Letters To A Young Architect

by Christopher Benninger

  People whose parents survived in comfortable simplicity on modest incomes, feel a pinch in their ‘lifestyle’ earning anything under four times their dad’s last pay check. They covet and protect every rupee, counting up who pays what share on each outing. Habitat is no longer a home; it is a ‘pad.’ Protecting one’s wealth from parasites, opportunistic relatives and hangers-on is a matter of daily management. The accepted dependents of the house are cell-phones and credit cards that eat up every paisa unnoticed. As the city, its architecture and urban society all change into a bland chessboard of stand-alone people and façades deposited in glass-walled blocks with no courtyards or street life, so too does the individual psyche, the persona and the personality transform. People don’t like people any more. They love themselves. The word ‘communities’ is becoming as archaic as typewriters. ‘Neighbor’ is a bad word. Everyone is worried that everyone else wants their money; and everyone else does want their money!

  Style, façades (personal as well as architectural), packaging, attention-getting stunts, fashion and obnoxiously selfish behavior are all part of the new life that is a product of the new economy, new society and the new urbanism. Bland and ugly buildings merely mirror the people who live inside of them. In the emerging ‘I, me, mine’ culture, the only true friend is one’s loyal pet dog.

  Europe, which is six decades ahead of us in the search for self, has invented the ‘single person family’ as a demographic profile. It is the self-fulfilling prophecy of the paranoid urbanite who fears that human beings are predators and scroungers. At the same time, every average person craves a life partner who is incredible: great looking, super intelligent, professional, high earning and possibly even loving! Thumbing through Page Three they think, Wow! Fantastic! First Class Act! Spectacular! How Clever! The average person wants to settle for none less than the spectacular, who they know they will never meet and the attraction will not be mutual even if they ever do. But the media and the tastemakers tell them not to settle for less. So they cruise the streets with pet dogs in tow, looking around for companionship.

  In the single person family what one is talking about is more important than who one is talking to. If your topic is not about the spectacular, your victim will feign busy and hang up. Family, close friends, and even lovers, are passé. That people are talking about you, good or bad, is more important than having a civilized conversation over a night cap. The weather and politics are no longer topics of discussion; sensationalism is the topic of catchy dialogue: Paris Hilton, a terrorist attack, the Bird’s Nest, or upside-down buildings. Architects used to talk about community, engendering interaction between people and neighborhoods. Now they speak of new visual tricks driven by computer graphics. Where people used to discuss ideas they now talk about other people, software and objects. There is no time for quiet times at home. Even sex can be purchased off-the-shelf, or experienced in thirty second trysts in aircraft toilets 35,000 feet above sea level, but not with a long-term partner at home. The redefined human being is labeled a metrosexual. Yet, at the end of the day, the single person family too needs companionship, without the hassles of people and community. It still wants something warm, with loving eyes, waiting at the door to greet them when they return home after a long day.

  According to recent census data on dogs in modern societies, the canine population is on the rise. Its ascendance shadows the rise of single person families. There are as many dogs in Amsterdam as there are people. This is all very important to us creatures who imagine ourselves as architects, as we are willy-nilly creating cities that not only respond to, but simultaneously catalyze the new social structure, culture and demography. Public screaming, posing, posturing and yelling are somehow the natural corollary to life alone with a dog. Just look at Europe, its new architecture, and its love affair with beasts.

  Modern architecture, the kind of modernism that Jose Lluís Sert practiced and wrote about, was focused on resolving the conundrums of urbanism and our human condition in the beehives we call cities. Modernists dealt with urbanism, the aesthetics of new materials, and a rejection of effete styles and fads. Heading the International Congresses of Modern Architecture (CIAM, or Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne), Sert incorporated the Team 10 revolt within the movement, and then founded the first Urban Design course at Harvard, which changed the way designers thought about built form and community. Le Corbusier was equally concerned with issues of humanity in transitional societies, and Wright championed craftsmanship and integration with context. Aldo van Eyck knew that place was the realm of the in-between, and he created 860 small play parks almost out of thin air. All these men abhorred the effete.

  While the modernists searched for human scale, proportion and social reality, the theorists were flip-flopping with new ideas and new heroes. Instead of evolving from a platform of ideas, a kind of incestuous love affair emerged between designers, magazines and architectural critics. Postmodernist theories in architecture attempted to piggy-back on French philosophy and the literary criticism of the late 1960s. Semantic Analysis, Structuralism, and Deconstruction that had come and gone in the arts in the early twentieth century, decades before ‘liberal humanism’ was debunked by French theorists, re-emerged as clichés of the vacuous elite. Philosophical and literary Postmodernism really shares nothing with architectural Postmodernism. Postmodernism in architecture seems to be some kind of neo-capitalist Employment Guarantee Scheme for a clique of academic theorists, journalists and designers, rather than a guiding charter of design leading to a better future. The prime beneficiaries have been the writers, publishers, magazines, media, and a few grandstand architects who vomit out the spectacular at the cost of good community building principles and practices. Honest expression of structure and materials has been labeled as passé. The word ‘community’ has evaporated.

  Just as the ‘Chicago School’ of architecture met sudden death with the Chicago International Exhibition in 1893, modern architecture wilted to the blow of a few humongous projects in the 1970s and ‘80s. Feeble though spectacular architecture caught the public imagination. Sigfried Giedion cites America’s cultural inferiority complex as the reason for the triumph of effetism at the close of the nineteenth century. He noted that the 1893 Exhibition sponsors turned to French academicians for advice, giving them, along with a thin theoretical base, a dominating role in the Chicago Fair. And again the world of architecture looked to France for intellectual reasoning in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Again a sense of inferiority drove bombastic exhibitionism and narcissistic isolationism. The terrorism of the avant-garde invaded the half-awake mind. The fear of being wrong and of displaying stupidity has made us stupid. The only creatures we dare talk to without recrimination are dogs. In fact in totalitarian regimes, where people snitch upon each other’s wrongs and wield ‘politically correct’ thinking as a threat, pets are the safest bet for a trusted friend. So aware were the Soviets of this human weakness, that when they invaded Prague in 1968, their first act of state terrorism was mass canicide: the killing of all the city’s dogs within the first week of occupation.

  Lacking any complex mission of values to sustain thought, buildings provoke us to ask questions about the intellectual context, that is an abstract analytical context, rather than the content and the actual setting. What is being sold is a theory, rather than a design emerging from the physical and social context. Some theory about the building has to be made up to justify its existence. Success lies in evoking doubt: ‘What is the reason for all of this?’ Yet, this is not a reasonable question in our Postmodernist times wherein it is the institution of the media, the galleries and the critics who have declared a mound of nothing to be ‘Architecture’. Postmodernists would like us to ask questions about the justifying ideas that surround the architectural monuments that they deem iconic. The buildings do not possess their putative poetry or beauty. You have to think over it and figure it out, and probably
read several books by Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida to fit things in. Like Duchamp’s famous Urinal, or Gehry’s Fish, these monumental clever structures test our patience and intellectual skills. As Christopher Butler ponders, ‘calling into question’, or ‘making the viewer guilty or disturbed’ seems to be a common element among the spectacular buildings being created. There is a neo-Marxist tint to it all as it makes everything from personal relations to buildings into political constructions and challenges. On the other hand the stunts created are to be consumed rather than used. A fire station can be turned into a profit center ‘museum’ reaping income from visitor tickets. A project that is five times over the budget can be justified on the grounds that it was paid for through the entry fees of ogling tourists in the first year. The Wal-Mart business model has become the justification for art. Mercantilism justifies the tyranny of the spectacular and the plain ugly.

  In the new world of cyber information, facts and figures are ‘suspect’ of being the manipulative image-making of mercantile forces, rather than the advancement of knowledge. To paraphrase Frederic Jameson, much built environment seems to be a mutation into a postmodernist hyperspace which transcends the capacities of the human body to locate itself, to find its own position in the mappable world, and this milling confusion is a dilemma, a symbol and analogue of the incapacity of our minds to map the great global multinational and decentered communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects.

  But yes, we like to talk about the spectacular and about things ‘new’; we write about style, about fashion and about fleeting things that are here today and gone tomorrow. Cute and clever designs rule over context, community and the reality of materials. The victims are the people who live in little repetitive boxes and are told spectacular sculpture is their compensation. They are told good architecture is a stunt of monumental construction, which massacres anything inside of it, all in the name of a vague concept of art, with a little French philosophy thrown in for spice.

  It seems architectural critics swallowed their own propaganda about ‘modernism’ and began to believe that ‘modern architecture’ was all about ‘isms’, great men, sculptural buildings and icons. In fact it was exactly the other way around. The Postmodern era we are living in is in fact a form of ersatz pre-modernism, which the early modernists ranted against. This is the same effetism which killed the Chicago School at the close of the nineteenth century, opening the door once more for the make-believe of the ‘spectacular.’

  The city makeover of recent decades is just cold façades; inhuman objects; machine scale monumentalism; stunts and spectacular structures and materials. Like the fashion ramp, our cities are getting cluttered with mimics of the Bilbao Guggenheim, the Valencia City of Arts and Sciences, China’s CCTV Tower, the Vitra Fire Station and Amsterdam’s Nemo. These are the scraps thrown out to the public for visual consumption. Museums have become the opiates of the masses. The urban landscape dies when the malls close, the lights go off and the pizzazz dims into darkness.

  Like the spectacular, anal retentive buildings all alone in their own little city blocks, the city dwellers all go home to their little boxes to feed canned food to their cats and dogs, with whom they cuddle up and go to sleep. This seems to be the India of our dreams.

  (Lecture at INDIA HOUSE for CCBA Staff, Saturday, November , 2008)

  Letter

  The Beautiful Velvet Box

  At the World Architecture Festival in Barcelona in November 2009 I was highly amused. I learned that architecture has transformed from a complex, creative process of integrating diverse functions, structural systems, myriad services and utilities, interrelated spaces, and exterior-interior visual connections, into a game of appliqué where one cuts and pastes decorations and ornament onto four sides of dull boxes. Just as the École des Beaux-Arts of the early twentieth century provided mental ammunition to the mercantile juggernaut, so a band of editors and academics dominated the Catalan seaside conference hall (an ugly box too). Few jurors had ever put pen to paper, much less watch earth fly to the order of their drawings. Box after rectangle, each with a more meaningless and mundane interior layout than the one before, was showcased to the applause of the jury members and to the excitement of the participating cut–and-paste quacks. I learned that the mundane is in; profundity is out. Architecture is decoration, or as Farshid Moussavi, the Keynote Speaker emphasized, ornament is the function, and she spoke eloquently of the ‘function of ornament’.

  Much in the same manner that degeneracy killed the early modern movement with the World Exhibition in Chicago in 1893, overshadowing the likes of Louis Sullivan and H H Richardson, we are back in a world driven by mercantilism and greed and where architecture is reduced to the commercial graphic art of decoration. Yes, the much loved dullness is accentuated by shrill and spectacular stunts. One stunt is the tallest, another is the most expensive and another is just silly. Most are justified by critics on the grounds that the hundred million dollar cost was recuperated through the sale of entry tickets to foolish tourists who came to gawk at artworks they could never understand. So in Barcelona I understood a few things that Giedion came to know more than a half century back, it seems, but that live on today as the ruling order of inanity. I learned that Effetism is the Enemy, and that the architectural Taliban hides out behind editorial desks and academic offices in London and New York. My life in fact could be termed ‘pre-Barcelona’ and ‘post-Barcelona’.

  Before my latest jaunt to eat tapas and taste lovely wines, I thought that cladding was some kind of a finish, more specifically a material, which is stuck onto the façades of buildings for some functional or aesthetic reason. Post-Barcelona I now know that ‘Cladding is Architecture’. Cladding is It. What happens behind that velvet covered box is beyond the scope of total architecture, and is relegated to realms of structural and services designers, whom the architect need never meet.

  The role of architects is becoming limited to the design of the outer envelope of buildings. If you do anything more you are insulting art! This aesthetic revolution was caused by several transformational factors that are redefining the meaning of architecture.

  Cold shells whose interior functions are not known, or even thought of during the design stage, are replacing buildings with specific functions.

  Air conditioning is leading to hermetically sealed buildings with no fenestration.

  Artificial illumination is supposed to be better than daylight and people inside working 24×7 aren’t supposed to know what time it is anyway.

  Many new building types have no relationship between what is happening inside a building and outside. The clients want blank walls to be decorated later. These new building types could be shopping malls, multiplexes, business parks, museums, exhibition halls, or even libraries.

  The design profession is becoming atomized. Where the architect once created ‘total designs’, the trend today is to fragment design into an array of consultants: the structural designer, landscape designer, firefighting, water supply, drainage, sewerage management, IT and communications, interior designer, lighting designer, sound and acoustics, audio designer, signage and graphics designer, branding experience designer, etc.

  Finally, clients don’t want the public to see their buildings anymore. They see their visible mass as a branding opportunity. Buildings have become billboards.

  The architect is left only to create the volumetric box and to decorate the ‘skin’. His sights should be set on creating the most beautiful velvet box. Here the function of ornament comes to play, as there is nothing else.

  The entire game now lies in the cleverness of the skin: Does it hide LED lights inside? Does it reflect from different layers of mirrors? Are there layers of glass all etched in different patterns? Is there a jaali with different colored paints behind, preferably lit with flickering lights at
night? Most important, does the designer have a ‘theory’ of how the skin and the integrated ornamentation reflects the culture of the setting and is even an iconic representation of the era in which it is created?

  Speculative investors and the resulting development want things to be ‘neutral’ and ‘blank’, leaving a myriad of potential leasers and buyers to use modular furniture to shape the interior spaces and to use the building facades for ‘branding experiences’.

  More and more, the only role of architects is to create volumes that achieve maximum FSI and maximum saleable area.

  Highly articulate and determined spaces, structures and elevations are often considered dangerous or bad investments, as they could limit the types and numbers of buyers, users, leasers or renters; or even reduce the hoarding space for lease. Architecture in the modernist sense is bad business. Not only does it limit speculation but it employs ‘transparency’ between interior and exterior spaces in a manner that leaves less of visible building surface to double up as hoardings and signage.

  Even new environmental considerations have made designers see the skin of a building more in terms of its insulation, reflection qualities and radiation factors. To many architects these new restrictions are in fact a kind of liberation. They need no longer bother with the relationship between what is happening inside their buildings and what is happening outside. After settling on the most profitable volume they only need to decorate and ornament the façade.