History Fatigue

Last week was the first week of semester so my choices for this post were the next installment of Yamamoto’s book or something I’d already had half a draft for and this is what follows this preamble. I did see this book in Tokyo’s Kinokuniya but didn’t pick it up. Last year, Yamamoto had another book on housing published but, as it’s taken me more than a year to still not finish the 2015 one, I will keep it for later. I’m curious to know his thoughts about what happened between the two books separated by ten years.

As it happens, this post is happening ten years after the draft I began in 2015 when its working title was Reconstructivism. I think I abandoned the draft when I saw the name Reconstructivism had just been appropriated for something I didn’t have in mind. Just then, I thought I’d search “architectural reconstructivism” and see what became of it but all I found was a 2020 post of mine titled Reconstructivism. Anyway, the content of the 2015 draft Reconstructivism was typical of my concerns at the time – as well as my current ones come to think of it. Has these ten years seen any difference? Any progress towards some worthy goal? I’m not sure there’s been any and this is why I’ve taken this post in the direction of finding some things that are absolute and that can be believed in – architectural axioms, if you like. Maybe someone in the future will combine them to derive an architecture that’s not merely the iteration after the one before.

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Late 19th century Chicago department stores and office buildings had no need for carved stone ornament. Instead, what was needed was the quick and inexpensive construction that steel structure provided. Perhaps The Chicago School did “express the structure” as the aesthetic decision we’re led to believe they made. Perhaps it’s only incidental that the larger openings and less cladding made the building more lightweight and extracted more performance from the steel structure. Both sides of this story are true but it was the quest for the performance benefit that generated the expression. The expression didn’t just happen to have beneficial side effects. I’m so tired of history.

After a fin-de-siecle resurgence, carved stone ornament was finally a thing of the past. And so too was the metallic but plantesque ornament that, for a while, looked like replacing it. Both had become too expensive and had no place in societies needing a better use of resources. The time was ripe for a new and proud type of building that didn’t need such expensive tat. For a little while, buildings could be seen for what they were. This was in fact a new type of beauty. It was not to last. 

As soon as quantitative problems of sunlight penetration into housing looked like being solved, Le Corbusier made sunlight into a qualitative aeshtetic imperative with his famous definition. Not content with that, he also took the useful logic of engineers and gave it architectural representation in illogical structures. Literal machines are not made from stucco and concrete blocks and neither are metaphorical ones. To this list I suppose we can add taking the good idea of efficiently defining space and giving it architectural representation by efficiently defining unneeded spaces. In the same vein,

• Modernism took the useful idea of a plastic conception of space and gave it architectural representation using materials and processes that were not plastic.
• The International Style took the useful idea of buildings having universal principles and gave them architectural representation using materials and techniques that were far from universal. Naming names, Mies van der Rohe took useful ideas of simplicity and having less and gave them architectural representation using expensive materials and complex processes. Latter-day Minimalism resurrected this.
• Post-Modernism took the useful idea of an architecture reflecting popular taste, and produced architectural representations of popular taste that bore no relation to it.
• High-Tech took useful ideas of prefabricated components and industrial production methods and gave them architectural representation in one-off buildings.
• Metabolism took the useful idea of replaceable modular units and gave it architectural representation in buildings with units that were modular only apparently.
• Deconstructionism took the useful idea of parts relating to a whole and gave it architectural representation as shapes apparently exploding or crystallising.
• Parametricism took the useful idea of parametric input to a design model and ignored all useful applications in favour of formfinding.

For a while, “sustainability” seemed to promise a way of looking at what buildings did rather that how they looked but efforts to represent sustainability became more important than achieving anything real. Ratings systems never question if a particular building is actually necessary. The legacy of the whole exercise is numerous sustainability information centers, bat houses and bird hides. Designing and constructing a building for maximum energy performance can be done but the project becomes unsexy if we include embodied energy. There seems to be a pattern.

I don’t think AI is going to change anything as long as it deals with probabilities wthin Large Language Models more akin to haystacks than any structured model that has meaning in terms of modelling the problem. This of course prompts the question of what the problem actually is. Generating visual options for supposedly option-starved clients is one problem that’s been solved as well as it needs to be for now. Some kind of AI-automated means for evaluating them would be useful but, as things currently stand, this only shifts the problem to one of curating the training data sets. But isn’t this just what architects have always done?

It might be wrong of me to want something to believe in but I’ve begun making a set of architectural axioms that might provide a starting point for what I’ll provisionally call Reconstructivism. This might not be a clever thing to do as it automatically marks it as something that will go the way of all the other isms like Stocism, Existentialism, Logical Positivism and so on. I don’t think these axioms should have numbers. They are all of equal importance.

Buildings are physical objects. They are tangible and, without getting all Pallasmaa about it, are things we can use all six senses to confirm their reality. I’m not suggesting we lick buildings to understand them, and nor am I arguing against virtual architecture and all sorts of headset-dependent experiences that only engage our sense of vision and, if we’re lucky, our imaginations.

Buildings are artificial objects. They do not germinate or sprout. They are not hatched, born, cloned, bred or farmed. A building can be made of timber or stone but it is dysfunctional to pretend it is a tree or a rock. Buildings are not natural objects.

Buildings have mass. It is dysfunctional for a building to attempt to appear weightless or transparent. Giving representation to having achieved the impossible is always in vogue.

Buildings do not move. Swooshy and curvy buildings are not dynamic. They are going nowhere. However, buildings that looked like snapshots of something that looked as if it could have been moving did start to appear a century after the notion was floated. Our current preferences seem stuck here. Designing a building to appear as if it is moving or still being constructed or in some other state of flux, is another case of taking an impossibility and giving it representation. I don’t think The Futurists were given enough credit for this.

Buildings have a reason for existing. This is not as philosophical as it sounds. Just as fire requires fuel, oxygen and a source of heat, a building requires a person with the land, resources and the desire to make it happen. It doesn’t matter – well, actually it does, but that’s not the point here – if their reason is noble or not. The history of architecture is littered with buildings that exist for no better reason than to display that somebody could make it happen. A building without a reason for existing is not a building.

Buildings are products of their time and place. And this is not as Gideon as it sounds, or at least not as deep as Gideon wanted us to believe. Everything is a product of its time and place. It’s just how the world works. However, the history of architecture is also littered with attempts to make a building look as if they come from the past of, more pointlessly, from the future. Using the buildings we have in ways that suit us at any given point in time is simply commonsense. It’s not about making it look older or younger than what it is. In terms of Existentialist Architecture, this means the use of materials and technologies appropriate for a time and place. It does not mean the adoption of whatever stylistic fad is currently circulating as that would be contrary to #1 Existence over Essence.

Buildings are for people to use. Yes there will be bat shelters and bird hides and penguin ponds but these exist for the enjoyment or satisfaction of people more than the comfort of their bird and animal occupants. Keeping it real, for a building to ignore the comfort and safety of its occupants is dysfunctional. Every now and then an architect will say something like “I would rather sleep in Chartres cathedral with the closest bathroom a block away than in, than in ….” but the subtext of statements such as these is that sensitivity to beauty is more important than practical concerns. It’s marketing, basically.

This is only my short list of architectural axions but it’s enough to denouce

• All buildings that appear to deny gravity
• All buildings that deny their physicality
• All buildings that deny their artificiality
• All buildings that deny their relationship to people
• All buildings that pretend to be something they’re not,
• All buildings that pretend to change shape,
• All buildings that pretend to shift towards or away from some imaginary ideal state
• All buildings that tell lies

Modernism is thus denounced for denying gravity and for treating space enclosing elements as a plastic substance in denial of a process of construction.
Post Modernism is thus denounced for celebrating what a building appeared to be rather than what it actually is.
The International Style is thus denounced for denying physical realities of location, climate and resources, but also for denying opacity and materiality.
Deconstructionism is thus denounced for …  everything.
Parametricism is thus denounced for …

It’s clear there’s not going to be much left.

If buildings that tell lies are bad, then what kind of stories should a building be telling? – and I’m not talking about “narrative”. The best contender I’ve come across is “the story of its construction – such as the short-lived Danish modernism. Traditional Japanese architecture and much vernacular architecture does the same. Renovating and repairing old buildings to enable their continued use is another layer of history. (Restoration is a type of lie.) I’m beginning to suspect that nothing less than the dismantling of the entire apparatus of architecture will be sufficient.

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• Existentialist Architecture: Being There
• Reconstructivism