A (belated) guide to the Autopoiesis of Architecture

About a year ago Patrik Schumacher's 'Autopoiesis of Architecture' was released. I read it and reviewed it for Icon here. What I also started doing was writing a detailed review, with the rationale that a work so ambitious needed at least to be given a proper look. The problem is, however, that I never managed to finish the bloody thing, being a) just a mere mortal, not a Herculean near-god like Patrik, and b) really bloody busy. That said, I've been getting a bit cagey about the general criticism that Schumacher gets from people who haven't read the book - I mean, they may well be right about it, but at the same time it's not a firm foundation for criticism. With this in mind, I went and had a look at the thing I had started writing, and realised that I had basically stopped after the exposition, which was more or less complete.

So I've decided to post up what I had completed by the 9th February 2011. It should hopefully function as a fairly neutral guide to what is contained in Schumacher's book, so may be of some help to someone who just has not the time to go through the bloody thing. Hope you find it useful.

Patrik Schumacher has written a book. Or two books. Well, sort of. He has written one book, which is so long that it has needed to be split into two volumes. Thus everything that I will write here is based upon the first half of the project. Whether or not this invalidates what I am writing is I suppose up to you to decide. I will refer to his book as if it were a complete work - I have no idea when the second volume will be released, so perhaps there will be occasion to read and write about that one when the time comes.

The book is titled 'The Autopoiesis of Architecture'. Autopoiesis is a neologism from the Greek, which means 'self-making' (it can also mean something else too, which I'll get to eventually). Schumacher has gotten the term from German sociologist/philosopher/theorist Niklas Luhmann, who in turn got it from biology. It's worth noting here that Schumacher reckons his work (henceforth AoA) is an application of the work of Luhmann to Architecture. If, like me, you've not had occasion to read Luhmann's work, then this puts you at an immediate disadvantage. I would go further and suggest that if somebody like me hasn't read Luhmann then very few architects at all will have done so. As a bit of background research I did ask about Luhmann in the company of a mathematician/theorist/political activist/nocturnal flying mammal, and the response was something like "OH! He's that crazy right-wing German systems theorist!" And sure enough, a cursory glance at the wikipedia page for Luhmann and it would seem that he was a social-ontologist, with a theory of emergent complexity, and was what you might call a 'relationist', in that his ontology seems to be structured more around the connections and less about the objects that make them up (OOO fans take note). In fact, his theories apparently have no room for subjects at all, and if wikipedia is to be believed, they have been criticised for being rather right-wing. The other thing that's worth noting is the gargantuan size of his theoretical edifice, which apparently is of a scale and scope that rivals Marx.

But, to go back for a second, who is Patrik Schumacher? He is partner at Zaha Hadid Architects, and is commonly thought of as Zaha's right hand man, and less charitably as the brains of Zaha's operation. Many of their designs of the last decade or more have been credited as 'Zaha Hadid with Patrik Schumacher', so you get the idea of his stature in the firm. He is also credited with being the main driving force behind the digitizing of Zaha's design process, which progressed from paintings to floppy shapes rather quickly from the late 90s onward, leading to much talk about pre-computer and post-computer Zaha buildings (Maxxi and the Evelyn Grace Academy are pre-computer, Guangzhou Opera House and the Aquatics Centre are post-computer, for example). As well as being at the top of the pile of the top of the league of 'starchitects', he has also been running the Design Research Lab at the Architects Association, which is, depending on your viewpoint, either one of the top post-grad programmes in all of architecture, or a fee-paying internship for those who want to work at ZHA. Schumacher seems to get a lot of flak from a number of directions, from old-school modernists, to environmentalists, to anti-theorists, to those who simply find his megalomaniacal pronouncements in public forums a little too much to take. I too have heavily criticised ZHA in my time, sometimes with more spite and venom than at others. I do not intend to be mean here - I will endeavour to be as reasonable as I can. I am approaching this as someone who has trained as an architect, has plenty of experience of digital architecture and its technologies, and some knowledge of the workings of parametric software. I am also reasonably well versed in continental philosophy and the history of modern theoretically influenced architecture. I am (overall) positive about the prospects of digital design in architecture, and also take theory to be more than fashionable nonsense. I would like to think that I am an ideal reader of this book.

  

So what the hell is AoA all about then? It is an attempt to provide a 'Grand Theory' of Architecture, and Schumacher's strategy is to utilise Luhmann's theory of society to explain architecture. Before we've even really started, Schumacher introduces us to Luhmann's theory of society as a series of autonomous networks of communications, for example economics, politics, law, the mass media, science and art. According to Luhmann, these networks function 'autopoietically', in that they emerge spontaneously as society becomes more complex, and then maintain themselves through internal communication networks, thus perpetuating the very complexity that gave rise to them. Schumacher has decided axiomatically that architecture, which in Luhmann is subsumed within the art system, deserves to be considered an autopoietic network by itself:

The comparisons and parallels that could be drawn between architecture and the various functional systems analyzed within Luhmann's oeuvre accumulated to the point where the possibility of a theoretical reconstruction of the discipline of architecture, set within this new encompassing theoretical system, seemed viable. This reconstruction is the core ambition of the theory of architectural autopoiesis. To orient the discipline's forward thrust is its purpose. [19]

We can see that there are already some grand claims being made about what is going on in the text - the notion of it being a guide to action rather than just an analysis is there from the beginning. But the fact that Schumacher is deviating from Luhmann is not lost on him, and the text is peppered with occasions where Schumacher is happy to tell us that he reckons that Luhmann was wrong, leading to the final admission that "Faithfulness with respect to Luhmann's work can thus no longer be claimed." [435] What is worth noting here is that for Schumacher, buildings themselves are only one kind of communication within the autopoiesis of architecture, indeed, buildings themselves are considered to be a 'negligible' [4] part of the theory. Instead, architecture is the discussion of architecture, the hypothesising of architecture, the speculation of architecture. An abstract render or essay can be as important as any building, if it connects up properly in the network, and makes allies which lead to further communications (we're very much in Latour territory here). What Schumacher is trying to do here is create a concept of architecture that would include all of the peripheral work that has been going on in academia over the last few generations to be uncontroversially counted as 'inside' the field.

           

Schumacher's first task in this vein is to stress the importance of theory in architecture. Rather than being a bunch of pretentious shits waffling at each other, as is sometimes claimed, Schumacher insists that theory is a vital aspect of the autopoiesis of architecture, giving the following trajectory of luminaries:

Virtually every architect who counts within architecture was both an innovator and a theorist or writer. The most striking examples are Alberti, Le Corbusier, Rem Koolhaas and Greg Lynn. [35]

Schumacher will insist that only self-reflexive architecture is worthy of the title:

Only theoretically informed building design constitutes architecture. [36]

            Schumacher will go on to discuss the difference between problematising (critical) and generative theory (inspirational), with Hannes Meyer an example of the former, and Eisenman the latter. Problematising theories are required when contemporary architecture is no longer adequate to the building tasks at hand, and once they have put standard practise into question, generative theories come along which begin to form methods in which these new problems can be solved. [41]

            As well as these distinctions, Schumacher insists that architectural theory must be

'autological' i.e self-reflexive, and senses that this occurred when architecture began to import ideas from 'post-structuralism'. In this sense it was important for architects to read Derrida at one point in order to increase the complexity of architecture theory - Schumacher feels that the increased complexity of an 'autological' theoretical system makes it more effective and able to contribute to its field. Schumacher feels that deconstruction becomes more of a hindrance to architecture at this point, because it "refuses this extensive system-building endeavour and therefore can never break the cycle of Deconstruction and counter-Deconstruction." [60] Schumacher states that the failure of deconstructive theory is in its inability to provide 'a coherent account of philosophy', and that this can only be achieved with a 'comprehensive theory of society' i.e. Luhmann's/his.[62] He seems a little disgusted with 'deconstructive' theorists, because he feels that they overstep the boundaries of architecture, and thus become if not irrelevant, then at least useless to the architecture's forward march. Basically, theory for Schumacher is utterly vital, but it is not worth a damn if it doesn't help architecture to 'innovate'.

           

            The next main section of AoA is historical. As you might have noticed, Schumacher is reframing the word 'architecture' slightly. Although he has set up the 'autopoiesis of architecture' as the emergent network within society, he already has a tendency to refer to it as simply 'architecture'. This is worth bearing in mind. Schumacher wishes to explain the 'historical emergence of architecture', ie the point when his 'autopoiesis of architecture' emerged from undifferentiated social complexity.

            Schumacher reckons that architecture didn't exist between antiquity and the renaissance. Gothic architecture isn't actually worthy of the name because it wasn't theorised, and so it is only with Alberti that architecture restarts, if you will. Renaissance architects allow architecture to emerge as an autonomous discipline, a status that has not regressed since. We are treated to a brief historical sweep through self-reflexive architecture, progressively differentiating itself from other function systems, right up until the differentiation from both engineering and art gives us modernism and figures such as Le Corbusier. [88]

            It is at this point that Schumacher brings in his notion of the avant-garde, which is to be differentiated from 'mainstream' practice. It is utterly vital for Schumacher that there is a separate subsection of architecture that is engaged in experimental research, and it is even more vital that they are protected from the constraints (economic etc…) of practice in order to better perform this role. The best place for this to occur, of course, is in academia. Schumacher's notion of the avant-garde is actually likened to scientific research, in the sense that creating a social vacuum around the avant-garde allows for a freedom to experiment that benefits society at large through the innovations it makes possible. [100]

            Of course, Schumacher must deal with the meanings that are already attached to the name 'avant-garde'. To do this, he divides the avant-garde into 'revolutionary' and 'cumulative' periods. Revolutionary periods are where many innovations are made very quickly, without necessarily working them out, whereas cumulative periods are when these innovations are systematically worked out. The proliferation of radical philosophy in architecture over the last 20 years was a symptom of a revolutionary period, which has receded now that avant-garde architecture is more interested in how to fit windows into curved walls. [122]

            No discussion of the avant-garde is complete without dealing with questions of utopia, and Schumacher doesn't disappoint. While stating the commonplace that utopian thinking about the future is out of the question, he goes on to suggest that what architecture can offer is the notion of 'latent utopia':

The radical architectural projects proliferating on today's computer screens do not offer themselves as utopian proposals in the sense of elaborated proposals for a better life. […] They are open-ended mutations that at best might become catalysts in the coevolution of new life processes. […] Who is to judge and deny a priori that a strange building will not attract and engender a strangely productive occupation. […] A decoded architecture - made strange - offers itself to inhabitation as an aleatoric field, anticipating and actively prefacing its own 'détournement'.[127]

            Did you get that? What is being asserted here is that the radical formal research conducted by the 'avant-gardes', by creating spatial configurations that are out of the ordinary, provide a necessary supplement to quotidian space that might possibly be taken up by an unforeseen new social arrangement.

           

            By far the longest section of AoA is the third, which goes into depth about architecture as an autopoietic system, and it is here where most of the 'theoretical heavy lifting' of the whole book resides. In this third section Schumacher first outlines exactly what it is that he thinks makes architecture architecture, and then proceeds into the elucidation of his own vision for architecture and its future. The former section contains an argument for architecture's autonomy, followed by an analysis of the process of architecture and the form/function distinction. The latter introduces the extra layer of the  beauty/utility distinction, before making an attempt to rehabilitate the notion of 'style'.

            It is worth quoting Schumacher's thesis about the autonomy of architecture in full:

"There can be no external determination imposed upon architecture - neither by political bodies, nor by paying clients - except in the negative / trivial sense of disruption."[188]

Now before you spit out your tea, there is actually a technical point being made here; 'Architecture', as the shorthand term for 'the autopoiesis of architecture', has to be autonomous as it is already defined as the emergent network of architectural communication. So technically (if a little tautologically) this is correct; for example, the cost of the building is an economic aspect of a building object, and by definition is not a part of the 'autopoiesis of architecture'. The budgetary constraint placed upon a building is not an architectural constraint, it is an external 'irritant' which can only be approached 'architecturally'.

            According to Schumacher, the 'elemental' architectural communication in architecture is the design decision, which is embodied in the elemental vector of architectural communication, which is the drawing. All of the external constraints that an architectural project must pass through are translated into design decisions, which are then communicated as drawings. The client of a building is not 'inside' architecture, but the pressures they exert must be translated into issues 'within' architecture.

            How are external irritants changed into internal architectural issues? Schumacher states that this is down to the 'lead distinction' of form/function. Any pressure that imposes upon the autopoiesis of architecture is transformed by forcing it through certain questions: "The total domain of architecture - the totality of its issues - is dissected by the distinction of form and function"[208]. Now, this might at first sound rather obvious, but there are interesting aspects to Schumacher's way of seeing form & function. First of all, this distinction understood this way doesn't have to be foundational - it can be seen as an emergent property, thus it is protected from idealism. It gives us a very simple way of mapping architectural communications, for example, the process of designing modernist buildings was obviously more strongly concerned with function, while postmodernism was far more concerned with formal questions. As the process of design proceeds, at any point one of the two terms can be used as a guide to move further on in the process; they help keep the complex activity of design moving forwards. Finally, if anything crops up that cannot be placed into this framework, then it is of no consequence to architecture. Form/function allows architecture to maintain its differentiation from other social systems.

            On top of this, Schumacher brings in a further binary here, that of the beauty and utility. This is the introduction of value into form/function. Beauty is good form, and utility is good function. Beauty & utility can be seen as two terms that all possible communications within architecture can be analysed with. As a metaphor we might think about how any point in two-dimensional space can be explained as the conjunction of an x and a y value. In the same way, a formal and functional analysis will place any design communication at a point in the autopoiesis of architecture. It's worth noting here that this is a rather significant deviation from Luhmann, who describes binary codes such as legal/illegal (legal system), or true/false (science). Architecture has what Schumacher calls a 'double code', ie, an architectural communication has to be fitted into 'beautiful/ugly' AND 'functional/dysfunctional'. This is Schumacher's own system, which he justifies by pointing out various failed attempts to eradicate one of the axes (for example, Hannes Meyer's functionalism or Peter Eisenman's formalism).

           

But this is still not enough; Schumacher introduces a third code into architecture, or at least the avant-garde section of architecture that he identified earlier. This is the code of novelty [228]. Schumacher's point is that although in the mainstream of architecture there are only two questions that can be asked (is it beautiful, is it elegant?), within the avant-garde there is a third question that puts itself forward: is it new? The reasons for this are twofold. Firstly, according to his Luhmannian framework (which he is increasingly deviating from by this point), autopoietic functions inherently become more complex; it is in their very nature to do so (Schumacher explicitly claims that a society becoming less complex is commensurate with totalitarianism, a rather Hayekian idea if you ask me). Thus an extra code of novelty is seen to allow for greater accommodation of this very complexity. Secondly, Schumacher is drawing from his own experience of being an avant-garde practitioner; in his milieu, newness has been enthusiastically taken up for the last fifteen years or so, after the relatively atemporal period of 'pomo'.

There is also a third aspect to Schumacher's obsession with novelty, which is perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book as a whole: Schumacher's analysis of the drawing. If you've bothered to read this far then you probably already know that Schumacher is one of the more prominent exponents of scripted/parametric architecture, and his expertise in the subject becomes highly apparent in this analysis. In keeping with the axiomatic character of AoA, Schumacher posits 'the drawing' as a singular yet typical medium for all of architecture, which provides a vital function within the autopoietic system of architecture:

Drawing has been developed as a medium of speculation that is able to depict an uncertain future state with a very convincing degree of internal consistency and detail. A drawing can cohere a large number of people around a new complex endeavour requiring long chains of coordinated activity, the results of which lie in the relatively distant future.[329]

Schumacher puts forward a very convincing argument about how the drawing simultaneously makes possible the creation of architecture as well as limits what is possible within it. He provides a brief history of the drawing that discusses what was geometrically & cumulatively possible as a result of the drawing techniques available. So the invention of the corner perspective greatly increased the ways in which a building could be composed, and the development of tracing paper allowed for a greater level of recursiveness in the development of a design. Now, with the rapid advances in digital modelling technologies, the possibilities to recursively edit a design are increasing almost exponentially, and the level of complexity that can be stored in a digital model that need not be fully worked out constantly is also vastly greater than it was, even one generation ago. The level of modulations that are made possible using parametric modelling software do indeed make possible a hitherto unseen level of flexibility in the design process in architecture. So the fact that brand new tools are consistently being made available to the practitioner means that if the avant-garde are to be worthy of the definition that Schumacher has given them, novelty must be their priority - it is their job to test out new and under-developed potentials.

All this novelty and exponential increase in potential options poses a problem of what the hell an architect is supposed to do with all this freedom. Schumacher's solution, and what will probably be the most controversial aspect of AoA is his rehabilitation of 'Style'. Schumacher wants to provide a functional analysis of 'style' in architecture as a guiding principle for formal decisions that allow the architect to resolve the massive complexity of the information that they have to process as they work through a design. It should be noted that he is primarily interested in large, overarching styles, rather than the individual styles of particular architects:

An epochal style is the dominant style of a particular civilisation within a particular historical era. It is primarily in this last sense that the theory of architectural autopoiesis uses the concept of style.[242]

As you've probably worked out by now, Schumacher's entire theory is not revolutionary. This is not such a problem, as no doubt he would prefer to think of his theory as evolutionary. His aim is not to reject previous theories but to include them in a more complex and more effective system. Thus, instead of reacting against stylistic concerns, he wishes to admit both previous stylistic theories as well as theories that have rebelled against style. He is attempting a reconciliation of ideas about architecture as divergent as eclecticism and functionalism, and the upshot of this is the familiar notion that a style is tied to the epoch that produces it, which is exemplified by this approving quote from Otto Wagner:

'Each new style gradually emerged from the earlier one when new methods of construction, new materials, new human tasks and viewpoints demanded a change or reconstituting of existing forms.' This lucid statement of the fundamental conditions and motive forces behind the development of architectural styles is as valid today as it was then. (With respect to our contemporary condition we only have to apply the now crucial factor of the evolving design media).[251]

At this point you might recognise what's coming along here. It's the old 'zeitgeist' argument:

Ephocal styles are those […] styles that demonstrate long-term viability because they offer a systematic solution to the essential problems and challenges of the respective epoch.[253]

Schumacher is convinced that there has recently been an epochal shift in the complexity of society, which is challenging architecture with new tasks and problems which the ordinary paradigm of architecture is ill-equipped to cope with. At the same time, new design technologies have sprung up which have made possible a new kind of formal expression in architecture. These two parallel processes make it possible for Schumacher to proclaim the following historical progression:

GOTHIC

RENAISSANCE

BAROQUE

NEO-CLASSICISM

HISTORICISM

MODERNISM

PARAMETRICISM [254]

So - what is parametricism? Parametricism is what Schumacher believes has finally come along to rescue us from the half-century crisis that modernism has been struggling through. Postmodernism and Deconstructivism qua styles of architecture were both transitional rather than epochal styles, too attached to the critique of the overarching narrative of modernism to truly surpass it. But Parametricism, born out of the research that avant-garde architects have been conducting into new digital design technologies, has finally coalesced into the style that is ready to take architecture into the new generation. Thankfully for us, Schumacher has lucidly and simply expressed what constitutes the style of Parametricism [286]: formally it is that everything must be 'parametrically malleable' and correlated, while rigid forms and simple repetition of elements must not be allowed. Schumacher is saying that the new possibilities to construct complex shapes mean that older formal strategies in architecture must be avoided. This is in keeping with his quest for novelty.

As far as function is concerned it becomes a little bit stranger. Here, what is demanded is that the function of the building must be understood in terms of smooth 'fields' rather than fixed 'spaces' of function. This notion of field is explicitly drawn from Deleuze & Guattari's notion of 'smooth space' [424]. The 'field', to Schumacher, is a gradiated, almost liquid transition of forms and functions that undermine simple binary distinctions like figure/ground, and allow architecture to supercede the modernist fixation with space which can only lead to false simplicity and a denial of autopoietic complexity.

But after all this, WHY parametricism?

Schumacher states that:

In an evolving, increasingly complex and demanding societal environment each of the coevolving function systems is burdened with the requirement of continuous adaptive upgrading. This also includes the continuous adaptive upgrading of the respective specialised media: new forms of money and financial instruments, new mechanisms for social control and the administration of power, and new design tools and techniques within the medium of architecture. All of them are upgrading their capacity on the basis of the advancing technologies of computational information processing. [347]

What he means is that world society is so complex now that only buildings of the complexity made possible by parametric software are capable of accommodating it effectively. Modernism (a term which for Schumacher includes corporate architect of choice Norman Foster [297]) is not capable of properly articulating the complexity of a globalised, decentred, diversified world and its spatial requirements.

Parametricism is the great, new, viable style after Modernism […] Parametricism provides a pertinent spatio-morphological repertoire for architecture and urban design that is able to organise and articulate the complexities of contemporary (post-fordist) society. [129]

            I have now given you a (rather extended) ride through AoA. You might consider everything up to this point to be a disinterested guide to the book, one that takes the book at more-or-less face value, that has avoided making strident critiques. Hopefully this in itself will be useful for those who may not have time to read 400 pages but might just have the time to read 4000 words or so. But in reading the book I have also collected a number of criticisms which I think are significant, which I will now outline below:

And that's where I gave up.

A Trip to N19

So, I'd like to write about a short jaunt I took the other day, with some pictures attached. This time I went off up to see some Camden 'council brutalism', and take in some of the sights around there. The object of my adventure this time was Stoneleigh Terrace, designed by Peter Tabori in 1972 onwards. It was utterly pissing it down, I might add.



First thing, after leaving Gospel Oak tube is that you are confronted by a long terrace in a very Corbusian manner, almost 'Pessac-ian'. It's also reminiscent of a smaller version of the 'Maiden Lane' estate, and sure enough, a little research shows that it was also the work of Benson & Forsyth, everyone's favourite Corb-worshipping Scottish intellectual architects.



Fairly rudimentary round the front, the rear facade showed more interest, and overall despite a certain weathering to the concrete, the black frames remained to offset the white, with a pleasant covering of plants and ivy.



Setting off under the railway bridge over which I had arrived, this metal lady looked rather threatened by my presence.



And underneath the bridge someone had stuck a landscape onto the brick pier. A fine likeness it is too.



That kissing couple look uncannily like the sort of thing one finds in the work of the Savage Messiah. Perhaps crossed with the sort of thing Thom Yorke draws on his Radiohead album sleeves.




And lo! A premonition of what was to come. I'm a big fan of the stepped-section building, of which this is a very tame example. There are some undoubtedly wonderful buildings in London that utilise the method - the Brunswick Centre for example. Allowing agreeable daylight into the front of the building, and accommodating all sorts of gymnastics and drama in the overhangs behind, the stepped section is a wonderful method of laying out flats. This is by Robert Bailie, 1963, and betrays a certain Scandinavian influence.



It's cliched but nevertheless true about London that one usually begins to experience it primarily through the tube, in which case it is perceived as a series of very small areas perambulated around, and only ever visited atomistically. After a while and you start to take the bus or cycle more, and it begins to link up with itself, becoming more of a territory that is understandable. But after a number of years, and if you are fond of wandering, it starts to become harder and harder to find a territory that is genuinely alien, surprising. So as I walked up the road and passed round the front of this block, I suddenly realised that I was crossing a street I had walked up a number of times. The joy I had been taking in being an 'explorer' was suddenly shattered as I recalled walks in sunshine towards Hampstead Heath with friends years before, or bus trips to picnics on Parliament Hill, or...

I must have been disheartened, as there are no photographs from the next few kilometers I walked, which thankfully took me back into uncharted territory. Living in the flatlands in the area surrounding the river, it is always a joy to find somewhere in London that has TERRAIN of any sort, and I took a certain pleasure in passing up and down the undulating streets that led east around the base of Highgate.



And at the very top of a hill, some humdrum modernism, I would say 1960 or thereabouts. The views from this one must have been tremendous.



How very very British this lot are. deferential, grim, and yet familiar, safe even. The lack of ambition is palpable.



I knew it wouldn't be a wander without encountering some Festival Style. This block, o'er-leapingly entitled 'The Tower' has it all: rounded, gentlemanly columns, tasteful brickwork, including some clever coursing, a cantilevered canopy, a gently pitched roof and a vaguely corbusian treatment of the ground floor. There's really nothing to complain about...



Unlike with this horror. Despite all the years that have passed, despite all the retro-mania in nearly all forms of culture, despite the rehabilitation attempts, I still find myself utterly dismayed by the tastelessness and tack of the 1980s.



I mean, these are nice, if deeply unremarkable examples of turn-of-the-century housing, but they're a million miles more appealing than that bastard to the rear of the photo, even if it does pretend to defer and to mimic.



A pillbox in Highgate. One for Paul Virilio.



Oh Hello! Hiding down a short stump of a street was this little cheeky terrace of five units, executed in a strange grey brick. Similar to the buildings seen at Gospel Oak, it turns out that these are by Neave Brown of Alexandra Road fame.



To be honest these are fairly non-descript. The windows are poky, the bricks are not exactly attractive. They are obviously desirable if the plush car is anything to go by, and they set quite the surreal juxtaposition with their terraced and church neighbours, but I could probably leave these ones.



Oh, and what a shame. It's time for dilapidation worship. These terraces are on their way out, currently undergoing an ignominious strip-out and apparently to be demolished properly soon enough.



An ex-picture framer framed.



For various reasons I was reminded of St Peter's seminary at Cardross. Partly this was due to the empty cells, with their views through the building interrupted only by rubble.



And so here I was. Highgate Newtown. The Whittington Estate, Stoneleigh Terrace. N19



But one last look back at the building to go. The other reason I'm seeing Gillespie Kidd & Coia in this building is the way the revelation of the timber infill panels reminds me of the way that GKC used to articulate theirs, with the ribs and studs clearly articulated on the outside. I must say that the escape staircase canted out to meet the road angle has created some brilliant little complexities, in a scheme which seems to emanate from that strange period when brutalism, hi-tech and kitch were all operative at the same time (exemplified by Stirling's Runcorn housing), which I have previously nicknamed 'Brutalomo'. Alas, these are to be wiped away by an (admittedly high performance) scheme by arch-bore Rick Mather.



We can get an idea here of how the new estate is supposed to work. Matching the scale of a traditional terrace, as well as more or less matching the width of a typical traditional flat, yet with full windows and generous balconies, this building is not Corbusian, is not CIAM in its approach to the urban. This is perfect Team X brutalism; an interpretation and elaboration upon a pre-existing typological arrangement.



But of course there is always architecture - note here the joyous method of terminating the block. It could have stopped at a full wall, it could have stepped down, but no, it appears to step up and out like some weightless honeycomb. This building was designed by Peter Tabori, about whom I knew nothing until recently, but the following is remarkable:

Peter Tábori was born in Hungary in 1942 and studied at the Regent Street Polytechnic. When he was a student, he asked the local authority for a diploma project and was given the brief for Highgate New Town. After working for Ernö Goldfinger and Denys Lasdun, Tábori joined Camden Architects Department - Sydney Cook had been so impressed by Tábori's student work that he was employed to develop it into the final scheme.

My goodness. I can't really imagine the following happening now, for a million different reasons.



One of which is shown here. Apparently the timid blocks on the left are part of the same scheme, albeit a later stage. How pathetic! A thoroughly turned-tide, pointless humility.  



Of course, one project that this should remind you of is the Brunswick Centre in Holborn, and how fortuitous!



You are forbidden from climbing onto a flat fish.



And as we approach, the absolute treat of the varying levels of access, the walkways, the stairs, the three dimensional movement.





Which, as we get into the estate proper, is shown in the entry sequence. What we have here are three routes into a flat. A double staircase up, a single staircase up, or a staircase down. There is free movement at the bottom level.




The estate is arranged across six rows of flats, which are connected by four streets in parallel. Due to the car parking being arranged underneath the estate, all of the paths are pedestrian only, which along with their patio paving gives them a quality somewhere between that of a street and a garden path.



Examplified here by the way that the path meanders around the side of the blocks.



The estate is very leafy at times, a park-like condition that compliments the fact that the estate backs onto Highgate Cemetery.



Walkways! Symbols of hope!




Some of the flats are entered from the side. These stairs lead up an open 'close', giving every single flat on the estate their own 'front door'. They are protected from the elements by transparent canopies, a condition that cannot help but remind me of some of the more exquisite flats in Glasgow, with rooflights casting soft glow down into their twirling stairwells.



And so an end to the estate. What I haven't pictured here are the children that were present while I visited. There were two boys who were playing with those metal scooters, rolling up and down the top street before coasting down the hill towards the bottom. There was a group of about four or five boys around 12 or so, who were running around the entire estate and crossed my path a number of times. Then, as I walked along one of the streets I saw two girls at the door of a flat, the mother inside talking to them, their conversation apparently about whether this lady's son/daughter would be able to come out to hang around. It was this that struck me the most - here was precisely the interaction that the Smithsons spent so much energy trying to study and maintain in their work, this was the 'life of the street' that they eulogised so, basically meaning a comfortable and safe-feeling space where there are plenty of people who know you, or at least know who you are. It's not that difficult to achieve.





The Girdlestone Estate next door is not of such high architectural merit, indeed, it resembles far more the sort of non-descript brick design one finds in the East End, but it seemed to be functioning in a similar fashion to its neighbour...



...and was, in places, equally lush.





And, gosh!



If ever there was a typology for garish pomo, it was a leisure centre. What is the correct classical order for a flume ride? I'm sure they asked themselves. I'd like to know who the architect was, as this is the obviously endearing, sub-Jim Stirling end of pomo, as opposed to the wanton kind shown before.



Can you say CORBU?



It seems that everytime I go on a wander it has to be finished off with some garish nonsense in the Blairite style. Take a bow, Kay Hartmann Architects! Now take them away, guards! What a bloody shocking building - thank god it's for children otherwise it might have made me cry it was so grimly jolly. Oh well.

Note - I wrote this up on the day that the UK government passed their vote on the NHS reform bill, which will effectively pave the way for the continuing destruction of the welfare state. In times as gloomy as these, we ought never to forget the wonderful things that a little bit of social spending can achieve. It's really not that hard.

Can Architecture Fail Better?

This weekend just passed I spent in Warsaw, in a hotel just on the edge of the massive square under the Palace of Culture. I don't possess a camera these days so there was no way I could really make a documented journey that I could share with you, but of course Owen has already done so rather bloody well. I must say that I really enjoyed my coffee outside of Powisle station, ruminating on certain particularities of Warsaw pact urbanism, which I've picked up in previous travels to Poland, the Czech Republic, East Germany and Slovakia. Such features include the width of the pavements, always generous, the unfussy borders between pavements and grass / shrubbery, and of course the accentuated distance between buildings. Top that all off with a windswept plaza and you're really somewhere.


My reason for being there was a talk to be given at the Museum of Modern Art, which awaits its eventual relocation into a building by Swiss architect Christian Kerez. I've previously interviewed him over the phone, and his English sounds uncannily like that of Werner Herzog's, which was eerie to say the least… I must say I'm impressed with his Warsaw project, which has hints of the best of post-war Brazilian Brutalism, and I hope that when it is realised it is as good a building as it appears in the drawings and renders.

Anyway, I'd like to share with you my notes for the talk, which I ended up kind of ad-libbing in the end. It's an early attempt to push ideas a bit further than they go in my book, but at the same time is a little bit of an elucidation into some of the ideas contained in it. Please forgive the conversational tone.

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As you may have noticed, we are at the current time experiencing a new period of ruinenlust. But the subject of this passion for ruins is modernism; many of the 20th century’s experiments in changing the spatial patterns of politics, aesthetics and life still exist, ever more poignant due to the faded urgency of their expressions of tomorrow. The ruins of modernism figure heavily in the work of contemporary artists such as Jane and Louise Wilson, Cyprien Galliard, Tacita Dean, or Jeremy Millar. To that you should add the new book by Owen Hatherley, and the recent film by Patrick Keiller 'Robinson in Ruins'.
So there are a number of strands of what we might call ruin-thought currently at work. To these I would like to add my own area of research, which in a very clichéd way might be described as a history of the future.
I too am interested in the ruin, but in my research the ruin has cometo signify something more abstract than the abandoned and the decayed. I might be able to talk about the 'abstract ruin', but I think that a better word to describe my research is perhaps the word 'failure'. To me, 'failure' is a word which describes not only its literal meaning, not achieving one's goals etc… but also a certain way of seeing.
One might call it 'urban romanticism' perhaps, or maybe 'architectural melancholy', but it refers to, and is drawn to a certain active repression of negativity in architectural culture, a repression that one can uncover through the examination of fragments. I contend that this constant repression is not only a process of aestheticisation but is also a politically charged repression as well. Hopefully I can give you a few examples here tonight.
I will look at a number of different types of building and discuss ways in which this 'failed' condition appears in them. What I will be trying to tease out is a certain 'radical weakness'.

Iron and glass palaces

I will start from what are often attributed as the very beginning of modern architecture, the iron & glass palaces. Made possible through the development of industrially mass-produced cast-iron and plate glass, these buildings evolved from the construction of small orangeries attached to the sides of aristocratic housing till by the middle of the 19th century they had become the largest enclosed spaces in the world, accommodating massive exhibitions, huge displays of flora, as well as covered shopping streets and railway stations. It is not to exaggerate to say that they accommodated some of the most significant changes in ways of life that were occurring at the time; the birth of consumer capitalist culture, the beginnings of mass transit and mobility.


Perhaps the most famous of these buildings is the Crystal Palace, built in London in 1851 to house the Great Exhibition, which in the words of Prince Albert, was "to give us a true test and a living picture of the point of development at which the whole of mankind has arrived." the Crystal Palace was a gigantic web of mass-produced iron & glass, a vast display cabinet containing over 100,000 exhibits, ranging from industrial machinery to raw materials, from fabrics to furniture. Over 6 million people visited the exhibition in six months, one of the most significant early moments in mass culture.


On the one hand the Great Exhibition was a way of symbolically demonstrating Britain's lead in the industrial race, but at the same time it was an event that was born from elite fears of insurgency; conceived in the wake of the failed European revolutions of 1848 and the Chartists revolt, a fear of the working class was a prominent accompaniment to the exhibition. However, not only did the Exhibition help to placate working class anger, it also united the aristocracy and bourgeoisie behind the banner of free trade, inaugurating a new regime of spectacular capitalism: Walter Benjamin wrote that at the Great Exhibition "the masses, barred from consuming, learned empathy with exchange value".


It is frequently thought of as the definitive example of proto-modernist architecture, the work of an engineer-genius who defined a new language of prefabrication and minimal regularity. Overall these iron & glass buildings ushered in a whole new regime of spatial qualities. Compared to the prevailing mood for beaux-arts eclecticism, massive, monumental, a language belonging to the initiates, the weightlessness and lack of conventional language made these buildings highly controversial. For many there was no way that they could be considered architecture at all, examples of 'mere engineering', unsuitable for existing in cities. Very soon aesthetic cowardice would prevail and iron and glass buildings would be constructed behind monumental masonry facades, (take, for example the 1893 Columbian Exhibition, which marked a return to Beaux-arts aesthetics, and about which the modernist Louis Sullivan would remark: "The damage wrought by the World’s Fair will last for half a century from its date, if not longer")

It is not at all difficult to understand the transition from the great exhibitions on to buildings such as shopping malls and other such vast commercial spaces, but there is far more to them than that.

First of all, there were a number of more utopian views of the Crystal Palace. One can be found in Chernyshevsky’s novel ‘What is to be Done?’. In a celebrated passage the Crystal Palace (which Chernyshevsky visited in 1859) appears to the heroine in a dream; functioning as a symbol of a peaceful socialist future brought about through rationalism and technology. (Later, Tatlin's monument to the third international would be described by the critic Victor Schklovsky as being “made of iron, glass and revolution”) The transparency, lightness and rationalism of iron and glass was seen by many radical critics in the early 20th century as a forward looking counter to the eclectic styles of the bourgeoisie. (See German Expressionism, or Siegfried Giedion etc...)


A less avant-garde attitude was that of the well meaning 19th century concept of 'improvement', whereby the lower classes were to be given access to culture in the hope not only of improving their lot, but also reducing the risk of working-class discontent. When the Crystal Palace was rebuilt after the exhibition was over, its owners were adamant that this massive building would be used as a space for, as described in its charter, "the illustration and advancement of the Arts, Sciences and Manufactures, and the cultivation of a refined taste amongst all classes of the community." Try to imagine a building that housed a massive concert venue (20,000+ capacity), with a series of museum spaces in which various architectural styles were rebuilt and mimicked, along with gardens, displays of art and sculpture as well as an art & engineering school. It basically contained every artistic and cultural activity that you might think of, all contained within a gigantic display case.


But far from the glorious monument it is often remembered as, the Crystal Palace itself lurched from crisis to crisis, never actually living up to its lofty intentions, and never managed to make any money, prompting the following comments:

"Glass, as we know, is an excellent non-conductor of heat; it is possible that it is also a non-conductor of coin & prosperity."

It slowly became dilapidated (like so many other buildings of its kind) and eventually burned down in 1936.

I recall a visit to the Crystal Palace during a summer in the mid 1930’s; it presented a most woe-begone picture, peeling and sun blistered paintwork, the glass grimy, ironwork encrusted with rust and stonework suffering from erosion. Overall was a film of black dust that seemed to invade everywhere.

And against monumentality, weakness is, perhaps, one of the defining characteristics of the palaces and their culture. From the very simple sense that compared to all architecture that had gone before the palaces looked as delicate as a spider’s web, “the most fairy-like production of Architectural Art that had yet been produced" ethereal, almost completely transparent, to the worries before the Great Exhibition that the building would collapse at the first heavy wind, to the very word ‘Crystal’, with its connotations of the fragility of glass, to their susceptibility to fire and collapse, to their pathetic fights against commercial decline, we should stress the strong narratives of weakness that attend the culture of the iron & glass buildings.


Eventually, nearly all the iron and glass buildings of the 19th century were demolished, or were destroyed, victims of neglect and a number of other conditions.

“these buildings vanished from the mental horizon like a fata morgana, like a shimmering soap bubble that could not survive the forces of the times and burst into tiny pieces."

Now, at this point I would like to note various other buildings with these qualities, failed, ruined architectures, bearers of the qualities that couldn't be allowed to happen.

HANNES MEYER'S LEAGUE OF NATIONS PROJECT


Perhaps the next time that a pure aesthetic of this kind would appear would be in the work of the most radical left-wing architects. Takes Hannes Meyer, head of the Bauhaus from 1928-30, who was fired by the fascist mayor of Dessau for donating money to striking workers, and who would design buildings for trade unions as part of a collective practice with his students. His competition entry for the League of Nations (1927, unbuilt) made great play of the egalitarian overtones of modularity and repetitive units; compared to Le Corbusier’s heroic modernist entry to the same competition Meyer’s was rough and full of radical commitment, with a gigantic steel & glass dome over the assembly. Critic Kenneth Frampton makes the connection explicit: referring to Meyer’s radically democratic deployment of prefabricated units and the privileging of process over composition, he wrote that
“All unity is now seen to reside not in some pre-ordained static ideal, as in antiquity, but in process itself, as made manifest through the proliferation of rationalized technique in response to changing need. Hannes Meyer’s design for the League of Nations building of 1927, with its systematic modular assembly of components, clearly intends little else but such a manifestation. In this respect one can hardly overlook its significant derivation as technical method from Paxton’s Crystal Palace." This is a very strong deployment of the aesthetic, naked prefabrication coming to stand as a metaphor for socialist organization.



Now of course the building is crude, and lacks a certain sophistication compared to Le Corbusier's more celebrated entry. But there is a certain charge to the rudimentary grid and its deployment, and considering the function of the building, the political message that would be put across can be seen to be almost unbearable; there is not a political organization that one can imagine that would be able to send the message that their power is prefabricated and generic.

CEDRIC PRICE'S FUN PALACE

British architect Cedric Price was in some ways perhaps the ultimate ‘functionalist’ - he had the required faith in technology and the belief in a changing society, but compared to his contemporaries Buckminster Fuller, Archigram in the UK and the various radial architecture groups at that point, his projects were based on a level of analytical rigour that was a world apart from his fellows.

Price was well known for commitment to indeterminacy, his aversion to style, his absolute rejection of monumentality and detail. Bearing in mind that a non-aesthetic is still an aesthetic, if we examine Price’s built work we can begin to see remarkable parallels with the iron & glass palaces, with their immateriality and their un-ruined dilapidation.



Price’s Aviary at London Zoo (1961-) is a spacious wire tent, so immaterial as to be almost non-existent. Filled with trees, it was intended to be quickly removed once the birds had made their permanent home, but is still standing, dirty yet proud.




His famous ‘Fun Palace’ project is very similar to the system of courts we discussed inside the Sydenham Palace; a minimal superstructure was to be filled with a shifting set of fragmented spaces for various leisure purposes. But while the courts of the Sydenham Palace were nominally static, the Fun Palace was to be structured in such a way that it could be reconfigured at any time. The Fun Palace has become a very significant project, highly popular with those in the art world with a passion for interdisciplinarity or relational aesthetics etc. For this reason I think it's important to not let it be an intellectual plaything of jet-set curators justifying their own patronisingly class-less and whimsical collaborations. In fact, contrary to the repeated injunctions, I think it's vitally important to consider the aesthetics of the fun palace, consider what kind of political and ideological message a building of its kind expresses. In fact, until recently there was an opportunity in London to do just that.




The InterAction Centre (1976-2003) was a scaled down version of the ideas from the Fun Palace. A lightweight and stripped down frame was constructed into which containers and other industrial objects were inserted to create an evolving and adaptable set of activities. Again, the comparisons to iron & glass are telling; the spindle-like frame, the sense of potential for expansion and contraction, the incomplete spaces made up by fragmentary units within, the dirt and grime that collected around the permanently-temporary structure, all these things were visible in the Crystal Palace, while the programmatic concerns of activity & delight were modern versions of the ‘people’s palace’. Price built little, and would probably reject this assessment of his work, but I suggest that what you can see there is an example of what a genuine future would look like, if the revolutionary change of the late ‘60s had been more successful. Dirty but not ruined, dream-like and un-monumental – Fantastically dreary.

BIG SHEDS


Now of course one might see certain tendencies that are currently active; it's true that the exhibition culture of the late 19th century did lead to the shopping mall capitalism, and also true that the culture & fun palaces as described before also provide roots and glimpses of the worldwide phenomenon of the contemporary art museum, There's another, more hidden route that these histories lead forward to. I'd like to talk here about LSSB's, or 'Large Single Story Buildings', or otherwise known as 'Big Sheds'.

These are possibly the most exemplary buildings of contemporary capitalism, functioning as distribution centres for goods. These buildings occupy space with high infrastructural density, and are perhaps the closest things to 'pure' architecture that exist any more. They are very difficult to love, almost entirely lacking in aesthetic reference points, significantly, these structures are almost entirely ignored by the architectural press in a manner that cannot help bring to mind that manner in which iron and glass architecture was ignored. Although they were described by the late British critic Martin Pawley as 'the architecture of the future' in 1998, this was not necessarily a recommendation. These buildings represent some of the only spatial manifestations of globalised capitalism, moments in the networks of container ships, automated container ports and so on. They are rare points where immaterial capitalism 'touches down'.


But if they have been ignored by architects themselves, they have been approached by artists. Patrick Keiller's 1997 film 'Robinson in Space' goes in search of the spatial qualities of contemporary British capitalism, expecting to find decline but instead being confronted with the blank faces of a then-thriving culture. Distribution parks built on former coal mines, the cheapest and most efficient spaces possible. More recently, Chris Petit's film 'Content' (2010) also attempts to aesthetically approach these almost entirely blank spaces. In the words of Petit, the big sheds 'render architecture redundant'. Is it possible to look to these buildings with a similar eye to those that saw fragments of the future in iron & glass?