🍎🍎 and 🍊🍊

At the end of the now long-ago post Teaching & Learning I implied that the teaching of music and the teaching of architecture might have something in common.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) famously said that architecture is frozen music but I wonder whose architecture and whose music he had in mind considering the time and place in which he lived. Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781-1841)?

We don’t hear Goethe’s phrase quoted so often these days but whether this is due to the architecture or the music or both drifting apart we don’t know. What would freeze-dried music look like? Or defrosted music? Disturbingly, I can imagine it and may well have seen it. I was wondering what other parallels between music and architecture are there to be found. Let’s start with ideas.

I’ve been thinking a lot about ideas lately. Goethe can be excused for having what we call classical music as his reference but it’s easy to forget that some of it was just the pop music of the time. Many composers relied upon gig work conducting to make ends meet but mostly, they were writing in hope of a hit. This post isn’t necessarily about classical music but I’ll use the term composer to indicate the source of a musical idea and performer to indicate the medium by which that musical idea is communicated to an audience. Is it okay to suggest that listening to it is an important part of the user experience of music? The musical idea may exist in the score but its experience is in the listening and hopefully the enjoyment of. This distinction carries over into ownership and rights. A handwritten score by Beethoven or Schubert is an object of value but relatively worthless compared with owning or purchasing the rights to be paid by performing that music in public. After all, this is how composers were paid. There’s also a sense in which these musical ideas exist as part of some “musical discourse” from which other composers learn. I used to think it was composer Robert Schumann (1810–1856) who said he always had a copy of the orchestral score for Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony on his piano and that he never ceased to learn from it. Something about sound “texture” was mentioned. The only problem is that Schumann had already been dead for more than a century by the time Prokofiev wrote the symphony in 1944. Maybe it was Stravinsky who, after all, did say Prokofiev was the greatest Russian composer of his day – after himself. If not Stravinsky, then perhaps it was somebody unexpected like Burt Bacarach. Anyway, I can’t imagine any architect of the past oh 120 years singling out another architect for similar praise.

In the case of architecture, we could use the term architect to indicate the source of an architectural idea but we soon run into problems concerning its communication. The drawing, the image, the spreadsheet, the BIM model, and the twenty different AI options with black-haired maidens swishing flouncy frocks all communicate different information about the idea to different people. Music doesn’t have this problem. Delivery may be complicated by the task of getting together a symphony orchestra, conductor and venue but the actual path between idea and experience remains direct and unsullied. With buildings, a sketch in the style of one of those unicorn cocktail napkin sketches may kick-start the process by communicating an idea to a client. Later, more accomplished sketches and images may communicate that idea to a greater audience such as the client’s project manager and finance people. Coming not too long and not necessarily from the same team is a BIM model that will communicate instructions to a contractor and, while that’s going on, other images will communicate that idea to the media and, in turn, to people who might be interested in the proposal for some reason.

For some reason. For the building’s real-life users and observers, the actual building will hopefully be a faithful manifestation of an idea that worked, but that’s another story. Before we get there, we have to separate the physical experience of the building for a small number of people from the idea of the experience of the building (even if that experience is no more than looking at it) communicated to more people than it needs to be. If we don’t separate these, then we risk conflating image and experience and that won’t end well.

In the normal course of things, an idea of a building or for a building first has to be communicated to its clients if it’s to ever make any difference to the built environment and our experience of it but this isn’t the case for ideas of buildings presented as, and intended to be understood as, image. With these, it doesn’t matter if they remain unbuilt. Often, these forcibly visionary press-release buildings only exist to remind us that a certain architect is still alive or their company hasn’t folded. (“Whatever became of so and so?”) It all comes down to at least two different audiences for two different things with, invariably, a degree of overlap. We have images of ideas of buildings generating enthusiasm for (the designers of) buildings that, for some reason or another don’t get built. [c.f. The Uncompleted]. We have buildings completed posthumously after several decades, and we also have ideas for buildings that, though never completed, live on through the influence those ideas had on those that were. This is already three different audiences for three different things. But for whom do these architectural ideas exist? It might help destrand this by focussing on the intent of the idea.

I’m just test-driving this word destrand after I saw it used twice in that Kim Stanley Robinson novel The Ministry For The Future – “One of Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of the Year” apparently. “A novel that presents a rousing vision of how we might unite to overcome the greatest challenge of our time.” Said challenge is of course climate change. I learned much about glacier collapse mitigation measures, carbon recapture, and blockchain as a means of dismantling the global monetary system. I was hoping to learn more about what could be done about the construction industry’s 37% contribution to global CO₂ emissions so I was left thinking that whatever we thought we were doing in the past has probably been misguided at best or irresponsible at worst. If that 37% is the result of furthering the discourse of architecture this past century, then we need to ask why we’re not anywhere we want to be.

Doha’s shiny new Hamad International Airport will enable 53 million mostly long-haul air travellers per year get to many places they want to be. This is a building in a desert climate and featuring 11,720 sq.m of landscaped and air conditioned retail and F&B space as well as a 10,000 sqm indoor tropical garden with a 268 sq.m water feature. And all of it built on reclaimed land including, as if an afterthought, runways and other airport stuff. And it’s a LEED Silver building! With top architects, you get what you pay for. “The flora for the indoor tropical garden will be brought in from sustainable forests from around the world.” [How, I wonder? By temperature and humidity controlled sailboats or solar-powered zeppelins?] “Designers have developed a column-free, long-span 85m grid shell roof with performance glass to control and filter the light required for the trees to acclimatize to the internal conditions of the terminal and grow throughout the life of the airport. Bless.

Even without the tropical air miles, it’s reasonable to ask if even larger airports for even more air traffic is really the direction we should be going. We’ve all been let down by building rating systems that haven’t brought about the sea change they promised. Similarly, we don’t hear much about carbon critical design since it only proved that anything “nice” usually involves a huge carbon cost. The problem here of course is our definition of “nice” that has pretentious, aspirational, expensive and “furthering the discourse of architecture” built into it. More recently, we have a lot of talk about AI right now and (even!) how it will produce buildings on par with the beauties of The Renaissance, but we don’t hear so much about the huge amounts of energy required to push these neural networks. I read that data centers and server farms in Ireland now use more electricity than the country’s entire residential sector. Dark times ahead.

The cost, let alone the carbon cost, of this energy isn’t yet folded into AI models still freely available to quickly grow market share in much the same way AutoCAD did decades ago now and to nobody’s benefit. And all this so students can write reports overusing delve, deep dive and intricate interplay, and so architects can sift through hundreds of options instead of just presenting clients with OPTION 1) the one they first thought of (a.k.a. the preferred one), OPTION 2) its opposite, and OPTION 3: some mish-mash of the other two.

TOP TIP: When doing this, always present the option you want the client to choose as “OPTION 2” so it looks like the happy medium. It’s even better if OPTION 1 looks attractive yet expensive, and OPTION 3 looks boring yet cheap. Being able to present clients with multiple options is said to be a major advantage of AI generated imagery but all images are not created equal and nor are they presented as equal. Even assuming that clients prefer multiple options, AI saves having to employ and pay an intern farm as the means of idea generatlon. It makes the existing office workflow more cost-efficient.

Neither building rating systems nor whatever AI is supposed to do, take into account how much of that 37% actually results from buildings the world has an acute need for. We can evaluate a building proposal’s embodied carbon and, if we wanted to, could demand a BIM system that provides us with a realtime (i.e. while designing) estimate of the amount of embodied carbon and, by the by, an estimated total construction cost while it’s at it. This would helpfully allow us to make more informed design decisions or at least quantify the amount of carbon offset we ought to be making from those design decisions thought worth the carbon cost. But even yet-to-be innovations such as these still operate on the assumption a particular building is actually necessary. Trying to unpick whose and what needs a particular architectural idea is intended to satisfy might allow us to differentiate those that actually do fulfill a useful need, and at the same time expose those that don’t.

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I never got around to finding the performer equivalent for architecture. With the performance of music, the performer communicates the brilliance of the music as well as their own [c.f. 10/10/2021 Playing It Like It Is]. In classical music at least, it’s the performer who’s expected to interpret the music and make us hear it afresh if they’re really doing the job we (increasingly) expect them to do. A reviewer of such a performance will mostly comment on the performance and refer only to the music in terms of whether the performer did it justice or not.

Judging by the number of unbuilt masterpieces these days, architecture is heading the same way. The Architect of Record, the builder or the contractor never gain reputations as interpreters of architects’ ideas. Theoretically, they could if the same architectural idea were to be repeatedly performed because people might continue to appreciate various performances of the same idea using different resources, across the decades and around the world. This doesn’t happen even though there’s no reason it can’t. Instead, what we have is an overabundance of throwaway one-off architectural ideas unlike music created to be performed and enjoyed over and over by as many people as possible. Some of that music may have dated but its continuing appeal doesn’t mean it was generic. Similarly, old paintings continue to please. A knowledge of the circumstances and artistic progression of composers and painters may even help us appreciate the problems they set themselves and the ways in which they solved them. Degas had no passion for ballet. He was just interested in painting bodies in unusual postures and lighting conditions. Monet’s interest in water lilies wasn’t botanical.

This approach to understanding architecture via the career trajectories of individual architects as if they were artists or composers doesn’t transfer well, and the problem is only perpetuated when architecture is taught as such. If the point of architecture is to make a physical contribution to a built environment we experience, then buildings aren’t things we can take or leave and like or dislike as if it were image or sound.

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• Is Aesthetics Sustainable?
• Critical Spatiality
• Architecture Myths #25: The Creative Spark