Architecture, State, and Utopia
I am sorry I have not joined in this exchange of views for some time. These past two weeks I have been completing my final exams in architecture at
1. (a) Describe how you would supervise and coordinate the architectural work (bearing in mind that the work site will be a building that is in service), and what methods you would use to monitor progress, to ensure that the proposed plans are followed and to operate within the prescribed time frame and budget.
I will not be duped into a pedestrian response by such a question. It is a provocation. So I answered, quoting Rem Koolhaas exactly:
The word ‘architecture’ embodies the lingering hope – or the vague memory of a hope – that shape, form, coherence could be imposed on the violent surf of information that washes over us daily. Maybe, architecture doesn’t have to be stupid after all. Liberated from the obligation to construct, it can become a way of thinking about anything – a discipline that represents relationships, proportions, connections, effects, the diagram of everything.
If I am not awarded full credit for this answer I shall protest to the administration.
After my exam I had coffee with another student who asked me a question, and I think this is exactly the one that Mr. Lord would also ask. He said:
Latouche, you talk like a utopian, but it is obvious all utopias must be dictatorships. In order to be coherent, they must reflect the vision of one person only, and the selection of this person is a fundamentally political question.
This brought to mind Mr. Lord’s remark about “the ego-driven, hyper-individualized search for enlightenment among monks or apolitical intellectuals,” an obvious allusion to Carter Sparks.
But accusing us of utopianism is to misunderstand the pragmatic nature of my romantic modernism. As Mr. Koolhaas has very clearly explained:
“… Americans are talking about the problems of their cities, Europeans are talking about the problems of their cities, Asians are talking about the problems of their cities, but if you look at these cities there is almost no difference between them… This same phenomenon, separate objects stranded fairly randomly without any glue in a more or less objective landscape, is now true of large parts of
posted by Latouche at Large at 6:43 PM
7 Comments:
Monsieur,
Your closing images themselves evidence the architect's demi-godly attitude towards human beings that hobbles much design.
For the moment, I will simply note that Koolhaas' comment:
"– a discipline that represents relationships, proportions, connections, effects, the diagram of everything," is the perfect embodiment of the frustration of the architect that he or she is not an artist.
The pencil and the chisel are lying there awaiting the perfection of your consciousness, without the pedestrian concerns of cement contractors and citizens committees screaming at you to demand some influence in the conditions of their life.
An acquaintance of mine, a real-boy architect who has passed his exams, is undertaking the radical notion of a design to ground-breaking firm to materials to execution firm, covering all aspects of building construction, in order to greatly improve the design and result by making the process dynamic, interactive and responsive to the conditions of site, materials, builders and users, rather than a CAD exercise that sort of looks good when view from a hypothetical above, and which is then handed to a random collection of low-bidders. His undertaking is precisely because these subjects were glossed over in both his education and his work experience. Probably the single most common failure in modern design is the lack of coherence between plans and materials and execution, a failing here in Seattle at new William Gates Law School, the Gehry EMP building (as close to an artist as you will find in an architect, but in this work a rather spectacular failure) and of course, the new Seattle public library. As a designer, sir, you must train yourself to SEE what you are working on, rather than theorize on what principle will be good.
Monsieur, you must admit that holding up Atlanta or Houston as examples of laudable non-design design is very nearly as absurd as suggesting that reality, particularly in architecture, is apolitical. Your coffee is political. Your keys is political. DRYWALL is political - ask my friends in the union. Politics are simply relations of power, and buildings and cities, my god, they are built first and last of politics, with a brief intervening moment of cement pouring and screwing (both in and over) and guys sweeping up dust and bits of blue tape while listening to classic rock.
All that is required to demonstrate my point is for you to walk eight blocks in any direction the next time you happen to visit San Francisco, and then, in Houston.
No architect has the political or economic power, or moral authority, to meet Koolhaas' absurd standard, unless you are a figment of Ayn Rand's imagination.
You are not a figment of Ayn Rand's imagination, are you?
How would I know?
It brings to mind a verse from the great French poet Wallace Stevens:
I cannot bring a world quite round
Although I patch it as I can.
I sing a hero's head, large eye
And bearded bronze, but not a man,
Although I patch him as I can
And reach through him almost to man.
It is almost daily that I am stopped on the street by young women between the ages of 19 and 22 1/2 and asked why are you so hard on that poor Mr. Latouche and here is my phone number?
It is not that I have any problem with arguing with someone with an irreal orientation - there's nothing wrong with that. But while I accept that people are no doubt born homofictional, there is a remaining and important question of enforcing important social norms among the dysanecdotal.
When engaging a dialectic, a protagonistical sort is at the considerable advantage of being able to disappear should he lose the argument or simply cease being imagined, freeing him of any accountability. Aside from the candy coating of my nom de plume, and being non-illusory, I have no such non-option. There is no room for the sort of respectful deference I would extend to the anti-figmental even if we were not dicussing matters within the general range of my professional expertise, which we are; or at least I am, since Monsieur Latouche is phenomenologically challenged and the nature of his arguing, stating or even avowing is of a highly fugitive quality.
While I do not consider myself bigoted against those who practive a mythical lifestyle, I will admit I prefer that my daughter not marry a notional.
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“In so far as I have hands, feet; a body, I sustain around me intentions which are not dependent on my decisions and which affect my surroundings in a way that I do not choose.”
- Merleau-Ponty
Perhaps the architecture that is of the best are those that are not of the physical existence, no?
No. Precisely, non.
Monsieur, this is a most grave error - that the building unbuilt, the symphony unscored, the painting unpainted, is superior to the actual, because perhaps of its fabulistic, Platonic purity. My studio classes are filled with students enamored of this nonsense, of which I must violently disabuse them.
Their notion of say "blue" is a haze of idealized non-description until it is seen and manipulated in material and context. It is hard, hard work to understand blue, and an incomplete task, after 40,000 years of painting and images of all kinds.
No conception you have of blue, nor of any building, can anticipate it's real expression, and whatever notion you have of blue will change, once you manipulate the real thing.
Many bad buildings are created when the makers do not have the experience to understand the profound transformative process of the symbol to the actual, which always changes both. Even in the case of art, which is largely a manipulation of symbol, the actual process of manipulation changes all, and becomes, rather more than not, the very source of the art, NOT the originating precept.
That illusion of purity is simple, uninformed irresolution. The hideous difficulty of the actual expression in cement and sweat is where fancies transform, and become worthy ideas. It is failing to understand the importance of this principle that is inflicting large numbers of hideous buildings which look exactly like large architectural CAD models of buildings.
You should not fling Merleau-Ponty about so lightly, suggesting an equivalency between the ambiguity of being and a being of ambiquity, as it were; it does not serve the cause of the imaginary.
My heart is filled with love and awe.
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