1985) “Science Newsfront,” Popular Science 226.5: 10. Fonio, Giorgio (Sept. 1992) “Images and the Territory,” L’Arca 63. Gorman, Lyn & McLean, David (2003) Media & Society in the Twentieth Century: A Historical Introduction, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Herr, Christiane M. (2012) “Non-Trivial Media Facades,” in Beyond Codes and Pixels, Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Computer-Aided Design Research in Asia. Kittler, Friedrich (1990) Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Kittler, Friedrich (Autumn 1996) “The City is a Medium,” New Literary History 27.4: 717–729. Manovich, Lev (2006) “The Poetics of Urban Media Surfaces,” First Monday, Urban Screens: Discovering the Potential of Outdoor Screens for Urban Society, Special Issue 4. McCullough, Malcolm (2013) Ambient Commons: Attention in the Age of Disembodied Information, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. McLuhan, Marshall (1994) Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Cambridge, MA: MIT. Press. McQuire, Scott (2008) The Media City: Media, Architecture and Urban Space, London: Sage. McQuire, Scott (2009) “Mobility, Cosmopolitanism and Public Space in the Media City” in Urban Screens Reader, eds., Scott McQuire, Meredith Martin & Sabine Niederer, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 45. Metz, Tracy ( June 2006), “Allianz Arena, Munich, Germany,” Architectural Record 194: 238–243. Neumann, Dietrich (2002) Architecture of the Night: The Illuminated Building, Munich: Prestel Verlag. Nye, David (1990) Electrifying America: Social Meanings for a New Technology, 1860–1940, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

390

Electric City Land: Architecture and Media Ong, Walter (1982) Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, London: Methuen & Co. Ltd. Sagalyn, Lynn (2001) Times Square Roulette: Remaking the City Icon.(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Schumacher, Geoff (2004) Sun, Sin & Suburbia: An Essential History of Las Vegas, Las Vegas: Stephens Press. Slavid, Ruth (Sept. 10, 1998) “Future Projections,” The Architect’s Journal 208: 59. Valance, Helene (2015) “Buffalo,” in Cities of Light: Two Centuries of Urban Illumination, eds., Sandy Isenstadt, Margaret Maile Petty & Dietrich Neumann, London: Routledge, 46–50. Venturi, Robert (May 1994), “Sweet and Sour,” Architecture 83: 51–52. Webb, Michael (1996) “Like Today, Only More So: The Credible Dystopia of Blade Runner” in Film ­Architecture: Set Designs from Metropolis to Blade Runner, ed., Dietrich Neumann, Munich: Prestel Verlag, 45.

391

24 Divergent Matter The Problematic Search for Material Suitability in Architecture Blaine Brownell In Louis Kahn’s frequently quoted “dialogue” with brick, the architect enters into an imaginary conversation with the building block. When asked what it wants, brick says “I like an arch.” Kahn tries convincing it that he can employ a less expensive concrete lintel instead, but brick simply responds, “I like an arch” (Kahn 1973: 271). This parable embodies one of the basic principles of material applications in architecture: respect each material and its most appropriate use. Kahn’s guidance is simple, sensible, and seemingly irrefutable—who could argue against the thoughtful consideration of a material and its proper application? There are two related messages contained within this parable: the first is that materials have more or less suitable applications, based on their inherent characteristics. The second is that architecture should be composed of suitably used materials. The concepts of material suitability and honesty in material expression have long been common themes in architectural circles. These notions profoundly shaped the modern architectural project, inspiring Le Corbusier’s advocacy of material selection in the context of current technologies as well as Adolf Loos’ privileging of natural material expression over traditional ornament. As materiality became a key concern for architects in the late 1990s, attention returned to Kahn’s parable and its intrinsic concepts—although its prescriptive and straightforward nature is largely incongruous with building construction today. Despite the apparently lucid logic within the idea of material suitability, it emerged out of a crisis of material identity. Modern material technologies such as reinforced concrete and synthetic polymers puzzled architects due to their variable and nonspecific applications, inspiring labels like “mongrel materials.” Furthermore, the notion of material suitability has been thwarted continuously with change. Over time, advances in technology have delivered new material capabilities, and the adoption of these capabilities, in turn, influences material processing technologies. According to designer Ezio Manzini, “In the history of technology, every new material has always been put to uses that were previously the consolidated domain of other materials while, simultaneously, opening the path to new possibilities and new applications that previously had been unthinkable” (Manzini 1986: 38). Material resources have also been in constant flux, based on changes in p­ hysical repositories and the volatility of commodity markets. Meanwhile, mercurial cultural p­ references have determined the popularity of particular materials and their commercial viability. In other words, material technology has been a moving target—particularly within the 20th and 21st ­centuries—and therefore, material suitability has been limited by the particularities of its context. This chapter will focus on the ever-shifting conflict between the concept of material suitability and its resulting applications—a productive tension that exemplifies the troubled search for 392

DOI: 10.4324/9781315674469-27

Divergent Matter

Figure 24.1  Jun Aoki, Aomori Museum of Art, Aomori, Japan (2006). Source: Blaine Brownell.

contemporary architectural expression. The essay will trace the evolution of material thinking in architecture from the 19th century to today and will emphasize critical 20th- and 21st-century developments like tectonic culture, mutant materiality, surface architecture, and material experimentation with a consideration of current debates and future implications regarding material use and meaning.

Structure and Skin The profundity of technological change ushered in by the Industrial Revolution cannot be ­overstated. Rapid advances in material technologies and the ability to produce mass quantities of new products economically resulted in significant transformations in the built environment. New capacities in iron, steel, and reinforced concrete technologies enabled the predominance of frame-based construction, and at unprecedented heights. The decoupling of structure and skin forever changed the intrinsic nature of the building facade. Freed from the thick poché of the ­g ravity-bound bearing wall, the architectural envelope exhibited new possibilities for the transmission of daylight and views, as well as novel means of expression. Such profound possibilities inspired a generation of artists and architects eager to exploit the expressive potential of industrialization. Paul Scheerbart embraced the new visual and physical freedoms afforded by the disengagement of building structure and skin, for example. His bold visions of future cities composed of colorful and transparent glass inspired modern architectural pioneers like Bruno Taut and Walter Gropius. Poet and theorist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who founded the Futurist movement, was an ardent advocate of industry’s newfound potentials and 393

Blaine Brownell

argued for the wholesale elimination of traditional design approaches. Yet the embrace of a new, machine-generated architectural language frustrated critics of industrialization, such as ­Augustus Pugin and John Ruskin, who were appalled by the deteriorating social and e­ nvironmental ­conditions of rapidly industrializing cities. Among these polarized viewpoints emerged other voices seeking to guide architects in the ­appropriate use of new technologies and construction methods in architecture. Adolf Loos b­ ecame the champion of unadorned material methods with his controversial essay “Ornament and Crime” (1913), in which he asserted the importance of expressing materials in their own terms, w ­ ithout embellishment. Le Corbusier supported the purposeful articulation of new technologies in ­building. In a 1929 article critiquing the prevalence of traditional materials and methods used in American architecture, he urged architects to employ materials relevant to their time: “­ Because precisely at this moment, there breathes a new spirit and the entire world—both man and m ­ aterials—must inevitably follow the implacable destiny of a new tendency” (Le Corbusier 1929). Far from original, such arguments contribute to a long lineage of guidance regarding ­m aterial appropriateness, as surveyed by Ute Poerschke in her essay “On Concrete Materiality in ­A rchitecture” (Poerschke 2013). The first such mention appears in Francesco Algarotti’s 1756 essay “Saggio sopra l’architettura,” in which the author references his mentor Carlo Lodoli: “… because the nature of wood is formally different from the nature of stone, so too the forms which you give wood in the construction of a building have to be different from those of stone,” the writer claims. “Nothing is more absurd… than when a material is made not to signify itself, but is supposed to signify another” (Algarotti 1756). Gottfried Semper reinforced this approach in an 1834 essay, articulating that “Brick should appear as brick, wood as wood, iron as iron, each according to its own statical laws” (Semper 1834)—an opinion repeated almost verbatim by ­Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc nearly two decades later: “the materials used must indicate their function by the form we give them; stone must appear as stone, iron as iron, wood as wood; and these substances, while assuming forms suitable to their nature, must be in mutual harmony” (Viollet-le-Duc 1863). The frequent reiteration of such commonsense wisdom, from the 18th century to today, ­reveals the intensity of the disruptive forces counteracting it—for why else would architects feel the need to argue that materials should look and behave like themselves? A primary divergence, mentioned above, is the disassociation between structure and surface enabled by the structural frame. The emergence of robust, rapidly constructible structures out of steel and reinforced concrete ­signaled the demise of bearing wall construction, particularly in multistory buildings. The brick, stone, and other forms of load-carrying masonry that permeated much of the preindustrial built ­environment suddenly faced an identity crisis—one that remains surprisingly omnipresent today. Previously, these materials were required to receive and distribute the compressive loads of a building, and the visible appearance of stratified layers of weight-supporting modules reinforced this role. Once this responsibility shifted to the frame, however, the weight of such materials became a liability rather than an asset. Although a masonry facade can still provide a robust layer of protection for a building, other materials can satisfy this role with less weight, fewer resources, and less labor than load-bearing masonry. The decoupling of frame and cladding is reflected in the differentiation of guidance concerning a material’s use as for structure versus surface. By declaring that materials “must indicate their function by the form,” Viollet-le-Duc presaged Louis Sullivan’s later pronouncement that “form ever follows function,” a maxim whose broad interpretation has included a building’s massing and programmatic accommodations as well as its structure. In reference to architectural ­h istorian Günter Bandmann, Poerschke identifies the early-20th-century emergence of two material ­concerns: a rationalist suitability, or a “justification of a material form in relationship to a purpose,” versus a sensualist suitability, or emphasis “on the senses of sight and touch” (Poerschke 394

Divergent Matter

2013). Loos attempted to address both concepts, arguing for clear material purpose as well as the expressiveness of surface. Yet inconsistencies in his application of these ideas, such as in the incorporation of prominent nonstructural columns in his Michaelerplatz project in Vienna, symbolize the emergence of an ongoing conceptual struggle for architects regarding the relationship of a building’s material expression to its function (Figure 24.2). One harmonizing strategy involves the development of structure as the primary vehicle for material articulation. This approach is evident in the evolution of the tall building throughout the 20th century, for example. Prior to the mid-20th century, the first steel skyscrapers merely hinted at the presence and location of their structural frames via their non-glazed surfaces, which were clad in materials like thin stone or terra-cotta. However, the call of rationalist suitability motivated architects to express the structure itself—a seemingly logical approach, yet one that is inherently fraught with difficulties. Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building (1958) is one of the most familiar precedents (Figure 24.3). In his design for an office tower on New York’s Park Avenue, the architect aimed to convey a pure, reduced representation of the two primary materials of steel and glass: steel as structural frame and glass as light-transmitting infill. Yet Manhattan building codes required the steel structure to be clad in a fireproofing material like concrete. A rationalist suitability approach would suggest exposing the fireproofing itself; yet, the resulting lack of sensualist suitability likely motivated Mies to dismiss such a strategy. Instead, he opted to clad the tower envelope in a series of nonstructural wide-flange sections external to the actual structure and its fireproofing—a clever ruse to convey the material expression of structure without actually doing so. A counter-strategy amplifies the disassociation between structure and cladding, permitting the skin as much freedom as necessary. Given the technical and regulatory facilitation of such an approach, it has been far more common in practice than structural expressionism. After the ­m id-20th century, once architects became disillusioned with the machinelike homogeneity and repetition of the International Style, the sensualist suitability approach became a predominant interest. Robert Venturi’s famous label of the “decorated shed” embodied not only the disconnect between envelope and frame, but also—as indicated by a generation of fancifully

Figure 24.2  Adolf Loos, House on Michaelerplatz, Vienna (1911). Source: Blaine Brownell.

395

Blaine Brownell

Figure 24.3  Mies van der Rohe, Seagram Building, New York, New York, USA (1958). Source: Blaine Brownell.

adorned facades of the Postmodern era—the supremacy of material sensuality over purpose. Yet Venturi’s advocacy of surface ornament as entirely “independent of the architecture in content and form” and having “nothing to do with the spatial or structural elements” left many architects disillusioned (Venturi 1982). Long after the demise of Postmodernism, architects still complain of their relegated role as “cake decorator” to the structural frameworks devised by engineers.

Production and Representation The schism between the rationalist and sensualist suitability approaches to materials is the focus of Surface Architecture by David Leatherbarrow and Mohsen Mostafavi. In the book, the authors argue that the projects of production and representation remain in conflict in current practice (Leatherbarrow and Mostafavi 2002). We may interpret production as referring to a “material form in relationship to a purpose,” whereas representation relates to “the senses of sight and touch.” The adoption of either approach without consideration of the other is inherently flawed. “These ­practices are problematic in two senses: buildings that relinquish their appearance to the image that results from assembly processes neglect the project of representation, and the picturing of ­h istorical profiles in nostalgic recollection ignores the opportunities for new configurations based on the availability of both new and old materials and methods of building construction,” they claim (Leatherbarrow and Mostafavi 2002: 1). A clear example of the authors’ argument is embodied in the work of architect Albert Kahn, whose pragmatic designs for industrial buildings contrasted starkly with his historicist approaches to nonindustrial projects—thus establishing a clear distinction between “business” and “art” in architectural expression. Such a dichotomy remains commonplace in building design and construction today. The most compelling aspect of Surface Architecture, however, is not in its elucidation of this dichotomy but its implicit challenge of reconciliation. As two prominent contemporary examples reveal, such a goal is not easily attainable; nor is there a predictable formula for its realization. 396

Divergent Matter

Figure 24.4  Renzo Piano, California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco, California, USA (2008). Source: Blaine Brownell.

On the production side, architect and engineer Renzo Piano has consistently architecture as a rational, technology-driven pursuit. However, his attention to proportion, detailing, and craft highlights the important role of representation. Projects like the Menil Collection (1986), California Academy of Sciences (2008) (Figure 24.4), and Kimbell Art Museum Expansion (2013) all impart an unambiguously technological expression that is shaped by a specific representation agenda. His Kimbell Art Museum “Piano Pavilion” bases its representational strategy on the prior 1972 building designed by Louis Kahn on the same site. The new structure takes cues from the original: a low-slung building composed of modular bays, with significant attention paid to the introduction of natural light into galleries. However, it clearly lacks the sophistication and poetry of Kahn’s masterwork. In a 2014 critique, Thomas de Monchaux declared the pairing to be an architectural version of the “uncanny valley” phenomenon, in which a simulacrum is close enough to resemble an original, yet its differences are repelling. “It is into this valley that much of Piano’s psuedo-Kahn falls, especially in the significant management of the many mechanical and structural elements… that in Kahn’s building reliably converge into resolved assemblies far greater than the sum of their parts,” he wrote. “In Piano’s building, many of these same components complacently compound—clips on clips, tubes on tubes—but by Kahn’s standards they are more coincident than truly convergent: adding and adding, without ever quite adding up” (de Monchaux 2014). On the representation side, architect Frank Gehry attempts to perform a different balancing act. Instead of employing technology to inform and express key project parameters, Gehry uses it to support the realization of a free-form, sculptural morphology. Works such as the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum (1993), Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (1997), and Louis Vuitton Foundation (2014) (Figure 24.5) are composed of visually striking assemblies of geometrically complex fragments of variously sized volumes and surfaces. Clad in advanced building envelopes composed of materials like stainless steel, titanium, or curvilinear glass, these projects impart a potent message concerning technology’s subservience to art. Eschewing Piano’s rationality, modularity, and repetition, Gehry instead makes use of the applications of mass customization and building information modeling as crucial production vehicles for the realization of his intricate projects. Yet the architect’s spin-off business Gehry Technologies and its contributions to digital modeling and construction represent a curious story: rather than innovations in the digital tools yielding related advancements in the architecture, the complexity and free-form nature of the building designs themselves created a need for a better system of architectural production. Leatherbarrow and Mostafavi classify Gehry’s designs as “formless” buildings while acknowledging that their facades are “nothing other than ‘formal’: form that intends to be original, non referential (to place 397

Blaine Brownell

Figure 24.5  Frank Gehry, Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris, France, 2014. Source: Blaine Brownell.

or program), spectacular in its chromatic and luminous effects, and insistently coherent” if not directly related to the interior programs they contain (Leatherbarrow and Mostafavi 2002: 198). The work of architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron represents yet another approach to reconciling production and representation. Unlike the tell-the-tale features of Piano’s and Gehry’s projects, each Herzog and de Meuron building represents a unique take on the constructional opportunities of a particular commission. Works like the Ricola Storage Building (1987), M. H. de Young Memorial Museum (2005), Beijing National Stadium (2008), and Hamburg Elbphilharmonie (2017) (Figure 24.6) each demonstrate a fresh approach to—and an intensive focus surrounding—the employment of material technologies and fabrication methods to attain innovative surface effects. Neither exclusively the artistry of the machine nor the mechanization of art, these projects revel in the ambiguities, contradictions, and idiosyncrasies that exist in the schism between production and representation. According to Leatherbarrow and Mostafavi, “In this way their works question the space between functional necessities and ornament, contingencies and supplement, inasmuch as most of their built projects produce effects that are either additions to or iterations of the logic of repetitive production” (Leatherbarrow and Mostafavi 2002: 211).

The Multilayered Facade A comprehensive analysis of the contemporary role of materiality in architecture cannot be made without recognizing another fundamental transformation brought about by industrialization: the multilayered facade. Like the structure-and-skin divide, the many-layered envelope has fundamentally challenged the direct connection between material function and expression. This facade has been influenced by increasingly important factors such as thermal control, energy conservation, moisture management, building codes, industrial automation, standardized practices, and affordability. Compared with the preindustrial facade, today’s version is governed by many more demands and regulations, resulting in a motley composite of dissimilar materials. Take a historic masonry wall, for example. This wall is likely composed of two courses of hand-laid masonry infilled with smaller stones and mortar. The result is a thick, solid mass capable of regulating interior temperature via thermal mass and water penetration via its inherent permeability. The wall’s interior surface might be exposed, thus communicating its material nature on the inside as well as outside—or it may be clad with a layer of plaster on lath. This inherently durable form of construction is not only load-bearing; it will likely endure for centuries—if not millennia. In contrast, consider a modern cavity wall—a prime example of the multilayered facade. A common version of this wall consists of an outer layer of nonstructural face brick, a two-inch air space, a weather barrier made from fibers of flash-spun high-density polyethylene, plywood 398

Divergent Matter

Figure 24.6  Herzog and de Meuron, Elbphilharmonie, Hamburg, Germany, 2017. Source: Blaine Brownell.

sheathing, wood or light-gauge steel stud framing, fiberglass batt insulation, interior wallboard made of paper-surfaced gypsum, and paint. This wall also incorporates regularly spaced adjustable metal masonry ties that connect the face brick with the studs, metal flashing, steel shelf angles, and polyurethane sealants with polypropylene backer rods. Much of this ragtag assembly is nonload-bearing (it relies upon a wood or steel frame for structure) and will last as long as its weakest component. In some cases, the masonry ties, which corrode in the presence of internal cavity moisture, fail first; in other cases, the brick itself deteriorates. For example, the brick facade of the original Walker Art Center (1971), designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes, failed after only 40 years due to water-induced degradation from the inside, requiring a $7 million retrofit (Abbe 2012). Compared with its robust predecessor, the modern cavity wall is not only more materially heterogeneous, but also imperiled by uncertainty. According to Sheila Kennedy, the multilayered or “hollow wall” demands new approaches: “It is no longer the familiar wall of archaic stone construction. It is no longer solid. The advent of the frame and its vernacular companion, stud wall construction, undermines the integrity of classical tectonics, as well as the authenticity of its languages” (Kennedy 2001: 8). The multilayered facade, in combination with the decoupled frame, thwarts architects’ aims to create a unified 399

Blaine Brownell

material assembly. As Poerschke states, “For architecture right up to the present, it has been an intellectual challenge to harmonize the two views of material as such as structural form and material as such as surface. The multilayeredness of the constructive elements… contradicts this harmony” (Poerschke 2013: 155). The increasing complexity of modern facade construction, with its growing number and variety of connections between different materials, has prompted renewed investigations of the architectural detail. Architect Marco Frascari interrogated the link between construction and material meaning in his essay “The Tell-the-Tale Detail” (1984). Based on architect Jean Labatut’s declaration that “The detail tells the tale” and Mies van der Rohe’s axiom “God lies in the detail,” Frascari elucidated the dual mechanisms by which material intersections convey architectural significance: “Elusive in a traditional dimensional definition, the architectural detail can be defined as the union of construction, the result of the logos of techné, with construing, the result of the techné of logos” (Frascari 1984: 23–4). In Studies in Tectonic Culture: The Poetics of Construction in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture (1995), historian Kenneth Frampton invoked the concept of the tectonic to evaluate the modern architectural legacy, examining the “expressive potential” of constructional techniques (Frampton 1995: 2). The same year Studies was published, architecture and design curator Terence Riley hosted the Light Construction show at the Museum of Modern Art. A collection of recent works by a diverse group of architects, Light Construction noted an intensified emphasis on two related dimensions of lightness: light transmission and lightweight construction. “In this architecture of ‘lightness,’” Riley wrote, “buildings become intangible, structures shed their weight, and facades become unstable, dissolving into an often luminous evanescence” (Riley 1995). Although lightness was the overt theme, the exhibition’s real contribution was its demonstration of the ways in which contemporary architects could successfully address the challenges of the multilayered wall. Rather than attempt to harmonize disparate facade materials by creating a false sense of unity, the architects revealed the expressive potential of the contemporary facade by celebrating its individual layers and components. This tectonic exposition, facilitated by strategically opening up the envelope to varying degrees of light and view, presents the inherent tensions and incongruities between the various layers. Yet the architects’ motivation was not merely the explication of building systems; rather, they sought to engage the user as an active participant concerning questions of material purpose and expression. For example, in Jean Nouvel’s Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris (1994), the architect explored the possibilities of physical depth and visual ambiguity of the glass curtain wall—a building language conventionally employed as a hermetic skin (Figure 24.7). He positioned layers of glass between the conditioned space of the building and the street, with a garden occupying the interstitial zone. According to Nouvel, “By laying out three parallel glass surfaces, I created an ambiguity which will have visitors wondering if the park has been built on, if it has been enclosed, or if—because of the series of reflections—the trees are inside or outside, if what they see through this depth is a reflection or something real” (Nouvel 1995: 55–6). This and other projects established the conceptual potency of Light Construction in its inherent paradox: increased architectural transparency need not result in greater visual access and comprehension, as early modernists like Scheerbart imagined. Rather, architects could employ translucency and layered materials to evoke mystery and intrigue. Conjuring the spirit of Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky’s notable 1956 essay “Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal”—which criticized the vapidity of the transparent glass curtain wall—the MoMA projects engaged the conceptual tension between the visible and invisible, reinforcing the fundamental importance for architects to become masters of material effects. Describing this phenomenon in the Cartier Foundation, Riley writes that Nouvel “achieves a level of extreme visual complexity, an architecture of light and shadow, which had been principally associated with the solid masonry structures…” (Riley 1995: 56). 400

Divergent Matter

Figure 24.7  Jean Nouvel, Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art, Paris, France (1994). Source: Blaine Brownell.

Light Construction included several works designed by Japanese architects, also known to e­ xplore the sensorial divide between clarity and obfuscation. Toyo Ito, Kazuyo Sejima, and ­Fumihiko Maki, in particular, were shown to exhibit an interest in exploiting technologies like metal meshes, smart glazings, and video projection to dramatic effect. Aside from their particular materials, such works alluded to traditional Japanese architectural approaches such as multilayered, dynamically transforming, light-transmissive surfaces. The ambiguous, ever-changing nature of projects like Toyo Ito’s Tower of the Winds in Yokohama (1986), an environmentally responsive media installation, celebrated—rather than challenged—the increasing uncertainties of material identity.

New Materials and New Technologies The same year that MoMA exhibited Light Construction, the museum also showcased Mutant ­Materials in Contemporary Design. In her description of this exhibition, curator Paola Antonelli wrote: “In only the past few decades, the impressive evolution of design materials and their technology has spawned a new material culture—one that is complex and in a state of continuous change and adaptation” (Antonelli 1995: 9). Mutant Materials not only revealed rapid technological advances in plastics, composites, and other substances, but also the transformation and ­blurring of material properties themselves. In their attempts to hybridize, recombine, and manipulate the microstructure of matter, scientists and manufacturers have created materials that defy easy ­categorization. This new breed of materials includes plastics that resemble metals, paper that can be thermoformed like plastic, ceramics made like paper, and wood that behaves like ceramics. The burgeoning field of nanotechnology has spawned a new class of materials that defy traditional categorization, with substances like metallic glass—an alloy with a non-crystalline structure like glass, yet electrically conductive like metal. Other materials violate established limits of material properties, such as nanostructured wood that is stronger than Kevlar. The ever-expanding realm of mutant materials has ensured that new materials remain a ­f requent topic of conversation in architecture and design. In the late 1980s, technology analyst Tom Forester presaged that three megatechnologies would eventually dominate global industrial activity: information technology, biotechnology, and new materials (Forester 1988). Two decades later, economist Sanford Moskowitz wrote: “the emergence of the advanced materials industry, beginning in the early 1980s, ushered in one of the most dynamic and important chapters in U.S. and international industrial history” (Moskowitz 2009: 1). In 2004, the architect Stephen Kieran, co-founder of KieranTimberlake and co-author of Refabricating Architecture: How Manufacturing Methodologies Are Poised to Transform Building Construction, declared: “More potential products have been invented in the last 15 years than in the entire prior history of architecture. We’re only 401

Blaine Brownell

beginning to tap the potential of those materials” (Kieran 2004). This significant trend inspired the formation of various research and consulting platforms to survey, curate, and disseminate crucial information about new materials and their capabilities. Notable examples include the New York-based consultancy Material ConneXion, Amsterdam-based network Materia, Minneapolis/St. Paul-based platform Transmaterial, and emerging libraries at university architecture ­departments—such as the Harvard University Graduate School of Design Materials Lab and associated Immaterial/Ultramaterial seminar led by Toshiko Mori. Since Mutant Materials, architects have sought to make sense of new material technologies for both sensualist and rationalist purposes. To be certain, the transformed identity and alien nature of many novel substances have invited aesthetically focused explorations in design. For the most part, however, architects remain steadfast in their pursuit of a functional rationale for new materials. This purpose-driven exploration includes many successful examples of technology transfer coupled with increasingly sophisticated digital tools. For example, when Japan’s shipbuilding industry fell on hard times toward the end of the 20th century, architects invited naval contractors to apply their expertise to buildings. Architects like Ito and Hitoshi Abe collaborated with shipbuilders not just in the construction phase, but also in the early design phases, such that their projects benefited measurably from the adoption of a new set of construction techniques for architecture. Ito’s Sendai Mediatheque (2001) (Figure 24.8), for example, with its expansive steel honeycomb-composite floor plates and open vertical cores, or Abe’s Kanno Museum (2006), composed of a structural skin of double-wall welded plate steel, could not have been realized without the direct involvement of naval contractors—as well as advances in structural engineering software allowing such structures to be accurately calculated prior to construction. Digital fabrication is another potent example of technology transfer. 3D printing, which emerged in the late 1980s with stereolithography apparatus (SLA) technology, was originally employed for the rapid prototyping of mechanical parts. In recent decades, 3D printing and other forms of additive manufacturing have proliferated, and the technology continues to become more cost-effective and offer a wider variety of material feedstocks. For architects, the excitement surrounding 3D printing relates to the possibility of regaining beginning-to-end control over building design. Just as quality advances in the technology have permitted designers to create final products as well as prototypes, increasing the scale of production makes possible the generation of entire buildings in addition to models. In 2014, Shanghai-based company WinSun achieved this very accomplishment, printing ten simple houses using a feedstock made of concrete, sand, and fiberglass. Today, the company’s 20 × 33 × 132 foot machine produces elaborately detailed twostory villas and six-story apartment buildings (Sevenson 2015). Jenny Sabin, director of the Sabin

Figure 24.8  Toyo Ito, Sendai Mediatheque, Sendai, Japan (2001). Source: Blaine Brownell.

402

Divergent Matter

Lab at Cornell University, posits that digital technology is repositioning the architect as a maker in a way that has not occurred since the Middle Ages. This enhanced control over fabrication is “turning issues of notation and representation upside-down,” she claims, with regard to the conventional relationship between architect and contractor (Sabin 2016). Yet the technology still has many challenges. A limitation of most 3D printers for buildings is that they are based on the extrusion of a single material. Ironically, this technique approaches the material clarity of the preindustrial masonry wall; however, it is difficult to incorporate other material systems or assemblies. Another challenge pertains to the idea of printing architecture comprehensively and in a single pass, which Ronald Rael argues is too inflexible and error-prone to be productive. Instead, he and his partner Virginia San Fratello digitally fabricate individual elements—such as 3D-printed ceramic shingles—for assembly with other construction systems (Figure 24.9).

Current Debates and Future Implications The necessity of design innovation in architectural practice is a fundamental concern in several contemporary debates. The architectural canon is replete with examples of novel material applications that transformed contemporaneous paradigms of design and influenced subsequent building practices. Yet the professional expectations of architects focus primarily on pragmatics and dependability, with little or no value placed on experimentation. According to Rael, “Architecture is full of so many professional responsibilities, but not creative responsibilities” (Rael 2016). One promising trend is the increasing influence of architecturally focused research and development institutions such as ETH in Zurich; the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts; and the Institute for Computational Design and Institute of Building Structures and Structural Design in Stuttgart. This disconnect aligns with the inherent conflict between standardized and non-standardized material practices. In contemporary building construction, the impetus for predictability is intrinsically at odds with material exploration. Standardization reigns in current practice. Building codes, reference standards, manufacturer associations, and greening protocols guide the selection

Figure 24.9  Rael and San Fratello, GCODE.Clay 3D-printed ceramic shingles (2016). Source: Blaine Brownell.

403

Blaine Brownell

of products, systems, assemblies, and the massing of architecture. Indeed, the architect’s relationship with materials today is akin to that of a shopping consultant: selecting code-approved, commercially available products out of online catalogs—as opposed to designing new materials and applications. In KVA: Material Misuse, Sheila Kennedy argues that “the role of the architect is not so much to form these entities as it is to deform them from their standard applications and invent for them new definitions and uses” (Kennedy 2001: 20). The aim to disrupt conventional applications clashes with so-called best practices, yet absolute adherence to standardization eliminates the potential for advancement in the field. The question of material methodology is also central to current debates about the influence of digital tools and industrial automation. The increasing proliferation of computer-automated fabrication methods has raised anxiety among both large-scale manufacturers and handcraft-based artists, who see the widespread accessibility of digitally based mass customization as a threat to the prevailing paradigms of mass production and bespoke craft, respectively. Rael sees digital fabrication as a boon to architects and artists. “The industrial revolution removed the hand; the technological revolution reintroduces the hand,” says Rael. “It’s not taking away; it’s adding” (Rael 2016). Another set of questions surrounds the field of sustainability and the concept of green design. The negative environmental effects of the Anthropocene Era are by now well known, as humanity’s awareness of its outsized ecological footprint has become widespread. Environmental consciousness has motivated a variety of platforms for change, from voluntary green building programs to international treaties focused on reducing industrial contributions to global warming. The issue is not whether to attend to matters of environmental responsibility—but how. Conservative architects and builders prefer to disguise green approaches within standard ­practices, seeking to avoid the quirky aesthetics of so-called “earthships” and other 1970s-era off-grid architecture. Others see environmental urgency as an impetus for the formulation of a new architectural expression. Another critical debate concerns the conceptual framework for ecological design, with one side advocating incremental change—e.g., reduced-cement concrete—and another arguing for more radical transformations—such as avoiding concrete and steel altogether. Advocates of the latter approach have declared sustainability to be “dead,” arguing instead for a focus on regenerative design and net-positive architecture. Regardless of their differences, contemporary material strategies in architecture will be increasingly influenced by a similar set of consequential forces. In addition to fundamental drivers such as ecological responsibility and social equity, a convergence of powerful technological changes will shape future materials and applications. Forester’s prediction about three dominant megatechnologies—biotechnology, information technology, and new materials—presages their powerful influence not only individually but also in combination. Many next-generation materials will therefore be shaped by advances in biotechnology and information technology, and these in turn will transform the future of architecture. For example, today’s materials are becoming more lifelike. In 1997, biologist Janine Benyus’ seminal book Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature influenced a generation of scientists, designers, and artists about the virtues of emulating life. Since then, advancements in synthetic biology, biohacking, and bio-art reveal an increasing interest in the manipulation of life—as opposed to merely mimicking it. In combination, biomimicry and biodesign point to a transformed relationship between architecture and nature: a “hypernatural” approach based on the amplification, extension, and intensification of natural capacities in the built environment. Examples of notable works include Arup’s SolarLeaf, a vertical algae farm encapsulated within a glass curtain wall that provides natural shade and biomass for energy; Philips Design’s Microbial Home, a domestic kitchen designed as a cradle-to-cradle ecosystem fueled by microbial waste; Giuliano Mauri’s Cattedrale Vegetale, a 650-square-meter cathedral comprised of living trees; and Achim Menges’ 404

Divergent Matter

HygroSkin, a meteorosensitive pavilion with spruce cone-inspired wooden apertures that automatically open and close with changes in humidity. A growing number of examples like these portend a future of responsive, adaptable, and ecologically compatible buildings. Materials are also increasingly imbued with information. Toward the end of the 20th century, technology analyst William Duncan claimed that “the single most important material used by manufacturers in the future will be data” (Duncan 1994): 203. The Internet of things (IoT), the phenomenon that describes the burgeoning web of computing-enabled physical objects, is anticipated to outpace the volume of traditional electronic devices dramatically. Scientists at MIT’s Tangible Media Group call the new crop of information-infused objects radical atoms—physical matter associated with a digital proxy that can be measured in real time. Science writer Bruce Sterling anticipates the future proliferation of spimes—objects that can be tracked in time and space throughout their lifetimes. The architectural implications of this intimate analog–digital coupling are profound: building structures, assemblies, and products all connected to the web, available for constant monitoring yet also susceptible to potential hacks. Material choices will include the IoT criteria of digital access, information storage, processing power, and electricity demand in addition to the typical list of functional, economic, and aesthetic considerations.

Manipulating the Material Code For today’s architects, purpose-driven quests for material suitability are not divorced from considerations of surface expression, and recent research in cognitive science reinforces the importance of this connection. Referring to a study conducted by scientists Jonathan Cant and Melvyn Goodale, architecture critic Sarah Williams Goldhagen elucidates the cognitive prioritization of surface over form in the built environment. “Our responses to surfaces … are more likely to powerfully contribute to our holistic experience of place than our responses to forms,” she writes. “In short: form has wrongly been crowned king, because form-based cues elicit less of a whole-body, intersensory, and emotional response than surface-based cues do” (Goldhagen 2017: 158). This finding supports the interests of contemporary architects preoccupied with the embodiment of various meanings in material surfaces—what Farshid Moussavi and Michael Kubo term perceptual “affects” in The Function of Ornament (2006). The notion that surfaces can channel cultural and experiential significance has obvious ties to the field of semiotics, which is primarily focused on the analysis of symbols and signs. According to Sara Ilstedt Hjelm, a scholar of design semiotics, “meaning is not ‘transmitted’ to us [by materials]—we actively create it according to a complex interplay of codes of which we are normally not aware” (Hjelm 2002). Designer Kenya Hara describes the larger system of codes as information architecture, the accumulation of all our past experiences in the physical world that we use to evaluate any new experience. For Jun Aoki, this transference of material meaning is a fundamental consideration of design. According to the architect, “A material is perceived according to a code—a social code. And so we can manipulate the code itself ” (Aoki 2011: 158). Aoki’s work demonstrates a penchant for such manipulation as a key strategy in the conceptualization of his building envelopes. His Louis Vuitton Namiki store in Ginza (2004) employs sheets of opalescent alabaster and glass that are seamlessly integrated within a facade of fiber-reinforced concrete. During the day, the building reads as a monolith with subtle variations in its otherwise uniform surface; by night, however, the alabaster panels glow from within, dematerializing the imposing facade with pockets of light. Aoki’s Aomori Museum of Art (2006) is similarly disarming, but in a completely different way (Figure 24.1). A significant portion of the building’s exterior is clad in white-painted brick in a running-bond pattern—a seemingly conventional construction strategy. However, the viewer soon becomes aware of something entirely unexpected: the field of brick spans massive 405

Blaine Brownell

Figure 24.10  Mock-up of an insulated precast wall with brick “decoration” (2012). Source: Blaine Brownell.

distances without any construction joints and wraps the underside of deeply cantilevered masses—­ applications entirely inappropriate for this gravity-bound, hand-laid building module. “The exterior wall is a brick curtain wall, but the joints that come with a curtain wall are concealed by having the exterior wall as a whole absorb any displacement,” Aoki explains. “As a result, the building looks like a brick-constructions structure floating in the air” (Aoki 2006). The architect thus intentionally disregards Kahn’s parable of the brick, as well as the long lineage of architectural guidance concerning material suitability. Or does he? Given the transformed nature of brick in a postindustrial context, Aoki’s application can be interpreted as entirely appropriate. As mentioned previously, brick today is nothing more than a highly engineered surface employed to clad a structural frame. Aoki’s utilization of the material is arguably more honest in both its purpose and expression than others’ attempts to make brick appear to be load-bearing masonry. At the same time, Aoki’s material manipulation intentionally triggers the viewer’s consciousness: its truth, however unsettling, leaves an indelible memory, in contrast to the lie that pervades much of today’s built environment and goes unnoticed (Figure 24.10). This kind of sophisticated engagement with the viewer involves a kind of stretching of reality—a critical strategy in contemporary architecture. “Reality is only truly perceived in the presence of some unreality,” declares Kengo Kuma. “If it is a little unreal, there is a little bit of a surprise. If there is no surprise with something, it is not real, because it goes unnoticed. It might as well not exist” (Kuma 2011: 42). In making materials “unreal” by revealing their authentic circumstances, architects can use construction as a vehicle to critique incongruities between material function and expression for an enlightened public. In this sense, contemporary material practice makes its contribution by seeking questions rather than answers and, in exploring points of divergence, offers something whole.

References Abbe, Mary (2012) “Walker Art Center will bare all in fix-up project” in Star Tribune, November 15, 2012. Online. Available http://www.startribune.com/walker-art-center-will-bare-all-in-fix-up-project/179570861/ Algarotti, Francesco (1756) “Saggio sopra l’architettura” in Saggi, Bari: Laterza (1963): 37. Antonelli, Paola (1995) Mutant Materials in Contemporary Design, New York: The Museum of Modern Art: 9. Aoki, Jun (2006) “Aomori Museum of Art,” www.aokijun.com, Online. Available http://www.aokijun. com/en/works/青森県立美術館/ Aoki, Jun (2011) quoted in Blaine Brownell, Matter in the Floating World: Conversations with Leading Japanese Architects and Designers, New York: Princeton Architectural Press: 158. de Monchaux, Thomas (2014) “The Renzo Piano Pavilion at the Kimbell Art Museum: Deferential or Deflating?” in Architect, February 2, 2014. Online. Available http://www.architectmagazine.com/design/ buildings/the-renzo-piano-pavilion-at-the-kimbell-art-museum-deferential-or-deflating_o

406

Divergent Matter Duncan, William L. (1994) Manufacturing 2000, New York: Amacom: 203. Forester, Tom (1988) The Materials Revolution: Superconductors, New Materials, and the Japanese Challenge, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Frampton, Kenneth (1995) Studies in Tectonic Culture: The Poetics of Construction in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Frascari, Marco (1984) “The Tell-the-Tale Detail,” VIA 7: The Building of Architecture: 23–37. Goldhagen, Sarah Williams (2017) Welcome to Your World: How the Built Environment Shapes Our Lives, New York: Harper. Hjelm, S.I. (2002) Semiotics in Product Design, Royal Institute of Technology KTH, Stockholm: 2. Kahn, Louis I. (1973) Lecture at Pratt Institute, quoted in Robert C. Twombly (2003) Louis Kahn: Essential Texts, New York: W. W. Norton & Company: 271. Kennedy, Sheila (2001) KVA: Material Misuse, London: Architectural Association. Kieran, Stephen (2004) quoted in Olsen, Patrick and Molly Marinik (eds.) “Buildings get smarter about energy,” The Chicago Tribune. Online. Available http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2004-10-25/ news/0410260012_1_building-materials-nbbj-stephen-kieran (25 October 2004). Kuma, Kengo quoted in an interview with Blaine Brownell (2011) Matter in the Floating World, New York: Princeton Architectural Press: 42. Leatherbarrow, David and Mohsen Mostafavi (2002) Surface Architecture, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Le Corbusier (1929) “Architecture, The Expression of the Materials and Methods of our Times,” Architectural Record, 66:2 (August 1929): 123–28. Manzini, Ezio (1986) The Material of Invention, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press: 38. Moskowitz, Sanford (2009) The Advanced Materials Revolution, New York: Wiley: 1. Nouvel, Jean (1995) quoted in Riley, Terence, Light Construction, New York: Museum of Modern Art. Poerschke, Ute (2013) “On Concrete Materiality in Architecture,” ARQ, 17(2): 149–56. Rael, Ronald (2016) quoted in “A Tipping Point” Public Artist Talk, Minneapolis, MN: Northern Clay Center (September 22, 2016). Riley, Terence (1995) Light Construction, New York: Museum of Modern Art. Sabin, Jenny (2016) quoted in “A Tipping Point” Public Artist Talk, Minneapolis, MN: Northern Clay Center (September 22, 2016). Semper, Gottfried (1834) “Preliminary remarks on polychrome architecture and sculpture in antiquity” in The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Wolfgang Herrmann, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1989): 48. Sevenson, Brittney (2015) “Shanghai-based WinSun 3D Prints 6-Story Apartment Building and an Incredible Home” 3dprint.com ( Jan 18, 2015). Online. Available https://3dprint. com/38144/3d-printed-apartment-building/ Venturi, Robert (1982) “Diversity, relevance and representation in historicism, or plus ça change…plus a plea for pattern all over architecture…,” the 1982 Walter Gropius Lecture, in Architectural Record ( June 1982), 114–119. Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène-Emmanuel (1863), Entretiens sur l’Architecture, trans. Benjamin Bucknall in Discourses on Architecture, New York: Grove (1959): 469.

407

25 Building Mass Customised Housing through Innovation in the Production System Lessons from Japan James Barlow and Ritsuko Ozaki

Introduction The housebuilding industry is often seen as different from other industries because it has failed to follow a conventional mass production model for economic development (Harris and Buzzelli, 2002, 2003). But this does not mean that the housebuilding industry in different countries is not well adapted to the local business environment. The differing conditions found in different housing markets can create varied, but equally efficient, industry responses. As Harris and Buzzelli (2002: 38) put it, this “challenges the view that the modern housing industry is backward, and that it must be viewed through a single lens”. These points relate to notions of “path dependency”, the way technological development trajectories are reinforced by existing technologies and the impact of institutional, cultural or environmental factors on an industry’s development path. Path dependency has been explored in relation to Japanese housebuilding by Patchell (2002). He demonstrates how a combination of social, economic, political and geographical conditions has resulted in the co-evolution of large-scale industrialise housing suppliers and smaller, local craft-based producers. Others have ­d iscussed path dependency in relation to the transition towards free markets in housing in Japan (e.g. Zhou and Logan, 1996). In this chapter, we develop the points made by Harris, Buzzelli and Patchell by focusing on the strategies adopted by Japan’s large national housing suppliers. We term these firms mass-customised housing suppliers to distinguish them from smaller local firms also producing customised homes, but using traditional building techniques. The mass customised housing suppliers use “lean” and “agile” production systems, including the extensive use of prefabricated components, to deliver high levels of product choice at mass production costs (Barlow, 1999; Barlow et al., 2003; Naim and Barlow, 2003, for a discussion of mass customisation within housebuilding). Our interest is in the way the Japanese mass customised housing suppliers have differentiated themselves from local suppliers and their possible future evolutionary path. The chapter is based on research carried out in the late 1990s and early 2000s on the introduction of mass customisation into the UK housebuilding industry. The research included four visits to Japan to study Japanese mass customised housebuilders. This chapter was previously published as Barlow and Ozaki (2005), which contains details of the research. We have updated parts of the paper where appropriate. 408

DOI: 10.4324/9781315674469-28

Building Mass Customised Housing

In the next section, we discuss the way key structural conditions such as market dynamics, regulatory framework and culture influence the business strategies adopted by housebuilders in general. Next, we discuss the evolution of the Japanese mass customised housebuilding industry and how this has been shaped by the structural conditions within which it operates. In doing this, we take forward Patchell’s findings on the co-evolution of the two main housebuilding sectors. Finally, we draw conclusions on the way in which innovation within the mass customised housing sector has been stimulated by its changing operating environment and the extent to which its possible future path is being shaped by current conditions in Japan. Although this chapter is not a comparison of the UK and Japanese industries, some UK data are provided as a contrast.

Influences on Housebuilders’ Business Strategies It has long been recognised that economic activity and its development pathways are socially and culturally embedded (Granovetter, 1985). As Harris and Buzzelli (2002, 2003) point out, a central theme to emerge from the industrial restructuring literature after the 1980s is that there is no single development path leading to a preordained best practice. Few industries have ever conformed to the ideal of mass production (Sabel and Zeitlin, 1985; Williams et al, 1992; Scranton, 1994). The housebuilding industry is no different. Its business strategies reflect the structural ­conditions – market dynamics, regulatory framework, culture – within which its firms operate (Eccles, 1981; Barlow and King, 1992). These conditions include the prevailing land-use planning and building control systems, the ways in which new housing is financed, and cultural and historical factors such as the structure of landownership and attitudes towards property ownership. One feature that is said to be of particular importance in explaining the structure and strategies of housebuilding industries is the way its production processes are organised. In housebuilding, unlike most manufacturing activities, the site of the production process is geographically variable, its location shifting as buildings are completed in a form of “assembly line in reverse” (Ball, 1983; McKellar, 1993). It has also been argued that construction as a whole is a supplier-dominated sector. Most innovation originates from the suppliers of equipment and materials and is less concerned with process innovation (Pavitt, 1984; Groák, 1992; Slaughter, 1998), inhibiting productivity improvements and complicating the integration of new products and components. This combination of factors is said to be a key reason for the relative lack of large, capital-­ intensive firms in housebuilding and an impediment to innovation (Ball, 1996; Clarke and Wall, 1996). Inflationary conditions in housing markets dominated by speculative housebuilding are said to further reinforce these features. For example, Leijonhufvud (1977: 280–1) has noted that inflation means that “being good at” real “productive activities – being competitive in the o ­ rdinary sense – no longer has the same priority. Playing the inflation right is vital”. This is particularly characteristic of speculative housebuilders (Barlow and King, 1992). We will now turn to the Japanese mass customised housebuilding industry and show that these axioms do not apply – the industry involves centralised, highly capital-intensive firms competing on their ability to innovate in their production processes.

Key Influences on Housebuilding in Japan With a population slightly less than double that of the UK, Japan builds almost six times the ­number of new housing units each year. Since 1987, when 1.7 million dwellings were completed, Japanese output has steadily fallen, to around 890,000 dwellings in 2014. A major difference 409

James Barlow and Ritsuko Ozaki

between Japan and other developed economies is the very high ratio of new homes sold annually compared to existing home sales. However, in the last 15 years, the existing homes market has grown considerably. When we carried out our research, new housebuilding represented around 80% of total annual domestic property transactions (compared to under 5% in the UK). By 2012, the market for existing homes was estimated to represent around 50% of total home sales (Fudosan-­Ryutsu-Keieikyoukai, cited in Kobayashi, 2016). At the time of our research, about half of all new completions were houses and over 90% of these were detached houses (Management & Coordination Agency, 1993). Approximately 75% of newly built detached houses were commissioned by individuals and built on their own plot of land to replace their existing house once it has outlived its usefulness. These houses are usually based on standard floor plans, but customised to a greater or lesser degree. This type of customer is almost always the owner-occupier of the house. The remaining 25% of new houses were built speculatively for sale, with purchasers being offered little or no choice over specification and design1 (see Figure 25.1). This distribution of submarkets in the new housing sector has remained relatively consistent, although there has been a growth in apartment/ condominium construction in the last 15 years (Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, 2017). The important point is that the dominant housebuilding model in Japan does not involve speculative development, i.e. purchasing land and building homes without an identified purchaser. Most housebuilders in the replacement homes sector build houses to commission from households. The scale and importance of this sector is a reflection of two factors. First, the historically strong cultural attachment to the land in Japan (Kirwan, 1987; Fukutake, 1989; Woodall, 1992; Hendry, 1995), reinforced by the post-1945 redistribution of farmland (Zetter, 1986), has played an essential role in shaping people’s sense of private property rights (Yoshida, 1990). Second, lifetime employment with a single employer was a feature of the high economic growth rates from the 1950s to the late 1980s for much of the working population (Hendry, 1995). Together, these have meant that Japanese households tend to remain on the same plot of land for generations. Although the house itself may be demolished and rebuilt, as needs change, the land remains within the ownership of the family. The replacement cycle in this segment of the housing market has historically been around 26 years, creating a “scrap and build” culture. While the average age of houses demolished in Japan has grown slightly since we conducted our research, it is still estimated to be below 30 years (Kobayashi, 2016).

Figure 25.1  The Japanese new homes market.

410

Building Mass Customised Housing

One outcome of this model is the reduced demand for second-hand and new speculative housing, described above. In addition, individual houses are regarded as consumer, rather than investment, goods – the investment value largely remains in the land (Ozaki, 1999). Because of the Japanese preference for new homes, second-hand values are little more than the value of the land alone. Either the existing house is considered to have no value, or it may even reduce the land value because of the cost of demolition. In the mid-2000s, Koo and Sasaki (2008) estimated that single-family houses in the Tokyo area lost all their value 15 years after construction. The regulatory framework within which this system operates has historically been relatively benign, reflecting a political and administrative system in Japan that favours minimum intervention in the economy (Alden, 1986). It is not necessary to obtain development permission outside a City Planning Area, although development in these predominantly rural areas is infrequent. E ­ lsewhere, a zoning system regulates the size and form of building, with a presumption in favour of development permission. In recent years, while the land-use planning system remains laissez-faire compared to the UK, the building regulation system has been strengthened, shifting the focus from quantity to quality. The Basic Act for Housing 2006, for example, seeks to achieve various quality and energy performance standards as well as increase the lifespan of housing to about 40 years. A final feature of Japan’s housing market that needs mention is the property boom of the late 1980s. This was partly stimulated by an acceleration in economic concentration in Tokyo and other major urban centres, with demand for office space spilling over to land zoned for housing. This resulted in inflationary pressure and the conversion of residential sites into commercial development. The National Land Use Planning Act was modified in 1987 to control such speculative land transactions and land prices peaked in 1991. After this, Japan experienced sharp and continuous land price decreases.

The Origins of Mass Customised Housebuilding in Japan As a whole, the Japanese replacement homes industry has not seen the same trend towards concentration that has been a feature in the UK since the late 1980s. Here, 55% of all private sector dwellings were built by the 18 largest housebuilders in 2000. In Japan, the largest 18 companies accounted for only 19% of the market that year (Barlow and Ozaki, 2001). There appears to have been some concentration since then, with the nine largest Japanese housebuilders accounting for 20% of the market in 2015, but the industry remains comparatively fragmented (Statista, 2017). At the time of our research, the sector was divided into three types of housebuilders: over 80,000 local firms, accounting for more than 50% of completions; 150 regional housebuilders, who produced 20%; and a small number of national suppliers, responsible for the balance (Iwashita, 2001). Only 67 firms were supplying more than 300 houses per annum in the late 1990s, but some were extremely large. The largest, Sekisui House, supplied over 60,000 houses and apartments annually. By 2015, Sekisui House (48,000) had been displaced by Daiwa House Industry (51,000). In contrast, the largest UK housebuilder built around 11,000 dwellings in 2000 and 16,000 in 2015. The first prefabricated housing suppliers appeared in Japan around 1960. Many of these were established by manufacturing companies involved in industrial sectors unrelated to construction. The sector grew rapidly from 1965 to 1975, stimulated by the initiatives of the Housing Loan ­Corporation to promote mass production of low-cost houses. However, while national policies provided the potential for a mass market, local housebuilders were not disadvantaged by these polices since demand was amplified across all market sectors (Patchell, 2002). To this day, traditionally constructed houses using “post and beam timber” frames comprise nearly 80% of all custom-built houses (Iwashita, 2001). The imposition of a national building code also benefited local builders by imposing stricter standards and raising quality.

411

James Barlow and Ritsuko Ozaki

The second phase in the evolution of the mass customised housing suppliers occurred between about 1975 and 1985, when housing demand fell and firms began to move away from a mass production model towards one offering wider variation around standard house types. The relationship between the housebuilders and components suppliers was initially problematic because it was unclear who was responsible for the risks of carrying stocks of components (Iwashita, 1990). Furthermore, the smaller housebuilders were able to provide flexibility in housing design for their customers through the use of the post and beam construction method, and provided competition for the national builders who were seeking to move towards a more customised model (Patchell, 2002). However, it was after the mid-1980s and during the 1990s that mass customisation emerged as a viable strategy for the large national housebuilders. This was achieved by the development of financially viable production and supply chain processes to enable high degrees of variation in housing. It was also underpinned by innovation at the customer interface in relation to design, sales and marketing. We discuss this in detail in the next section. Mass customisation was able to develop during this period for several reasons. First, ­throughout the 1980s and 1990s the housing market was encouraged by the Japanese government, first in order to satisfy US insistence that it stimulate its domestic demand and later to boost the ­deflationary Japanese economy. Both these policies openly promoted the prefabrication methods of the national builders (Patchell, 2002). Second, the large firms were able to take advantage of their size to ­develop process innovation and achieve economies of scale and scope. Third, rising customer expectations in relation to quality, design, equipment and energy efficiency provided the national housebuilders with an opportunity to develop their production systems to meet this demand. The national suppliers therefore changed the dynamics of the industry, an outcome being considerably increased competition for the local and regional housebuilders. As one commentator noted, the unhappiness of many Japanese with their homes at this time, in comparison with what they knew to be available, was taken as evidence by the major firms of a large market awaiting them (Ikegami 1997: 18; cited in Patchell, 2002). The local and regional housebuilders were not completely disadvantaged during this period, though. Patchell (2002) explains how this sector’s production system was rooted in conventional building techniques, but these firms were able to adopt some of the economies of scale and p­ roduct differentiation strategies of the national housebuilders by developing purchasing and advertising networks. This, however, meant there was a trade-off between maintaining a degree of independence and product standardisation. Process and organisational innovation also occurred at the site assembly end of the supply system. According to Iwashita (1990), the increased housing demand from 1987 and shortages of labour at construction sites made it hard for smaller housebuilders to employ sufficient staff. This led to the emergence of “super subcontractors”. These are vertically and horizontally integrated networks of suppliers of major building elements, exterior finishing and carpentry works, who work directly under contract for a housebuilder. However, the super subcontractors are not tied to a specific firm and smaller housebuilders also use their services. The development of super subcontractors allowed many housebuilders to outsource the construction function altogether. The next section will discuss the innovations introduced by the mass customised housebuilders during the 1980s and 1990s. We are particularly interested in the way the structural influences discussed above have impacted on the industrial development pathway of these firms.

Delivering Customised Housing – Innovation across the Production System The mass customised housing suppliers have adopted a “quasi-standardisation” approach which controls the cost of components through constraints on variety of choice, even though they ­actually appear to offer more choice. This perspective, however, downplays the extent to which 412

Building Mass Customised Housing

these firms have developed advanced production systems, along with sophisticated management of the customer interface, which is able to deliver highly desirable products to this segment of the ­m arket. Before we describe the methods developed by Japanese mass customised housing suppliers to achieve this, we will first describe the levels of choice they offer their customers.

Choice The amount of choice offered depends on the firm, their market orientation and the construction technology used, but unlike housebuilders in many other countries, Japan’s mass customised housing suppliers offer choice across their entire product range and not simply those at the upper end of the market. Typically, a firm will offer up to 300 standard designs in terms of elevations and floor plans, which can then be adapted by the customer. Medium or larger British housebuilders, in contrast, typically offered a core portfolio of 30 standard floor plans, with little or no opportunity for adaptation at the time of our research (Nicol and Hooper, 1999; Hooper and Nicol, 2000). Customer choice in Japanese housebuilding mainly relates to floor plans and internal specification. Sekisui House, for example, was offering around 22 house models, each with about 50 different floor plans. These could be built in either steel or timber frame, finished externally in various prefabricated cladding systems, and their interiors can be adapted to three basic design concepts ( Japanese, Western or hybrid). Finally, customers could choose between different specifications of interior fixtures and fittings. Japanese housebuilders offer a large range of internal “fit out” options from which the purchaser can customise their home. Firms maintain supply agreements with manufacturers of white goods and bathroom, lighting and storage products. These provide the standard range from which customers can choose. This is generally updated every six months. In addition, some optional items – such as ventilation systems – are included in the price of the house but can be rejected by customers if they wish. If customers are not satisfied with the standard range of fittings, they are able to choose from other manufacturers, although the housebuilder will charge a price premium on the item. Choice is restricted, however, by four factors. First, exterior cladding choices are controlled in order for housebuilders to achieve economies of scale in construction processes, by building and planning regulations and by the size and shape of the plot. Second, there is the obvious constraint imposed by income, the starting point for all discussions with potential customers. Third, housebuilders are adept at managing customers’ choices by making suggestions and holding approved pre-defined lists of fixtures and fittings. Finally, the size and orientation of the plot are critical. Orientation is especially important because Japanese households prefer the living and traditional “tatami” rooms to face south (Ozaki, 1999, 2001; Ozaki and Lewis, 2006). Nevertheless, the permutations of design, construction technology, interior design and specification are large compared to those offered by housebuilders in most countries.

Supporting Production System Providing high levels of choice over design and specifications, and at the same time delivering homes on time and to a high quality, has required significant innovation across the entire production process. Underpinning the mass customised approach is the way the large suppliers have been able to use of standardisation (the complete and consistent interchangeability of parts) and pre-assembly of components and complete sub-assemblies (such as timber and steel frame systems and external cladding), to move from a focus on economies of scale in production towards economies of scope. The latter involves the introduction of processes that facilitate the production of a variety of models using the same machinery and material inputs. We describe the underlying production and supply chain processes elsewhere (Barlow, 1999; Barlow et al., 2003, Naim and 413

James Barlow and Ritsuko Ozaki

Barlow, 2003). The salient point is that these firms have been able to move housebuilding away from the traditional “assembly line in reverse” model towards one where the bulk of production takes within the factory. To help achieve this, major component suppliers have been encouraged to invest in dedicated housing production systems (Bottom et al., 1996; Gann, 1996; Gann et al., 1999). Long-term relationships with suppliers help to inform product development, and collaborative R&D with key suppliers is common. Together, these production technology and process innovations have enabled the mass customised housing suppliers to exploit opportunities for improving productivity and quality, improving managerial control and coordinating processes more effectively.

The Customer Interface The introduction of standardisation and pre-assembly within the production processes has been coupled with the development of a sophisticated approach to managing the interface with the customer (Barlow and Ozaki, 2001, 2003). Customisation inevitably means that housebuilders spend considerable resources at the front end of the customer relationship. Once a decision has been made to purchase, firms might spend three or four planning sessions with customers, which can last up to four hours each. However, purchasers sometimes liaise with the designer as many as ten times and one company said there could be as many as two meetings per week during the design phase. The absence of large development sites that can accommodate show areas and sales facilities means alternative methods of enticing the customer have had to be adopted. In Japan’s small speculative detached housebuilding sector, potential house-purchasers are generally directed to development sites by advertising or estate agents. The mass customised housebuilders instead use the following four approaches: show villages, company-specific customer centres, word-of-mouth sales and repeat business. Show villages, which first emerged in 1966, allow housebuilders to collectively display their show homes. There were 405 show villages in Japan in 2000, containing about 5,000 houses. Some are large, with 50 or more houses. Housebuilders also maintain large numbers of sales offices or customer centres. Sekisui House, for example, had 200 sales offices across Japan and, at any one time, 600 show homes. Great stress is placed on word-of-mouth sales and repeat business. This is achieved through high levels of aftercare service, a reflection of the Japanese notion that a continuing relationship is part of the sale. More pragmatically, aftercare service provides valuable feedback for ­product development and may lead to word-of-mouth referrals and higher brand loyalty. Apart from ­follow-up visits within the first year of occupation to check and deal with any problems, the long-term relationship involves routine inspection and maintenance, the construction of extensions, and internal and external remodelling. Japanese housebuilders will continue to visit their customers and carry out surveys to capture their experiences of living in the home 10 or even 20 years after the sale. Word-of-mouth referrals are high, compared to the UK, where rates at the time of the research were generally below 5%. Mitsui Home, for example, received 30% of its sales in this way (60% from show homes in housing parks and 10% from advertising or other sales promotion). At the time of our interviews, the company hoped to increase the ratio of the word-of-mouth ­introductions to 60%–70%. The mass customised housing suppliers are placing growing emphasis on using the after-sales period to gather useful data for product development. A tool used by some firms is local “clubs” bringing together their purchasers and holding seminars on how to get the most out of the home. Large housebuilders are using their websites to gather customer feedback, providing advice to existing purchasers and generating sales of household products. They also capture the knowledge and experience of site assembly teams and sales personnel. Sales personnel feed their knowledge of 414

Building Mass Customised Housing

changing customer needs via regular meetings with designers, and site assembly teams are used as a resource for improving the buildability of homes.

The Future Evolution of Mass Customised Housing Suppliers Patchell (2002) argues that both the large national housebuilders and those operating at the local or regional level are constrained by path dependency in different ways. The former have sought growth through heavy investment in economies of scale and scope, which has necessitated a geographical expansion in return for forfeiting local responsiveness. The latter are constrained by local traditions, materials and relations, which afford some competitive advantages at the expense of their spatial scope of activities. Patchell also argues that the local embeddedness of smaller housebuilders has meant that the national firms face a challenge of spatial organisation – they have had to create a sales and distribution infrastructure that is able to interact with customers locally. There is some truth in this analysis, inasmuch as the mass customised housing suppliers cannot design as freely as their local competitors who are able to use their carpentry and assembly skills to tailor-make a house to an individual’s needs. However, this downplays the extent to which the former have been able to achieve a high degree of design flexibility and minimise the associated costs. As we saw above, the mass customised housing suppliers have been able to develop sophisticated customer interface and production systems to address the problems of coordinating the range of potential design choices available to purchasers. This approach is, however, costly in terms of sales and marketing expenses. In 2000, about a fifth of Sekisui Heim’s workforce comprised full-time sales people, and more than a third in Sumitomo Forestry, a more upmarket housebuilder. In the UK, sales staff might represent under 10% of total staff in a medium or larger housebuilder, including agency staff. Along with the heavy investment in manufacturing capacity and R&D, this ensures that the operating profit margins of Japanese housebuilders were therefore very low, generally around 2%–3%, and comparable to those of typical construction contractors (Barlow and Ozaki, 2001)2. Our question is how the organisational and spatial co-evolution of each housebuilding sector will develop in the future. Despite persistent economic problems, Japan still has almost 900,000 housing starts per annum. But downward pressure on housing market is evident as household formation peaks and the population declines. There is also mounting concern about whether Japan is simply building too many new homes (Koo and Sasaki, 2008; Kobayashi, 2016), as well the environmental cost of the scrap and build, mass customised housebuilding model (Braw, 2014). There are therefore uncertainties over the future market for replacement housing. The need for a larger house or desire to replace an outdated one remains the primary driver for this market, but this might be tempered by two forces. First, an ageing population has resulted in a trend towards larger, three-generation homes, where ageing parents’ and their children’s households live under the same roof, but separately (Ozaki, 1999). However, any movement towards the replacement of larger three-generation houses would be dampened by growth in the apartment/condominium market if this included housing specifically designed for elderly people. Similarly, a parent’s house can be sold by the children to a speculative developer, who then builds a number of small houses in the original land of plot (Ozaki, 2001). This recent trend would also slow down the replacement house building market. Second, the long-term impact of introduction of temporary or part-time employment contracts, stagnating earnings and low expectations about future growth prospects would generally dampen the ability of households to replace their homes, with the result that an increasing number of Japanese owner-occupiers turn to renovation of the existing dwelling. Under these circumstances, housebuilders in the mass customisation sector are therefore seeking new business strategies. One is to try to raise their market share. When we carried out our research, 415

James Barlow and Ritsuko Ozaki

some interviewees felt there was scope to win business from the numerous smaller firms; this strategy is possibly reflected in the increased market concentration over the last 15 years, described above. Another strategy has been to seek to rationalise their portfolio of housing designs to raise profitability and improve production efficiency. Sekisui House, for example, reduced the number of product models from 110 in 1997 to 50 in 2000. The challenge is to find ways of rationalising product ranges, while still offering the flexibility and choice offered by competitors. Third, a number of housebuilders are attempting to compensate for the decline in new housebuilding by becoming involved in refurbishment for their existing customers. These include both large national firms and local builders and building products manufacturers. All maintain detailed customer databases that include the design and technical specifications of the house. Some also see potential in offering repair services after major seismic and weather events. The ability to organise large-scale production processes, coupled with the strength of their brands and all-pervasive emphasis on lifetime customer relationships, may ensure that the mass customised housing suppliers are able to carry out these three strategies and offer greater competition for the smaller local firms. However, a continuation of recent mergers and acquisitions, and vertical and horizontal alliances and integration throughout the housebuilding industry as a whole, could lead to the expansion of regional or larger local housebuilders and act as a counterweight for the mass customised housebuilders’ expansion strategies.

Conclusions The example of Japanese mass customised housing suppliers refutes the view that industrial development does not occur in housebuilding. These firms, as well as the smaller local housebuilders, have adapted to their environment. The emergence of the mass customised suppliers was a unique response to the structure and condition of the Japanese housing market and its social circumstances in a period of rapid economic growth. Part of this has involved the coexistence and co-evolution of large industrialised firms and small local traditional builders. The flexibility of local builders in terms of design and planning – and their local connections, very important in Japan, especially in rural areas – is a huge advantage in the competition between industrialised national and local craft housebuilders. However, these two types of firm have influenced each other and the competition between them has helped them to evolve. Large national housebuilders have relied on innovation across the production process to match the local connections of small firms. While competition between the two sectors may increase as the scale of housebuilding declines, the emergence of supplier relationships, a consolidation of firms in the local/regional housebuilding and the introduction of tighter regulation to increase quality suggest that the two sectors will continue to evolve in tandem. We argued above that the impact of house and land price inflation is an important structural condition explaining the lack of innovation in housebuilding industries. Japan’s mass customised housing suppliers show how product and process innovation has occurred, despite high rates of land price inflation in the late 1980s, because the majority of housebuilding is non-speculative. Housebuilding in this segment of the Japanese housing market does not involve land development, since the plots are already in the ownership of the housebuilder’s customer, so firms supplying this market are obliged to innovate to reduce production costs and develop new products to differentiate themselves competitively. Responsiveness to customers’ individual needs through levels of product customisation has become an important competitive strategy in some sectors. Menu-driven approaches to the supply of goods and services, whereby certain features are selected and products are tailored from a relatively standardised core of parts, are now common in many service and manufacturing sectors. Japanese housebuilders – and in particular those involved in mass customised supply – have extended this 416

Building Mass Customised Housing

philosophy into the new homes market. Competition between firms is largely on the basis of levels of choice and service, rather than their ability to secure development land in the right place and at the right point in the market cycle, as is the case with speculative housebuilders in the UK. This requires much closer integration of market intelligence with design and product development. The Japanese mass customised housing system amply demonstrates how this can be achieved in housebuilding.

Acknowledgements The research was supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions under the LINK-MCNS ­Programme. A prior version of the chapter was published in Environment and Planning A (Barlow and Ozaki, 2005).

Notes 1 Speculative developers who plan and develop whole communities include railway companies with large land holdings (e.g. Tokyu Dentetsu) and real estate companies (e.g. Mitsui Fudosan). 2 Housebuilders supplying the replacement homes market do, however, benefit from extremely favourable cash flow, receiving 40% of the final price on commencement and further 30% once the house has been erected.

References Alden J, 1986, “Some strengths and weaknesses of Japanese urban planning” Town and Planning Review 57 127–34. Ball M, 1983 Housing Policy and Economic Power. The Political Economy of Owner Occupation (Methuen, London). Ball M, 1996, Housing and Construction. A Troubled Relationship? (The Policy Press, Bristol). Barlow J, 1999, “From craft production to mass customisation: innovation requirements for the UK housebuilding industry” Housing Studies 14 23–42. Barlow J, King A, 1992, “The state, the market and competitive strategy: the housebuilding industry in the UK, France and Sweden” Environment and Planning A 24 381–400. Barlow J, Ozaki R, 2001 Are you being served? Japanese lessons on customer-focused housebuilding. Report of a Department of Trade and Industry Expert Mission (SPRU, University of Sussex, Brighton). Barlow J, Ozaki R, 2003 “Customer focus in private housebuilding: lessons from other industries, current practice and the potential of new technologies” Housing Studies 18(1) 87–101. Barlow J, Ozaki R, 2005 “Building mass customised housing through innovation in the production system: lessons from Japan” Environment and Planning A, 37 9–20. Barlow J, Childerhouse P, Gann D, Hong-Minh S, Naim N, Ozaki R, 2003, “Choice and delivery in housebuilding: examples from Japan” Building Research & Information 31(3)134–45. Bottom D, Gann D, Groák S, Meikle J, 1996 Innovation in Japanese prefabricated housebuilding industries (Construction Research and Information Association – CIRIA, London). Braw E, 2014, “Japan’s disposable home culture is an environmental and financial headache” The Guardian, www. theguardian.com/sustainable-business/disposable-homes-japan-environment-lifespan-sustainability Clarke, L. and Wall, C. (1996) Skills and Construction Process. A Comparative Study of Vocational Training and Quality in Social Housebuilding ( Joseph Rowntree Foundation, York). Eccles R, 1981, “The quasi-firm and the construction industry.” Journal of Economic Behaviour and Organisation 2 335–57. Fukutake T, 1989, The Japanese Social Structure. Its Evolution in the Modern Century. 2nd edition (University of Tokyo Press, Tokyo). Gann D, 1996, “Construction as a manufacturing process? Similarities and differences between industrialised housing and car production in Japan” Construction Management and Economics 14 437–50. Gann D, Biffin M, Connaughton J, Dacey T, Hill A, Moseley R, Young C, 1999, Flexibility and Choice in Housing (Policy Press, Bristol). Granovetter M, 1985, “Economic action and social structure. The problem of embeddedness.” American Journal of Sociology 19 481–510. Groák S, 1992, The Idea of Building (E & F N Spon, London).

417

James Barlow and Ritsuko Ozaki Harris R, Buzzelli, M, 2002, House Building in the Machine Age, 1920s–1970s: Realities and Perceptions of Modernisation. Unpublished report available from: http://sciwebserver.science.mcmaster.ca/geo/faculty/ harris/geography/build.pdf Harris R, Buzzelli M, 2003, The Virtual Housebuilder: Constructing Divisions of Spatial Labour. Unpublished report available from: http://sciwebserver.science.mcmaster.ca/geo/faculty/harris/geography/build.pdf Hendry J, 1995, Understanding Japanese Society, 2nd edition (Routledge, London). Hooper A, Nicol C, 2000, “Design practice and volume production in speculative housebuilding” Construction Management and Economics 18 295–310. Ikegami H, 1997, Jyutaku Gyokai Handobuku [Housing Industry Handbook] (Toyo Keizai, Tokyo). Iwashita S, 1990, “Production Integration in Japanese Housing” Habitat International 14 235–43. Iwashita S, 2001, “Custom made housing in Japan and the growth of the super subcontractor” Construction Management and Economics 19 295–300. Kirwan R, 1987, “Fiscal policy and the price of land and housing in Japan” Urban Studies 24 345–60. Kobayashi M, 2016, “The housing market and housing policies in Japan” ADBI Working Paper Series, 558. Asian Development Bank Institute. Koo R, Sasaki M, 2008, “Obstacles to affluence: thoughts on Japanese housing” NRI Papers, 137. Nomura Research Institute. Leijonhufvud A, 1977, “Costs and consequences of inflation.” In G Harcourt Ed The Microeconomic Foundations of Macroeconomics (Westview Press, Boulder) pp. 265–327. Management and Coordination Agency, 1993, The Survey of Housing Statistics (Management and Coordination Agency, Tokyo). McKellar J, 1993, “Building technology and the production process.” In J Miron Ed House, Home and Community: Progress in Housing Canadians, 1945–1986 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal and Kingston) pp. 136–54. Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, 2017, Jutaku Chakkou Toukei (Housing Construction Statistics) (MAITT, Tokyo). Naim M, Barlow J, 2003, “An innovative supply chain strategy for customised housing” Construction Management and Economics 21 593–602. Nicol C, Hooper A, 1999, “Contemporary change and the housebuilding industry: concentration and standardisation in production” Housing Studies 14 57–76. Ozaki R, 1999, Society, Culture and House Form in England and Japan unpublished PhD thesis (University of Sussex, Brighton). Ozaki R, 2001, “Society and housing form: home-centredness in England vs. family-centredness in Japan” Journal of Historical Sociology 14 337–57. Ozaki R, Lewis JR, 2006, “Boundaries and the meaning of social space: a study of Japanese house plans” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24 91–104. Patchell J, 2002, “Linking production and consumption: the co-evolution of interaction systems in the Japanese house industry” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 92 284–301. Pavitt, K, 1984, “Patterns of technical change: towards a taxonomy and a theory” Research Policy 13 343–73. Scranton, P, 1994, “Manufacturing diversity. Production systems, markets, and an American consumer society, 1870–1930,” Technology and Culture 35 476–505. Sabel C, Zeitlin J, 1985, “Historical alternatives to mass production. Politics, markets and technology in 19th century industrialization” Past and Present 108 133–76. Slaughter, S, 1998 “Models of construction innovation” Journal of Construction Engineering and Management 124 226–31. Statista (2017) ‘Leading housing construction companies in Japan’ www.statista.com/statistics/667933/ japan-top-housing-construction-companies/ Williams K, Haslam C, Williams J, 1992, “Ford versus ‘Fordism’: The beginnings of mass production” Work, Employment and Society 6 517–55. Woodall, B, 1992, “The politics of land in Japan’s dual political economy.” In J Haley and K Yamamura Eds Land Issues in Japan: A Policy Failure? (Society for Japanese Studies, Washington DC). Yoshida, K, 1990, Genkouhou no paradaimu to tochi kihonhou (A paradigm of existing legislation and the Basic Land Act). In Y Honma et al. Eds Tochi kihonhou wo yomu (Reading of the Basic Land Act) (Nihon Keizai Hyouron Sha, Tokyo). Zetter, J, 1986, “Challenges for Japanese urban policy: Some findings from the OECD review” Town Country and Planning Review 57 135–40. Zhou N, Logan J, 1996, “Market transition and the commodification of housing in urban China” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 20 400–21.

418

26 The Programmable Architect Rizal Muslimin

In envisioning a universal digital machine that can think and solve a variety of problems, Alan Turing foregrounded the role of logic over the engineering mechanism. For Turing, one cannot draw parallels between a machine’s mechanism and the human nervous system simply because both operate according to electrical principles, as the similarities between them are superficial. In Computing, he wrote: Importance is often attached to the fact that modern digital computers are electrical, and that the nervous system also is electrical. Since Babbage’s machine was not electrical, and since all digital computers are in a sense equivalent, we see that this use of electricity cannot be of theoretical importance… In the (human) nervous system, chemical phenomena are at least as important as electrical… The feature of using electricity is thus seen to be only a very superficial similarity. If we wish to find such similarities, we should look rather for mathematical analogies of function. (Turing 1950: 16) John von Neumann pointed out a similar message with the analog–digital mechanism of the memory component in a computer. In a vacuum-tube mechanism, the effect of binary transmission (all-or-none state) is present, yet the memory is not stored in a vacuum tube itself; rather, ‘the thing which remembers is nowhere in particular’ (Von Neumann et al. 1966: 68). To find a proportional comparison on how humans and machines think, Turing calls for investigation using a machine that can be thought of as being a discrete-state machine, e.g., digital computer, which can be programmed for various computing processes based on symbol and quantified data. Today, the term universal in digital technology has shifted from signifying versatility to ubiquity. In the last half-century, the engineering side of digital computing has evolved very rapidly, expanding the term speed from fast processing to pervasive networking: that is, to be in many different places simultaneously (McCullough, 2004; Mitchell, 1995, 2003). Given such capacity, a human digital activity sometimes struggles to keep up with advances in digital technology, as most users’ engagement with a digital computer is a fraction of what the machine can offer. At other times, however, the social effect of digital usage is too quick to anticipate. Digital architecture practice in the 21st century is more or less similar. Computer-aided d­ esign (CAD) has enabled architects to evaluate, analyze, and synthesize various architectural design problems, from analyzing to modeling, and from simulation to fabrication. High-definition

DOI: 10.4324/9781315674469-29

419

Rizal Muslimin

sensing devices and automated rapid-prototyping technologies have increased speed and precision in architectural engineering and construction. However, drawing upon Turing and von Neumann’s proposition, such an engineering triumph is probably not the best way to measure digital architecture capacity. To regard digital architecture simply as a product generated by an electrical computer is to miss the opportunities and the risks, offered by the underlying discrete-state thinking. Much as an architect would object to the notion that CAD software running on an expensive desktop will produce a better house design than the same software running on a cheap laptop, it is also incorrect to say that CAD-produced design represents better digital thinking than a design drawn on paper. Digital architecture, I argue, should be assessed more from the way in which a design is considered as a discrete-state process in the architect’s mind, or, in other words, the way in which a design is construed as an assemblage of parts or units. As von Neumann aptly stated, when we simplify the complex analog problem by discretizing it into parts, we essentially perform a ‘digital trick’ (Von Neumann et al. 1966: 70). Thus, discrete-state thinking is not unique to architectural design. The question, then, given the architect’s increasing engagement with the digital device: to what extent can architecture be considered as a digital thing? This chapter maintains that architecture has been embedded with digital traits long before the invention of the electrical computer; hence, part of architectural design is derived from a discrete-state process. To assess digital architecture capacity solely from today’s practice will be incomplete. The term ‘digital’ in architecture has come to be associated with design appearances, narrowed by specific design agendas and, in short, become another -ism (Picon, 2010; Schumacher, 2009). For example, in pursuing an efficient production workflow, some digital design principles are prescribed into computer software (e.g., BIM software). In such practice, digital architecture practice is mostly associated with quantifiable parameters and driven by the laws of physics and economy, such as in optimizing structures and microclimates, rather than the underlying design principles. Thus, instead of investigating the digital in the present practices, this chapter illustrates the forming of digital architecture in three sections. The first section reflects upon the dawn of algorithmic design reasoning during the Renaissance, from around the 1400s to the 1700s, prior to the invention of the first machine in 1804 ( Jacquard Looming Machine). The second section discusses the implications of Turing’s vision of a universal discrete-state machine from the 1950s to the 1970s. The third section discusses the limits of discrete-state thinking by contrasting how machines and humans compute design differently and similarly.

First Digital: Bits and Rules A flashback to the Digital Renaissance encompasses persistent endeavors to reason, formulate, and communicate design logic with clarity and marks the rising awareness of the need for explicit design thinking (Carpo, 2011; Mitchell, 1990; Williams et al., 2010). This recollection begins with early attempts at representing discrete data and design reasoning by Leon Battista Alberti, followed by highlighting the role of design agency and design parameterization in Albrecht Durer’s representation methods. This section rests on the enhancement of parametric design thinking and Object-Oriented Design strategies in the works of Andrea Palladio and Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand near the end of the Renaissance.

Recursion and Combination Alberti’s passion for the exact replica and his limited tolerance for defect and imperfection led him to encode his design into a set of instructions, written in number or explicit textual descriptions with minimum drawings. In De Statua, Alberti proposes a method to reproduce a statue by 420

The Programmable Architect

sectioning a 3D object and projecting the section outline into a series of 2D planes (Alberti [1464] 1999) (Figure 26.1). The proposed device, the Finitorium, discretizes the projected outlines into points and then encodes them into numbers based on a polar coordinate system (Carpo, 2011). This polar coordinate system uses radius and angle (r, α) as opposed to the perpendicular axis (x, y) in the Cartesian system. With the center point, base point, and a set of reference points, one can then obtain a vector to represent a certain trajectory. The vector’s length and angles respectively indicate the point’s radius and the direction of the reference points. To decode the original shape properly, one would repeat Alberti’s encoding process, guided by the numbers one step at a time, until all reference points and their outlines are drawn accurately. Through this method, Alberti essentially encoded two types of information: first, the discrete data of the object represented by the polar coordinates; second, the production process codified in the polar coordinate rules. To minimize error, he determined not only what to draw but also how to draw the object. The Finitorium relied less on the draughtsman’s skills to reproduce a given design, but rather on their compliance in following the same process, hence providing less room for interpretation. Alberti’s obsession with the discrete making process is evident in his manuscripts. In one case of making an Ionic column capital in De Re Aedificatoria, he explicitly expresses the order for a spiral’s ratio and composition to suit the common tools at that time. The discrete steps to create a spiral were based on a simple rule, that is, to draw a semicircle with a compass around two center points along a vertical axis. By following the order of where to put the compass’s fixed (F) and movable legs (M), one could repeat the same procedure and eventually draw the desired spiral that rests proportionally within the column’s capital (Figure 26.2). In another case, which involved molding the column’s base profile, Alberti employed the shapes embedded in the profile, i.e., L, C, and S profiles (Alberti [1485] 1988; Carpo, 2003). Each profile could be rotated and mirrored into different orientations, and together, the transformed shapes could be combined to compose various ornament profiles (Figure 26.1). While outlining instructions to reproduce a design, Alberti laid out two fundamental features for generative design to come: recursion and combination. The spiral instruction calls itself to repeat the same process recursively on a different scale (i.e., self-similarity), and the column base

Figure 26.1  (a) An interpreted instrument to create a map of Rome by Xavier Proulx, based on Alberti’s Descriptio Urbis Rome (Proulx, 2012); (b) a diagram of Alberti’s Finitorium from De Statua (Alberti, 1466), Wikimedia, Public Domain; (c) combinatorial transformation of L, C, and S shapes for a column profile, as interpreted from De Re Aedificatoria (Alberti [1485] 1988).

421

Rizal Muslimin

Figure 26.2  A  lberti’s rule (top) and Palladio’s rule (bottom) for drawing a spiral in an Ionic capital. The alternating ‘M’ and ‘F’ in Alberti’s rule refers to a compass movable endpoint (M) and fixed rotation center point (F), whereas the changing number in Palladio’s rule iteration (1–12) corresponds to the rotation center point’s position based on the lower-left diagram. Interpreted from De re aedificatoria (Alberti [1485] 1988: 207) and I quattro libri dell'architettura (Palladio [1570] 1997: 38).

profiles rule demonstrates the way a few shapes can generate numerous designs through different transformations and combinations.

Parametric Proportion Parametric architecture in today’s practice can be compared with the visual discretization and parameterization introduced by Alberti as the ‘veil’ in De Pictura and later developed by Albrecht Durer on his Painter’s Manual (Alberti [1435] 1991; Durer [1525] 1977). Durer’s Draughtsman’s Net – a lattice fixed between the painting object and the drafter’s eyes – subdivides the drafter’s vision into a two-dimensional array of small cells and significantly reduces the amount of visual information required to replicate the object. Through a fixed observational point, different people can then draw the discretized objects in each cell separately, hence decentralizing the drafters’ skills. Prerequisite knowledge to drawing, such as human anatomy, can be skipped in this setting. Subsequently, the arrangement of lines in the net was further modified to form a visual analytical device. In his Four Books on Human Proportion (1528), the grid in Durer’s net, with uniform cell sizes, has varying sizes and adjustable to fit different sizes of the object’s parts, e.g., lines to measure the eyes-to-nose distance or head-to-chin distance (Figure 26.3). Durer’s adjustable net provides ways to analyze a variety of different figures and to induce a parametric model of such figures. In this model, the preconception that each figure is unique is slightly dissolved as with one parametric template, only minimal adjustment is needed to generate a variety of the model, as demonstrated with 43 human variants in Durer’s book. The digital traits coined by Durer and Alberti were then refined by Andrea Palladio in I quattro libri dell'architettura. In 1570, the net’s versatility expanded from analyzing human figures into synthesizing desirable building proportions (e.g., wall–vault height ratio) with explicit variables and parameters. Some rules are a refinement of the previous Renaissance and Greek architect’s methods, yet exemplified more discretely and visually (Palladio [1570] 1997). For instance, while 422

The Programmable Architect

Figure 26.3  D  iscretizing and modifying visual information. (a) ‘Draughtsman Making a Perspective Drawing of a Reclining Woman’ via a lattice grid and a fixed vantage point (Dürer, 1600), The Met, Public Domain; and (b) parametric versions of human head (Dürer, 1528), The Met, Public Domain.

Alberti uses a semicircle and two alternating center points to generate the Ionic column’s spiral, Palladio enhanced it using a quarter-circle and multiple center points with a counting mechanism (Figure 26.2).

Object-Oriented Design In its time, Palladio’s parametric schema in quattro libri effectively served as an ‘open source’ for regenerating desirable space in architecture (Tavernor, 2005). Hitherto, some of his design processes have yet to visualize how the architectural elements are assembled together. For instance, across various floor-plan drawings in quattro libri, one can infer the law of symmetry underlying the room’s layout; as to how this law works, this was left to the eyes of the beholders to deduce (Stiny and Mitchell, 1978). The focus on object assemblage becomes more apparent in Durand’s Précis des leçons d'architecture, a set of an extensive catalog of building elements (élément des edifice), element’s combination parts (parties), and parts combination (ensemble des edifice) (Durand [1821] 2000; Madrazo, 1994). The catalog provides an example iteration of how to combine an element with another from the catalog, parallel to Alberti’s combinatorial instruction for the L, C, and S profiles. Durand’s Précis allows a designer to recombine multiple objects to mass-customize building designs, as demonstrated in the enumerative examples of combinatorial designs (Figure 26.4).

Second Digital: Discrete-State Design In the 20th century, the idea of a universal machine began to converge discrete-state thinking across scale and disciplines, including graph theory in mathematics (Euler, 1741) and the recursive cell division in biology (Nägeli, 1845). Turing’s hypothetical machine consists of a store, executive 423

Rizal Muslimin

Figure 26.4  A  n interpretation of J.N.L. Durand’s catalog of objects with substitution rules (top left) and the combinatorial process to generate different types of floor plans based on plate 1 and 3 of Précis des leçons d'architecture (Durand [1821] 2000).

unit, and controlling mechanism, which is similar to the control processing unit (CPU) in today’s computer. It is equipped with a table of instruction (codes), a program that translates human thinking and operates discretely – hence, a discrete-state machine (Turing, 1950). In Turing’s example, a wheel rotating in three different states (@ every 120° per state to the left or right; 0° = ↑, 120° = ↘, 240° = ↙) responds to a series of cells on a paper-tape consisting of 0 or 1 (or black/white cell) as an input. A ‘head,’ representing the executive and controlling mechanism, will check the cell one step at a time. For instance, if the state is ↑ and the input cell is black, then turn the black cell into white, move the head to the right one step, and set the state to ↘. Else, if the state is ↘ and the cell is white, then turn it into a black cell, move to the right one step, and set the state to ↙, and so on. As such, the head will move accordingly based on the input and the condition. Expansive examples of Turing machine iteration and other variants are outlined in Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science (Wolfram, 2002). As can be seen in Figure 26.5, with two inputs and three different angles, there are six different conditions to move the head back and forth. Conversely, if a machine is given a series of prearranged black and white cells, the head will imitate the back-and-forth mechanism when checking the tape (Shannon, 1956; Turing, 1950). With enough storage capacity to store the number of states, the instruction table can be reprogrammed for many different purposes to create an idealized universal machine. Turing’s discrete-state computation evolves in many different forms and disciplines, including architecture and biology (Knight and Stiny, 2001; Lindenmayer, 1968a; Turing, 1952). John Conway’s and Paul Coates’ rules in Figure 26.6 demonstrated the same logic in a two-dimensional cell grid. TX-0, developed 424

The Programmable Architect

Figure 26.5  E  xample of Turing machine iteration. Each row represents a cell condition in a ‘tape’ at one time, checked by a ‘head’ represented with an arrow. Based on six different possible conditions on the top, the head will modify or skip a cell and move either to the left or to the right. By Stephen Wolfram from A New Kind of Science (Wolfram 2002: 78).

at MIT in 1955 by Wesley Clark and Ken Olsen, was one of the early manifestations of the Turing machine (Reilly, 2003). The invention of SketchPad, the first graphical CAD software, in 1963 by Ivan Sutherland using the TX-2 (TX-0 successor) paved a fertile ground for converting parametric schema and ­Object-Oriented Design into the digital machine, in particular through features such as Constraint Satisfaction, which establishes the relationships within a design for kinematic manipulation (e.g., how the width will adjust itself to the length based on a given ratio). Another important feature is its Recursive Function, for modifying multiple objects in parallel, such that modifying part of an instance will affect the same part in the other instances (Sutherland, 1963). These features recall Durand’s strategies on recombining architectural parts (Mitchell, 1990). Sutherland’s Constraint Satisfaction remains underpinning most CAD subroutines today, such that ‘If a thing upon which other things depend is deleted, the dependent things must also be deleted’ (Sutherland 1963: 90). As seen in some BIM software today, for instance, deleting a wall would also delete the doors and the windows constrained to the wall. In its early demonstrations, SketchPad’s versatility was demonstrated through several scenarios, such as structural analysis and on-screen drawing. The former was appealing, as SketchPad was able to simulate a trusses bridge deformation, taking only ten minutes to draw the bridge and 30 seconds to compute the forces (Sutherland, 1963). The latter was pacifying; SketchPad’s digital 425

Rizal Muslimin

Figure 26.6  C  lassical discrete-state computation. The Game of Life rules on the left, created by John Conway, operate with two numbers to check whether a cell and its neighbors are dead (0) or alive (1). The logic is comparable to the settlement rules on the right by Paul Coates, with four variables representing different properties. Coates’ rules use two types of neighborhoods: Moore’s, which only count four neighbors (nsum4 or n4-count), and von Neumann’s, which count all eight neighbors (nsum or n-count). Conway Automata rules notation is adopted from Daniel Shiffman (Shiffman et al. 2012: 344), Nature of Code, and the right rules are from Paul Coates (2010: 148), Programming.Architecture, Routledge.

interface allows the designer to approach the machine with less anxiety. By enabling the drawing of a shape directly on to the screen, Sutherland let designers skip the laborious geometrical formulation and the data storing process and preserved the way in which design was typically produced since before the Renaissance, i.e., drafting.

Parametric Network Around the same year as Sutherland released the SketchPad, Christopher Alexander proposed a method to develop a design–function relationship in the Notes of Synthesis of Form (Alexander, 1964). Borrowing D’arcy Thompson’s ‘diagram of force’ of a bone’s structural integrity, Alexander maintains that the relationship between the forces and the form is the agent of the good fit that governs the way form is developed by forces and also constrains the forces. The design task, for Alexander, is not just about altering the form, but more about developing a good fit between the form and the context. He represented this relationship with a network graph, where a set of fit-ormisfit problems (M) and a set of links (L) connect M’s nodes in a graph function G(M, L). Problems in graph-G are interdependent such that one misfit problem (node’s value = 1) could turn another into a fit problem (node’s value = 0), and vice versa. For example, adding more windows in a dark room might solve its lighting problem; i.e., node-value changes into 0 for a daylighting problem. This solution, however, could create another issue because more windows could mean 426

The Programmable Architect

less privacy; hence, node-value can turn into 1 for a privacy problem. To control such a chain reaction, Alexander grouped the problems into a series of subsystems, in which they become less dependent on changes external to their subsystem. In a complex relationship of subsystems, the graph represented as a pattern. For instance, in an urban context, a pattern constrains the spatial element with the social element, e.g., agriculture valley pattern, shopping street pattern, and stair vault pattern (Alexander et al., 1977). In a shopping street, the pattern is not only defined by the physical path but also by the linkage of its surrounding environment, such as the shop’s facade, the intersection, signage, benches, and many other elements, including other patterns such as ‘pedestrian street pattern’ and ‘individually owned shop pattern’. The fate of the graph as an abstract representation seems to have been set ever since Leonhard Euler originated it in 1736. To solve the Königsberg city’s bridge-routing problem, i.e., how many ways a traveler can cross the seven bridges in Königsberg without revisiting one, Euler disregards irrelevant geometries and retains only those that pertain to the problem: the position. Hence, parts of the cities are represented as four nodes [A, B, C, D], with seven bridges symbolized into seven links, i.e., [(A-B), (A-D), (D-A), (D-B), (D-C), (C-D), (C-B)] (see Figure 26.7). For Euler, the Seven Bridges of Königsberg is a relationship problem of how different positions related to one with the others (Sachs et al., 1988). In a similar fashion, architectural computing methods derived from graph theory inherited its traits of simplification. To be useful, the graph demands a split from the geometry that it represents, for in the absence of geometrical complexity, nodes and linkages in a graph become more elastic in analyzing the relationship of spatial configuration (e.g., point, line, or room relationship) (Figure 26.8), for instance, to highlight a room’s degree of privacy or street proximity in a city, as demonstrated in Space Syntax, a method for analyzing

Figure 26.7  A  city viewed as a graph. (Top) The Königsberg city from about 1813, engraved by Joachim Bering (Bering, 1613), with labels showing four positions (A to D in black circles) and the seven bridges (a to g in white circles), Wikimedia, Public Domain. (Bottom left) Euler’s drawing of the Seven Konigsberg Bridges (Euler, 1741), Wikimedia, Public Domain, and further abstraction in graph (bottom right).

427

Rizal Muslimin

Figure 26.8  D  ifferent types of graph representation for a shape on the left (a), showing points, lines, and polygon relationships (b) and room relationships (c).

design configurations developed by Bill Hillier and his colleagues at UCL (Hillier, 1996; Hillier et al., 1976). Despite Alexander’s reservation on formalizing the graph as a ‘design method’ (Alexander [1964] 1971), graph representation remains appealing. As it is well established and widely implemented, such as in computer science and engineering, graph application can travel across disciplines, including architecture. For example, March and Steadman use the analogy from Kirchhoff’s laws of electricity flow to represent accessibility in a floor plan (i.e., a wire’s conductivity represents a room’s accessibility) (March and Steadman, 1971). Arvin and House use Hooke’s spring theory to adjust space adjacency of different rooms (i.e., some rooms are connected with stiffer spring than the others) (Arvin and House, 1999, 2002).

Generative Rules While the way graph representation is visually different from Durer’s and Palladio’s parametric schema, the two do intersect in the sense that both schematize constraints and relationships between the design elements. Yet, graph and parametric schema mostly express a particular state of a relationship and less about how the relationships evolved. How did the Königsberg city turn into four different parts with seven bridges? How did Alexander’s pattern develop in urban places? How does one room become more private than before? A different school of thought from linguistics and biology in the late 1950s–1970s proposed a slightly different approach. In pursuit of framing multiple linguistic problems and data, Noam Chomsky proposed a generative approach in assembling the grammatical structure, whereby a set of syntactic rules can be iteratively applied (Chomsky [1957] 2002). For example, a phrase rule: Sentence → NP + VP defines a Sentence as a composition of Noun Phrase (NP) and Verb Phrase (VP), which can be broken down into smaller elements, e.g., VP → Verb + NP. The syntax Verb and NP can then be substituted with a given list of words, for example, with rules NP → a line, a man, and Verb → is, draws (Figure 26.9). The rule can be applied generatively whenever it found a match in the syntactic structure. For example, an iteration Sentence ⇒ NP + VP ⇒ NP + Verb + NP produces a structure ‘Noun phrase + Verb + Noun Phrase’, and further iteration with substitution rules, NP + Verb + NP ⇒ a line + Verb + NP ⇒ a line + is + NP ⇒ a line + is + a line, registers the word to each syntax to produce a sentence, e.g., ‘a line is a line’. Chomsky’s syntactic structure is comparable to Durand’s assemblage of Parties (Figure 26.9). A shape, for instance, can be viewed as an assemblage of parts, where each of these parts can be registered with meanings such as ‘wall,’ ‘roof ’, and ‘floor’. Yet, the difference is that there is no meaning attached to Chomsky’s rules. Whereas shapes in the Object-Oriented Design are tightly bounded by their meanings and orders (e.g., a tilted plane is a roof; a window must be on a wall), sentences generated from Chomsky’s phrase structure can be nonsensical, as the goal was to demonstrate syntactic and not semantic iteration. The Grammatical for Chomsky cannot be identified with the Meaningful (Chomsky, 2002). The rule, similar to that in graph, is inherently agnostic to 428

The Programmable Architect

Figure 26.9  E  xample of syntactic rules produces different sentences (b), adopted from Chomsky’s phrase structure (a) (Chomsky 1956: 117) and a comparison to object-oriented rules to describe a shape with various design components (c).

meaning unless the semantic values and descriptive functions are provided. It is this meaning– object detachment that makes a rule versatile for framing different problems. Alberti’s finitorium versatility increases when its scale became ambiguous as he uses it for mapping a sculpture and a city (Carpo, 2011), and Durer’s net becomes more adaptive when D’Arcy Thompson applied it for biological research (Thompson, 1992). With less semantic attachment, a rule can travel more freely across scale and disciplines.

Recursive Growth Chomsky set out the way words in messages can be iteratively developed and rearranged linearly; i.e., we speak one word at a time. In biology, Lindenmayer uses a similar approach for his early investigation on the growing mechanisms within intercellular development. He started with a simple one-dimensional array of cells, symbolized by 0 and 1 a la Turing. With a set of states and input, for instance, 0 → 1, 1 → 0, and 1 → 1 1, the development of how a cell divides and grows into a filament can be represented by following the iteration: 0 1 ⇒ 0 1 1 ⇒ 0 1 1 0 ⇒ 0 1 1 0 1 ⇒ 0 1 1 0 1 1 1 ⇒ 0 1 1 0 1 1 1 0 0 (Lindenmayer, 1968a). Subsequently, Lindenmayer increases his rule’s dimension to generate more complex shapes in biology. First, by introducing a branching rule, identified by bracket symbols [ ], such as 1 → [0 1 1], a new branch of the filament in two-dimensional space can be ‘grown’ by nesting the branch into the filament, e.g., 0 [0 1 1] 0 0 [0 1 1] 0 [0 1 1] 0 (Lindenmayer, 1968b). Second, by replacing the binary symbols 0 and 1 with strings to represent different types of element, for example, g, (g), and d, where g is a trunk, (g) is a new branch in a new direction, and d distinguishes a shape that is not g for the next step (Lindenmayer, 1971). Thus, the rule g → d(g)g or g → d(g)(g), for instance, can recursively generate d(d(g)g)d(g)g or d(d(d(g)g)d(g)g)d(d(g)g)d(g)g as there is always g for repeating the rule in the next step (see Figure 26.10). Later, by visualizing his rule into a higher spatial dimension, e.g., by replacing the strings g and d with lines, Lindenmayer expanded his rule’s versatility to analyze the growth pattern for many other objects. Lindenmayer’s recursive function (L-system) has been widely adopted architecture for generating street patterns, motifs, and buildings (Müller et al., 2006; Prusinkiewicz, 1986; Prusinkiewicz and Lindenmayer, 1996). 429

Rizal Muslimin

Figure 26.10  (a) Example results from Lindenmayer recursive branching (Lindenmayer 1971: 469) and (b) their visualized iterations.

Third Digital: Seeing and Mimicking A persistent cause for architect’s reservation on digital architecture is the procedure for formalizing design intention into abstract representations such as graphs and rules. Walter Gropius’s keen observation on the emerging digital computer in his time aptly envisioned this concern: What I cannot envisage yet is a practicable method for the average architect or designer to use these tools at the moment when they are needed. The emphasis will certainly be on the intelligent formulation of the questions to be answered by the computer. Will it then be necessary to educate a new profession of architectural assistants for the purpose of articulating the problems to be solved in the proper language of the computer? (Gropious 1964, quoted in Rocha 2004: 91) In the same tone, Alexander also warned that computerized formulation would disorient designers from the main problem, as the encoded formula only works for specific aspects of the problem (1964). This warning is somewhat aligned with Chomsky’s concern about a prescribed linguistic method that only serves predesignated problems. Chomsky’s answer was to ignore the semantic problem entirely, which makes his syntactic structure flexible enough to frame different problems, including those in psychology, computer science, and biology. Some designers, however, may not be willing to detach the meaning from the form, considering that meaning and context in architecture (such as genius loci and the spirit of the place) are too imperative and holistic to be discretized and detached. It should not be surprising that the discrete-state principles that are mostly sustained in today’s practice (parametric design and Object-Oriented Design) are the ones that kept familiar meanings. As seen in some BIM software, meaning and shape are tightly attached to the object (e.g., ‘squared door,’ ‘pitched-roof ’), and designated problems (e.g., cost, climate, and structure) are prescribed by the software developers (Mitchell, 2001).

Visual Calculation While designers might have concerns that untying meaning from shape means losing control and creativity on how they perceive design, George Stiny did precisely that to represent how a designer sees and modifies design during the creative process. In 1971, Stiny and Gips proposed 430

The Programmable Architect

Shape Grammar, a method that seems to be parallel to the previous discrete-state process (Stiny and Gips, 1971, 1972). However, the underlying mathematics for calculating the shapes in Shape Grammar is fundamentally different, as in addition to discrete state, it also involves the role of seeing and embedding, where a shape can be ambiguously perceived as a continuous or discretized object. Shape Grammar is defined by four basic elements (S, L, R, and I): that is, a set of shapes (S), labels (L), rules (R), and initial shapes (I). With the rule a → b, an initial shape (C), and a new shape (C’), Shape Grammar works under the expression C’ = (C – t(a)) + t(b). That is, if a user sees shape-a’s transformation, i.e., t(a), that matches in shape C, then substitute t(a) with shape-b’s transformation, i.e., t(b), to produce a new shape C’ (Figure 26.11). This process requires intense visual calculation and constant shift between perceiving the shape discretely or continuously. As can be seen in Figure 26.11, by seeing a shape differently, there are many ways transformed shape t(a) matches in shape C, and there are options to apply shape t(b) to produce a different kind of C’. While a computer calculates shape and assembles the relationships between them as discrete data, a designer’s eyes can see the shape as either continuous or discrete data. For example, attaching a pentagon (A) onto a side of a rectangle (B) will create a combined shape, as a result of A + B (Figure 26.12). Arithmetically, 5 + 4 produces 9, and subtracting 9 from 4 equals 5, or 9 – 5 equals 4. However, in our eyes, the sides of shapes A and B fused at the intersection of the pentagon and rectangle. Try this with pencil and eraser on paper: taking away the rectangle, A – B, will leave 4 sides instead of 5, while taking away the pentagon, B – A, will leave only 3 sides instead of 4 (Wittgenstein [1956] 1978). Thus, discrete combinatorial arithmetic, which is the backbone of Turing’s universal machine, is not always compatible to represent how designers see an object in the creative process.

Figure 26.11  Shape rule (left), rule computation (right) based on the expression C’ = (C – t(a)) + t(b), and other possible results for shape C’ (bottom). The shape in the far right at the bottom (the big-x) is obtained by applying the rule to the middle segment of the lines.

Figure 26.12  Visual calculation á la Wittgenstein.

431

Rizal Muslimin

This adds complications to the way information is stored in the data structure. While in Chomsky and Lindenmayer, the structure is based on the order of the discrete object, for example, a tree will be defined with string d(d(g)g)d(g)g, and a sentence is structured as ‘NP + Verb + ) or ( ) or NP,’ in Shape Grammar, shape can be seen as an assemblage of shapes ( ). Consequently, in programming, perceiving design in new ways could mean develop( may be ing a new subroutine. For example, a code that uses and as an input to generate as an input. different from code that uses A shape in design is not analogous to a word in a sentence, as there are different ways to recognize a shape and a word. For Shape Grammarist, the word ‘a line’ as NP in Chomsky’s phrase structure can be heard as ‘elaine’ (Noun) or ‘align’ (Verb), while ‘line is’ (Noun + Verb) can be ‘linus’ or ‘lioness’ (Noun); there are many other possibilities in different accents. In the same way, the shape that looks like a ‘square’ can be seen in many ways within our eyes (Stiny, 2008). It was this visual ambiguity that lets Alberti captured L, C, and S profiles from the same column base. It is also this ambiguity that lets Palladio sees a different spiral’s segment than Alberti’s in the Ionic capital. One developed a half-circle rule; another developed a semicircle schema. In other words, as a design is developed by rule and rule is composed of shapes, the way one sees a shape initially will determine how a rule is developed and how design is produced. As the creative solution depends on the capacity of a person to see things differently, tying a meaning rigidly to shape is not a good idea in Shape Grammar. Shape Grammar computation is memory-less, in that how one sees a shape in one moment may be different in the next moment. Shape d1 in Figure 26.13 can be seen as a pentagon with a line inside (d2), a pentagon on top of a rectangle (d3), two polylines covering a rectangle (d4), a meandering polyline (d5), or an assemblage of lines (d6, as used in Figure 26.9). As outlined in these brackets, each way of seeing a shape produces a different dataset—hence, different structures in programming and different design outputs. Some architects are used to this. Building elements such as floor, wall, and roof are not always regarded as individual elements. They constantly challenge the way they perceive a design. The wall and the roof can be viewed as one continuous element; the floor element can serve as a shape divider (e.g., by introducing a split level or a small pond); a wall might be pivoting into a threshold, and let the relation between space and function be loosely tied in a spatiotemporal approach. This type of architect, who thinks discretely and continuously back and forth, may have some reservations toward discrete-state software platforms. Conversely, architects and engineers who pursue efficient workflow in the discrete mode of thinking will embrace the discrete-state process in CAD software. Object-Oriented Design is computer-friendly, but Object-Oriented software is not always designer-friendly. While Shape Grammar’s rule, schema, and embedding mechanism allow one to be a designer, programmer, and computer simultaneously, today’s digital computer is a manifestation of Turing’s discrete-state machine. It can be reprogrammed to compute multiple design tasks, yet consequently, CAD software running on this machine always starts with discrete objects, i.e., points, without which nothing can be virtually constructed. It follows Sutherland’s rule from 1963. Thus, at this moment, the best way to implement visual calculation is to develop the design logic on

Figure 26.13  V  arious emergent shapes and their dataset inside the brackets from different ways of seeing and embedding.

432

The Programmable Architect

paper or with physical material, and then rewrite the logic into a discrete-state machine’s programming language. Once a set of shapes is discretized into the dataset, the transformation logic in the computer is called Set Grammar, instead of Shape Grammar, as it mainly manipulates the dataset of discrete objects in a combinatorial, rather than visual, manner (Stiny, 2008). With the dataset established, a computer will do ‘two things, and two things only, that is performing calculation and remembering the results of those calculations. But it does those two things really well’ (Guttag 2013: 1). Stiny did not suggest to ignore the discrete-state machine, but rather to let the machine do the useful, yet repetitive tasks in design, and call the designer to indulge themselves to visually calculating novel things within Oscar Wilde’s mantra: ‘to see the object as in itself it really not’ (Wilde 1982: 369 quoted in Stiny 2015: 726). To secure such indulgence, a machine needs to be instructed or trained to perform useful tasks. The former involves representing the design intention into an algorithm, while the latter involves feeding samples and information to the machine to interpret the designer’s intention (e.g., machine learning). In the 20th century, the architectural design algorithm has been approached at least in two ways. The first is by rewriting the architect’s design language (e.g., design style or building typology) into a discrete-state program to regenerate them automatically (Duarte, 2001; Harness, 2018). The second is by programming the architect’s thinking to suit the discrete-state process. Consciously or not, some architects might have reprogrammed themselves to ensure their design strategy compatible with how the software works. In BIM software, this implies assembling the design objects in the same manner as Durand did in the 17th century, and in parametric design software, this could mean generating design variants from adjustable schema the same way Durer’s did in the 15th century ( Janssen, 2006; Madrazo, 1994; Mitchell, 2001). Either way, the pursuit of compatible algorithmic design may create a closed loop, for example, where a programmer or software developer (C) learns how a popular architect (A) designs and develops a program that mimics A’s design strategy. In turn, another architect (B) learns that program and produces new designs using a design language similar to A’s. If A’s language or technique is in popular demand and more architects like B attempt to use C’s program, then this loop will be self-circulating between those whose design is programmed and those whose design logic is being reprogrammed. If A or B is progressive, then this loop will be mutually progressing and self-improving. However, if B and A are wandering in the same circle, then C’s program will be finished when A is no longer in demand, or only incrementally improved when A’s techniques become a standard.

Design Game A recent alternative to escape from this loop is to rely less on humans to codify the design, but more on the machine to learn the design algorithm directly from humans, parallel to Turing’s vision of a thinking machine in the 1950s. Like an infant, the machine learns from whatever it can grasp and sense, and as the border between virtual and physical becomes more porous, it can reach data from multiple sources. Through high-definition sensors (e.g., by tracking our eyes and scanning our physical movement), a machine can begin to reason how we see, hear, reason, and act in real space (Aytar et al., 2017). From online activities, it can identify our physical presence, aesthetic taste, and mental state (Kramer et al., 2014). Through a touchscreen-enabled device (e.g., stylus), the machine can interpret the designer’s logic by remembering how they draw, model, and write. Now and then, the machine will ask the user to validate its interpretation by recommending favorite choices, predicting the next step, or recognizing images. In this endeavor, intentions from the Renaissance digital are now shifted from analyzing a design to learning the designer; from making a perfect spiral to mimicking the unperfected spiral, yet precisely as a human would draw. For example, the machine 433

Rizal Muslimin

can now mimic user’s handwriting, predict what a user is trying to draw, and even finish the user’s drawing itself (Carter et al., 2016; Graves, 2013; Ha and Eck, 2017; Ha et al., 2017; Jongejan et al., 2016; Qian, 2017) (Figure 26.14). Furthermore, a machine can also mimic a design style by learning from a training dataset and use its internal curatorial system (an adversarial agent or discriminator), to check whether the generated output mimics the input. Examples in Figure 26.15 demonstrate how a machine learns existing images to produce fake yet deceptively real outputs with Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) algorithm (Chaillou, 2019; Isola et al., 2017). The learning machine is still in its infancy. There are spacious rooms for human designers, for creative disruption requires inconsistency in mind. However, given the increasing digitalization in architecture, it is worth recalling Turing’s classic Imitation Game, proposed in 1950 to test the versatility of his universal machine, i.e., the computer. The game is played with a person (D), a machine (E), and an interrogator (F), who stays in a separate room from the other two. The goal is for F to interrogate whether D or E is a machine or human through text-based communication. In this setting, the notion of a thinking machine is determined by whether a discrete-state machine, equipped with adequate specifications and appropriate programs, can deceive F into thinking that it is human (Turing, 1950). The imitation game in architectural context can be split into four hypothetical sub-games: In the first game, we have D as the architect, E as a computer equipped with D’s design rules, and F as a person who will interrogate whether a building is designed by D or E. For this challenge, E may have an equal chance to win the game, by following the design rules. In the second game, computer-E has the same capacity, but architect D is challenged to propose a novel logic and solution, and F will question which one is the most preferable. In this setting, E will have little chance to win the game as E is only built to mimic the way D solved the previous problem, whereas D may have moved on to perceive a problem in a new way or invent a new method to propose a more preferable solution.

Figure 26.14  M  y drawing buddies. Neural net algorithm recognizes what a user intends to draw (top left), suggests alternative versions (top right), and completes a user’s unfinished drawing for a given context, e.g., lighthouse (middle and bottom). Made with Quick, Draw! and Sketch-RNN apps from Google Creative Lab (‘A.I. Experiments’ 2017).

434

The Programmable Architect

Figure 26.15  O  utputs showing fake floor plan (left, by Stanislas Chaillou 2019: 46) and fake façades (right, by Phillip Isola, 2017) automatically produced with Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) algorithm by learning and mimicking the ground truth images.

In the third game, architect D has the same challenge and F has the same question. However, computer-E is now equipped with a new capacity to learn how D developed or refined the design in previous games, as well as why F prefers D’s or E’s solution. This time, E’s chance to win may increase, as E not only learns the design language as a product but also reasons the way D solves the design problem. This setting essentially brings D and E back to the first game, where given E’s learning capacity, it will always possess D’s design rules. Thus, the only way for D to win is to be one step ahead by proposing a new kind of solutions. In the fourth game, E has the same learning capacity, F has the same question, but ­architect-D has the new capacity to program their own rule. In addition, D and E are now in a separate room, and F is observable to both. This game is now a race between different modes of reasoning as D is also equipped with intuition, experience, and empathy to understand F, while E’s novelty might come from the absence of those features (as cognition can sometimes block creativity). This separation could provide creative problem findings and solutions, similar to that of the isolation that drove vernacular architecture diversity before global migration. Digital architecture practice in the 21st century is currently preoccupied with the first and the second game. However, the setting for the third and the fourth game has been advancing from the past few decades, such as machine learning in processing big data via social media and digital sensing, as well as digital training in architectural education (McCullough, 2006). With coding being incorporated more frequently into the secondary and even primary education curriculums, future architecture students might be equipped with discrete-thinking skills and could play an active role in the games above, as a designer, a programmer, or both. These games, I argue, will not replace the architect role, but rather reconfigure and expand it to facilitate a new kind of professional that could solve complex issues in our built environment inventively. What is of greater concern, essentially, is not about whether a computer would take over an architect’s job, but more about whether the architect’s mind would just be hosting the computer routines and merely do what they are told by the machine. Photoshop does not replace 435

Rizal Muslimin

the photographer, but it delivers more Photoshop-oriented photographers and different ways of appreciating photography. The same can be said of CAD software and rapid-prototyping tools if the architects do not improve their capacity to reprogram the machine and their minds creatively.

References Alberti, Leon Battista ([1485] 1988) On the Art of Building in Ten Books (De Re Aedificatoria), trans., Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Alberti, Leon Battista ([1435] 1991) On Painting (Vol. 21), trans., Cecil Grayson. London: Penguin. Alberti, Leon Battista ([1464] 1999) De Statua, trans., Mariarosaria Spinetti, Napoli: Liguori. Alexander, Christopher (1964) Notes on the Synthesis of Form (Vol. 5), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Alexander, Christopher ([1464] 1971) Notes on the Synthesis of Form, Preface to the paperback edition, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Alexander, Christopher, Ishikawa, Sara, & Silverstein, Murray (1977) A Pattern Language, New York: Oxford University Press. Arvin, Scott A., & House, Donald H. (1999) “Making designs come alive: Using physically based modeling techniques in space layout planning,” in Augenbroe, G. & Eastman, C. (Eds.) Computers in Building: Proceedings of the CAADfutures’99 Conference, New York: Springer Science+Business Media (pp. 245–62). Arvin, Scott A., & House, Donald H. (2002) “Modeling architectural design objectives in physically based space planning,” Automation in Construction, 11(2): 213–25. Aytar, Yusuf, Vondrick, Carl, & Torralba, Antonio (2017) See, Hear, and Read: Deep Aligned Representations. ArXiv:1706.00932 [Cs]. Carpo, Mario (2003) “Drawing with numbers: Geometry and numeracy in early modern architectural design,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 62(4): 448–69. Carpo, Mario (2011) The Alphabet and the Algorithm, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Carter, Shan, Ha, David, Johnson, Ian, & Olah, Chris (2016). “Experiments in handwriting with a neural Network,” Distill, 1(12): e4. Chaillou, Stanislas (2019) AI + Architecture: Towards a New Approach (Master Thesis, Harvard, GSD). Chomsky, Noam (1956) “Three models for the description of language,” IRE Transactions on Information Theory, 2(3): 113–24. Chomsky, Noam ([1957] 2002) Syntactic Structures, Berlin; Boston, MA: De Gruyter Mouton. Durand, Jean Nicolas Louis ([1821] 2000) Précis of the Lectures on Architecture (1802-05) with Graphic Portion of the Lectures on Architecture (1821), trans., David Britt. Los Angeles, CA: The Getty Research Institute. Dürer, Albrecht ([1525] 1977). The Painter’s Manual, trans., Walter L. Strauss. New York: Abaris books. Dürer, Albrecht (1528) Four Books on Human Proportion (Hierin sind begriffen vier bucher von menschlicher proportion), Nuremberg: Hieronymus Formschneyder. Euler, Leonhard (1741) “Solutio problematis ad geometriam situs pertinentis,” Euler Archive – All Works, 53: 128–40. Graves, Alex (2013) Generating sequences with recurrent neural networks. ArXiv Preprint ArXiv:1308.0850. Guttag, John V (2013) Introduction to Computation and Programming Using Python: With Application to Understanding Data, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ha, David, & Eck, Douglas (2017) A Neural Representation of Sketch Drawings. ArXiv Preprint ArXiv:1704.03477. Ha, David, Jonas Jongejan, & Ian Johnson (2017) Sketch-RNN, AI Experiments, Google Creative Lab, https://experiments.withgoogle.com/sketch-rnn-demo Harness, Clifton (2018) Test Fit – Rapid Test Fits for Multifamily Buildings. https://testfit.io/ Hillier, Bill (1996) Space Is the Machine: A Configurational Theory of Architecture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hillier, Bill, Leaman, Adrian, Stansall, Paul, & Bedford, Michael (1976) “Space syntax,” Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 3(2): 147–85. Isola, Phillip, Zhu, Jun-Yan, Zhou, Tinghui, & Efros, Alexei A (2017) “Image-to-image translation with conditional adversarial networks,” Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 1125–34. Isola, Phillip (2017) Index facades2 loss variations, viewed June 13, 2020, https://phillipi.github.io/pix2pix/ images/index_facades2_loss_variations.html Janssen, Patrick (2006) “A generative evolutionary design method,” Digital Creativity, 17(01): 49–63.

436

The Programmable Architect Jongejan, Jonas, Henry Rowley, Takashi Kawashima, Jongmin Kim, & Nick Fox-Gieg (2016) Quick, Draw! Google Creative Lab and Data Arts Team, https://quickdraw.withgoogle.com/ Knight, Terry, & Stiny, George (2001) “Classical and non-classical computation,” Arq: Architectural Research Quarterly, 5(04): 355–72. Kramer, Adam D. I., Guillory, Jamie E., & Hancock, Jeffrey T. (2014) “Experimental evidence of ­m assive-scale emotional contagion through social networks,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(24): 8788–90. Lindenmayer, Aristid (1968a) “Mathematical models for cellular interactions in development I. Filaments with one-sided inputs,” Journal of Theoretical Biology, 18(3): 280–99. Lindenmayer, Aristid (1968b) “Mathematical models for cellular interactions in development II. Simple and Branching Filaments with two-sided inputs,” Journal of Theoretical Biology, 18(3): 300–15. Lindenmayer, Aristid (1971) “Developmental systems without cellular interactions, their languages and grammars,” Journal of Theoretical Biology, 30(3): 455–84. Madrazo, Leandro (1994) “Durand and the science of architecture,” Journal of Architectural Education, 48(1): 12–24. March, Lionel, & Steadman, Philip (1971) The Geometry of Environment: An Introduction to Spatial Organization in Design. London: RIBA. McCullough, Malcolm (2004) Digital Ground: Architecture, Pervasive Computing, and Environmental Knowing, Cambridge MA: MIT Press. McCullough, Malcolm (2006) “20 years of scripted space,” Architectural Design, 76(4): 12–15. Mitchell, William J (1990) The Logic of Architecture: Design, Computation, and Cognition, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Mitchell, William J (1995) City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Mitchell, William J (2001) “Vitruvlus redux: Formalized design synthesis in architecture,”Formal Engineering Design Synthesis, 1–19. Mitchell, William J (2003) Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Müller, Pascal, Wonka, Peter, Haegler, Simon, Ulmer, Andreas, & Van Gool, Luc (2006) “Procedural ­Modeling of Buildings,” ACM SIGGRAPH 2006 Papers, 614–23. Nägeli, Carl Wilhelm (1845) “Wachsthumsgeschichte der Laub-und Lebermoose,” Z. Wiss. Bot. Zurich, 1: 128–210. Palladio, Andrea, ([1570] 1997) The Four Books on Architecture (I quattro libri dell’architettura). trans., Robert Travernor & Richard Schofield, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Picon, Antoine (2010) Digital Culture in Architecture: An Introduction for the Design Professions, Basel: Birkhaeuser. Prusinkiewicz, Przemyslaw (1986) “Graphical applications of L-systems,” Proceedings of Graphics Interface, 86, 247–53. Prusinkiewicz, Przemyslaw, & Lindenmayer, Aristid (1996) The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants, New York: Springer-Verlag. Qian, Wei (2017) Graph Matching, Pattern Learning, and Protein Modeling (Doctoral dissertation, Brandeis University). Reilly, Edwin D (2003) Milestones in computer science and information technology, Westport CT: Greenwood Publishing Group. Rocha, Altino João Magalhães (2004) Architecture theory, 1960–1980: Emergence of a Computational Perspective (Doctoral dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Sachs, Horst, Stiebitz, Michael, & Wilson, Robin J (1988) “An historical note: Euler’s Königsberg letters,” Journal of Graph Theory, 12(1): 133–9. Schumacher, Patrik (2009) “Parametricism: A new global style for architecture and urban design,” Architectural Design, 79(4): 14–23. Shannon, Claude E (1956) “A universal Turing machine with two internal states,” Automata Studies, 34, 157–65. Shiffman, Daniel, Fry, Shannon, & Marsh, Zannah (2012) The Nature of Code: Simulating Natural Systems with Processing. D. Shiffman. https://natureofcode.com/book/ Stiny, George (2008) Shape: Talking about Seeing and Doing, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Stiny, George (2015) “The critic as artist: Oscar Wilde’s prolegomena to shape grammars,” Nexus Network Journal, 17(3): 723–58. Stiny, George, & Gips, James (1972) “Shape grammars and the generative specification of painting and sculpture,” Information Processing, 71(1460–65): 125. Stiny, George, & Mitchell, William J (1978) “The palladian grammar,” Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 5(1): 5–18.

437

Rizal Muslimin Sutherland, Ivan E (1963) Sketchpad a Man-machine Graphical Communication System (Doctoral dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Tavernor, Robert (2005) Palladio and Palladianism, London: Thames and Hudson. Thompson, D’Arcy Wentworth ([1942] 1992) On Growth and Form: The Complete Revised Edition. New York: Dover Publications. Turing, Alan M (1950) “Computing machinery and intelligence,” Mind, 59(236): 433–60. Turing, Alan M (1952) “The chemical basis of morphogenesis,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society London, B237, 37, 72. Von Neumann, John, Burks, Arthur W., & others (1966) “Theory of self-reproducing automata,” IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, 5(1): 3–14. Williams, K., March, L., & Wassell, S. R. (Eds.) (2010) The Mathematical Works of Leon Battista Alberti, Basel: Birkhäuser; London: Springer distributor Wittgenstein, Ludwig ([1956] 1978) Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, von Wright, G.H., Rhees, R., & G.E.M. Anscombe (Eds.) trans., G.E.M. Anscombe, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wolfram, Stephen (2002) A New Kind of Science (Vol. 5), Champaign, IL: Wolfram Media.

438

27 Biomimicry for Sustainable and Regenerative Architecture Maibritt Pedersen Zari

Introduction Life on planet Earth has been evolving for approximately 3.8 billion years. Existing organisms have survival mechanisms that have withstood and adapted to constant changes. Humans therefore have an extensive pool of examples to draw on to solve problems experienced by society that organisms may have already addressed, usually in ways that are energy and material efficient. Buildings that grow and store carbon much like how coral grows (Goreau, 2010), or that are able to capture and desalinate water passively like desert beetles (Pawlyn, 2011), and cities able to replenish aquifers and operate in a zero-waste model like ecosystems do (Taylor Buck, 2017) have been developed, for example. We call these practices “biomimicry”: the emulation of strategies seen in the living world as a basis for human design. Humans must mitigate the causes of and adapt to climate change and the loss of biodiversity, as the now-inevitable impacts of these changes demand urgent responses. The built environment contributes significantly to these problems (IPCC, 2007: 59). For example, the built environment is responsible for up to 75% of global energy use and up to 80% of global carbon emissions due to construction and demolition activities as well as the in-use phase of buildings (UNEP, 2007). Sustainable design typically seeks to minimize pollution rather than achieving clean air, soil, and water. It minimises energy use, rather than using energy from non-damaging renewable sources. It minimises waste rather than eliminating it altogether by creating positive cycles of resource use. Within this paradigm, little attempt is made to remediate past damage. Given the severe outcome for humans, should efforts not go far enough to reduce or remediate damage to climate and ecosystems, the built environment will need to go beyond current efforts to simply reduce negative environmental outcomes. Moving from a built environment that is degenerating ecosystems to one that regenerates capacity for ecosystems to thrive will require fundamental rethinking of architectural and urban design (Cole et al., 2012; Pedersen Zari, 2020). This can be termed regenerative design. Regenerative design aims to enable the built environment to evolve, so it works towards restoring the capacity of ecosystems to function at an optimal level for the mutual benefit of both human and non-human life (Cole et al., 2012). Crucial to this approach is considering buildings not as individual objects, but parts of larger systems, much like organisms form parts of ecosystems.

Mimicking the Living World The modern building industry tends to be linear and uses large amounts of energy to function, in comparison with the system of cyclic, integrated, and low-energy processes that typify a DOI: 10.4324/9781315674469-30

439

Maibritt Pedersen Zari

healthy ecosystem (Kibert et al., 2002: 7). Ecosystems are resilient, resourceful, and opportunistic, ­utilising existing relationships for symbiotic advantage. They adapt and evolve, are resilient to disturbance, and create conditions conducive to ongoing life (Pedersen Zari, 2015a). Ecosystems then, in a given location and climate, may provide a model or a set of performance targets, for individual buildings or wider urban areas in the same location and climate. The mimicking of organisms or ecosystems is an expanding field of research in both academic and design discourse (Bonser and Vincent, 2007, Gebeshuber et al., 2009). Although recent advancements in both biological knowledge and technology have enabled more complicated manifestations of bio-inspired design, meaningful, systematic translation of ecological and biological scientific knowledge into built environment contexts remain infrequent. Examples of biomimicry that have progressed past the concept stage are typically of products or materials (Pedersen Zari, 2018). For example, research into altering the make-up or properties of concrete or concrete-like materials is an exciting application of biomimicry to architectural materials science. In the United States, cements or cement alternatives that sequester carbon are being developed by researchers at Stanford University based on how coral grows, and at Sandia National Laboratories based on how abalone biomineralisation works (Pedersen Zari, 2015b). At Cornell University, carbon sequestration in plants is being mimicked to create carbon-based polymers that are 40% transformed CO2 by weight and could be used as insulation or coatings for building materials (Pedersen Zari, 2015b). At UC Berkeley, the “BIOMS” project is developing material systems through biologically inspired technologies such as the sucrose wall system for thermal and light transmission control (Gutierrez, 2008). Much biomimicry literature presents examples of biomimetic design in an “ad hoc” way without a clearly defined approach to biomimicry. This, along with the absence of a comprehensive general theory and philosophy of biomimicry as applied to architectural design, is a barrier to its application (Vincent et al., 2006). Despite this, there are several developing biomimicry-­ related tools and methodologies that mean biomimicry as applied to architectural design is rapidly evolving (Taylor Buck, 2017). Pawlyn (2011) provide contemporary examples of biomimetic architecture, while a number of historic examples of biomimetic architecture and architectural technologies are detailed by Vincent et al. (2006) and Vogel (1998: 249-275). Case studies of the application of biomimicry to urban design are discussed by Taylor Buck (2017) (Figure 27.1). Motivation (innovation, sustainability, well-being)

Approach A h (design referencing biology, biology influencing design)

Levell L (organism, behaviour, ecosystem)

Dimension (form, material, construction, process, function)

Figure 27.1  Defining biomimicry (by M. Pedersen Zari).

440

Sustainable and Regenerative Architecture

Biomimicry: Motivations and Approaches Advocating the use of the living world as a source of design inspiration can have different philosophical foundations and ideological aims. It is important to analyse the projected end aspirations of different kinds of biomimicry to avoid the assumption that because an object, material, system, or building mimics nature in some way, it is inherently more sustainable (Gebeshuber et al., 2009). There are three main motivations behind investigating biomimicry. Firstly, ­biomimicry can be seen as a source of innovation in the creation of new materials and technologies ­( biomimicry-for-innovation). Most biomimetic research, patents, and developed technologies are not necessarily concerned with improving the ecological performance of technology. Rather, novel approaches to technical problems, increased performance capabilities, or the ability to increase economic profit margins are the goals (Wahl, 2006). A considerable body of biomimicry research details experiments and technological innovation particularly in robotics, computing, and materials technologies that have no focus on sustainability issues. Secondly, there is a rise in interest in the potential of biomimicry as a way to create more sustainable materials, products, built environments, and engineering solutions (biomimicry-for-sustainability). There is however little quantitative evidence to suggest that the act of mimicking an organism in design is in itself a means to achieve greater sustainability. Despite this, Gebeshuber et al. (2009) investigate how biomimicry might contribute to addressing global challenges, including sustainable development, in a 50-year time frame. They see probable tangible advancement in the areas of materials science, energy conversion technologies, energy production systems, and material recycling systems. However, technological advancements alone are unlikely to result in a society with less negative ecological impact (Mitchell, 2012). Finally, the third motivation for biomimicry comes from researchers who examine whether design based on an understanding of the living world could contribute to increasing human psychological wellbeing, due to its relationship to the concept of biophilia (Benyus, 2008) (biomimicry-for-wellbeing). Some biomimicry related to innovation alone is more aligned with increasing the ­unsustainable exploitation of, or perpetuating damage to, both ecosystems and people. Examples include several new military technologies based on a variety of animals (Bar-Cohen, 2010); the ­creation of new consumer items such as cars, clothing, and paint based on understandings of various fish, trees, and flowers (Pawlyn, 2011: 5); and the design of echolocation technologies to d­ etect areas suitable for mineral mining based on bats and dolphins (Allen, 2010: 9, 84). Examples i­nclude Lotusan paint, the DaimlerChrysler “Bionic car”, or even Velcro, all of which are ­common ­examples given by people advocating biomimicry-for-sustainability but none of which are good examples of radically more sustainable design (Pedersen Zari, 2018). A key difference between b­ iomimicry-for-sustainability ­ utually exclusive, is that the former and biomimicry-for-innovation, which are not necessarily m tends to recognize the importance of mimicking not just organisms but also the underlying processes and functions of ecosystems. Such an approach has more potential to alter the underlying philosophes of design (MacKinnon et al., 2020; Wahl, 2006), because it requires people to understand that humans are not separate from ecosystems but are in fact dependent upon them for survival. Approaches to biomimicry as a design process typically fall into two categories. The first is “design referencing biology”, which defines a human need or design problem first, and then, the ways other organisms or ecosystems solve this is explored. An example of this is Mick Pearce’s Eastgate building in Harare, Zimbabwe. Eastgate was designed to have a relatively thermally stable interior environment with minimal mechanical cooling. This resulted in reductions in energy use of 17% to 52% compared to similar buildings in Harare (Baird, 2001, Smith, 1997), and therefore also reduced greenhouse gas emissions. The design was partly based on principles of induced flow and the use of thermal capacity to regulate temperature observed in termite mounds 441

Maibritt Pedersen Zari

of southern Africa. Recent scientific research shows that termite mounds interact with the environment in a more sophisticated way to regulate temperature, however (Pawlyn, 2011: 84). This has led to suggestions that a new generation of “living” biomimetic buildings could utilize a more accurate understanding of the termite mound as a multipurpose extension of termite physiology more analogous to the function of lungs (Turner and Soar, 2008). Although Eastgate is still an example of successful sustainable architecture, it shows that with limited scientific understanding, the translation of biological knowledge into a human design setting may remain at a shallow level (Taylor Buck, 2017) (Figure 27.2). The second approach is termed “biology influencing design”, which refers to biomimicry where a particular characteristic, behaviour, or function in an organism or ecosystem is identified, and is then translated into a human design context. Similarities between human design solutions and tactics used by other species are surprisingly few considering they exist in the same context with the same available resources (Vogel, 1998: 298). The overlap is as small as 12% (Vincent et al., 2006). An advantage of the biology influencing design approach is that new technologies or design methods that are outside of predetermined human design problems may develop. The study of gecko feet is an example of a biomimicry-for-innovation study of biology for human application and has led to experiments aiming to create strong dry adhesion tapes that are reusable (Hesselberg, 2007). Several researchers have tried to mimic the minute fibre structure on the toe pads of the gecko that create van der Waals forces that enable it to walk on vertical surfaces and the undersides of surfaces (Eadie and Ghosh, 2011). This approach requires that biological research must be conducted and then identified as being of relevance to a design context. It also relies on designers being able to understand biological research at a basic level. This emphasizes the inherent need for meaningful interdisciplinarity when engaging in biomimicry. Recently developed biological function databases have started to address these issues. At least three such databases have been developed: AskNature by the Biomimicry Guild, BioTRIZ by researchers at the University of Bath, and DANE 2.0 by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Pedersen Zari, 2018; Vattam et al., 2011).

Figure 27.2  L  eft: Eastgate building in Harare, Zimbabwe (photo by G. Bembridge); and right: Termite mound in Africa (photo by J. Brew).

442

Sustainable and Regenerative Architecture

Levels and Dimensions of Biomimicry Determining which aspect of “bio” has been “mimicked” is referred to here as a “level”. There are three levels of mimicry: Organism, behaviour, and ecosystem (Pedersen Zari, 2018). The organism level refers to mimicking part of or the whole of a specific individual organism. The second level refers to mimicking behaviour and may include translating an aspect of organism behaviour into human design. The third level is the mimicking of whole ecosystems and the common principles that allow them to work successfully, or their actual functions. Within each of these levels, a further five possible “dimensions” of mimicry exist. The design may be biomimetic in terms of what it looks like (form), what it is made out of (material), how it is made (construction), how it works (process), or what it is able to do (function) (Pedersen Zari, 2018).

Organism Level An architectural example of process biomimicry at the organism level using a biology influencing design approach is the mimicking of the Namib Desert beetle (Stenocara gracilipes) by Parkes with his proposed fog-catcher design for the Hydrological Centre for the University of Namibia. The beetle lives in a desert with negligible rainfall but with short infrequent morning fogs. It is able to capture moisture from the fog that moves swiftly over the desert by tilting its body into the wind. Water condenses on the surface of the beetle’s back because its shell is cooler than the surrounding air. Droplets form on the shell, and the alternating hydrophilic/hydrophobic surface of the beetle’s back and wings enables the drops to roll down into its mouth (Parker and Lawrence, 2001). Parkes proposed that a nylon-mesh sail be used to intercept the fog. This mesh would hold the moisture until it began to roll downwards under the force of gravity into an underground storage tank. ­Research detailing more specific material biomimicry at the organism level has shown that surfaces based on the beetle’s shell are several times more effective at harvesting fog than typical methods using nets (Trivedi, 2001), and can be used for other applications such as improving dehumidification and distillation equipment. Grimshaw Architects in collaboration with Charles Paton of Seawater Greenhouse have also examined the Namib Desert beetle and proposed a unique desalinisation process that would form part of a large outdoor theatre called Teatro del Agua on the Canary Islands. The Teatro del Agua mimics aspects of the beetle by passing seawater over a series of evaporative grilles. As the sea breeze moves through these grilles, some of the water evaporates leaving salt behind. The moist air then continues until it hits pipes holding cool seawater, pumped up from the nearby ocean. As the warm moist air touches the cool pipes, condensation forms and clean freshwater trickles down the outside of the pipes and is collected. The seawater pumps are powered by wind turbines using the same unidirectional sea breeze. The building was projected to be self-sufficient in water with surplus being transferred to neighbouring buildings and landscapes (Pawlyn, 2011: 70). Mimicking an organism without also understanding how it participates in and contributes to the larger context of its ecosystem may produce designs that remain conventional or below average in terms of environmental impact. An example is Velcro. While Velcro mimics how burrs of certain plants attach to animal fur, the product is made from petrochemicals and is not typically recycled, nor does it take into account other aspects of how ecosystems work. Although Velcro is biomimetic (form based at the organism level), it is not necessarily more sustainable than other fasteners such as zips or buttons. Because mimicking of organisms tends to be of a specific feature, rather than a whole system, this kind of biomimicry could lead to the development of technology that is simply added onto buildings rather than being integral to them. While this may result in innovative building technologies or materials, methods to increase sustainability over whole lifecycles are not necessarily explored. 443

Maibritt Pedersen Zari

Behaviour Level In behaviour-level biomimicry, it is not the organism itself that is mimicked, but its behaviour or strategies for survival. A great number of organisms encounter the same environmental conditions as humans and therefore need to solve similar issues. There are, for example, organisms that can build thermally stable habitats, that can harness sun, wind, and rain for various purposes, and that can survive extremes of weather. Organisms tend to operate within the environmental carrying capacity of a specific place and within limits of energy and material availability (Reap and Bras, 2008). These limits as well as pressures that create ecological niche adaptations in ecosystems mean not only that well-adapted organisms continue to evolve, but also that well-adapted organism behaviours and relationship patterns between organisms or species exist. The building behaviour of other species is often termed “animal architecture” (Hansell, 2007). Humans may gain valuable insights by looking at how other species change their environments while creating more capacity for life to continue in that system rather than diminish. Several authors provide details of organisms altering their own habitats while facilitating the presence of other species, increasing nutrient cycling, and creating mutually beneficial relationships between species (Wright and Jones, 2006). An example of process and function biomimicry at the behaviour level is demonstrated by the previously discussed Eastgate building in Harare, Zimbabwe. It is not the termite that is mimicked in this building, but the results of its mound building behaviour. Although Eastgate is perhaps the most often cited example of biomimetic architecture, biomimicry at the behaviour level is much less common than biomimicry at the organism level. Another example of behaviour biomimicry is the 2006 Council House 2 (CH2) in Melbourne, Australia, which Mick Pearce was also involved in. In CH2, 100,000 litres of water is extracted and cleaned from the sewers beneath the building and used to condition the air (Figure 27.3). This is reminiscent of how certain termite species use the proximity of aquifer water as an evaporative cooling mechanism. African Barossa termites (Isoptera order) make tunnels tens of metres deep to reach the water table, so that its cooling effect can be used in extreme heat to keep the mound within a one-degree temperature fluctuation range (Bellew, 2006). In CH2, some of the cleaned water is passed through shower towers on the outside of the building. This cools the water,

Figure 27.3  C  H2 building in Melbourne, Australia (photo by W. Gurak).

444

Sustainable and Regenerative Architecture

particularly at night. The water passing through the shower towers also cools surrounding air, which is then used to ventilate the commercial premises on the ground floor. The water continues to the basement where it passes through a system that stores the “cooth” by using phase change materials. The water is then used in a closed loop in chilled beams that provide cooling to the building interior. In combination with the effects of additional sustainability features such as onsite energy generation, CH2 is estimated to use 85% less energy, reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 87%, and use 70% less water than typical comparable buildings ( Jones, 2008; Tan, 2007). CH2 was built at a cost premium of 22.1% (Aranda-Mena et al., 2008), but due to productivity increases of 10.9% from staff attributed to the new building (Paevere and Brown, 2008), as well as substantial energy savings, payback was between five and seven years (Bond, 2010). These results suggest that the building is successful and performs better than conventional buildings. A final example of form and function biomimicry at the behaviour level is the proposed design of storm water systems in the Indian town of Lavasa by HOK architects. The surrounding area had been deforested over time. This, in combination with large seasonal volumes of monsoon rainfall over short time periods, meant that flooding and erosion were issues on-site. The storm water system designed to address these problems is based on the spiralling series of channels or earth dams that local Indian harvester ants build around the entrance to their nests to slow monsoon rain inundations and to mitigate erosion (Hayes et al., 2019; Rossin, 2010).

Ecosystem Level Ecosystems are typically resilient and many are able to move though infrequent abrupt changes while still supporting the survival of organisms. Mimicking ecosystems offers insights into how the built environment could function more like a system than a set of unrelated buildings, and thus become better able to adapt to change. Bio-inspired buildings are likely to have better sustainability outcomes if they mimic the process strategies (how they work) or the functions (what they do) of ecosystems, rather than simply the form or material properties of individual organisms (Baumeister et al., 2020; Pedersen Zari, 2012), which is still the more typical way to translate biomimicry into built form (Gutierrez, 2008). Ecosystem biomimicry can operate at both the metaphoric and functional levels. At the metaphoric level, general ecosystem processes, based on how most ecosystems work, can be applied by designers to a built environment context (Pedersen Zari, 2015a). If the built environment were designed to be a system and expected to behave like an ecosystem, its environmental performance may increase. Table 27.1 illustrates the results of a comparative survey of ecosystem processes given by biologists and ecologists and those found in the biomimicry literature. Further examination of results and details of methodology employed and the processes themselves is given by Pedersen Zari (2018). Some building projects have been successful in terms of ecological performance by using an understanding of ecosystem processes. They typically focus on mimicking how materials are cycled in ecosystems to avoid waste or to increase energy effectiveness. For example, the sharing of waste as resource in Denmark’s Kalundborg Eco-industrial park resulted in a reduction of 154,000 tonnes of CO2 and 389 tonnes of mono-nitrogen oxides (NOx) emitted over a five-year period, and a reduction of 30 million m³ of groundwater used over a 12-year period. Five companies and one local municipality make up the industrial park where 20 different bi-product exchanges occur ( Jacobsen, 2006). This example of emulating the way ecosystems work demonstrates the potential of ecosystem biomimicry to result in reduced ecological damage. Analysis of further ecosystem processes other than cycling of wastes or sharing of energy suggests many additional strategies for the built environment to mimic (Allenby and Cooper, 1994). For example, research out of the University of Akron in Ohio (USA) investigates biological 445

Maibritt Pedersen Zari Table 27.1  Ecosystem processes Tier one. Ecosystem context: 1.1 The context that life exists in is constantly changing. 1.2 Living entities that make up ecosystems generally work to remain alive. Tier two. Therefore: 2.1 Ecosystems adapt and evolve within limits at different levels and at different rates. 2.2 Ecosystems are resilient. They can persist through time even as components within them change. 2.3 Ecosystems enhance the capacity of the biosphere to support life, and functioning and processes within ecosystems and organisms tend to be benign. 2.4 Ecosystems are diverse in species, relationships, and information. Tier three. The implications of this are that: 3.1 Ecosystems are self-organising decentralized and distributed. 3.2 Ecosystems function through the use of complex feedback loops or cascades of information. 3.3 Organisms within ecosystems operate in an interdependent framework. 3.4 Ecosystems and organisms are dependent upon and responsive to local conditions. 3.5 Ecosystems and the organisms within them optimize the whole system rather than maximize components. 3.6 Organisms within ecosystems are resourceful and opportunistic. Abundances or excesses are used as a resource. Tier four. This is supported by the fact that: 4.1 Ecosystems have the capacity to learn from and respond to information and self-assemble. 4.2 Ecosystems and the organisms within them have the capacity to heal within limits. 4.3 Variety can occur through emergent effects (rapid change). 4.4 Variety can occur by recombination of information and mutation (gradual change). 4.5 Ecosystems are organized in different hierarchies and scales. 4.6 Ecosystems and organisms use cyclic process in the utilisation of materials. 4.7 Ecosystems often have inbuilt redundancies. 4.8 Parts of ecosystems and organisms are often multifunctional. 4.9 Local energy/resources become spatial and temporal organisational devices. 4.10 Ecosystems and the organisms within them gather, use, and distribute energy effectively. 4.11 The form of ecosystems and organisms is often a result of functional need. 4.12 Organisms that make up ecosystems are typically made from commonly occurring elements.

growth as a basis for new architectural construction methods. The “Biornametics” project examines patterns in nature for transferability to architectural design, while the “Growing as Building” (GrAB) project explores mimicking biological growth traits such as adaptiveness, exploration, and local resource harvesting as a basis for self-growing buildings. Researchers note that “implementing principles of growth could potentially transform building towards a more integrated and sustainable setting, a new living architecture” (Gruber and Imhof, 2017). By mimicking process strategies in ecosystems, designers may have successful models to follow in devising how systems in buildings or urban environments should be put together and how they should work. The danger exists that simplified lists of how ecosystems work can be misunderstood by designers and lead to small gradual improvements in sustainability outcomes rather than paradigm shifts in design thinking (Mathews, 2011). Function biomimicry at the ecosystem level could mean that in-depth understandings of ecology drive built environment design so that it is able to participate in the major biogeochemical material cycles of the planet (hydrological, carbon, nitrogen) in a reinforcing rather than damaging way. In this regard, integrating an understanding of provisioning, supporting, and regulating 446

Sustainable and Regenerative Architecture

ecosystem services into biomimicry processes could be useful (Pedersen Zari, 2018). Mimicking the functions of ecosystems is different from mimicking their processes. The former suggests that a building or development could be designed to form a system similar to the functioning of an ecosystem, or be part of a system that produces food; produces renewable energy; produces raw materials for the future built environment; collects and purifies water; purifies air and soil; regulates climate through mitigating greenhouse gas emissions and the heat island effect; contributes to soil formation and fertility through careful cycling of biodegradable wastes and recycling of non-biodegradable wastes; and deliberately provides habitat for species suitable for cohabitation with humans in the urban built environment. Such developments could act as filters (mechanisms that purify air and water), producers (of food and materials), and generators (of energy) for the rest of the built environment which is still degrading ecosystems over its lifetime. If these regenerative nodes become part of the built environment and start to perform even small aspects of ecosystem functioning, it is possible that climate change would be to some extent mitigated, and the built environment could in turn become more adaptable to climate change, while creating beneficial biodiversity outcomes. This kind of biomimicry holds the greatest potential to contribute to regenerative design paradigms. Table 27.2 illustrates a set of ecosystem services that may be most suitable for emulation in a built environment context through a methodology termed “ecosystem Table 27.2  Ecosystem services Ecosystem services applicable to the built environment: Supporting services

1. Habitat provision (including provision of genetic information; biological control; fixation of solar energy; and species maintenance) 2. Nutrient cycling (including decomposition; soil building; and provision of raw materials)

Regulation services

3. Purification

4. Climate regulation

Provisioning services

5. Provision of fuel/energy for human consumption

6. Provision of freshwater

7. Provision of food

• Plan for habitat for non-human. • Consider reducing fragmentation of habitat.

• Nutrients (materials) should be able to be biodegraded or recycled in closed loops and retained in the system. • Development should contribute actively to soil formation and the renewal of fertility. Development should be considered a potential source of future building materials. • Water, air, and soil should be purified on-site before return to non-human ecosystems. • Water and air should be cleaner leaving the development than when it entered. • Surrounding soil should become more fertile over time. • Development should contribute to regulating climate by sequestering carbon; providing protection from decreased ozone; and remediating the heat island effect. • Development should provide enough fuel or gather energy from renewable sources to provide for its own needs, preferably more so this can be distributed to neighbours. • Design should encourage effective energy use. • Development should capture rainwater and conserve water to meet more than its own needs so that excess can be distributed to neighbours. • Design should encourage the conservation of water. • Development should produce food.

(including provision of biochemicals)

447

Maibritt Pedersen Zari

services analysis” where measurable aspects of each ecosystem service of a specific site’s predevelopment ecosystem form the design goals for urban development. This methodology is detailed further by Pedersen Zari (2018, 2017). An example of this kind of functional ecosystem biomimicry is the Urban Greenprint project for Seattle which has grown out of the work of Biomimicry Puget Sound (Taylor Buck, 2017). The functions of the forest that existed on the site before development have been studied, not to recreate the predevelopment ecosystem, but to determine how buildings and urban spaces on the same site could potentially restore the functions of those predevelopment ecosystems. The identified goal of the project was to operate more sustainably and improve quality of life (Urban Greenprint, 2017). Predevelopment ecological history analysis of site was also conducted by the team working on the Lloyd Crossing Project for Portland, Oregon. The site’s predevelopment ecosystem functioning was investigated in terms of rainfall, carbon balance, solar energy fixation, and habitat type and coverage, to determine the ecological performance goals of the project over long time periods (Portland Development Commission, 2004). HOK’s Lavasa town development project in India similarly also started from the understanding of how the ecosystem on the site functioned in order to determine development goals (Baumeister et al., 2020).

Pitfalls of a Biomimetic Design Approach Ecosystems provide an extraordinary number of examples of how living systems are energy effective, material efficient, and innovative at solving problems. Because many aspects of biological entities as well as ecosystems are not fully understood, there is a tendency to romanticize nature as a perfect system and simplify it (Vogel, 1998: 19). Not all solutions found in organisms and arrived at through evolutionary processes are perfect, or suitable for a human context. Humans have the ability to source inspiration and materials from a wide range of sources, which may lead to solutions different from a simple linear evolutionary approach to design. There is a tendency in organisms and ecosystems for mechanisms and materials to be multifunctional and not optimized for one specific function. A spider web’s primary function, for example, is to catch prey and retain it. It also acts as a communication mechanism and camouflage strategy. These multiple functions mean the web may not be optimized for strength and stickiness, which might be of most interest to human designers. While multifunctionality may be an important and useful trait of organisms or ecosystems to mimic, there is a need to emulate organisms or ecosystems critically and ensure appropriate adaptation occurs in the process of translation to a human context. Kibert et al. (2002: 17) pose the following question: “Do natural systems in fact use resources optimally or can technology actually improve on the energy and matter utilisation of Nature, perhaps through observing Nature itself?” Mathews (2011) describes some of the philosophical dangers of such a pursuit. She argues that the philosophical separation of humans from the non-made or non-built (i.e. “nature”) and the tendency to see the “natural” as something to leave alone and protect as uniquely different from humans are problematic. If humans are to become better at living on the planet without damaging ecosystems, the organisms within them, and planetary biochemical cycles, the dualistic idea of nature as separate from humans must be challenged. If humans are seen as a part of ecosystems, it could follow that human-made technologies are “natural”. Understanding humans as “natural” would signal a philosophical shift in thinking that could pave the way to societal change in relationship to ecosystems. This does not mean that human activities and products become any less damaging to the biosphere, however. Instead, human activities that harm ecosystems could be considered “natural” and therefore acceptable. This could lead to the idea that if human-made artefacts are an expression of nature, nature could be improved upon by human design, so that nature as it exists undisturbed by humans will cease to be something to 448

Sustainable and Regenerative Architecture

value. There is a certain anthropocentric arrogance in this that should be examined and, if left to its natural conclusion, could result in a completely human-made world devoid of “nature”. These issues do not mean that designers cannot learn anything from studying how biology or ecosystems work, but there is a need to explore and respect solutions seen in the living world along with tested and successful strategies that humans have devised, and to understand the differences between them. This is important in order to make decisions about what is and is not appropriate in terms of biomimetic design, so that sustainability is increased, and the greater philosophical or ethical implications of biomimicry-for-sustainability are not ignored.

Conclusion: Biomimetic Design for Sustainability Different approaches to biomimetic design have evolved and can have different outcomes in terms of overall sustainability. Mimicking organisms can produce innovations that address sustainability issues in some cases (Pedersen Zari, 2010; Taylor Buck, 2017), but without an understanding of the ecological context of these organisms, such innovations can easily become technological add-ons to conventional architecture, and buildings can remain average in terms of overall sustainability performance over whole lifecycles. Such solutions miss opportunities to examine the possibility of systemic changes in design practices and re-evaluate the nature of relationships between people, their built environments, and the ecosystems they exist in. Taylor Buck (2017) notes from a series of interviews of biomimicry urban design experts that one of the greatest impacts of biomimetic design collaboration is on the mindset of the people involved. Research and design collaborations such as those between HOK and Biomimicry 3.8 may be a model for cross-disciplinary designing (Hayes et al., 2019; Rossin, 2010). While biomimicry is often described as a tool to increase the sustainability of human-designed products, materials, and the built environment, many biomimetic technologies or materials are not inherently more sustainable than conventional equivalents and may not have been initially developed with such goals in mind. Many examples of technologies or strategies that have achieved high ecological performance have been developed outside of a biomimicry paradigm. Biomimicry is worthy of continued exploration, but it is not the only plausible way forward in terms of increased sustainability performance of the built environment or even the evolution of regenerative cities. Ecosystem-based biomimicry may be the most effective kind of biomimicry to employ in moving towards a regenerative paradigm for built environments. This is also the least explored aspect of biomimicry in built form. If the living world is to give designers insights into sustainable and regenerative design, an understanding of ecosystems could be used to set goals for a project, drive design solutions, and evaluate successes or failures of the design. Such a concept goes beyond encouraging a basic understanding of ecological processes over time. Instead, it is the thorough integration of ecological knowledge into architecture to alter how buildings function in relation to ecosystems and to each other. Buildings would be expected to become intelligent active contributors to ecosystems and social systems, rather than remaining unresponsive agents of ecosystem degeneration.

References Allen, Robert. 2010. Bulletproof Feathers. How Science Uses Nature's Secrets to Design Cutting-Edge Technology, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Allenby, Braden R. & Cooper, William E. 1994. Understanding industrial ecology from a biological systems perspective. Total Quality Environmental Management, 3, 343–354. Aranda-Mena, Guillermo, Sperling, Jeff B. & Wakefield, Ronald 2008. E-Business adoption: Case study on Melbourne City Council CH2 building. World Sustainable Building Conference (SB08). Melbourne, Australia.

449

Maibritt Pedersen Zari Baird, George. 2001. The Architectural Expression of Environmental Control Systems, London: Spon Press. Bar-Cohen, Yoseph. 2010. Humanlike robots. In: Allen, Robert (ed.) Bulletproof Feathers. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Baumeister, Dayna, Pedersen Zari, Maibritt & Hayes, Samantha. 2020. Biomimicry: An opportunity for buildings to relate to place. In: Pedersen Zari, Maibritt, Connolly, Peter & Southcombe, Mark (eds.) Ecologies Design: Transforming Architecture, Landscape, and Urbanism. Oxon: Routledge. 85–95. Bellew, Peter. 2006. Going underground. Ingenia, 28, online. Benyus, Janine. 2008. A good place to settle: Biomimicry, biophilia and the return of nature’s inspiration to architecture. In: Kellert, S. R., Heerwagen, J. H. & Mador, M. L. (eds.) Biophilic Design. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons. Bond, Sandra. 2010. Lessons from the leaders of green designed commercial buildings in Australia. Pacific Rim Property Research Journal, 16, 314–38. Bonser, Richard H. C. & Vincent, Julian F. V. 2007. Technology trajectories, innovation, and the growth of biomimetics. Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part C: Journal of Mechanical Engineering Science, 221, 1177–80. Cole, Raymond J., Busby, Peter, Guenther, Robin, Briney, Leah, Blaviesciunaite, Aiste & Alencar, Tatiana. 2012. A regenerative design framework: Setting new aspirations and initiating new discussions. Building Research & Information, 40, 95–111. Eadie, Leslie & Ghosh, Tushar K. 2011. Biomimicry in textiles: Past, present and potential. An overview. Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 8, 761–75. Gebeshuber, Ille C., Gruber, Petra & Drack, Manfred. 2009. A gaze into the crystal ball: Biomimetics in the year 2059. Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part C: Journal of Mechanical Engineering Science, 223, 2899–918. Goreau, Thomas J. 2010. Reef technology to rescue Venice. Nature, 468, 377–77. Gruber, Petra & Imhof, B. 2017. Patterns of growth—Biomimetics and architectural design. Buildings, 7, 32. Gutierrez, Maria P. 2008. Material bio-intelligibility. Acadia. Silicon + Skin: Biological processes and ­computation, Oct 16th–Oct 19th 2008, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 278–85. Hansell, Mike. 2007. Built by Animals: The Natural History of Animal Architecture, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hayes, Samantha, Desha, Cheryl & Gibbs, Mark. 2019. Findings of case-study analysis: System-level­ ­biomimicry in built-environment design. Biomimetics, 4, 73. Hesselberg, Thomas. 2007. Biomimetics and the case of the remarkable ragworms. Naturwissenschaften, 94, 613. IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) 2007. Climate Change 2007. Synthesis Report. ­Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Core Writing Team, Pachauri, R.K. & Reisinger, A. (eds.), Geneva: IPCC. Jacobsen, Noel B. 2006. Industrial symbiosis in Kalundborg, Denmark: A quantitative assessment of ­economic and environmental aspects. Journal of Industrial Ecology, 10, 239. Jones, Terry. 2008. Distributed energy systems. In: Newton, Peter (ed.) Transitions. Pathways towards ­Sustainable Urban Development in Australia. Collingwood: CSIRO. Kibert, Charles J., Sendzimir, Jan & Guy, G. Bradley. 2002. Construction Ecology, New York: Spon Press. MacKinnon, Rebecca B., Oomen, Jeroen, & Pedersen Zari, Maibritt. 2020. Promises and Presuppositions of Biomimicry. Biomimetics, 5(3), E33. Mathews, Freya. 2011. Towards a deeper philosophy of biomimicry. Organization & Environment, 24, 364–87. Mitchell, Ronald B. 2012. Technology is not enough. The Journal of Environment & Development, 21, 24–7. Paevere, Phillip & Brown, Stephen 2008. Indoor environment quality and occupant productivity in the CH2 building: Post-occupancy summary. Report No. USP2007/23. Melbourne: CSIRO. Parker, Andrew R. & Lawrence, Christopher R. 2001. Water capture by a desert beetle. Nature, 414, 33. Pawlyn, Micheal. 2011. Biomimicry in Architecture, London: RIBA Publishing. Pedersen Zari, Maibritt. 2010. Biomimetic design for climate change adaptation and mitigation. Architectural Science Review, 53, 172–183. Pedersen Zari, Maibritt. 2012. Ecosystem services analysis for the design of regenerative built environments. Building Research & Information, 40, 54–64. Pedersen Zari, Maibritt. 2015a. Ecosystem processes for biomimetic architectural and urban design. ­Architectural Science Review, 58, 106–19. Pedersen Zari, Maibritt. 2015b. Can biomimicry be a useful tool in design for climate change adaptation and mitigation? In: Pacheco-Torgal, Fernando et al. (eds.) Biotechnologies and Biomimetics for Civil Engineering. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

450

Sustainable and Regenerative Architecture Pedersen Zari, Maibritt. 2017. Biomimetic urban design: Ecosystem service provision of water and energy. Buildings. Special Issue: Biomimetics in Sustainable Architectural and Urban Design, 7, 21. Pedersen Zari, Maibritt. 2018. Regenerative Urban Design and Ecosystem Biomimicry, Oxon: Routledge. Pedersen Zari, Maibritt. 2020. Introduction: a shifting paradigm in ecologically focused design. In: Pedersen Zari, Maibritt, Connolly, Peter and Southcombe, Mark. (eds.) Ecologies Design: Transforming Architecture, Landscape and Urbanism. Oxon: Routledge. Portland Development Commission. 2004. Lloyd Crossing: Sustainable Urban Design Plan and Catalyst Project, Portland: Portland Development Commission. Reap, John & Bras, Bill. 2008. Exploring the limits to sustainable energy consumption for organisms and devices. International Journal of Sustainable Manufacturing, 1, 78–99. Rossin, Kaufman J. 2010. Biomimicry: Nature’s design process versus the designer’s process. WIT Transactions on Ecology and the Environment, 138, 559–70. Smith, Fred. 1997. Eastgate, Harare, Zimbabwe. Arup Journal, 32, 3–8. Tan, Su-Fern. 2007. CH2 6 stars, but how does it work? Architecture Australia, 96 (1), 101–104. Taylor Buck, Nick. 2017. The art of imitating life: The potential contribution of biomimicry in shaping the future of our cities. Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science, 44, 120–40. Trivedi, Bijal P. 2001. Beetle’s shell offers clues to harvesting water in the desert. National Geographic Today. Turner, John S. & Soar, Rupert C. 2008. Beyond biomimicry: What termites can tell us about realizing the living building. First International Conference on Industrialized, Intelligent Construction (I3CON). Loughborough University. UNEP-Sustainable Buildings and Construction Initiative 2007. Buildings and Climate Change: Status, Challenges and Opportunities, Paris: United Nations Environment Program. Urban Greenprint. 2017. Seed Kit: Design Concepts Learned from Pacific Northwest Forests, Seattle. Vattam, Swaroop W., Brian, Helms Michael, Goel, Ashok & Yen, Jeannette. 2011. DANE: Fostering creativity in and through biologically inspired design. In: Taura, Toshiharu & Nagai, Yukari (eds.) Design Creativity 2010. London: Springer. Vincent, Julian F. V., Bogatyreva, Olga A., Bogatyrev, Nikolaj R., Bowyer, Adrian & Pahl, Anja-Karina. 2006. Biomimetics – Its Practice and Theory. Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 3, 471–82. Vogel, Steven. 1998. Cat’s Paws and Catapults, New York: Norton and Company. Wahl, Daniel C. 2006. Bionics vs. biomimicry: From control of nature to sustainable participation in nature In: Brebbia, Carlos. A. (ed.) Design and Nature III: Comparing Design in Nature with Science and Engineering, Southampton: Wessex Institute of Technology. Wright, Justin P. & Jones, Clive G. 2006. The concept of organisms as ecosystem engineers ten years on: Progress, limitations, and challenges. Bioscience, 56, 203–9.

451

28 Design for Ageing Buildings An Applied Research of Poikilohydric Living Walls Marcos Cruz

Buildings are only new for a very short period of time; they soon start going through an enduring weathering process that gradually changes their physical properties and visual appearance. Our society makes huge efforts to maintain buildings clean and keep their original look. Most designers also conceive them with this short-lived and ephemeral moment of immaculate newness in mind forgetting the long-lasting impact of weather and use. Externally facing surfaces, however, will transform mostly via the exposure to climatic and biochemical factors. This will depend on the degree of surface roughness of materials and the intensity of particle deposition which will trigger biological succession of plants. Bacteria, cyanobacteria, algae, molds, bryophytes, and lichens will take over slowly ‘staining’ facades when biocolonizing buildings (Figure 28.1). But rather than the negative assumption that such conditions imply a sense of neglect and decay, biocolonized surfaces offer an ecological patina that is alive and therefore an active contributor to the environment. Against the common expectation that architecture will look forever new, the research on bioreceptive materials and poikilohydric living walls has focused on design strategies for ageing buildings in which biological processes are understood as an integral part of architecture – manmade systems in which nature is invited to follow its natural path (Figure 28.2). The research was carried out between 2014 and 2021 with a multidisciplinary team of experts at the Bartlett School of Architecture (Cruz 2021). The outcomes were globally disseminated to a broad audience via numerous high-profile exhibitions and publications (16 exhibitions and 25 publications), including the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial in New York. It was also mentioned in The Sunday Times as one of eleven inventions that could change the world, while being featured in a film documentary about concrete as one of humanity’s most successful inventions. The present chapter is an extended version of a Bartlett Research Folio that was submitted to the UK’s national Research Excellence Framework (REF) in 2021. One of the underlying premises of the research is to explore the potentials of bio-material changes that happen naturally on our buildings over time. Fundamental to this is a complex geometric dialogue of naturally grown and design morphologies that help blending walls with their surroundings. Lichens, in particular, can offer unique formal and chromatic qualities by enhancing architectural features that give buildings an attractive expression, providing them even with a sense of immortality (Gilbert 2000: 23, 25). But designing with such irregular and unpredictable patchy growth is challenging when considering the expectation that our built environment is to a large extent static and permanent, and the dominant taste is influenced by a long-lasting “aesthetic of cleanliness” (Vigarello 1988) and “purity” (Forty 1986) that still prevails today. The scattered presence of spots, tufts, and clumps of organic matter on walls resembles the blotching of human 452

DOI: 10.4324/9781315674469-31

Design for Ageing Buildings

Figure 28.1  E  xample of a biocolonized north-facing façade with scattered cryptogamic surface cover. Evidence of six different lichen types was observed on expanded cork agglomerate panelling. Pavilhão Centro de Portugal, Coimbra Portugal [Arch. Álvaro Siza Vieira and Eduardo Souto de Moura] (photo credit: Marcos Cruz).

Figure 28.2  Transplanted moss on a bioreceptive lightweight OPC component for the exhibition ‘Beyond the Horizon – Design for Different Futures’, Philadelphia Museum of Art, USA, 2019 [original component designed and built in 2015; team: BiotA Lab with Wen Cheng, Sul Ah Lee, Taehyun Lee, and Dan Lin] (photo credit: Marcos Cruz).

skin, being regarded as a pathological occurrence that the anthropologist Mary Douglas defined as “matter out of place” (Douglas 1966: 165). In response, the proposed biocolonization of building facades explores such conditions in anthropogenic contexts focusing on the following: Scale and 453

Marcos Cruz

gradients of patterns; transitions between material and biology; coexistence of living and dead biomass; figural tectonics; intricate chromatic values; and depth and shading. All these phenomena form the basis of a new language of ageing buildings that fits in the broader context of aesthetics of impurity in architecture (Cruz & Beckett 2016: 53). A key aspect of this research is the exploration of biocolonization processes that happen naturally on walls and infrastructures, which offer a varied ecological repertoire of species and habitats (Figure 28.3). Certain lichen types, for example, have adapted to man-made constructions in such a way that they are now exclusive to particular churchyards and other ancient constructions (Gilbert 2000: 151). In order to capitalize on these scenarios, the research focuses on design, material, and manufacturing protocols to create a novel type of living walls where ageing is not a random occurrence, but instead a purposeful strategy – a creative and environmentally driven process that integrates vegetative growth in urban surroundings. Ageing through biological means is in this manner not only offering a new ornamental and inhabitable depth for architecture (Cruz 2013: 79), but ultimately a way to respond to the urgency of the current climate crisis by improving the environmental qualities of cities. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute and University of Kaiserslautern found that cryptogamic cover amounts to 7% of net global primary carbon uptake by terrestrial vegetation, while accounting for nearly half of the biological nitrogen fixation on land (Elbert et al. 2012: 459). When washed off from roofs and walls, this organic matter brings carbon and nitrogen that had been absorbed from the air back into the soil where it will help plants to grow. This process becomes an intrinsic part of the earth’s carbon and nitrogen cycles. Algae and mosses also absorb large amounts of pollutants, especially airborne particulate matter (PM) as they lack protective cuticles on the leaves, which offers an additional benefit for such species to propagate in larger quantity in urban contexts. In this research, poikilohydric living walls aim at proliferating cryptogams directly on buildings via the use of cementitious materials that are produced via novel manufacturing processes. The walls seek to increase moisture availability, creating organic substrata to feed the florae. Cryptogams are in evolutionary terms very ancient. Among others, they include mosses, lichens, and ferns that propagate via spores and have the ability to switch on and off their photosynthetic activity, guaranteeing their survival and distribution in all climatic zones on earth. In this context, the phenomenon of poikilohydry is a pivotal concept that defines the aptitude of such genera to survive for very long periods in urban settings without depending on human intervention. Most

Figure 28.3  E  xample of biocolonized walls with mosses [New Mosque, Eminönü Istanbul]; algae [Ornamental component, Gloucester Gate Bridge/Regent’s Park, London]; and lichens [Chapterhouse Window, Convent of Christ, Tomar, Portugal] (photo credits: Marcos Cruz).

454

Design for Ageing Buildings

plants die without water supply. However, the structural and physiological capacity of mosses and lichens enables them to resist lengthy drought periods and extreme temperatures, reducing their cellular metabolism to a minimum. This anabiotic state allows them to resist extreme cold and heat for as long as renewed moisture readiness makes them revive again. Most notorious is that these species can easily rehydrate either by absorbing rainwater or by the uptake of vapor or dew, which leads to intermittent growth patterns (Figure 28.4). This is an environmentally driven process that suggests for architecture a novel type of poikilohydric design (Cruz 2020) where the inherent biological performativity of the plants allows entire buildings to be alive. With the support of porous material scaffolds, such designs take advantage of the desiccation tolerance of species on the one hand, while on the other extending their photosynthetic activity through prolonged moisture readiness. This is done with compounds that absorb, retain, and distribute water for lengthy periods, which in turn help calibrating and enhancing the natural fluctuations of the ageing process in buildings. Poikilohydric living walls are proposed as an innovative approach to vertical greening in cities, generating a long-term solution to improve environmental levels and urban wellbeing. They provide an alternative to existing green walls that require expensive water and nutrient supply to be preserved, and which also reflect preconceived ideas of growth that are far too often homogenous, sterile, and unsuitable for the local environment. In response, poikilohydric living walls embrace the environmental unpredictability of naturally grown process. Like an architectural bark (Cruz & Beckett 2016: 51), such biocolonized surfaces offer ecologically heterogeneous habitats that evolve over time (Figure 28.5). They are in fact not always green as expected in urban green infrastructures; the proposed living walls are planned to simultaneously accommodate the coexistence of growing, dormant or decaying plant cover depending on individual life cycles. To achieve this, biologically responsive materials are being employed with specific formal attributes that include the figural expression of patterns and carefully crafted crevices and protrusions to nest and integrate

Figure 28.4  E  xample of poikilohydric growth. Microscopic imagery showing water droplets on lichens and mosses (photo credits: Marcos Cruz).

455

Marcos Cruz

Figure 28.5  Cryptogamic surface cover on tree barks (photo credits: Marcos Cruz).

growth in panels. Bioreceptive composites are to be understood as part of a new “paramateriality” in architecture that goes beyond the performative and aesthetic limitations of traditional materials (Cruz 2018), employing interdisciplinary workflows that combine simultaneously biological testing, design, and environmental simulations, and advanced fabrication protocols. Observational analysis in urban settings showed that plants proliferate on vertical planes due to the complementary performance of solid scaffolds and soft substrates. Scaffolds offer a structural framework on which plants and also substrates are fixed. Substrates, on the other hand, tend to be more superficial and work as nutrient providers and context for the microbiome of small-scale plants to thrive. Both systems are vital retention mechanisms for moisture. Most poikilohydric species, such as mosses, are epiphytic and have no roots or only very small rhizoids (proto roots) that force them to hook onto the surface roughness and/or crevices of materials (Figure 28.6). They only require very small layers of organic substrates from where they can feed. On building facades, such substrates are commonly produced naturally through the deposition of dusts and organic matter, mostly of cyanobacteria, dead algae, and other organic matter which encourages cryptogams to establish. Material composites employed in this research, like Magnesium Phosphate Concrete (MPC) or porous TecCast, worked predominantly as hard structural scaffolds on which the substrates could accumulate, providing saxicolous habitats. Corkcrete, on the other hand, another composite tested in the research, worked with a natural aggregate that made the scaffold be simultaneously an organic substrate, helping the proliferation of plants to happen quicker. In the latter, saxicolous and corticolous plant habitats are hybridized to enhance cryptogamic surface cover. Cities are characterized by building facades that are inherently vertical and notoriously difficult for plants to growth. From an evolutionary point of view, they have “many of the same macro- and microhabitats, and many of the same plants, as natural cliff faces” (Figure 28.7). According to the urban cliff hypothesis, “cliffs, talus, and other rock outcrops represent a marginal, ­unproductive refuge habitat that gave rise to […] humans and their commensals and mutualists” (Larson et al. 2004: 2, 13). At the same time, the harsh conditions of these designed urban cliffs are inherently xeric, sharing many characteristics with desert environments: Very low-nutrient conditions; extreme superficial temperatures; irregular precipitation patterns that create desiccation through evaporation or rainwater run-off; and material alkalinity. Plants occupying building surfaces thus share features with species that thrive in such arid conditions, being characterized by “(1) shallow roots and a high root–shoot ratio; (2) higher water stress and heat tolerances; (3) small leaves that closely track air temperature; … (5) low photosynthetic and growth rates; (6) opportunistic phenologies; and (7) a regular spatial pattern” (Smith et al. 1997: 229). On buildings, plants that share these features have developed strategies to adapt to the extreme conditions of facades. They make use of the concavities and protrusions, benefiting opportunistically from the small-scale 456

Design for Ageing Buildings

Figure 28.6  P  reliminary tests of poikilohydric growth with transplanted moss on multi-material OPC cast done for the St Anne’s Catholic Primary School, London, UK (photo credit: Marcos Cruz).

Figure 28.7  Cliff morphologies (photo credits: Marcos Cruz).

environmental heterogeneity of walls. The tectonic variability of elevations is then what enables increased water retention, deposition of organic matter and accretion of micro-substrates that produce a biodiverse micro-landscape of “fertile islands” (Smith et al. 1997: 41). Combining this morphological complexity with the porous matrix of bioreceptive materials ultimately encourages new “habitat templates” (Lundholm 2006) for cryptogamic surface cover in cities. 457

Marcos Cruz

In the 1990s, the Belgian biochemical engineer Olivier Guillitte defined the phenomenon of materials that are biologically colonized without deterioration as “bioreceptivity”. He ­categorized four types, all of which enhance plant growth on walls (1) “primary or intrinsic” – the first phase of biocolonisation; (2) “secondary” – biocolonisation that evolves due to external influences; (3) “tertiary” – biocolonisation that is produced by human activity; and (4) “extrinsic” –­ biocolonisation that results from particle depositions to create new substrates (Guillitte 1995: 216). But whereas all four types of bioreceptivity are fundamental to promote vegetative growth on facades, these common biocolonisation processes are primarily on inert scaffolds like stone, brick or concrete, which in turn are also extremely slow to develop. As the result, the research on poikilohydric living walls capitalizes on these phenomena, creating a hyper-bioreceptivity that speeds up and extends the photosynthetic activity of plants. This includes the purposeful design of patterns to slow down water run-off; the increase of porosity to improve water sorption; the use of multi-material composites with larger and thinner pore size to provide selective growth patterns; the creation of scaffolds with embedded organic substrates to intensify plant performance on anthropogenic environments. The applied research of poikilohydric living walls was done in three separate phases and focused on multiple testing to evaluate the most suitable environments for cryptogams to grow. The first phase entailed an 18-month research period focused on intense fabrication processes in which small samples were scaled up for the first time to a building scale. This was followed by an outdoor weathering scheme in which MPC and Ordinary Portland Concrete (OPC) were compared, while water run-off and thermal variability were tested throughout a full annual cycle. In the second period, a wall for the exhibition La Fabrique du Vivant at the Centre Pompidou was built (Figure 28.8), being used as the model for the subsequent installation of 32 panels at the St. Anne’s Primary Catholic School and 20 panels at the East Putney tube station in London. With the industrial partner Pennine Stone Limited, a material mix was developed that had a high-level porosity, being structurally and cost-efficient, and easy to manufacture – porous TecCast. Designs

Figure 28.8  P  oikilohydric living wall made for the exhibition ‘La Fabrique du Vivant’, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France, 2019 [team: Marcos Cruz with Javier Ruiz and Richard Beckett; biology: Bio-ID/Brenda Parker and Rushi Metha; manufacturing: Pennine Stone] (photo credit: Sara Lever).

458

Design for Ageing Buildings

and transplantation protocols were further explored. In the third phase, a new set of wall components were incorporated in the project of a building extension at Merchiston Park in Edinburgh. This period focused on the development of a composite that was developed with academic partners from the University of Coimbra and the Technical Institute of Tomar in Portugal. In this case, Portland Cement was mixed with cork aggregates to increase its bioreceptivity – Corkcrete. Besides testing a variety of mixtures to retain more water, different moss types and additional organic substrates were explored, as well as supplementary formal simulations generated.

Research Phase 1 In the first phase, numerous tests were conducted with MPC due to its hardiness, low alkalinity and water retention capability. This basic characterization of MPC had been previously defined by biologist Sandra Manso Blanco in her PhD at the UPC in Barcelona (Manso Blanco 2014), who later joined the Bartlett team at University College London to scale up the process. Composites were made of magnesium oxide; ammonium dihydrogen phosphate; borax as a curing retardant; and two types of aggregates, 1- to 2-mm sand for a fine layer, and 2- to 4-mm sand for a course layer on the panels. The ingredients were mixed with a minimum of water to create a very porous dry mix. Two MPC recipes were produced and juxtaposed to allow for water to be absorbed more quickly through a courser back layer into a finer front layer. Additional porosimetry measured the panels’ surface roughness and capillary action, while material analysis included flexural and compressive strength, freeze-thaw resistance, and fixing pull-out resistance tests. In terms of design, the classification of different tree barks, as well as intense sketching, led to the production of over 30 3D Rhino and Houdini models that were organized into a ‘taxonomy’ of patterns (Figures 28.9 and 28.10). From those, 15 small models were 3D-printed and categorized into six geometric families: Vertical curtain system; diagonal baroque; scattered poché; horizontal striations; bulging; and branching. The first three geometries were selected for the fabrication of three panels (1000 × 1500 mm in vertical format) to be compared in the 12-month outdoor exposure (Figure 28.11). A set of nine MPC (three selected geometry types × three replicas) and OPC (the same three geometry types × three replicas) panels were produced creating 18 medium-scale façade prototypes. During this year-long exposure study, different types of algae were selected to understand the viability of motile, non-motile, and filamentous species to be applied on the panels as an organic substrate. Later, a selection of mosses was collected from the local area and mixed

Figure 28.9  P  reliminary computational studies of horizontal surface morphologies for bioreceptive panels (computational drawings: Marcos Cruz).

459

Marcos Cruz

Figure 28.10  P  reliminary computational studies of variable surface morphologies for bioreceptive panels (computational drawings: Marcos Cruz).

Figure 28.11  F  inal built bioreceptive MPC panels with three selected surface patterns: Curtain, poché, and baroque (photo credit: Marcos Cruz).

460

Design for Ageing Buildings

into a shake that was applied to the right side of each panel to allow comparison with the other half. All studies considered the complementary relationship between the initial algal seeding process, the following nursery stage of early biological communities through controlled irrigation, and later growth stage with established moss. A series of environmental studies were realized to understand the possible growth occurrence on prototypes. This included climatic data regularly collected from an automatic weather station. Changes in speed and direction were compared with prevailing wind norms in London. Also, sub-surface temperature measurements were taken from incorporated sensors in both OPC and MPC to show diurnal and seasonal fluctuations. Panels mounted above a tray were able to collect and measure water run-off, and colored water collected from MPC was chemically analyzed. A community dynamics test was further conducted indoors and outdoors to compare the evolution of the microbial and algal communities on different panel sizes and under different conditions of humidity and irrigation. Metagenomics tests were carried out with samples collected at four different times. Molecular data were analyzed by bioinformatics, allowing for the characterization of microbial biodiversity in 14 points/samples after one year of exposure. Three additional tests were done on samples and compared with small components outdoors as part of an observational study to monitor water content with three volumetric water sensors (VWS), creating a database that was analyzed via MATLAB software. Moreover, a robotic photographic survey of panels was done from a fixed vantage point at regular intervals of two weeks. Two 3D LiDAR surveys generated point clouds that were coordinated with the photographic survey and examined for vertical-rain catchment area. The 356-day exposure of this initial phase led to the conclusions that color variations on MPC resulted from an intense evaporation activity and chemical leaching from within the panels after rainfall (Figure 28.12). Surprisingly, no sign of biological growth on MPC was visible after 12 months. There was also no evidence that the possible cooling effects from surface evapotranspiration affected superficial growth. In order to test biological growth in optimal conditions, a further two-week algae-fouling test was implemented with algae in water running over MPC samples, which still did not show growth. Two main reasons were found to explain such unexpected results: Residual chemical surface properties that included the crystallization of boric acid; and the relative large-scale pore size shaped by the sand aggregate of 2–4 mm in the panels that desiccated any establishing biomass from within. Both conditions made the proposed MPC to be

Figure 28.12  3 56-day outdoor exposure of 18 MPC and OPC panels in the courtyard of the Bartlett Hampstead Road between 2016 and 2017 during the EPSRC-funded research. Leaching effect of boric acid visible on the surface of MPC panels [team: Marcos Cruz (PI), Richard Beckett, Sandra Manso Blanco, Chris Leung, Bill Watts] (photo credits: Marcos Cruz).

461

Marcos Cruz

an unforeseen inhibitor for microorganisms and cryptogams to grow during a single annual cycle. However, algae and mosses were evident in specific areas of OPC panels that had no porosity. This condition offered water catchment areas in horizontal crevices without unnecessary dehydration. This was a vital finding and significant proof that the morphology on its own – independent of its chemistry, pH and porosity – has a vital role in providing growth opportunities on facades. A further observational study was conducted with one MPC panel for two additional years in other locations in London, finally showing a mild presence of algae in selected areas. The panel was exposed first at Camley Street Natural Park and then relocated to Meanwhile Gardens in West London. Another set of multi-material MPC panels were exposed at Camley Street Natural Park and also showed evidence of algal growth after two annual cycles (Figure 28.13). Both observational studies demonstrated that more time was necessary for porous MPC to become bioreceptive, possibly to allow uncured chemicals in the panels to be washed out. At the same time, an additional finding showed that surrounding plants are hugely important to form an inducive context for self-regulated living walls due to continuous shading, along with the regular release of moisture, algae, and spores from bushes and trees.

Research Phase 2 In the second phase of the research, the St Anne’s and East Putney projects were built at Pennine Stone of porous TecCast, which is predominantly a mix of OPC (Figure 28.14). Despite its initial high alkalinity, the gradual decrease in the pH level when carbonized over time makes OPC an appropriate scaffold for several moss types to develop in urban settings. The goal of using OPC was also to turn the most available material in the construction industry into a bioreceptive compound whose initial carbon footprint could be gradually offset through long-term plant activity. A preliminary design involving complex three-layered prototypes was produced. This was not pursued beyond the testing phase because they did not retain more water as hoped, and transplanted moss did not establish due to the large pore size and excessive desiccation. All panels were thus made from a single-layered composite made of cement, sand, lime dust, water, admixtures, yellow dye, and glass fibers for higher tensile, and flexural strength. It was calibrated to gain an increased porosity, showing a much higher level of water-absorption capability than commonly used OPC. Compressive strength tests showed an average of 26.12 N/m 2 per panel; density of 120 kg/m 3; and average weight of 80 kg for St Anne’s and 70–100 kg for East Putney samples. The manufacturing

Figure 28.13  S elective algal growth on a multi-material MPC prototype after 24 months of outdoor exposure at Camley Street Natural Park, London, UK [original component designed and built in 2017; team: BiotA Lab with Yuxin Jiang, Zhili Wang, Xinhe Lin, Qungyue Zheng] (photo credits: Marcos Cruz).

462

Design for Ageing Buildings

Figure 28.14  V  arious stages of the manufacturing process of bioreceptive panels at Pennine Stone Limited, including (a) a multi-material and single-material porous TecCast cast; (b) testing of structural strength; and (c) the installation at the St Anne’s Catholic Primary School, London, UK [team: Bio-ID; manufacturing: Pennine Stone] (photo credits: Marcos Cruz).

Figure 28.15  F  inal wall morphology of curtain tectonic for the East Putney Station, divided into 20 horizontally juxtaposed panels of 500 × 1,000 mm (computational drawing: Javier Ruiz).

of the final glass fiber-reinforced concrete (GRC) panels employed state-of-the-art CNC milling of two sets of molds and industrial-casting systems. In this second phase, a series of geometric studies with a vertical branching system were carried out with help of Houdini software. For the St Anne’s project, the selected patterns were mirrored to create a repetitious yet diverse rhythm for the whole wall. The spacing between branches was calibrated to allow transplanted moss to be fixed in the crevices, at the same time preventing schoolchildren from climbing on it. For the East Putney Station, a new series of branching patterns were simulated that suggested a wall with few repeated panels (Figure 28.15). To enhance the readability of the wall from the distance, and to maximize the depth for increased shading to retain moisture, the concept of an undulating curtain was chosen. A branching pattern was then juxtaposed over the folds, and the size calibrated with a gradient that ranged from vertical flat indentations to a more horizontal and deeper set of crevices. Flat indentations occurred where curtain folds were deepest – deeper crevices where the curtain was shallowest. In biological terms, different types of mosses were considered for the St Anne’s and East Putney projects – Bryum capillare, Tortula muralis, and Grimmia pulvinata. In addition to aesthetic qualities, this was done according to the specific biological and ecological criteria: Resilience during the grafting process; speed of getting established; occurrence on concrete in urban environments; greater dehydration tolerance; pH preference; and impact of light conditions. In parallel, a variety of cross-linked hydrogels were deployed to promote initial adhesion of moss to porous TecCast and to increase moisture availability in early growth stages. However, the morphological complexity of both St Anne’s and East Putney panels suggested that in future applications on much 463

Marcos Cruz

larger facades, much faster and accurate robotic extrusion processes could be utilized to inject hydrogels into bioreceptive materials (Malik et al. 2019).

Research Phase 3 In a third phase, cork was used as an aggregate to complement sand as it is an extremely light aggregate that is both thermally and acoustically insulating and also bioreceptive for florae that is very slow to proliferate. A variety of porous mortar mixtures of OPC with natural and expanded cork were compared in what concerns the speed and occurrence of biomass on the surface ­(Figure 28.16). The result was a set of Corkcrete samples that minimize the evaporative loss of water in highly absorbent components, while keeping a much-needed structural integrity for future large-scale applications. In terms of design, new differential growth patterns were used to slow down water run-off. At the same time, colonization rate tests were performed on different material scaffolds, assessing the compatibility between these composites and moss. But the microbiome of mosses is complex. The uptake of nutrients can only be done with the presence of bacteria and hypha, which encourage plant development. Also, to fix atmospheric nitrogen that is particularly important for mosses that grow on very small amounts of organic substrates, they need certain bacteria to fix and convert it so that it can be absorbed by the plant. Some types of nitrogen-fixing bacteria have shown to be able to secrete growth hormones which help to stimulate plant growth (Nutman 1976). Microbiological laboratory tests with induced hormonal growth were then carried out in the Bio-ID labs at University College London. Epiphytic methylotrophic bacteria were associated with phytohormone production in mosses, which led to scientific methods to accelerate moss growth by providing the plant with elevated levels of methylotrophs. This was followed by a field study focusing on substrate and microbiology research to understand growth rates on different concrete mixtures. Further transplantation exercises were done to figure out an efficient method to graft moss on porous TecCast (Metha 2018). The problem to find large quantities of usable moss that had to be removed from adjacent areas of the proposed walls, however, proved to be extremely challenging and time-consuming. This led to the conclusion that for large-scale poikilohydric living walls that are supposed to be covered with transplanted moss at the moment of installation, a commercial supply chain of bryophytes will be required for future project. Later in this third research phase, additional outdoor observations and lab experiments were concluded to measure in more detail the impact of bryophyte ecology and phytosociological features of mixed colonies (Figure 28.17). Biotic and abiotic factors that influence the physiology and propagation patterns of moss were tested. The isolation of methylobacteria,

Figure 28.16  C  orkcrete samples with microscopic imagery showing evidence of algal, moss, and lichen growth after 12 months of outdoor exposure at the Meanwhile Wildlife Gardens, London, UK [team: Bio-ID/Marcos Cruz, Anete Salmane, Brenda Parker] (photo credits: Marcos Cruz).

464

Design for Ageing Buildings

cyanobacteria, nitrogen-fixing bacteria, and other epiphytic microorganisms from moss phylloids, rhizoids, and associated biogenic crusts was achieved in order to understand the functional diversity of moss microbiome. Also, epiphytic microbial species were cultivated in liquid medium for the development of probiotic biogenic binder and liquid probiotic consortia. Furthermore, the impact of specific probiotic treatments on in vitro growth of the three previously chosen moss varieties in Phase 2 was assessed. The in situ growth rate of different mosses was further documented according to specific concrete-substrate compositions to optimize bryophyte transplantation (Lacatusu 2019). For long-term observations, samples of Corkcrete were exposed for one and a half years in the Meanwhile Wildlife gardens in West London and in the terrace of the Bartlett School of Architecture in 22 Gordon Street, showing that several components were largely covered with algae and moss, as well as lichens in very early stages. The bioreceptivity of components made with larger-scaled cork aggregates provided an ideal scaffold for water retention and a very suitable substrate to increase growth (Salmane 2017). When compared with the extremely slow algae and moss propagation on MPC, the selected Corkcrete samples proved to be much more effective, hosting a variety of cryptogams after a single winter cycle.

Conclusion The material and biological recipes tested in the research on bioreceptive materials and poikilohydric living walls are not to be understood as universally applicable; they are context specific and rely on ecologically driven solutions and geometric properties that have to be defined in accordance with each site and climate. But abundant testing and observational studies in all three research phases have shown that a poikilohydric-responsive architecture can work in a temperate environment such as in the UK and that it is an effective model with the potential to be extrapolated to other places in the world. It can be generated by designing material and environmentally tailored walls that promote the growth of microorganisms and cryptogams on buildings. Morphological patterns and the calibrated porosity of specific material scaffolds and substrates, mostly porous TecCast and Corkcrete, were developed to enhance the biocolonization of panels that can be applied on façades, infrastructures, and walls (Figure 28.18). This was achieved by slowing down water run-off to increase water retention and the accumulated organic matter to promote the growth of algae, mosses, and lichens in specific areas of manufactured prototypes. The research has concluded that bioreceptive facades can be manufactured in a structurally sound and cost-efficient way, aiming for widespread future application in the built environment (Figure

Figure 28.17  I n situ testing of porous TecCast component with and without transplanted moss to evaluate the impact of outdoor weathering, Wembley, London, UK [team: Bio-ID/Marcos Cruz, Alexandra Lacatusu] (photo credits: Marcos Cruz).

465

Marcos Cruz

Figure 28.18  Final installation of a poikilohydric living wall with transplanted moss from five different areasofLondonattheStAnne’sCatholicPrimarySchool,London,UK[team:Bio-ID/MarcosCruz,Brenda Parker; manufacturing: Pennine Stone] (photo credit: Jakob Bauer).

466

Design for Ageing Buildings

Figure 28.19  D  rawing of a poikilohydric living wall installed at the Merchiston Park house extension, Edinburgh, UK [team: Marcos Cruz (panels), Andrew Shaw, and Neil Greenshields (Building); client: Dr TRD Shaw and Mrs MPL Shaw] (rendering: Andrew Shaw).

28.19). It suggested a new sense of depth and impure aesthetics that is highly attractive to the general public. The poikilohydric living walls demonstrated that the natural weathering process of buildings can be used as an effective planning strategy to encourage the proliferation of cryptogamic surface cover in cities, offering a long-term carbon offset for the initial carbon footprint of cementitious materials. This self-regulated greening process not only embellishes but also contributes through its poikilohydry to a more sustainable built environment. It ultimately defines a new design for ageing buildings.

Acknowledgements The research resulted from the collaboration of a multidisciplinary team of colleagues and experts in architecture, biology, and engineering who contributed to the work in different capacities and phases. It was funded by Transport for London (Tf L); London Borough of Lambeth; St Anne’s Catholic Primary School; Camley Street Natural Park; and Meanwhile Wildlife Gardens as part of the London Wildlife Trust. The initial concept phase was shared with co-researchers Richard Beckett and Dr Sandra Manso Blanco who joined from the UPC in Barcelona where initial Magnesium Phosphate Concrete (MPC) tests were patented. This led to an 18-month EPSRC-funded research that laid the foundation for broader material, design, and environmental explorations. The team included Dr Chris Leung and Bill Watts (co-I), and industrial partners Michael Pelken from Laing O’Rourke UK, and Professor Antonio Aguado de Ceo from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia in Spain. Further computational design explorations were developed by Javier Ruiz, while the CNC milling of molds was carried out by Alex McCann and William Victor Camilleri at UCL B-Made. This EPSRC-funded research benefitted from strategic inputs of an Advisory Board that included Professor Marc-Oliver Coppens, Professor Alan Penn, Professor Nima Shokri, Professor Peter Bishop, and Richard Sabin. Biological, material, and environmental investigations of following phases 2 and 3 were developed with co-researcher Dr Brenda Parker from the UCL Department of Biochemical Engineering and with the help of various research assistants, Anete Salmane and Nina Jotanovic, and several interns, Alexandra Lacatusu, Rushi Metha, and Giovanna Lanius-Pascuzzi. International academic partnerships for Corkcrete were developed with Professor Fernando Branco from the University of Coimbra and Dr Lurdes Belgas from the Polytechnic Institute of Tomar and with the support of Amorim Cork Composites in 467

Marcos Cruz

Portugal. A gradual evolution from the proof-of-concept first phase to various applications in the later phases culminated in three main projects supported and manufactured by Pennine Stone Limited. This partnership laid out the industrial feasibility of the research. Structural Engineering was developed by Tim Lucas from Price and Myers for the EPSRC grant and Manja van der Worp from NOUS Engineering for the St Anne’s and East Putney projects.

Bibliography Cruz, Marcos, (2013). The Inhabitable Flesh of Architecture, London: Routledge. Cruz, Marcos, (2018). Paramateriality: Novel Biodigital Manifolds. In: M. Voyatzaki, ed. Architectural Materialisms: Nonhuman Creativity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Cruz, Marcos, (2020). Poikilohydric Design. In: M. Joachim, M. Aiolova, eds. Design with Life: Biotech Architecture and Resilient Cities. New York: Terreform ONE/ACTAR, 414–18. Cruz, Marcos, (2021). Poikilohydric Living Walls. Bartlett Design Research Folio, London: University College London. Cruz, Marcos and Beckett, Richard, (2016). Bioreceptive Design: A Novel Approach to Biodigital Materiality. Architectural Research Quarterly, 20(1). Douglas, Mary, (1966). Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge. Elbert, Wolfgang et al. (2012). Impact of Cryptogamic Covers on the Global Cycles of Carbon and Nitrogen. Nature Geoscience. 5, 459–62. Forty, Adrian, (1986). Objects of Desire: Design and Society since 1750. London: Thames and Hudson. Gilbert, Oliver, (2000). Lichens. London: Harper Collins Publishers. Guillitte, Olivier, (1995). Bioreceptivity: A New Concept for Building Ecology Studies. Science of the Total Environment. 167(1–3), 215–20. Lacatusu, Alexandra, (2019). Microbially Mediated Bioreceptivity. Minor Research Project Report, created on the occasion of an internship at the Bartlett School of Architecture/UCL, unpublished manuscript. Larson, Douglas et al. (2004). The Urban Cliff Revolution – New Findings on the Origins and Evolution of Human Habitats. Ontario: Fitzhenry & Whiteside. Lundholm, Jeremy, (2006). Green Roofs and Facades: A Habitat Template Approach. Urban Habitats. 4(1), 87–101. Malik, Shneel et la. (2019). Robotic Extrusion of Algae-Laden Hydrogels for Large-Scale Applications. Global Challenges. 4(1), 1–12. Blanco, Sandra M. (2014). Bioreceptivity Optimisation of Concrete Substratum to Stimulate Biological Colonisation. Doctoral Thesis. Barcelona, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya – Department d’Enginyeria de la Construcio’ and Ghent University – Magnel Laboratory for Concrete Research. Metha, Rushi, (2018). Optimaisation of Bioreceptivity. Minor Research Report, created on the occasion of an internship at the Bartlett School of Architecture/UCL. Utrecht University, unpublished manuscript. Nutman, Philip S. (1976). Symbiotic Nitrogen Fixation in Plants. International Biological Programme. 7, Rothamsted Experimental Station / Cambridge University Press. Salmane, Anete, (2017). Bioreceptive Materiality. Minor Research Project Report, created on the occasion of an internship at the Bartlett School of Architecture/UCL. Utrecht University, unpublished manuscript. Smith, S.D. (1997). Physiological Ecology of North American Desert Plants. Berlin: Springer. Vigarello, George, (1988). Concepts of Cleanliness: Changing Attitudes in France since the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

468

29 Nature, Infrastructure, and Cities Antoine Picon

Since the dawn of industrialization, the place, and role of nature in cities has represented a major source of concern for politicians and professionals in charge of urban planning. Indeed, nature was supposed to contribute both to the physical health of urbanites and to the pacification of social life. This concern has risen steadily from the early decades of the 19th century to the present, in direct relation with the growing estrangement of city centers from the countryside. With urban growth, cities have become more and more artificial, thus contributing to make even more pressing the issue of gardens and parks. While Haussmannian engineers and architects or American landscape architects like Frederick Law Olmsted were still thinking in terms of limited projects such as rows of trees, public gardens and parks, modernist planners, following visionary urbanist Ebenezer Howard, invented the much more global Garden City ideal before trying to reconcile its fundamental principles with the requirements of automobile circulation. Such a reconciliation was at the core of Le Corbusier’s proposal for a Radiant City in which skyscrapers would have risen from a canopy of trees covering almost the entire city ground (Cohen, 2013). Since the mid1990s, environmental concerns and the development of ecology have given a new urgency to the question. Urban agriculture has developed as a possible antidote to the poor quality of industrial food. Simultaneously, roof plantations appear as a solution to limit the development of heat island in dense urban environments. Never has the place of nature in cities been as intensely discussed as today. From the contribution of nature to public health to its allegedly pacifying influence, many contemporary questions are, however, rooted in the more-than-two-centuries-long history that I just evoked. Throughout this history, technology has played an important role. Indeed, making natural life possible in the middle of the industrial city called for technological sophistication. From the mid19th century onward, this technological dimension explained the role played by infrastructures in making nature available to inhabitants of cities, a role especially evident in cases like London, Paris or New York. However, this constant presence of technology has been accompanied by important evolutions. The past decades in particular have been marked by a profound transformation in the relations between nature, infrastructure, and cities, a transformation itself indicative of a much broader shift in our understanding of the natural as opposed and complementary to the artificial. Here, I will use the New York High Line as a revelator of this shift. Part of the success with which this project was met is linked to the fact that it offers a striking expression of the changing relations between nature and infrastructure (Figure 29.1). Before the rise of the environmental crises we now face, nature served as the support for infrastructures. Roads, bridges, and canals were generally located in natural settings. They exploited the productive power of nature to the DOI: 10.4324/9781315674469-32

469

Antoine Picon

Figure 29.1  B  uilt on a disused section of the New York Central Railroad, the High Line has become a new tourist attraction. Photo © Antoine Picon.

Figure 29.2  Nature appears as a fragile entity that is itself in need of infrastructural support. Photo © Duanfang Lu

benefit of mankind. In our contemporary technologically driven world, nature increasingly appears as a fragile entity that is itself in need of infrastructural support. This new and ambiguous condition is among the meanings conveyed by the High Line. Nature is literally on its deck like a superficial layer that needs to be tended as if it were some sort of ornament (Figure 29.2). At this stage, however, there arises the question of the difference between the situation ­presented by the High Line and the traditional urban program of the suspended garden. From Babylon, eponymous world marvel, to modern and contemporary urban plantations on decks and roofs, this program has always been a constant feature of the city. To what extent are we observing something new with a realization such as the High Line? In order to answer this, two aspects must be taken into account. The first involves the symbolic or even fictional character of the relation to nature embodied by the High Line. In parks and gardens, nature is always invested with a symbolic character often related to literary fiction; think, for instance, of the role played by ­Greco-Roman mythology in classical gardens like Versailles. The High Line is inseparable 470

Nature, Infrastructure, and Cities

from a new approach of the symbolic role of nature in cities. The second aspect touches upon the notion of a “return” of nature that was recently investigated in collective volume of essays edited by architect Preston Scott Cohen and historian of art Erika Naginski (2014). What the High Line seems to epitomize is the return of nature in a world that had long taken its presence or absence for granted. Actually, in our contemporary urban environment, nature is often neither present nor absent; it is returning; that is to say, it is dynamically asserting its power to appear and unfold. Another way to put it would be to say that nature appears more than ever as a potentiality, a virtuality that is in a process of actualization. The dimension of the potential or the virtual is inseparable from a series of related themes and notions like emergence, a much-discussed issue in design circles today. Through these themes and notions, what is likewise at stake is the relation between nature and information. Is nature fundamentally informational? By the same token, what can be said about the nature of information? These questions will repeatedly intervene in our attempt to understand what is currently happening regarding the relations between nature, infrastructures, and cities.

Nature and Infrastructure Let me begin by addressing the ongoing shift in the relation between nature and infrastructure. Nature used to surround infrastructures. Most bridges, viaducts or dams were located in the countryside, and part of their aesthetic appeal lay in the marked contrast between their generally straightforward and artificial looking lines and the seemingly spontaneous sinuosity of natural topography. During the second half of the 18th century, this contrast played a decisive role in the emergence of two new aesthetic categories: the sublime and the picturesque. The story of their rise has generally been told in relation to architecture and the art of gardens, but one should not forget the role played by infrastructures in the affair. In the eyes of the engineers in charge of their conception and realization, the sublime epitomized the initial disproportion between nature and human labor as well as the heroic character of the fight necessary to render the two compatible by the end. As for the picturesque, it spoke to the capacity of infrastructure, once built, to complement nature harmoniously all the while revealing some of its hidden features (Picon, 1992). Understood in this light, an infrastructure was akin to an event. It dramatized the natural scenery that surrounded it like a fabric designed to enliven a garden. Revealingly, 18th-century parks were frequently adorned with bridges, from the Palladian bridge at Stowe to the small-scale replica of the Coalbrookdale Iron Bridge in the Wörlitz gardens. Now infrastructures were not only found in the countryside. From bridges to sewers, they were also urban. Some of them, like canals, brought natural elements into the city. But the nature that arrived into the middle of the city was often seen as degraded and synonymous with urban squalor. In places such as Manchester, urban waterways seemed, for instance, doomed to waste and pollution. This led urban reformers, architects, landscape architects and engineers to an innovative answer: to bring nature directly into the city by designing plantations and parks as infrastructures. Indeed, in order to bring an allegedly undamaged nature into the city, many 19th-century parks had to be conceived as infrastructures. This approach was especially clear in the case of Haussmannian Paris where the plantations and the parks were interpreted as elements of a complex network covering the entire city. In this network, the trees appeared as an integral part of the infrastructure, just like the sewers running underground or the lampposts regularly disposed between them. A realization like the Park of the Buttes-Chaumont in the northeast of Paris was even designed by an engineer and based on an accumulation of technological tours de force such as the creation of artificial hills on a former quarry. The garden also featured a series of bridges, a railway line and above all great deal of reinforced cement. Documented by photographer Charles Marville, 471

Antoine Picon

the construction of Park of the Buttes-Chaumont was emblematic of what it meant in practice to approach nature in infrastructural terms. Interestingly, despite its artificial character, Parisians consider this park to this day as the most natural of all the gardens of the city (Komara, 2004; Picon, 2010a). One could make a similar argument with Central Park, which was designed both as a consummate infrastructure and as a place where untamed nature could survive in the midst of one of the busiest cities in the world. The same type of argument applies, of course, to subsequent urban parkways. From the aesthetics of territorial infrastructures, industrial age urban parks and parkways inherited a propensity to make use of sublime and picturesque effects. The success of the High Line—the symbolic impact it has had both on its users and on the various design communities interested in the future of urban parks—may very well be related to a series of profound changes in the relations between nature, infrastructures and cities that I have just evoked. To put it simply, one could say that these relations were typical of an industrial context that no longer applies to our world. These changes are in turn indicative of a shift in our conception of nature, which is linked to its increasingly informational dimension. In contemporary science and philosophy, nature is interpreted as information-driven. And since information is fundamentally commensurate with events—a bit is nothing but an elementary occurrence, to paraphrase philosopher Pierre Lévy— nature appears as a complex maze of events ranging from micro-unfolding of ordered structures to macro-changes (Lévy, 1987). In contemporary design theory, the concept of emergence is often mobilized in order to characterize this new understanding of nature in terms of events that seem to lead to spontaneous phenomena of auto-organization (Hensel, 2004; Weistock, 2010). Contrary to what Mark Jarzombek suggested in a provocative lecture given at Harvard Graduate School of Design in 2010, today’s information-based nature is certainly not dead ( Jarzombek, 2010). If this were the case, we would not be preoccupied by so many natural entities, from rain forests to red tuna, from the polar ice caps to pandas. Again, whereas the traditional conception cast nature as only marginally a matter of events, it appears now as fundamentally constituted by myriad events. A lot of things happen all the time in the natural realm. There is no need to insist on the connection between this new conception of nature and the importance taken in our contemporary culture by mass media, with the world of information in the journalistic sense. Nature in the age of information is nature as information but also nature as news. Climate change and its trail of warning disorders and catastrophes offer perhaps the best illustration of this intimate association between nature and news. Many pieces of news revolve around the notion that nature is not dead but vulnerable. Rain forests are threatened by human development, ice caps by global warming. Red tuna and pandas are endangered species. This means that nature is in need of support. Its survival has become a scientific and technological challenge. Specialists of science, technology, and society studies often refer to that situation by saying that we live in a techno-nature in which the respective roles of the natural and the artificial are often reversed. Science and technology now surround and often support nature instead of the reverse. A number of natural parks in Europe are emblematic of this situation. What they present to their visitors is an artificially maintained nature, a scenery curated like fragile plants in a greenhouse. Many botanic and animal species that they host may be considered as artifacts given the intensive care invested in their survival. Put another way, nature is very often now the superficial layer, something akin to software. In traditional industrial society, nature used to support infrastructures. Now, it is often supported by infrastructures, whether physical or electronic. In other words, the urban park and parkway status, this infrastructure-supported status of nature that used to be an exception motivated by the exceptional character of the urban environment, has become a commonplace situation. This should not come as a surprise given the fact that the urban environment has become more often the norm than the exception. Nature is now typically supported by infrastructures. 472

Nature, Infrastructure, and Cities

Our current fascination with vertical gardens might have to do with this fact. To see plants in this way, as a vertical forest stemming out of a wall like an urban ornament, reminds us of the new place of nature in our world. In such a context, nature is no longer a pervasive condition. It happens. The nature of the natural in an information-driven age is to “happen,” thus generating an endless stream of news. From this perspective, the High Line presents striking analogies with another emblematic project of the 2000s: Seoul Cheonggyecheon river restoration project. There also, nature is supported by infrastructure. The stream and planted banks enjoyed by the inhabitants of the South Korean capital city constitute the superficial layer of a huge infrastructural system. While it would be tempting to interpret the High Line and the Cheonggyecheon river as the very symbols of this new situation of dependence of nature upon infrastructure, things are actually not that simple. Indeed, let us not forget that suspended gardens are almost as old as cities themselves. Could the High Line represent just another instance of the old Babylonian marvel? To take this a step further, one could argue that nature’s supported character goes further than its need for technological protection. Nature is also what quite literally returns in the midst of our urban sprawl using infrastructures as its channels much like a radio broadcast is carried by a given wavelength. Nature is what haunts the sprawl. A striking illustration of its haunting presence was proposed by French artist Pierre Huyghe in his 2003 film “Streamside Day.” In one of the key sequences of the film, a fawn evoking Disney’s Bambi wanders through the new and still empty streets and houses of a recent suburban development like the ghost of a long-gone natural life that is suddenly, almost miraculously back. In numerous cases, natural life, wildlife even, is to be found alongside technological systems. In Europe, the margins of untended freeways have become, for instance, the dwelling place of various endangered species (like the last slow worms in France). In the United States, coyotes and other wild animals often enter cities following rail tracks. Once again, nature is what literally returns in cities, and this return is there again an event. Nature is necessarily something that happens in a profoundly urban world. Cities, just like infrastructures, took place in nature. To 17th-century Dutch painters, their skyline of towers and spires often appeared as human signatures appended to largely natural landscapes (Alpers, 1983). Now nature takes place in cities often in direct relation with infrastructures. What seems to be at stake is another inversion, for nature is not only in need of infrastructural support. Contemporary urban infrastructures often represent a means for nature—wild nature, that is—to survive and penetrate the urban environment as a series of occurrences. With some of its plants apparently gone wild, the High Line is all the more fascinating in that it is not an authentic expression of this context. Of course, it conveys the notion of a supported nature and an impression of wilderness at work at the core of the urban fabric and urban infrastructure— something like a return of nature. It conveys this return precisely because it avoids the traditional genres of the sublime and the picturesque, although the case is less clear with the picturesque. One may indeed wonder whether a new type of picturesque is not at work in such a project. Yet as soon as one looks more closely at the High Line, one realizes that the nature in question is not wild but carefully tended. It cannot be wild given the number of people that go for a stroll on this elevated promenade. Nature does not really return in the case of the High Line. The pedestrian is in fact confronted with a fiction, and so oscillates constantly between the belief in this fiction and the disillusion generated by a reality that is fundamentally different. What appears as a fiction on the High Line actually corresponds to the prevailing state of things almost everywhere else where nature is supported by infrastructure, where all kinds of natural species use these infrastructures to return to cities. Another fiction that presents itself here is that of a ruined infrastructure colonized and gradually swallowed by nature. The truth is that the High Line is no longer in ruins despite its staging 473

Antoine Picon

to the contrary as well as the fact that its natural elements belong to an almost traditional genre of urban parks and gardens. Its ambiance is that of a highly civilized place where the remains of a former railroad vocation are not really ruins but carefully crafted evocations. Ruins have by the way become problematic in a world in which the artificial has often become more pervasive than nature. For what were ruins, if not the mark of the progressive return of artifacts, from buildings to machines, to the natural order of the world? In our contemporary techno-nature, the rusted condition has taken precedence on the ruined one, since human creations are unable to dissolve themselves gradually within nature (Picon, 2000). The High Line tends to suggest nevertheless that part of it is ruined. There is therefore an almost traditional aspect in its conception. Following a long tradition of sophisticated parks and gardens, it situates itself at the threshold of illusion and disillusion, with the additional complication that outside the garden, the illusion is actually a reality whereas the allegedly disillusioned state does not correspond to the prevailing state of affairs. The gardens of André Le Nôtre already functioned in terms of this fragile limit between illusion and disillusion (Farhat, 2008). The same can be said of the aforementioned Park of the Buttes-Chaumont. One often says that gardens are magic. Actually, what they achieve is closer to prestidigitation. A good trick must appear like magic, so that one is almost tempted to believe that there is something supernatural at work in it. But the act of conjuring must simultaneously convey the notion that it is an illusion. Where would be the art otherwise? What happens in reality with these gardens is not nature but, rather, an evocation of nature as something that happens. This transmutation might lead to broader lessons for designers at large. Contemporary garden and landscape architecture have emerged as a potent source of inspiration for architecture and urbanism (Garcias, 1997). What can we learn from the High Line and similar projects of our time? The answer could very well be that to deal convincingly with nature, design must fictionalize it. At the same time, the fiction must convey something of the new prevailing condition of the nature at a scale that is broader than the actual project. It must, among other things, suggest that nature is supported. Last lesson: to fictionalize something today is to make it appear as an occurrence or, better yet, an event. It is worth noting that the need to fictionalize in order to convey the truth of a higher order used to be characteristic of the relation between architecture and tectonic. One of its best expressions of this relation is perhaps Sullivan’s treatment of the high-rise theme at the Wainwright building in Saint Louis. In order to express the rhythmic dynamism of the steel frame, Sullivan chose to have twice as many vertical pilasters as steel columns. In other words, one pier out of two was actually nonstructural, meaning that something akin to a constructive lie was necessary for conveying the higher order truth of the tectonic order. This could be called the dialectic of tectonic. The first order of structural reality has to be negated so that a higher order of tectonic truth becomes tangible. With the spectacular development of digital technologies, we may be witnessing the end of tectonic as we knew it (Picon, 2010b). Does this mean that nature is going to replace the tectonic or, rather, play the role the tectonic used to fulfill vis-à-vis architecture? Are we going to see the emergence of a dialectic of nature based on a similar play between reality and truth and between disillusion and illusion? By the same token, one is left to wonder whether we are on the verge of witnessing a radical inversion of the categories of the natural and the artificial, meaning that now nature must be fictionalized whereas previously artificial creations like structures were in need of such fictionalizing. For the architectural discipline, the big difference between yesterday and today—between the age of the tectonic and the age of nature—is that formerly, fictions used to make present the ­reassuring coherence of the built object. Sullivan had to lie in order to emphasize such coherence. Today’s fictions stage open-ended occurrences, events, and processes that do not necessarily 474

Nature, Infrastructure, and Cities

possess a human scope. We have not yet succeeded in our attempts to tame the nature of the information age. Between the stability of old and a highly unstable present condition, the new role of nature in cities, as epitomized by the High Line, could very well be to promote a soft vision of what may happen, despite the perspective of ever more dramatic catastrophes that haunt our collective consciousness.

Acknowledgments A prior version of this chapter was published in Cohen and Naginski (2014).

References Alpers, Svetlana (1983) The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cohen, Jean-Louis (ed.) (2013) Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes. New York: Museum of Modern Art. Cohen, Preston Scott and Erika Naginski (eds.) (2014) The Return of Nature: Sustaining Architecture in the Face of Sustainability. New York: Routledge. Farhat, Georges (2008) L’Anamorphose du Territoire: Les Fonctions Paysagères de la Perspective Topographique dans l’Economie Seigneuriale de la France. Autour de l’Oeuvre d’André Le Nôtre (1613–1700), PhD dissertation ­defended at Université de Paris I-Sorbonne. Garcias, Jean-Claude (1997) Sullivan. Paris: Hazan. Hensel, Michael, Achim Menges and Michael Weinstock (eds.) (2004) “Emergence: Morphogenetic Design Strategies,” Architectural Design (May–June). Jarzombek, Mark (2010) “The Return of Nature: The Apparatus of Sustainability”, paper presented at the Symposia on Architecture, Harvard Graduate School of Design, Boston, Feb. 24, 2010. Komara, Ann (2004) “Concrete and the Engineered Picturesque: The Parc des Buttes-Chaumont (Paris 1867),” Journal of Architectural Education 58 (Sept.): 5–12. Lévy, Pierre (1987) La Machine Univers: Création, Cognition et Culture Informatique. Paris: La Découverte. Picon, Antoine (1992) French Architects and Engineers in the Age of Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Picon, Antoine (2000) “From Ruin to Rust,” Grey Room 1: 65–83. Picon, Antoine (2010a) “Nature et Ingénierie: Le Parc des Buttes-Chaumont,” Romantisme: Revue du Dix-Neuvième Siècle 150: 35–49. Picon, Antoine (2010b) Digital Culture in Architecture: An Introduction for the Design Professions. Basel: Birkhäuser. Weistock, Michael (2010) The Architecture of Emergence: The Evolution of Form in Nature and Civilisation. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons.

475

INDEX

Note: Bold page numbers refer to tables; italic page numbers refer to figures and page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. Aalto, Alvar 47, 290, 291, 305 abstract space, concept 261 Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA) fund 183 Abu-Lughod, Janet L. 353 academicism 89–90 Achmadi, Amanda 347 “activist oriented” approach 320 Adam, R. 357 Adams, Annmarie 361 Aerospace Hall 107 aesthetic and programmatic playfulness: bioclimatic architecture 62; “cradle-to-cradle” waste-free design 66; digital technology 53–54; Dubai 68– 69; eco-skyscrapers, notion of 62; environmental subject 55; high-tech architecture 61–62; “imagined community” of likers and dislikers 57; innovator 54–55; ludification process 56; playful behavior 55; rise of parametric design 59–60; social media platforms 56; see also playfulness affect 260–65 ageing buildings design: Bartlett Hampstead Road 461; biocolonized north-facing façade 453; biocolonized walls with mosses 454; bioreceptive panels at Pennine Stone Limited 463; cliff morphologies 457; corkcrete samples with microscopic imagery 464; cryptogamic surface cover on tree barks 456; curtain tectonic for East Putney Station 463; exhibition ‘La Fabrique du Vivant’458; final built bioreceptive MPC panels 460; horizontal surface morphologies for bioreceptive panels 459; lichen types 453; Merchiston Park house extension, Edinburgh, UK 467; porous TecCast component 465; Research Phase 1 459–62; Research Phase 2 462–64; Research Phase 3 464–65; selective

algal growth on multi-material MPC prototype 462; St Anne’s Catholic Primary School, London, UK 457, 466; transplanted moss on bioreceptive lightweight OPC component 453; variable surface morphologies for bioreceptive panels 460; water droplets on lichens and mosses 455 agricultural work 214 Airbnb 147 airborne particulate matter (PM) 454 Alberti, Leon Battista 232, 420, 421, 422, 423, 429, 432 Alexander, Christopher 158, 289, 426 algorithmic form-making 1 Alloway, Lawrence 81, 100 Almeida, Reginaldo Oliveira de 213 Alsayyad, N. 316, 320 Aluminium Francais company 94 Amager Bakke Powerplant, Copenhagen 66 Amazon 4 ambient screens 381–84 The American Hospital of the Twentieth Century (Stevens) 369 American National Exhibition, Moscow 122 “American Style” 257 AMRUT 163 Anderson, Benedict 16, 331, 343 Anderson, Stanford 230, 235, 238 Ando, Tadao 137, 159–61, 290 “animal architecture” 444 Animal Architecture and Building Behaviour (Hansell) 53 Ant Farm 105 Anthropocene Era 404 anti-modernism 90 Antonelli, Paola 401

477

Index Aoki, Jun 405, 406; Aomori Museum of Art, Aomori, Japan 393 Arantes, Pedro Fiori 214, 215, 220 Aravena, Alejandro 145, 217 Arboleda, Gabriel 316 archetypal human experiences 290 Archigram 39 Architect’s Act of 1972 165 architectural archetypes 293–94 architectural historiography 5–6, 16; art historiography 5–6; autonomy of architecture 6; existential 5; interactive 14–21 architectural phenomenology see phenomenology architectural space 7–8, 30 architectural theory 119, 227, 236, 241, 253, 283n16, 287–90, 292, 300, 309 architecture: in age of playfulness (see architectural historiography); “Architecture as a Political Weapon”114–15; attributes 6; contemporary (see contemporary architecture); contemporary art 4–5; defined 4; and globalization (see globalization); history-writing 4; and image (see image); modern (see modern architecture); nation building and politics of identity 344–47; ordering and reordering human existence 6–8; and phenomenology (see phenomenology); and preemptive spectacles (see preemptive spectacles); Pritzker Prize award 4; system of tangible elements 8 Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development (Tafuri) 39, 140 architecture’s world 90–92; architects’ use of graphic symbols 91; CIAM modernists 90–91; “Functional City” 91 Archi-Union Architects 136 Archizoom 39 Art Deco towers 114 artificial intelligence (AI) 1, 14, 147 artistic critique of society 231 Arup 14; SolarLeaf 404 Ashbee, Charles Robert 321 Ashraf, Kazi 169 Asplund, Gunnar 47 assemblage, concept of 14–21, 136, 192, 234, 420, 423 Atlantis Palm 68, 68 atmosphere: and architecture 292–93; defined 292, 293 Atmosphere (Zumthor) 46 Aureli, P. V. 143, 238 authenticity, concept of 142, 165, 228, 308, 317–19, 324, 329, 332–35, 399 autonomy: after modernism 234–36; architectural notions of 231; artistic autonomy 231–32; Bürger, Tafuri, and criticality 236–38; Kaufmann’s conception of autonomy 232–34 avant-garde movements 16, 84, 86, 88, 91, 105, 113–14, 123, 142, 145, 195, 232–37, 236–37

axonometric drawings 43 Azuma, Hiroki 161 Bachelard, Gaston 44, 288, 289 Baird, George 279 Ban, Shigeru 52 Bandmann, Gūnter 394 Banham, Reyner 81, 89, 100, 101, 102, 106, 108, 197, 233, 251, 368, 371 “bare modernity” 81 Barlow, J. 362, 408 Barragan, Luis 309 Barr, Alfred H. Jr. 89, 113 Barros, Joana 219 Barthes, Roland 128, 158 Batistini Housing Complex, Peabiru: Block Typology, 2014 218; Evolutionary Homes, rendering, 2014 217; Passageway Typology, 2014 218 Baudrillard, Jean 190 Bauen der neue Wohnbau (Taut) 88 Bauer, Catherine 113, 114 Baumgarten, Alexander 231 Bawa, Geoffrey 45 Baydar, Gulsum 253, 259, 260 Beaux-Arts buildings, Algiers 22 Bell, Clive 231 Belluardo, James 169 benevolent state, notion of 209n15 Benjamin, Walter 379 Bennett, Tony 276 Benyus, Janine 404 Bergdoll, Barry 136 Berman, Marshall 275, 308 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo 274 best practices 404 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud) 43 Bhalla, J.R. 177 Bhatia, Gautam 170 Bhatt, Vikram 169 Big TV 381–84 Bilbao Museum 57–59, 58 Binhai New Area Library, Tianjin, China 3, 67 bioclimatic architecture 62 biocolonisation: extrinsic 458; north-facing facade with scattered cryptogamic surface cover 453; primary or intrinsic 458; secondary 458; tertiary 458; walls with mosses 454 “biology influencing design” 442 biomimicry: biomimetic design for sustainability 449; CH2 building in Melbourne, Australia 444; defining biomimicry 440; Eastgate building in Harare, Zimbabwe 442; ecosystem processes 446, 447; levels and dimensions (see levels and dimensions of biomimicry); mimicking living world 439–40; motivations and approaches 441–42; pitfalls of biomimetic design approach 448–49

478

Index biomimicry-for-wellbeing 441 Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature (Benyus) 404 biophilia 441 bioreceptive panels: horizontal surface morphologies 459; at Pennine Stone Limited 463; variable surface morphologies 460 bioreceptivity 458 Bleriot, Louis 86 Bloch, Marc 242 Blount, Thomas 316 body-subject or pre-reflective corporeal engagement 291 Bohme, Gernot 45, 292 Borgmann, Albert 295 Borromini, Francesco 250, 274 Bourdieu, Pierre 8 Braque, Georges 41 Brazilian architecture: architecture and politics 222–23; Assessorias Técnicas, concept of 85, 212–13; Mutirão, history of self-building 213–15; Peabiru 216–18; Usina 219–22 BREEAM (Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method) 64 Brewster, David 276 Brown, Denise Scott 37 Brownell, Blaine 362 Bubble Economy 151 Buckley, Michelle 186 Buddhist pagodas, Asia 1 Building Information Modeling (BIM) 147 building information modelling (BIM) 1 Burckhardt, Jacob 233 Burdett, Henry 367 Burger, Peter 232, 236, 237 Burj Dubai 191 Burj Khalifa 69, 187, 192 Burnham, Daniel 22 Business Bay 187 Buzzelli, M. 408, 409 Cacciari, Massimo 234 Cadillac Ranch 105 Cameron, Ewen D. 373, 375 Canizaro, Vincent B. 227 Cant, Jonathan 405 Carpo, Mario 135 Carvalho, Caio Santo Amore de 214, 215 Casey, Edward S. 289, 291 “central building of the world” see Ducal Palace in Venice Central China Television (CCTV) complex, Beijing 14, 106, 106 Central Public Works Department (CPWD), New Delhi, 1954 174 Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris 61 Chalk, Warren 102, 105 Chang, J-H. 310, 366

Chareau, Pierre 255 Chatterjee, Malay 166, 310 Chee, Lilian 226 Chiat Day Building 107 Cho Hyunjung 156 Chomsky, Noam 235, 428, 429, 431, 432 Choral Work 130 Chytroi-Constantia Aqueduct, Byzantine Cyprus 20 CIAM IV 81 cities 469–71 City Beautiful movement 22 civilizing mission, concept of 22, 329 Clarke, Arthur C. 156 Clark, Wesley 425 cliff morphologies 457 Coates, Paul 424 Coderch, J. A. 307 Cohen, Preston Scott 471 Cold War modernism: capitalist “First World”82; conscripting modernism 113–14; domestic subjects 116–21; ERP Pavilion, West Berlin, Marshall-Haus 112; Expo 135, Montreal, Canada 123; Kulikov building 120; socialist “Second World”82; Soviet Embassy, East Berlin 111; “Third World”82; ‘unique constructions’121–23; waging culture war 114–16; “We’re Building a Better Life” model home exhibit, West Germany 117 Colomina, Beatriz 255, 256, 260 colonial city 340–44 Colquhoun, Alan 251, 307, 308 Columbia Point, Boston 84 community of discourse 247 compartmentalized world 93–94 Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (Venturi) 142 Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) 61 computer-aided design (CAD) 53 computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) software 53 computer-aided three-dimensional interactive application (CATIA) 107 computer numerical control (CNC) tools 53 concrete panel housing 120, 120 Confucian ethics 8 Congres International d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) 87, 89; complexity of positions 97n7; fourth congress 90; Team 10’s elevation 141 Connell, Amyas 93, 94; Crown Law Offices, Nairobi 93 “The Conservation Movement”228, 328, 330–31, 333–34, 337 constructional playfulness: CLT, introduction of 52; experience economy 45; Jinchokan Moriya Historical Museum, Chino, Nagano, Japan 48, 49; Kengo Kuma & Associates 49, 50; Koga Park Cafe, Ibaraki, Japan 49, 51; Mjøstårnet building, Brumunddal 52; People’s Canopy

479

Index 52, 52; Pfaffenholz Sports Centre, Saint-Louis, France 48, 48; prefab architecture 49, 52; “Red School” and “White School” 48; Saint Benedict Chapel, Sumvitg, Switzerland 46, 46, 47; Sendai Mediatheque, Sendai-shi, Japan 49, 51; tectonics, concept of 44–45; Toyo Ito and SANAA 49; see also playfulness constructions: concept of techne 9; design of dougong 9, 9, 10; elements of space framing 11; Gothic construction techniques 10; ionic columns 10, 11; labor 12; material articulation 12–13; significance of 10; tectonics 9, 10, 11; in Yingzao fashi 10 constructive: labor 12; making and construction 6; masonry and carpentry 11; materiality 13; replacing firmitatis (stability) 5; techne, defined 9; technology 9 contemporary architecture: advanced capitalist countries 43; digital technologies 43; publicprivate partnerships 44 contemporary art 4–5 “Continuous Monument” project 105 Conway, John 424 Cook, Peter 102; Plug-In City, Section, Max Pressure Area 102 Corkcrete 363, 456, 459, 464, 465, 467 corkcrete samples with microscopic imagery 464 Correa, Charles 166, 168, 175, 176, 310 Cortona, Pietro da 274 “cradle-to-cradle” waste-free design, concept of 66 crafting architecture criticism: criticism silently understood 250–51; Lyric Theater, Belfast, Ireland, 2012, Sheila O’Donnell and John Tuomey 247; Poli House, Concepcion, Chile, 2005, Pezo von Ellrichshausen 249; reconstructing what has been constructed 246–48; relocating work 248–49; setting record straight 243–46; Skirkanich Hall, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 2006 244; Wa Shan Guest House, China Academy of Art, Hangzhou, China, 2013, Wang Shu 250; worldmaking 242–43 Crinson, Mark 81, 353 “critical,” notion of 299 critical regionalism: of Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre 301–305; Atelier 66 – Archaeological Museum at Chios 303; Critical Regionalism 2.0 310–11; criticizing 307–309; development of 300–301; Dimitris Pikionis – Philopappos Hill 302; J. A. Coderch’s ISM Apartment building 308; of Kenneth Frampton 305–307; Moore Lyndon Turnbull Whitaker – Sea Ranch Condominiums 304; Renzo Piano – Menil Collection 299 “Critical Regionalism” 167 critique of false consciousness 250 critique of ideologies 250 Croce, Benedetto 86 Crompton, Dennis 102, 105

cross-laminated timber (CLT) 52 Crown Law Offices, Nairobi 81 Cruz, Marcos 363 cryptogamic surface cover on tree barks 456 Crysler, Greig 43 “cultural cold war” 114 cultural landscape 331 Curie, Marie 86 curtain tectonic for East Putney Station 463 Curtis, William J.R. 167 dabanfang, China 49 Dali, Salvador 105, 106 DALL-E 71 danchi, Japan 49 d’Annunzio, Gabriele 86 Darwin, J. 353 “day hospital” 373 The Death and Life of Great American Cities ( Jacobs) 36, 142 3D LiDAR surveys 461 3D printing 1, 53, 147 Debord, Guy 128, 270, 280 Declaration of the Rights of Man 233 “decon” 128 deconstruction, notions of 82, 129 deconstructivist architecture 127–29; Demolition of the Dance Theater, Hague 133; Derrida’s Lyre and Sieve 129–31; dissimulation at MoMA 131–33; Eisenman Architects, Wexner Center, Columbus 82, 134; global proto-parametric design 134–36; King Abdullah Petroleum Studies and Research Centre, Riyadh 138; neo-modernism and return to material logic(s) 136–38; The Peak Club, Hong Kong 132; Wexner Center: The Museum That Theory Built 133–34 Dehio, Georg 329 Deleuze, Gilles 16, 128, 130, 135, 158; superproduction 16, 130 Delirious New York (Koolhaas) 105 Derrida, Jacques 40, 41, 82, 127, 128, 130, 131, 134, 235 “design research programs” of “degenerate dogmas” 136 dialectic of tectonic 474 Diébédo Francis Kéré 64 digital architecture 14, 420–23; design game 433– 36; generative rules 428–29; object-oriented design 423; parametric network 426–28; parametric proportion 422–23; recursion and combination 420–22; visual calculation 430–33 digital condition 145 digital fabrication 14, 53 digital play 3 Disch, Rolf 64 discrete-state design: generative rules 428–29; parametric network 426–28

480

Index “dismantlement or disappearance,” techniques of 129 divergent matter: Aomori Museum of Art, Aomori, Japan 393; California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco, USA 397; Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art, Paris, France 401; debates and future implications 403–405; Elbphilharmonie, Hamburg, Germany 399; GCODE.Clay 3D-printed ceramic shingles 403; House on Michaelerplatz, Vienna 395; manipulating material code 405–406; Mies van der Rohe, Seagram Building, New York, USA 396; multilayered façade 398–401; new materials and new technologies 401–403; production and representation 396–98; structure and skin 393–96; Toyo Ito, Sendai Mediatheque, Sendai, Japan 402 DJI Sky City, Shenzhen 61, 63 DOCOMOMO-International 2018 Conference in Ljubljana 335 Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem 20 domesticity 260–65 Domostroitel’nye kombinaty (D.S.K.): “homebuilding plants” 118 Doshi, B.V. 167–69 Douglas, Mary 453 dougong, design of 9, 9, 10 Duany, Andreas 142 Dubai Airport Free Zone 187 Dubai architecture: altered facade of building along Mohammed Bin Rashid Boulevard 189; basis for building boom 183–84; CNES/Airbus Defense Space, 2012 188; Dubai Aquarium at Dubai Mall 190; Dubai Plan 2021 182; Dubai 2020 Urban Masterplan 182; government-related entities 84, 182; parking at Souk Al Bahar with Burj Khalifa in background 192; production of architecture 187–92; role of real estate 184–86; shopping for property at cityscape real estate exhibition 182 Dubai Expo 2020 69 Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) 187 Dubai Internet City 187 Dubai Mall 187 Dubai Media City 187 Dubai Opera 187 Dubai World Game Summit 69 Ducal Palace in Venice 93 Duchamp, Marcel 104 Duncan, William L. 405 Dunne, A. 145, 146, 147 Durand, Jean Nicolas Louis 420, 423, 428, 433 Durer, Albrecht 420, 422, 429, 433 Durkheim, Emile 230 Dutschke, Rudi 234 “dwellings on conveyor belts” (doma na konviere) 119 Eames, Charles 122, 256 Eames, Ray 122, 256

earthships 404 Eat, Pray, Love (Gilbert) 45 eco-skyscrapers, notion of 62 “ecosystem services analysis”447–48 Eggener, Keith L. 309 Eiffel Tower 61 E-1027, Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France 30, 30, 31, 32 Eisenman Architects: Wexner Center, Columbus, OH 134 Eisenman, Peter 36, 40, 82, 122, 127–31, 133, 134, 136, 235, 236, 238, 377; architectural deconstruction 41; Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies 40; Oppositions 40; realization of House VI 40, 41 Electric City Land: ambient screens and Big TV 381–84; Electric Tower at Pan-American Exposition, Buffalo, New York, USA 380; Galleria CenterCity, Cheonan, South Korea 387; illuminating building into sign 379–81; media infrastructure 387–89; Mediatecture 384–87; New Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria 386; from site to network 378–79; Times Square, New York, New York, USA 384; Zeilgalerie facade, Frankfurt, Germany 382 Electronics Corporation of India Ltd. (ECIL), Hyderabad 176 Eliade, Mircea 288 embryos 217 emergence, concept 472 empathy (Einfühlung) 15 empire 340–44 Enlightenment 38, 39, 82 environmental embodiment and architecture 290–91 “environmentalist movement” 328 era of “global globalism” 137 Erskine, Ralph 213 Erundina, Luiza 214 European Recovery Plan see Marshall Plan European Recovery Program (ERP) Pavilion, West Berlin 112 Evenson, Norma 168 Every Building on the Sunset Strip (Ruscha) 104 everyday world 94–96 Evolutiva (Evolutionary) 216 Exeter Library 66 exhibition ‘La Fabrique du Vivant’ 458 existential: architectural space 7–8; “care” 7; expressions of architecture 294; materiality of architecture 8; motion, weight, and substance 294; ordering and reordering human existence 6–8; “ready-to-hand” 8; replacing utilitatis (utility) 5; tangible entities and nontangible forces 8 Experience Music Project, Seattle 107 Expo 135, Montreal, Canada 122–23, 123 Expulsion: Brutality and Complexity in the World Economy (Sassen) 358 extrinsic biocolonisation 458

481

Index Fair, Alistair 367 “fairy-tale model” 133 Faso, Burkina 64 The Feminine Mystique (Friedan) 257 Ferguson, Niall 145 Ferng, Jennifer 82 Ferreira, Angela 81, 94, 95; ‘Maison Tropicale’ 95 “Festivals of India” 166 Fiedler, Konrad 231 Fielden, Bernard 330 firmitatis (stability) 5, 6 First Machine Age 101 Fischer, Ole W. 270 Fisker, Kay 47 Fletcher, Banister 341; A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method 17 “flow” of space 248 “flying saucers in the void” 133 Fontana, Carlo 274 Foster, Hal 81, 280 Foster, Norman 2, 143, 190, 355, 356 Foucault: discursive regime 130 Foucault, Michel 128, 130, 164, 365; concepts of governmentality, power/knowledge, and biopower 54; understanding of subject formation 54 Four Books on Human Proportion (Durer) 422 Fourier, Charles 143 Fox, Michael-David 355 Frampton, K. 11, 44, 142, 167, 227, 299, 300, 304, 306–10, 400 Frankfurt School tradition 38 Frascari, Marco 400 Frederick C. Robie House, Chicago, USA 25, 26 “Free World” capitalism 112 Freire, Paulo 219, 221 Friedman, Alice T. 260 Friedmann, J. 354 French colonialism 22 Freud, Sigmund: Beyond the Pleasure Principle 43 Friend, Donald 45 Fujimori, Terunobu 48 Fujimoto, Sou 137 Fukuyama, Francis 150, 161 Fuller, Richard Buckminster 102, 105, 121, 122, 123, 144 functionalism 318 “functioning decoration” 256 Fun Palace 102 Futurist movement 393 Galleria CenterCity, Cheonan, South Korea 387 Gandhi, Indira 164, 166, 173, 176 Gandhi, M.K. 173–75 Ganju, Ashish 177 Garnier, Tony 32; Une Cité Industrielle (The Industrial City) 25 Gaudi, Antoni 136

Gautier, Theophile 231 Gebeshuber, Ille C. 441 Geddes, Patrick 141, 142, 300 Gehl, Jan 289 Gehry, Frank 56, 57, 105–107, 127–29, 131, 133, 243, 355, 356, 397, 398; Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Bizkaia, Spain 2; Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles 107 gender 260–65; sexuality and modern domestic architecture 255–60 Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) algorithm 434 Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture (Norberg-Schulz) 44 generic housing type 82 Gide, Andre 86 Giedion, Siegfried 140, 233 Gilbert, Elizabeth: Eat, Pray, Love 45 Gilmore, James 45 Ginsburger, Robert 88 Gips, James 430 “give-and-take,” push-and-pull effect 375 glass fiber-reinforced concrete (GRC) panels 463 Glassie, Henry H. 315, 318 Glendinning, Miles 228 Gli elementi dell’architettura razionale (Sartoris) 88 “Global City” (1991) 354 globalization: definition of 353; global production of building form 352–53; of heritage 332–33; history 354–55; and homogenization 357; iconic buildings 355–56; and imperialism 353–54 glocal, glocalism and glocalization 355 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 15 Goldhagen, Sarah 36 Gonzalez Lobo, Carlos 217 Goodale, Melvyn 405 Goody, Joan E 202 Google 4 Gorman, Lyn 385 Gothic cathedrals, Europe 1 Gothic construction techniques 1, 8, 10–11, 15, 18, 20–21, 23, 27 Goulthrope, Mark 135 government-related entities (GREs) 84, 182 grand hotel 352 “grand narrative” 337 Graves, Michael 36, 82, 100, 133 Gray, Eileen 30–32 Great Depression 36, 114 Great Hypostyle Hall, Egypt 1 Greenberg, Clement 231, 232, 235, 237 green design, concept of 404 Greene, David 39, 102 Gregotti, Vittorio 136 Grey Lynn (USA) 53 Griffero, Tonino 292 Gropius, Walter 88, 89, 96, 101, 114, 115, 378, 393, 394, 430

482

Index gross domestic product (GDP) 185 Grosz, Elizabeth 265 Guangzhou Opera House 59 Guangzhou Tower, Guangzhou 14, 18 Guattari, Felix 16, 158; A Thousand Plateaus 16 Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Bizkaia, Spain 2, 57, 107 Gulf Cooperation Council (G.C.C.) 181 Gwathmey, Charles 36, 133 “habitat,” notion 176 Hadid, Zaha 14, 56, 59, 127–29, 131–33, 136–38, 193, 283, 355, 356; 3D printed Mew table 137; King Abdullah Petroleum Studies and Research Centre, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia 138; Messner Museum in Corones, Italy 137; Olympic Aquatic Centre, London 137; The Peak Club, Hong Kong, China 44, 132; Peak Leisure Club 132 Hagia Sophia, Istanbul, Turkey 7, 7 Hall, Edward 289 Hamilton, Richard 81, 100, 104 Han Chinese society 8 Hanieh, Adam 186 Hansell, Michael: Animal Architecture and Building Behaviour 53 Harbour Place: Hunghom Peninsula Estate 206; luxurious clubhouse of 206 Harries, Karsten 289, 293, 294 Harris, R. 408, 409 Hartoonian, Gevork 9 Harvey, David 148, 186, 270, 282 Hasegawa, Itsuko 159 Haus-Rucker-Co 39 Haussmann, Georges-Eugene 333, 339, 363, 469, 471 Hayakawa, Kunihiko 159 Hayden, Dolores 260 Hays, K.M 41, 128, 235, 238 Heatherwick, Thomas 70; UK Pavilion, Shanghai Expo, 2007–10 144 Heidegger, Martin 7, 8, 44, 142, 286, 288 “heimat,” notion of 300 Hejduk, John 36, 41, 133 Held, D. 351 Heliotrope, Freiburg, Germany 64, 65 Helsinki Central Library Oodi, Finland 66, 67 Henket, Hubert-Jan 334 Herb, Michael 183 heretics 274 heritage conservation: Beijing, Qianmen tourist zone 334; DOCOMOMO-International 2018 Conference in Ljubljana 335; Dresden, “new Altstadt” developments 336; end of “grand narrative”331–32; future for past 337; globalization of heritage 332–33; from “heritage militant” to “world heritage”329–30; Nuremberg “City Model”330; post-1989 conservation 331–32; in postmodern age 334–37

Herron, Ron 102, 105 Herzog: Elbphilharmonie, Hamburg, Germany 399 Herzog, Jacques 378, 398 Heynen, H. 254, 260 high-definition sensors 433 high-rise mass housing 84 Hilberseimer, Ludwig 88, 237 Hill, Kerry 45 historicist or retro-design 321 A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method (Fletcher) 17 Hitchcock, Henry-Russell 89, 113, 114, 234 Hjelm, S.I. 405 Hodapp, Alexandre 218 Hollein, Hans 39, 234 Holl, Stephen 44, 146, 217, 290, 291 homo ludens, concept of 2, 38, 56, 71 Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) Headquarters 61 Hope VI program see Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere program Horkheimer, Max 40 Hospital Construction and Management (Snell) 368 hospital design: access to healthcare 370–75; “Activity is Emphasized in Modern Mental Hospital”374; advertisement for Clerk windows, from Canadian Hospital 372; intervention (surgery) 368–70; Royal Victoria Hospital, Montreal 366, 369; ventilation 366–68 House-Machine, concept of 25 housing: from Columbia point to harbor point 201–204; comparison of facades of old and new Park Hill estate 200; demolition and preservation of public faith 204–207; estate’s street decks, or “streets in the sky”198; Hunghom Peninsula Estate, Harbour Place 206; and infrastructure 1; luxurious clubhouse of Harbour Place 206; original Park Hill estate and its surrounding context 198; preserved tower blocks of Columbia Point 203; remaking of Park Hill Estate 196–200; from “slums in the sky” to heritage property 196–200; towers of Columbia Point Housing Development project 203; transforming Hunghom Peninsula Estate 204–207 Housing for All programmes 163 Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere program 201 Howard, Ebenezer 469 Hubsch, Heinrich 191 Hugo, Victor 69; Notre-Dame de Paris 69 Huizinga, Johan 2; homo ludens, concept of 2; play, definition of 5, 38; significance of culture 3 Humans (Homo sapiens) 17, 69 Hume, David 15, 248 Hunghom Peninsula Estate, Hong Kong 84 Husserl, Edmund 286–88 Huxtable, Ada Louise 245, 246

483

Index Huyghe, Pierre 473 hybridity 342 IBA 14 “iconic building” 356 image: Learning from Las Vegas (1972) 103; OMA, Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren, CCTV Building, Beijing 106; Plug-In City, Section, Max Pressure Area, Cook 102; Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, Wu Hall, Princeton University 104; Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, Gehry 107 imagined communities, concept of 331 Imparato, Ivo 213 Independent Group (IG), London 81; Pop idea 82 Indian Architecture: Architecture + Design (A+D) 167; Central Public Works Department (CPWD), New Delhi, 1954 174; CIET, New Delhi 167; contemporary architecture 83; Delhi’s Akshardham Temple complex 173; economic liberalisation policies 171; facade details for Devi Art Foundation, Gurgaon 172; Festival strategy 166; international architectural discourse 83; ISKCON Shri Radha KrishnaChandra Temple in Bengaluru 173; launch announcement for Smart Cities Mission, AMRUT and Housing for All programmes, PMO 163; machine-based design 172; Mela exhibition 166; Modi (Prime Minister), SBUT project 164; nation-building project 83–84; Nehru (Prime Minister) with architect Achyut Kanvinde 164; professional agency and architectural discourse in 83; project of Greha 171; “Satellier,” a Delhi-based BPO firm 172; Township for ECIL, Hyderabad 176; “Village Centre” at International Exhibition on low-cost housing 174 “Indianness,” notion of 166 Industrial Revolution 12, 21–22 infrastructural support, need of 470 Ingersoll, Richard 307 innovations 2, 361–64 In Praise of Shadows (Tanizaki) 44 institutions and environment 340–44 intellectual playfulness: anxious modernisms 36; architectural modernism 32–33, 36; aspirations of political regimes 33; in Brasilia 33–34, 34; concept of criticality in architecture 41; consumer capitalism 38; discourse of developmentalism 33; modernist architecture 33; postmodern architecture and mass culture 38; postmodernist and avant-garde architecture 37; San Cataldo Cemetery, Modena, Italy 39, 40; Socialist Realism 35; socialist societies 35, 35; use of historical elements 37, 37; virtual reality lab 40; Wall House 2 41, 42; see also playfulness intentionality, concept of 287

International Union of Architects (UIA) conference 35 interactive: aesthetic character vs. style 14–21; assemblage vs. movement 14–21; replacing venustatis (beauty) 5 Inter-American Housing Center in Bogota, Colombia 123 Interbau 118 Internal courtyard view of the Central Institute of Educational Technology (CIET), New Delhi 167 1957 International Building Exposition, West Berlin’s 118 Internationale Architektur (Gropius) 88, 96 Internationale neue Baukunst (Hilberseimer) 88 “international modern” style 115 International Program of Circulating Exhibitions (I.C.E.) 115 International Style 87 International Trade Fair (I.T.F.) 123 interrogations 4, 225–29 intrinsic biocolonisation 458 “Iron Curtain” 118 Islamic architecture 20 Isozaki, Arata 83, 156–59, 161; Oita Prefectural Library 156 Ito, Toyo 49, 137, 159, 160–61, 381, 382, 401, 402; Sendai Mediatheque 49; Silver Hut 160 Iwashita, S. 412 Izenour, Steven 37, 318 Jacobs, Jane M. 142, 245, 289; The Death and Life of Great American Cities 36 Jameson, Frederic 270, 279, 308 Janson, Alban 292 Jayakar, Pupul 166 Jebel Ali Free Zone 187 Jencks, Charles A. 36, 278, 279 Jhabvala, Cyrus 175 Jiakun Architects 67 Jinchokan Moriya Historical Museum, Chino, Nagano, Japan 48, 49 Johnson, Philip 82, 89, 113, 114, 128–31, 234, 255 Jokilehto, Jukka 331 Jonge, Wessel de 334 Jordy, William 242, 251 Joyce, James 86 junkspace 141 Kabyle house, Algeria 8 Kahan, Fannie Hoffer 374 Kahn, Louis I. 10, 171, 251, 290, 392, 397 Kaminer, Tahl 225 Kant, Immanuel 230, 231, 233 Kanvinde, Achyut 175 Kaufmann, Emil 232–35 Kawazoe, Noboru 151, 152, 156, 159 Kellner, Douglas 298

484

Index Kelly, Kevin 294, 295 Kengo Kuma & Associates 49, 50 Kennedy, Alicia 128 Kennedy, Sheila 399, 404 Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan 191 Khôra 130–31 Khosla, Romi 170 Khrushchev, Nikita 82, 117–19, 121 Khrushchyovka, Russia 49 Kieran, Stephen 401 Kikutake, Kiyonori 152–57; tower-shaped community 155 Kinetic Light Sculpture 382 King, Anthony D. 228, 346 King, Leland W. 115 Kirkham, Pat 256 Kittler, Friedrich 377, 388 Klingmann, Anna 45 Kogan, Marcio 85 Komatsu, Sakyo 150 Kon Wajiro: at Kinokuniya Shinjyuku 263 Koolhaas, Rem 105, 106, 127, 129, 133, 137, 141, 146, 147, 158, 236, 250, 333, 335, 355, 356; Demolition of Dance Theater, 1987, The Hague, Netherlands 133, 133; “junkspace”141; Seattle Library and CCTV tower 137 Koo, R. 411 Krier, Leon 129, 142, 158 Kroll, Lucien 213 Kulikov building 120 Kuma, Kengo 137, 406 Kundoo, Anupama 64 Kunstwollen, “artistic will,” concept of 238n4 Kuroishi, Izumi 263 Kurokawa, Kisho 143, 152, 155–57; agricultural city 155 Kuzmin, Ivan 24–25 Labatut, Jean 288, 289, 400 Lao Tzu 6; concept of void 25; Tao Teh King (Daodejing) 6 Lapidus, Morris 104 Large Boxer Shorts see Central China Television (CCTV) complex, Beijing Large Panel System (LPS), UK 49, 52 Laszlo, Paul 255 Lari Octa Green shelter, Makli, Pakistan 64 Lawrence, Roderick J. 320 Leach, Neil 135, 136 Learning from Las Vegas (Venturi and Brown) 100, 103, 104 Leatherbarrow, David 225, 226, 289, 396, 397 Le Corbusier 1, 86, 87, 89–91, 90, 91, 101, 105, 119, 141, 153, 164, 170, 174, 176, 197, 232, 233, 242, 244, 245, 248, 250, 251, 318, 362, 392, 394, 469; architectural promenade concept 32; “A house is a machine for living in” 2, 32; “false modern architecture”89; “la bataille ‘pour le moderne’”86–87;

Palace of the League of Nations 86, 86, 89; plan for Algiers 25; Towards a New Architecture 1, 41; Ville Radieuse (The Radiant City) 25 LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) 64 Lefaivre, Liane 227, 299–302, 304, 305, 307, 309, 310 Lefebvre, Henri 261 Legault, Rejean 36 Leijonhufvud, A. 409 Lemaire, Raymond 330 Lethaby, Richard 321 levels and dimensions of biomimicry: behaviour level 444–45; ecosystem level 445–48; organism level 443 Lever House, Manhattan’s 114, 115 Levi-Strauss, Claude 158 Libeskind, Daniel 127, 131, 331 lichen types 453 Lissitzky, El. 88, 129 Liyuan Library, Beijing 66 Lizon, Peter 35 Lodoli, Carlo 394 Loos, Adolf 25; House on Michaelerplatz, Vienna 395 Lucio Costa 33 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: “maximum effect with minimum means,” principle of 2 Luzhkov, Yuri 336 Lyautey, Hubert 86 Lynch, Kevin 289 Lynn, Greg 135 Lyon School of Architecture 32 Lyotard, Jean-Francois 234 Macarthur, John 290 machine learning 14 MAD 14 Madox Ford, Ford 86 Maekawa, Kunio: with Otaka, Apartment House in Harumi 154 Magnesium Phosphate Concrete (MPC) 456, 458, 459, 461, 462 Maison Tropicale 81, 94–95 Maki, Fumihiko 137, 152, 401 The Malay Archipelago 343 Malevich, Kazmir 129 Malpas, Jeff 289 Mannerist to Baroque architecture 226, 271 Mannheim, Karl 147 Marcuse, Herbert 39; One-Dimensional Man 39 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 393 Marshall Plan 111, 116–17 Martin, R. 142, 270 Marville, Charles 471–72 Marx, Karl 161, 230, 275 mass customised housebuilding: choice 413; customer interface 414–15; future evolution of

485

Index suppliers 415–16; influences on housebuilders’ business strategies 409; innovation across production system 412–13; Japanese new homes market 410; key influences on housebuilding in Japan 409–11; origins in Japan 411–12; supporting production system 413–15 mass housing: schemes 83; in Second World 117 materials, phenomenon of 458 material suitability, concept of 392 Matsson, Bruno 47 Mathews, Freya 448 “maximum effect with minimum means,” principle of 2 MAXXI Museum 59, 60 May, Ernst 237 McCann, Rachel 289 McCullough, Malcolm 387 McLean, David 385 McLeod, Mary 128 McLuhan, Marshall 379 Media Burn 105 media facades 381, 384 Mediatecture 384–87 Meier, Richard 36, 133 Melinkov, Konstantin 129 Mendelsohn, Erich 237, 380 Merchiston Park house extension, Edinburgh, UK 467 Meredith, Michael 280 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 44, 286–88, 290, 291 metabolism 39; agricultural city 155; Apartment House in Harumi 154; architects’ unknown history 152–55; architecture for “endless everyday”159–61; “Architecture in the Age of the Cold War”156; exhibition pavilion in Hiroshima 154; Expo ‘138: resistant to postmodernism 157–59; House in Uehara 159; in Japan’s recovery from war 151–52; 1960s Launching, the End and the New Beginning 156–57; megastructures 83; National Athletic Hall for 1964 Olympic Games, Tokyo 157; Oita Prefectural Library 156; Silver Hut 160; towershaped community 155 Meuron: Elbphilharmonie, Hamburg, Germany 399 Meuron, Pierre de 378, 379, 398 Miagusko, Edson 219 MidJourney 71 Miesian tower, Seattle 106 Mies van der Rohe: “Less is more” 32 mikrorayon (“micro-district”) 119 misuse of historical material 249 Mitchell, Kevin 84 modern architecture 86–90; architecture’s world 90–92; compartmentalized world 93–94; Crown Law Offices, Nairobi, Connell 93; definition of 86–88; development of 16; everyday world 94– 96; exemplification of 88; historicizing in 21–69;

intellectual playfulness, 1945–1991 32–43; in Lingnan region 32, 33; ‘Maison Tropicale,’ Ferreira 95; ‘Men Living in One Unit of Area,’ Neurath 92; Palace of the League of Nations, Le Corbusier 86; panorama of 88; in shadow of functionalism, 1851–1945 21–32; spatial 21–32; transplantation or “export” 81 modernism: Cold War (see Cold War modernism); industrial capitalism 1–2; “International Style” modernism 82, 89, 113–14; origin 1; orthodox international modernism 167; Western modernism, adoption of 117–18 modernist architecture 113, 232, 234 modernity: bare modernity 81; capitalist/socialist 82; colonial 94, 344; demotic 96; Enlightenment 337; European 143; hybrid forms of 342; intrinsic 328; “laboratory of modernity” 96 Modern Movement 195, 199, 318, 321, 330, 334, 380 modern skyscrapers 1 Modi, Narendra 164, 173 Mody, Piloo 175, 177 Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl 318 monarchy, concept of 275 Mongol Empire, establishment of 17 mongrel materials 392 Moore, C. 82, 100, 142, 288–89 More, Thomas 140 Morris, William 143, 329 Morsch, Georg 337 Morton, Patricia, A. 342 Moskowitz, Sanford 401 Mostafavi, Mohsen 396, 398 movement, concept of 16 Mozuna, Kiko 159 Mugerauer, Robert 289 Muller, Peter 45 Mumford, Lewis 113, 114, 142, 227, 245, 300, 301, 304, 305, 309 Murcutt, Glenn 291 Murphy, D. 148 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA): “Built in USA: Post-war Architecture”114, 115; “The contemporary style”89; deconstructivist architecture 82, 128; dissimulation at 131–33; “Early Modern Architecture, Chicago 1870– 1910” 114; 1932 exhibition 89; “International Style” modernism 82, 89, 113–14; “Modern Architecture: International Exhibition” 88 mutirão or cooperative self-built housing, concept of 212, 219 MVRDV 67 Naginski, Erika 471 Napoleonic Wars 16 1994 Nara Declaration 332 National Athletic Hall for the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo 157

486

Index nationalism, rise of 22 natural attitude 288 The Natural House (Wright) 25 natural symbols 293–94 nature and infrastructur e 471–75 Navaro-Yashin, Yael 262 Negrelos, Eulalia Portela 214 Negroponte, Nicholas 145 Nehru, Jawaharlal 164, 166, 174, 175 Nelson, George 122 neo-vernacular housing 142 Netherlands Dance Theater (1987) 56 Neues Bauen in der Welt (El Lissitzky, Neutra, and Ginsburger) 88 Neues Bauen, or Nieuwe Bouwen 87 Neurath, Otto: ‘Men Living in One Unit of Area’81, 91–92, 92 Neutra, Richard 88, 106, 255 The New Architecture (Roth) 88 New Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria 386 New Babylon project 38, 38 New Deal vision 114 Newman, Oscar 289 News from Nowhere (Morris) 143 New Urbanist communities 142 New York Central Railroad 470 New York High Line 469–73 Nieuwenhuys, Constant 38, 38 Nikita Khrushchev 35 Non-Aligned Movement 344 Norberg-Schulz, Christian 289, 294; Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture 44 Northern Song dynasty (960–1127) 10 Notre-Dame de Paris (Hugo) 69 Nouvel, Jean 355, 400; Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art, Paris, France 401 novostroiki (“new buildings”) 119 Nuremberg “City Model” 330 Nye, David 379 Object-Oriented Design 432 occupy movement 145 O’Donnell, Sheila 246 Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) 14, 106, 109n16, 127 official “sanitary norm” 118 Oldenburg, Claes 107 Oliveira, Francisco de 214, 219 Oliver, Paul 318, 319 Olmstead, Frederick 127, 364 Olmsted, Frederick Law 469 Olsen, Ken 425 One-Dimensional Man (Marcuse) 39 Opera Village, Laongo 64–65, 66 Ordinary Portland Concrete (OPC) 458 orthodox international modernism 167 Oscar Niemeyer 33 “ostranenie,” concept of 302

Otero-Pailos, Jorge 288–90 Otlet, Paul 86 Otto, Frei 136 ou-topia 141 Owen, Robert 143 Ozaki, R. 362, 408 pagodas, China 12 Painter’s Manual (Durer) 422 Palladio, Andrea 9–10, 158, 420, 422, 428, 432 Pallasmaa, Juhani 45, 289, 290, 291, 293 Panelák, Czechoslovakia 49 panelház, Hungary 49 paper architecture 43 “parallel utopias” 142 Park Hill, Sheffield 84 Patchell, J. 408, 409, 412, 415 path dependency, notions of 362, 408 patient-centered care 368 Paulo Freire complex 221 pavilion plan 366 Pavillion system 233 Pawlyn, Micheal 440 Peabiru 216–18 Pedersen Zari, Maibritt 363, 445 Penick, Monica 257 Penner, Barbara 253, 254, 266 Percassi, Jade 219 perception management 270 Perez-Gomez, Alberto 289, 293 Perriand, Charlotte 101 Peteri, Gyorgy 118 Peterson, E. 355 Pevsner, Nikolaus 101, 233, 328 Pezo, Maurizio 248 phenomenology: architecture, architectural phenomenology, and virtual worlds 294–95; atmosphere and architecture 292–93; development of architectural phenomenology 288–90; environmental embodiment and architecture 290–91; environmental embodiment, body-subject, and place 291–92; natural symbols, and architectural archetypes 293–94; nature of phenomenology 287–88 Piano, Renzo 61, 105, 305, 307, 321, 382, 397, 398; California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco, USA 397; Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Center, Noumea, New Caledonia 61 Pichler, Walter 39 Picon, A. 141, 144, 145, 147, 363, 364 Pieris, Anoma 228, 262, 263 Pieterse, J.N. 351 Pikionis, Dimitris 301, 302 Pine, Joseph 45 Piotrowski, Andrzej 226 place, concept of 227, 291 plattenbau, Germany 49 Platter- Zyberk, Elizabeth 142

487

Index play, definition of 5 playfulness: aesthetic and programmatic (see aesthetic and programmatic playfulness); aesthetic characters vs. styles 14–15; assemblages vs. movements 16–17; constructional (see constructional playfulness; constructions); in contemporary architecture (see contemporary architecture); education and politics 3; entanglements vs. roots 17–21; global architectural historiography 5–6; historicizing in modern architecture 21–69; “histories of the immediate present” 5; intellectual (see intellectual playfulness); in modern architecture (see modern architecture); ordering and reordering human existence 6–8; social relationships 8; spatial 21–32 Plug-In City, Section, Max Pressure Area, Cook 102 Poerschke, Ute 394, 400 poikilohydric growth: living walls 454–56; St Anne’s Catholic Primary School, London, UK 457; water droplets on lichens and mosses 455 Pop art 108n9 Pope, Alexander 242 porous TecCast component 456, 465 Porphyrios, Demetri 9 Posokhin, Mikhail V. 122 Postcolonial Studies 340 post-digital 136 post-formal 136 postfunctionalism 40 postmodern theories 282n2 postmodern utopianism: restorative utopias 83, 141–43; UK Pavilion, Shanghai Expo 144; utopias of disruption 83, 145–47; utopias of high-tech globalization 83, 143–45 practices 4, 81–85; professional practices 81 Pratt, Mary Louise 342 preemptive spectacles: Baroque 274–75; collage of graphics promoting parametric design 280; crystal palace and Great Exhibition 277; kaleidoscopic parametricism 278–82; Mannerism 271–74; Mr. D. L. Einstein’s Dining Room, published in Artistic Houses, 1883 278; Palazzo del Te in Mantua, Italy 272; proposal for Expo 2010 in Shanghai 281; representational practices in Victorian Era 275–78; St. Johns Church in Vilnius, Lithuania 275; town hall in Chełmno, Poland 273 Price, Cedric 66 primary biocolonisation 458 Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) 163 Prior, Lindsay 365 privacy and nuclear family, notions of 8 privacy and rights to space, notions of 257 production of buildings 317 programmable architect: Alberti’s rule 422; classical discrete-state computation 426; discretizing and modifying visual information 423; drawing

buddies 434; emergent shapes and dataset 432; Euler’s drawing of the Seven Konigsberg Bridges 427; fake floor plan 435; first digital: bits and rules 420–23; interpretation of J.N.L. Durand’s catalog of objects 424; Konigsberg city 427; Lindenmayer recursive branching 430; map of Rome by Xavier Proulx 421; Palladio’s rule 422; recursive growth 429; second digital: discrete-state design 423–26; shape rule and rule computation 431; syntactic rules 429; third digital: seeing and mimicking 430–36; Turing machine iteration 425; types of graph representation for shape 428; visual calculation a la Wittgenstein 431 Prost, Henri: plans for Morocco and Turkey 25 Prouve, Jean 81, 94 public housing 201 public space in Dubai 189 Pugin, A. W. N. 10, 329, 394 Qianmen tourist zone, Beijing 334 Raby, F. 145, 146, 147 racetrack plan 371 Rado, Ladislav 115 Rael and San Fratello: clay 3D-printed ceramic shingles 403; GCODE 403 Rajchman, John 279 Raj Rewal Associates 167 Rapoport, Amos 318 Raumplan (spatial plan) method 25 Raymond, Antonin 115, 153 Reader’s Digest Building 115 Reagan, Ronald 104 Real Estate Regulatory Authority (RERA) 187 regenerative design 439 Reliance Controls, Swindon 61 Relph, Edward 289 rentier state theory (R.S.T.) 184 restoration of utopian thinking 146 restorative utopias 83, 141–43 “return” of nature, notion of 471 Rewal, Raj 166, 310 Richards, Thomas 275, 277 Ricoeur, Paul 147, 306, 308 Riegl, Alois 233, 329, 331, 337 Rietveld, Gerrit 25 Rietveld Schroder House, Utrecht 25, 27 Riley, Terence 400 Risse, Guenter B. 365 Robertson, R. 351, 355, 357 robotics 1, 441 Rodchenko, Aleksandr 129, 131 Rodgers, Richard 61, 382 Rodrigues, Fernando Nigro 215 Rogers, Ernesto Nathan 288 Rogers, Richard 105, 355 Rokkaku, Kijo 159

488

Index Romano, Giulio 271, 272 “Romantic Movement” 329 “romantic neoclassicism” 238n3 Rorty, Richard 281 Rosler, Martha 258 Rossi, Aldo 39, 142, 158, 234, 235, 238, 248; The Architecture of the City 39–40 Ross Memorial Pavilion, Royal Victoria Hospital, Montreal 369 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 233 Rowe, Colin 36, 234, 400 Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) 167–68 Royal Victoria Hospital, Montreal 366 Rudofsky, Bernard 315, 316, 318 Rudolph, Paul 255, 354 Ruff, Thomas 378 Ruskin, John 12, 94, 228, 233, 279, 329, 394 Russian constructivists 24, 24 Russian Revolution of 1917 24 Ruster, Jeff 213 Saffo, Paul 145 Said, Edward 279, 341, 342 Saifee Burhani Upliftment Trust (SBUT) project 164 Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich 61 Saint-Simon, Henri de 145 Sakamoto, Kazunari 159, 161 SANAA 49 San Cataldo Cemetery, Modena, Italy 39, 40 Sandler, Daniela 85 Sartoris, Alberto 88 Sasaki, M. 411 “savage machine”158, 162n7 “scandal of Modena and Mantua” 282n7 scenographic object 11 Scharoun, Hans 237 Schklovsky, Victor 302, 304 Schlich, Thomas 370 Schumacher, Patrik 135, 136, 147, 281 Schwarzer, Mitchell 361 Scott Brown, Denise 82, 100, 318, 381 Scott, Walter 329 Scriver, Peter 83, 84, 169 Seamon, David 226, 227 The Sea Ranch 142 seashore library, Qinhuangdao 66 secondary biocolonisation 458 Second Machine (or First Pop) Age 100, 101 The Second Sex (Beauvoir) 257 Secretariat building New Delhi, India 345 Semper, Gottfried 11, 394 sensory and haptic media 1 Set Grammar 433 Shaftesbury, Lord 231 The Shallows (Carr) 388 Shape Grammar 431

Sharma, Ram 166 Shiber, Saba George 181, 185, 187 shifting geometry of power 347–49 Shinohara, Kazuo 83, 157–60; House in Uehara 159 signature building style 111 significance, notion of 310 Singapore public housing interior 264 Singapore’s Indian cultural heritage precinct along Serangoon Road 341 Siza, Alvaro 217, 307 Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) 114 skyscrapers, Chicago, USA 22–23, 23 “The Slender Waist of a Dancing Beauty” see Canton Tower, Guangzhou “slum in the sky” 199 Smart Cities Mission 163 smart cities of the East 143 smart systems integration 1 Smith, Adam 230 Smithson, Alison 81, 100, 101, 141, 142, 197 Smithson, Peter 81, 100, 101, 141, 142, 197 Smith, Terry: contemporary art, defined 5 Smith, Tony 8 Snell, Henry Saxon 368 social Darwinism 22 social distinctions 4 socialism of “People’s Democracies” 112 “socialist competition” campaigns 116, 117 “socialist movement” 328 Socialist Realism 111 “sociocultural value system” see “American Style” socio-petal planning 374 Sommers, Robert 289 Somol, Robert E. 134, 236, 279 Sorkin, Michael 251 Soviet Embassy, East Berlin 111 space framing, elements of 11 Space, Time, and Architecture (Giedion) 101 spatial playfulness (1851–1945): anti-colonial resistance 22; Beaux-Arts buildings, Algiers 22; cathedrals of work 23; concept of House-Machine 25; decorations 24; eclectic architectural forms 22; economic austerity and political instability 25; economies of European nations 24; European colonial expansion 22; functionalist perspectives on human existence 25; interior of E-1027, Roquebrune-CapMartin, France 30, 30, 31, 32; interior of Frederick C. Robie House, Chicago, USA 25, 26; Lyon School of Architecture 32; mass production of weapons 21–22; model of Tatlin’s Tower at Centre Pompidou, Paris, France 27–28, 28; new spatial typology 23; reshaping architecture and urban environments 22–23; Rietveld Schroder House, Utrecht 25, 27; rise of nationalism 22; Russian constructivists 24, 24; in shadow of functionalism 32; skyscrapers,

489

Index Chicago, USA 22–23, 23; Villa Moller, Vienna 25; Villa Muller, Prague 25, 26; Villa Savoye, Poissy, France 28, 29; see also playfulness spectacle in architecture 282n3 Spectacolor 383 Spuybroek, Lars 135 Sri Lanka Parliament 346 Srinivas, S. 141 Srivastava, Amit 83, 84 St Anne’s Catholic Primary School, London, UK 466 Stanek, Łukasz: Architecture in Global Socialism 36 “star architect” or “starchitect”229, 355 State Diffusion 71 21st-century architecture 4 Stead, Naomi 290 Stein, Clarence 113 Sterling, Bruce 405 Stern, Robert 82, 100, 142 Stevens, Quentin: playfulness, definition of 5 Stiny, George 430, 433 Stirling, James 89, 101 St. Lorenz Church 20 St Mary Axe, London 61, 62 stonemasonry 12 Stravinsky, Igor 86 “the style of many hands” 135 Suharto 321, 347 Sullivan, Louis: “Form follows function” 32 super-modernism 137 Superstudio 39, 105 supported nature, notion of 473 Surface Architecture (Leatherbarrow and Mostafavi) 396 surgical suite in the interwar hospital 369 sustainable design 168 Sydney Opera House 57, 57, 59 Tafuri, Manfredo 140–43, 234, 237; Architecture and Utopia 39 Tange, Kenzo 151–53, 156–59, 161; exhibition pavilion in Hiroshima 154; National Athletic Hall for the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo 157 Tanizaki, Junichiro: In Praise of Shadows 44 Tao Teh King (Lao Tzu) 6 Tarikhaneh Temple, pre-Islamic Persia 20 Tatlin’s Tower at Centre Pompidou, Paris, France 27–28, 28 Taut, Bruno 87, 88, 144, 318, 393 Taylor Buck, Nick 440, 449 Taylor, David 356 Taylorism 116 Team 10 141 TecCast 456, 462, 464–65 Techne 9 “techno-cosmopolitanism” 353 technological object 11

technology 14, 89, 90, 95, 96, 102, 105, 123, 157, 221 tectonics: construction 9, 10, 11; environmental dimension 12; existential dimension 12; pragmatic dimension 12; transmissive dimension 12 tertiary biocolonisation 458 Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (Banham) 100, 101 Thiis-Evensen, Thomas 227, 289, 293, 294 thinking machine 434 Third Mind Foundation 147 Third World 33, 123n1, 168; Cold War modernism 82; competition and architecture 82, 311n1 “third world modernism” 310 “This is Tomorrow” exhibition, London 101 Thompson, D’Arcy 426, 429 A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari) 16 Tigges, Florian 292 Till, Jeremy 208 Times Square, New York, New York, USA 384 Tjibaou, Jean-Marie 321 Tomkins, Silvan 262 topoanalysis 288 Towards a New Architecture (Le Corbusier) 1 Township for Electronics Corporation of India Ltd. (ECIL), Hyderabad 176 Toyo Ito: Sendai Mediatheque, Sendai, Japan 402 “The Tree of Architecture” 18, 19 Tronti, Mario 230, 234, 235, 238 Trump, Donald 145, 300 Tschumi, Bernard 127–31, 136, 137, 146 Tsien, Billie 243, 247 Tuan, Yi-Fu 289 Tuomey, John 246 Turraine, A. 355 Tyrwhitt, Jacqueline 174 Tzonis, Alexander 227, 299–302, 304, 307, 309, 310 Tzu, Lao 6 Uber 147 Ukeles, Mierle Laderman 258 UK Pavilion 143–44, 144 undulating curtain, concept of 463 UNESCO Convention 332 Ungers, Oswald Mathias 142, 143, 234 United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.) 181 Upton, Dell 208, 320 “urbanization of favelas” 216 urban renewal in 1950s–1970s 141 U.S. Foreign Building Office (F.B.O.) 115 Usina 219–21; Paulo Freire Housing Complex, Sao Paulo, 1999–2010 222; Uniao da Juta Housing Complex, Sao Paulo, 1992–98 221 U.S. Information Agency (U.S.I.A.) 121–22 utilitatis (utility) 5, 6

490

Index utopianism 83 “the utopianism, the zeal for social reform” 233 utopias of disruption 83, 145–47 utopias of high-tech globalization 83, 143–45 Utzon, John 57, 60 Valery, Paul 86 value-added tax (V.A.T.) 184 Van Bruggen, Coosje 107 Van der Rohe, Ludwig Mies 2, 89, 114, 115, 129, 255, 395, 400; Seagram Building, New York, USA 396 Van Eyck, Aldo 142 Vastushastra (ancient building treatises) 170 Vellinga, Marcel 227 Venturi, Robert 36, 37, 82, 100–104, 106, 142, 236, 318, 378, 379, 381, 395, 396 Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, Wu Hall, Princeton University 104 venustatis (beauty) 5, 6 Verdery, Katherine 112 “verging space” 246 Verheyen, Egon 271 vernacular architecture: abandoned and ruined vernacular architecture, Akcicek, Northern Cyprus 324; approaches 319–20; appropriations 321–23; definitions 315, 316–17, 319, 325–26; futures 325–26; historicist design, Stroud, Cotswolds, UK 323; histories 317–19; JeanMarie Tjibaou Cultural Centre, by Renzo Piano, Noumea, New Caledonia 322; realities 323–25; Riparian settlement, Kampuchea, Cambodia 314; Suburban house, Toowoomba, Australia 314 Vesely, Dalibor 289 The Vessel, Hudson Yards, New York 70, 70–71 Vidler, Anthony 5, 142 Vienna Method or isotype 91 “Village Centre” at International Exhibition on Low-Cost Housing 174 Villa Moller, Vienna 25 Villa Muller, Prague 25, 26 Villa Savoye, Poissy, France 28, 29 Vincent, Julian F. 440 Viollet-le-Duc, Eugene-Emmanuel 329, 335, 394 Vischer, Robert 15 visual effectuation 226, 271 Vitra Fire Station 59 Vitruvian Triad 5; constructive replacing firmitatis (stability) 5; existential replacing utilitatis (utility) 5; interactive replacing venustatis (beauty) 5 Vogel, Steven 440 Voll Arkitekter (Norway) 52 volumetric water sensors (VWS) 461 Von Ellrichshausen, Sophia 248 Von Neumann, John 419, 420, 426

Vo Trong Nghia 64 “vulgar pluralism” 136 waging culture war 114–16 Wagner, Martin 237 Wajiro, Kon 263 Walker, Lynne 261, 265 Wall House 2 41, 42 Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, Gehry 59, 107 Wasylenki, Donald 375 Webb, Michael 102 Webb, Philip 321 Weber, Max 230 Weinfeld, Isay 85 welfare, notion of 206 Wells, H. G. 86 Welter, V. 141 “We’re Building a Better Life” model home exhibit, West Germany 116–17, 117 Western modernism, adoption of 117–18 WeWork 147 Wexner Center, Columbus 134; Eisenman Architects 82, 134; The Museum That Theory Built 133–34 Whiting, Sarah 236, 279 Whyte, William 289 Wigley, Mark 41, 82, 128, 130–32 Williams, Sarah 90, 405 Williams, Tod 243 Wilson, Japhy 261 Wolff, G. 354 Wölfflin, Heinrich 31, 233 Workerist movement 234 World Design Conference, Tokyo 150 World Expo tradition 143 World Heritage Convention 332 World War I 24 Worringer, Wilhelm 21 Wright, Frank Lloyd 143; The Natural House 25 Wright, Gwendolyn 254, 260 Wright, Henry 113 Wylie, Christopher 282 Yatsuka, Hajime 83 Yeang, Ken 62 Yuan, Philip 136 Zarecor, Kimberly Elman 119 Zeilgalerie facade, Frankfurt, Germany 382 Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town 66 Žižek, Slavoj 42 Zumthor, Peter 13, 46–48, 290, 291, 293; Atmosphere 46 Zwei Welten bauen in Berlin 111

491