Architecture History and Theory in Reverse

From an Information Age to Eras of Meaning

Jassen Callender

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317339731
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture Criticism

This book looks at architecture history in reverse, in order to follow chains of precedents back through time to see how ideas alter the course of civilization in general and the discipline of architecture in particular. Part I begins with present-day attitudes about architecture and traces them back to seminal ideas from the beginning of the twentieth century. Part II examines how pre-twentieth-century societies designed and understood architecture, how they strove to create communal physical languages, and how their disagreements set the stage for our information age practices. Architecture History and Theory in Reverse includes 45 black-and-white images and will be useful to students of architecture and literature.

[Part 1: Architecture in an Information Age]

FIGURE 1.0 Markthal ceiling

Source: Photograph by J. David Lewis.

1
TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY TRAJECTORIES

February 5, 2016. New York Times headline: “In Tokyo, Brand-Name Stores by Brand-Name Architects.” Hyperbole? Perhaps. Accurate reporting? Probably. Marketing ploy for the stores, the architects, and the newspaper itself? Of course. But don’t for a moment think that hyping, reporting, and marketing fully describe media’s role in twenty-first-century architecture.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau famously said, “The invention of theater is remarkable for inflating our pride with all the virtues in which we are entirely lacking.”¹ Media is our theater. And media invents architects and architecture. Or stated with greater fidelity, architects reinvent architecture in the image of media and in pursuit of the theatricality the media can celebrate or exploit. This pursuit is responsible for contemporary architecture’s indulgences, of which there are many. Blogs. Webzines. Journals. The entire city of Dubai. Strange forms. Moving parts. Wall assemblies that emit light or grow plants or decompose in extraordinary and highly prescribed ways. A deluge of spectacles coming so fast there is hardly time to do more than marvel at the accumulation. Caught in this torrent, it is useful to grasp a well-known example in order to examine the tendencies otherwise rushing past.

MVRDV is an exemplar twenty-first-century practice dealing almost exclusively in media imagery, both as source material and as product. The Stairs to Kriterion (2016) is one of the firm’s most recent, and most temporary, spectacles. Rotterdam’s Markthal (2014) is the firm’s most award-winning and arguably best-known project (see Figures 1.1 and 1.2). In it, three theatrical impulses of late information age media are literally on display: (1) an overt presentation of technology; (2) a celebration of pragmatics or program; and (3) a hyper-saturation of imagery. The arch structure, the broad curtain walls, the interior apartment windows rotated to function as quasi-floors, and the flora pattern printed on metal panels are minor technological achievements individually, but together assert the building’s newness as its primary content. The traditional schema of an open marketplace surrounded, in plan, by buildings composed of retail at lower levels and residential above is highlighted by MVRDV’s rotation of the axis. Here, the context arches over instead of wrapping around the market. The floral mural is a billboard for the products that fill the building’s farmers’ market, grocery store, and restaurants. Finally, the intense pattern and color of the mural, punctuated by square windows along its length and drenched in light by the curtain walls at either end, form a spectacle designed as much for the camera, for viewing on the internet and in color monographs, as for pedestrians. The Markthal constitutes a media-driven shift from direct to mediated perception.

Architects, like fashion designers and lawyers, invented their necessity. By working to restructure societies and the expectations of cultures, these professions have marketed the notion of perpetual novelty – this year’s dresses, new class action suits, and buildings that show up in commercials and movies. Self-promoted as understanding this whirl of the new, they make themselves doubly necessary: as inventors of novelty and arbiters of its conventions. Ironically, this invented necessity is so pervasive it seems natural to us. As recently as 1828, Heinrich Hübsch could bemoan the craze for innovative variation as something relatively new.² With a depth of historical perspective, one millennium, two millennia, three millennia back, the necessity of professionals fades. The services once rendered by professionals correspondingly grow entwined with the communities once served. Admittedly, this is a polemic. What I hope will be evident is the rise of professional architects and architectural media has not spawned a concomitant rise in the value of architecture to society.

FIGURE 1.1 Markthal, Rotterdam, MVRDV Architects

Source: Photograph by J. David Lewis.

FIGURE 1.2 Markthal, Rotterdam, MVRDV Architects

Source: Photograph by J. David Lewis.

In many regards, architecture is less affecting and less effective than theater or film. Film is the quintessential information age media and the best films have no equals in buildings. Consider Alexander Sokurov’s (2002) film, Russian Ark. Filmed as a continuous 96-minute point-of-view dream sequence, a narrator wanders through thirty-three rooms of the Hermitage Museum’s Winter Palace in which he witnesses scenes of Russia’s pre-revolutionary history unfold. Through this journey, social, practical, and journalistic desires are engaged. Recreated scenes from history books and imagined glimpses of life behind those scenes engage our desire for sociological connection to the origins of a community. Beautifully choreographed and technically extraordinary use of a single unbroken Steadicam shot fulfills our desire to be within the film to an unprecedented degree. The harrowing ending, as hundreds of guests file out of the Palace’s last ball and into the coming storm of revolution, triggers speculation on justice, class, and obligations to learn the lessons of history. This is the power of film. By comparison, much recent architecture is merely fascinating, like baubles. Arguably, Gehry’s Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and his Guggenheim in Bilbao are functioning as intended when used as backdrops for car commercials or tourism brochures. As historian Mary N. Woods points out, “Architecture is now a chic vocation for characters in films, television series, and advertising campaigns.”³ These buildings and their makers are products of and stage sets for marketing, for the commodification of products or place or even people. MVRDV understands this. Their website features a question from a Financial Times article, “Will Rotterdam’s Markthal be equivalent of Bilbao’s Guggenheim?”⁴ The comparison the question frames is not between two works of art or cultures or practices but whether one building will serve architecture’s kaleidoscopic market effects as well as another.⁵

Indulgence in the Thrall of Media

Bright lights of discourse are few and flickering. Joan Didion does not write much criticism these days. Susan Sontag, Edward Said, and Christopher Hitchens have died. As always, Gore Vidal followed Hitch. In the narrower dialogue of architecture, Ada Louise Huxtable and Herbert Muschamp left noticeable voids. Despite the appearance of newness and engagement, most remaining late information age voices deliver narratives for which conclusions were formulated in dim instrumentalities of earlier times, behind closed doors, and change only with the movements of narrow self-interests. In other words, branding in the service of power.

There is much to lament in corporate and private interest media. The blogosphere and other forms of ostensibly ‘critical’ discourse assess change based on proto-religious underpinnings, whose value lies with a perceived lack of connection between future and past, destiny and history. Journalists often characterize these changes in biblical terms: a series of semi-random missteps triggered by humanity’s disregard for or ignorance of the natural course of time or, worse, an intentional infidelity guiding us toward a future woefully inferior to our pre-destined promise. Such historicizing characterizations are common to the 24-hour news cycle. Moreover, the ease with which we accept classifications of a thing or an event as “natural” or “artificial,” as “fulfilling our promise” or as “missteps,” is evidence of just how deeply engrained these tendencies are. James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus heralded the modern age by proclaiming, “History … is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”⁶ Today, the nightmare reported in thousands of analog and digital dailies is of a different sort. It is announced in terms of loss or deviation from or irony within the present. The character of this discourse is flat: literally and intentionally shallow in its attention to spectacles. It exposes a partially excavated multitude of political, societal, cultural, economic, and aesthetic narratives and presents these as often co-existing or conflicting without exposing the in-depth, long-term causes. Read western coverage of any conflict in the Middle East – or anywhere else for that matter.

This moralizing, quasi-religious undercurrent is evidenced in various ways in much recent architectural theory. Dalibor Vesely’s notion of poetics as “a way of making (poie¯sis) in which the result preserves continuity with the conditions of its origin” is a subtle example.⁷ Kenneth Frampton’s closing remarks in Studies in Tectonic Culture are more direct: “the culture of the tectonic still persists as a testament to the spirit: the poetics of construction. All the rest … is mixed up with the lifeworld, and in this it belongs as much to society as to ourselves.”⁸ Peter Zumthor’s impression of light as a thing that “doesn’t feel as if it quite belongs in this world” and “gives me the feeling there’s something beyond me, something beyond all understanding” invokes a transcendent otherworldly entity without much theorizing.⁹ Arie Graafland’s “On Criticality” surpasses these examples in the degree to which it attempts to justify this moralizing teleology. Borrowing from Timothy Luke’s restatements of first, second, and third nature as “terrestriality,” “territoriality,” and “telesphere,” Graafland reasserts the temptation to move from givenness (terrestriality) through personal interest (territoriality) toward detachment or newness (telesphere). While Graafland claims “all spaces are constructs and real, including our digital worlds,” it is clear that he attempts this rejoinder in arrears to address a real division that he has implicitly accepted in order to build his argument.¹⁰

As stated at the outset, media does more than report. Amidst the bombast and despite the temporal shallowness, media plays a covert double narrative game. On the one hand, it asserts that modern societies are free-floating, synchronic, devoid of teleological trajectory. Consider the number of times a commentator has called some group “aimless” or declared some event “without precedent.” On the other, media pits diachronic or disconnected past promises, such as biblical claims to the city of Jerusalem, against an imagined future, such as prophecies in Revelations, as a metric of judgment on the course of contemporary civilization. These conflicting narratives can be argued to have at least two outcomes. Positively framed, media temporalizes the a-temporal present. It invents, or reinvents, illusions of past, present, and future – illusions that are more characteristic of Classical and mythical times than our own. Negatively judged, media leverages the Industrial Age notions of ‘work time’ and ‘leisure time’ to atomize all time as times-in-conflict: ‘productive time’ vs. ‘time wasted,’ ‘present’ vs. ‘non-present,’ ‘time of decline’ vs. ‘an age of greatness.’ The resulting cultural discourse is legitimately characterized as confusing, antagonistic, or even schizophrenic depending on the level of anxiety the double narrative forces on a given individual or group.

This artificial double bind has consequences in every aspect of life. Media is not only a form of discourse; it frames and thereby limits possibilities of forms. All forms of discourse cannot help but act, react, connect and contest media streams, as times-in-conflict. This shallow presentation of spectacles underpins architecture’s recent trends. It is understandable that architects, clients, builders, critics, users, and ‘mere’ perceivers of works of architecture are as distant from, distrustful of, and antagonistic to each other as the media streams into which they were born or to which they are stridently committed. Linguist Leo Weisgerber put it succinctly in 1950 when he wrote, “our understanding is under the spell of the language which it utilizes.”¹¹ If you have ever listened to a true believer in architectural phenomenology and a strict adherent to East Coast formalism argue the merits of a particular project, this should be quite clear. Le Corbusier’s La Tourette is much beloved by b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Epilogue: Today, in the Beginning …
• Part I Architecture in an Information Age
• Part II Architecture in Eras of Meaning
• Further Reading
• Image Credits
• Index