Buildings and Power

Freedom and Control in the Origin of Modern Building Types

Thomas A. Markus

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136130922
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

The material and cultural world in which we now live perhaps represents the end of a process created out of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. The battles fought over class, ideology and language are represented most clearly in the explosion of new building types during the Century of Revolutions.
Lavishly illustrated with photographs, drawings, maps and plans, Buildings and Power analyses architectural form, function and space to explore the reproduction and the subversion of power in the modern city.

PART I

SOME UNDERLYING IDEAS

CHAPTER 1

The shape of the argument

Things and words

In the myths of Australian Aboriginals the world was created by spirits of nature – human, animal and vegetable – in the ‘Dreamtime’ The intimate link between people and nature is maintained by song, poetry, stories and painting. A Dreaming site is loaded with symbolic meaning. And these rituals keep the myth alive and so give the site an invisible mental structure. That, rather than changes to its material form, make it significant. In other cultures this can easily be overlooked when space is shaped by buildings and settlements. These, by far the most important products of material cultures, are so concrete and rich, so obviously useful, that they can swamp the invisible structures which give meaning to both use and form, whether in the Australian bush or the European city.

Except for gibberish, language means something. But that buildings mean something is not a familiar idea. Of course a lot is clear. Someone has decided who can use a building. We share it with others and have little doubt whether it is a palace, a church or an electronics factory. Its form arouses feelings alongside the associations which spring from a Greek temple portico, a pointed spire, stainless steel tubes or explicit symbols such as an Imperial eagle, a Christian cross or an IBM logo. All this is part of the building’s narrative. But we still find it hard to say that it means something, that there are invisible structures present.

That may be difficult with language too, but with buildings it seems much harder. The search for meaning entails a number of questions. What kinds of things do buildings mean? How do they do so? Do they have the same meanings for everyone? Do meanings change over time, even for a given person?

In language the inner and outer worlds meet. This is equally the case in buildings. This is so vital for understanding them that despite many misleading links between buildings and language which have been made, it is useful to compare our task with the work of those whose concern is language itself.

Poets, philosophers, linguists, semioticians, psychoanalysts, literary critics and workers in artificial intelligence explore meanings behind what common sense tells us. But even their most hard-fought battles, in what Eliot calls ‘a raid on the inarticulate/With shabby equipment always deteriorating’ (Eliot 1944: 21), rely on everyday use. Wittgenstein said that language means what its users take it to mean. So these artists and intellectuals share ordinary meanings with each other and with us. This is the secure anchor and salutory test of their work. There is no private language.

When the ordinary world is obscure and confused, digging beneath its surface is that much harder. This seems to have happened to towns and buildings as a result of an erosion which started some two hundred years ago, a period which, paradoxically, defined itself in terms of making the world clear through reason. Designers, scholars, critics and users now no longer seem to inhabit the same world. Many places no longer distinguish clearly between public and private. A shopping mall is accessible to all and hence ‘public’ but feels as if someone controls it, and us, through a powerful presence. Ambiguity in forms, confusion about function, or labyrinthine space deprive towns and buildings of clarity. Forms have become difficult to decode. Classical buildings are as likely to be associated with 1930s European Fascism as with republicanism or humanism; the Modern Movement with democratic freedom as with doctrinaire bureaucracy. Jameson (1990) argues that Post-Modernism has challenged the very notion of meaning with its jokes, disconnections, historical cannibalism and ‘photorealism’, and that its roots are in the free market of multinational capital.

Much of what is written about towns and buildings feels equally obscure, esoteric and alienating. Despite the writers sharing daily use of buildings with us, little seems to be shared in the way of responses and it is difficult to encroach into their territory. The obscurity of buildings and of the language about them are of course two sides of the same coin.

All this is sometimes defended as a mature tolerance for contradictions and layers of meaning, a view based on work such as Sennett’s (1971). His defence of creative disorder depended, like Erikson’s psychoanalytic theory of adolescence upon which it was based, on a tolerance of ambiguity and contradiction within a world which most of the time made sense. It was the hidden paradox, the unexpected conflict, the Surrealist joke which were maturing. The argument was a vindication of creative disorder, slippages of meaning which illuminate the world, but not a defence for chaos in that world itself.

Of course the media texts are more accessible. They identify visible and important issues. Some concern failures: technical ones of poor construction and shabby finishes, high energy consumption and ecological damage; or visual ones of inhuman scale, coldness, or even of disease (Prince Charles’s ‘carbuncle’ metaphor has become a byword). In housing there is reference to vandalism, crime and lack of neighbourliness. Some concern successes: praise for key art galleries and museums; or reverence for a historic heritage which combines the sacredness of cathedrals, the splendour of country mansions, the innocence of nature in the great estates, and the inventiveness of the industrial entrepreneur. These failures and successes are real enough and the media do open them to public debate. And yet their silence over less visible failings and successes, and their blinkers, obstruct the quest for meaning. In advocating good modern design and rejecting timorous historical pastiche the distinction between the ‘shock of the new’ and loss of meaning is erased. And whatever the rights and wrongs of that, by squeezing out all issues other than those of form the debate is further trivialised. So it is good to stay close to language because it acts as a model for what it is like to go beneath the surface and behind silence.

Language is at the core of making, using and understanding buildings. Through it a community is able to articulate its feelings and thoughts about them, to share its experience of meaning. Much of what we think and feel is the direct outcome of descriptive texts – scholarly works, educational material, media productions, travel literature and exhibition catalogues. There is a host of prescriptive ones too such as competition conditions, briefs, legislation, building regulations, feasibility reports and design guides. These texts exist before a building is designed and yet in many ways ‘design’ it. Their language, like all language, cannot be innocent. The values and intentions of their authors are present in length, subdivision, tone, the degree of elaboration of parts, and the things that are not said – the silent discourse. And above all the texts use everyday speech categories. Classification puts these names for things, people, spaces and processes into an order. That buildings can be regarded as classifying devices is obvious in libraries where classification is overt and governs the location of books in space and the very structure of that space. But all buildings classify something.

The way the material world and our inner world are related through language is so problematic that only a treatise in linguistics or philosophy can unravel it. As I am neither a linguist nor a philosopher I shall not attempt that. But its essence is simple enough and in setting it out I am indebted to one of the pioneer scholars of material culture, Kouwenhoven (1982: 79–92).¹

Every building is experienced as a concrete reality. I visit a bank. Behind its Classical entrance are glass doors, its banking hall is domed and it has an elaborate mosaic floor. Across its mahogany counter I face a familiar clerk. I see doors to other rooms and other people behind the counter, but I do not recognise these spaces nor these people. The bank has its own smell and sounds. The entire experience is unique. By calling it a ‘bank’ I am using what Kouwenhoven calls something ‘inherently “defective” … a sort of generalised, averaged-out substitute for a complex reality comprising an infinite number of individual particularities’ (Kouwenhoven 1982: 83). If I speak to someone whose sole experience is of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank’s headquarters we are likely to misunderstand each other. If the hearer shares the experience of the speaker then the value of the spoken word is that it makes communication about myriads of experiences possible by means of a very limited vocabulary. But ‘words do not have meaning; they convey it. But they can convey it only if the receiving consciousness can complete the current of meaning by grounding it in comparable particulars of experience’ (1982: 84). Otherwise, though we exchange words we think we understand, the currents pass each other by like ships in the night. Of course the comparability might be quite remote or even only metaphorical. But, given the skills of a good novelist or poet, even such germs of shared experience are sufficient.

Kouwenhoven used this argument to justify the exhibition of artefacts as an antidote to the excessively cerebral conventions of scholarship and popular display, over-dependent on descriptive texts. The artefacts were to be used and touched, thus creating shared experience. It might be objected that this is not a problem with buildings – we fully experience them every day. But much writing is about buildings which one or both parties have been unable to experience. And ‘texts’ like drawings, photographs, models and computer simulations fail to reproduce their rich reality, above all the unique experience of being within space together with other people. As with the artefacts, when the particularity of experience is not shared, then what is said is not heard. When writers do not even try to base their abstractions on experience then, by Kouwenhoven’s definition, they cannot make sense to anyone.

But he aimed not to discredit language, but to warn that its very abstraction is its weakness. Short of remaining mute nothing can be done about that; but an awareness of this fragility is a strong motivation for holding tight to experience. And in any case this shortcoming is exactly its power when it comes to analysis. We simply have no other way to deal with the invisible, mental structures.

So where are we? We are going to be concerned with buildings about which there are texts; that is, things and words (and I am adding more words). There are live debates about whether the meaning of a text (who ‘writes’ the text) is created by the author, or by the reader’s mind. And also about the degree to which the author and the reader are socially formed. Some of these debates are profound; others, in Short’s words are ‘structuralist gibberish, about as digestible and intelligible as overcooked suet pudding’ (Short 1991: 224). My position is unambiguous: just as meaning in language needs a speaker and a listener who are members of the same language-using community, so buildings and their texts acquire meaning when the subject (an observer, user, reader) experiences a building or a text about it; when the two worlds intersect. Subject and object are embedded in – neither free of nor determined by – their historical societies. The first world is an outer, visible one (which is, of course, the result of its author’s inner world) and the second an invisible, inner world. At this intersection the Cartesian boundary between object and subject dissolves. So our study of meaning will have to embrace three domains: the building, the text and the experiencing subject, all in a language-using society. In practice I shall not be able to tackle all three in equal depth, but this map of the task suggests that power, my central theme, will permeate its every nook and cranny.

A case

If meaning springs from experience, what is it about buildings, texts and subjects that matters? The answer returns to the idea of an unfolding serial event, a building as a narrative. From the moment it is conceived, through its design, production, use, continuous reconstruction in response to changing use, until its final demolition, the building is a developing story, traces of which are always present.

In the seminal but indigestible work by Frankl (1914) which we shall consider again, he cites a part of such a narrative – the case of a medieval monastery converted to a courthouse. This troubles him, as if it were an obstacle to understanding, an unfortunate accident, rather than the inevitable stuff of history. But he does argue that if some knowledge is missing then a building makes less sense than it might.

If we study buildings of older cultures and find one lacking in original fittings because, for example, what was once a monastery is now a courthouse, then our need to know something becomes still more conspicuous. The spectator who is without knowledge has even greater need for the right reference when confronted by a building designed for an obsolete purpose … to reconstruct the essence of the building.

(Frankl 1914: 158)

Frankl contrasts this with experience in one’s own time where, he says, problems can arise because whilst ‘we understand without explanation the spaces created for … common purposes’ we may lack the experience to cope with a new function ‘for which … a person probably needs special instruction’ (Frankl 1914: 158). Certainly for his example, a factory, this would be true for an art historian. Though the monastery-into-court is a dramatic metamorphosis of a kind for which the National Archives in Paris provide ample evidence chiefly as unexecuted, Revolutionary projects especially from the Directoire onwards in the 1790s², it is untypical, for change is normally far less abrupt.

Frankl’s second example is misleading because he envisages no change in the factory. There is no stasis though whether change is perceptible depends on the time intervals used. History no more stops for an hour than a century. Material fabric is always different from what it was at any earlier moment. Use has also changed, minutely from day to day, dramatically over centuries. So has the experience of users and observers and hence the things said and written about the building. Transformations are partly governed by the nature of the building and those who occupy it, and partly by external events. In the monasteryinto-courthouse the abrupt political upheaval is the prime cause but the possibility of change depended on material factors (space, load-bearing potential and location in the town) as well as on some kind of analogy between spaces for liturgy and for legal processes, which all inhered in the building.

Monasteries were gradually remodelled in response to changes in liturgical practice, the Rule, or the numbers of monks, expanded activities or the need for strengthening a structurally weak element (say supports for a tower) – all originating in the building or its users. Of course change can never be entirely internally generated, otherwise ‘desert island history’ would be possible.

The ever-changing inte...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Some Underlying Ideas
• Part II Buildings and People
• Part III Buildings and Knowledge
• Part IV Buildings and Things
• Part V Concluding Remarks
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index