Architecture in the Space of Flows

Andrew Ballantyne, Christopher Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135722876
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Traditionally, architecture has been preoccupied with the resolution of form. That concern helps to make photogenic buildings, which have received a great deal of attention. This book looks instead at the idea of the flows, which connects things together and moves between things. It is more difficult to discuss, but more necessary, because it is what makes things work. Architects have to think about flow – the flow of people through buildings, the flow of energy into buildings, and waste out of them – but usually the effects of flow do not find expression. The essays gathered here present a collection of exploratory ideas and offer an understanding of buildings, people and settlements through concepts of flow.

Chapter 1

Fluxions

Andrew Ballantyne and Chris L. Smith

Shells

Herakleitos of Ephesus may have been the first to articulate the idea that the world is in a state of flux when he said that ‘everything flows' (ta panta rhei). People before him had noticed that things change, but he made a lasting reputation by extending the reach of the idea. It was not only individual creatures that changed – by growing up and growing old – but also the mountains, the clouds and the stars in the heavens. The change could be so slow that a person's lifespan might not be long enough to notice it, and at the time (around 500 BCE) it was not exactly reasonable for Herakleitos to have this conviction, but in our age it is the conventional wisdom. Monumental architecture has generally set itself against change. The ancient Egyptian pyramids are a powerful emblem of the appeal of the illusion of permanence. The purity of their Euclidean geometry makes them seem surprisingly modern and therefore, given their age, timeless; but that too is an illusion. Le Corbusier defined architecture as ‘the masterful, correct, and magnificent play of volumes brought together in light',¹ and it is a view that the pyramids exemplify: eternal authoritative form in brilliant light at the edge of the desert – prismatic triangles set against the cloudless sky and endless horizon.

From a Herakleitean standpoint, however, it all looks rather different. If Euclid – who came from the Greek city of Alexandria, in Egypt – or Le Corbusier saw fixed geometric volumes, by contrast they can be seen as a few moments in a process that encompasses the formation of the Earth, the extraction of stone from the ground, its assemblage by swarms of people into a geometric mound that then begins to decay – robbed of the treasures buried within and of its pale limestone surface, then eroded by wind to return eventually to the desert sand, having outlasted the original swarms of people and maybe outlasting humanity. The pyramids used up the surplus resource of a civilization that was generated largely by means of a very different flow: the Nile. It was the connections that were made possible by the Nile (as an immense thoroughfare) that constituted the civilization and enabled the concentration of resources that allowed such a stratified society to develop, and for it to accumulate such wealth. Much of its prosperity derived from the fertile ground that was irrigated by the Nile's annual flooding of a narrow strip of land, with desert to either side, hundreds of miles long.² The flow of water generated life, and fostered the activity of populations along the Nile. They lived for the most part in modest buildings made of sun-dried brick, which vanished long ago. Even the ultraelite rulers dwelt magnificently in buildings of which there is now little trace. The life and activity that tapped into, produced and then directed vast resources into pyramid-building, was sustained by buildings that have all disappeared. When we read about the architecture of ancient Egypt, we are told about the pyramids and magnificent temples, but we hear little about the buildings that made life possible – the buildings that were actually known on a daily basis to the people of that society. The monumental buildings that resisted absorption into the flux have all the attention, while the productive, life-promoting buildings are edged out of the discourse.

The thing that Herakleitos most famously said is that we can never twice step into the same river.³ The water moves on and is away by the time we return to the river, but we have developed a habit of giving the watercourse a name and a consistency. It would seem odd that we give such an active force a name, a proper noun, rather than assigning it a verb. The Nile is so-called because of the channel it runs along, not because of the particular water that is in it. We might think that we are naming the flow, but in fact in our effort to give it Euclidean stability, we name its container. The state, when it controls a commodity as precious as water, as it does in hydraulic civilizations, confines it and makes it Euclidean, quantifiable and controllable, in conduits, pipes, embankments.⁴ The pyramids remotely impose their geometries on the flux, and harness the life-giving flow to state control and monument-production. The human life and settlements seem peripheral to the process, as if humanity flourished on the spillage from the great orthogonal system.

It is possible to find a narrative to make sense of architecture through this spillage, which at the moment seems peripheral, but which ought to be seen as the mainstream. There is a history of modern architecture that has lapped against the monumental, remaining aware of fluidities. One such spillage might be found in the architecture of Eileen Gray. Gray took issue with Le Corbusier. It was understandable. He had let himself into her house and painted eight large murals on her walls. He had himself photographed while doing it, and he was wearing no clothes. The sense of violation and outrage is mitigated for Le Corbusier, but not for Gray, by the fact that Le Corbusier had been encouraged by Gray's lover, Jean Badovici, a Romanian art-dealer and her collaborator on some projects. Gray had discouraged the idea of the murals and found them disruptive to the harmony she had set up. She admired Le Corbusier's work, and at first welcomed his attention, but came to find him and Badovici noisy and troublesome, and ultimately very intrusive. She moved on, ever the free spirit, leaving Badovici with the house and the neighbour.

The house overlooked the sea at Roquebrune, near Monte Carlo. The main living room was raised up and faced the clean horizon with a wall of plate glass that opened up on to a terrace. It was a remarkable design for 1934 and Le Corbusier was entranced by it. Gray's background was aristocratic, but her life was bohemian, and her lovers were more often women than men, so she lived without the clutter of her ancestors' grand Irish houses or inherited furniture, and was not inclined to be stifled by conventions that did not suit her. She always had a maid, never learning to cook, so the image of living that comes through in the house is glamorous and leisured. The service rooms are insignificant, while the focus of domestic life was the living room-boudoir that flowed into the dining space, barely defined as a room, and very much a place for sociability. There is a photograph of Badovici, Le Corbusier and his wife Yvonne at this table, but Gray is not in the picture. Perhaps she was taking it.

Le Corbusier later designed some apartments that were built just behind the house, and built himself a tiny summer studio, intrusively close – between Gray's house and the sea. He swam here daily during the summers of his later years; he had a heart attack in the water and died on the shore, making Gray's house the last building he saw. Now outside the house there is a monument to Le Corbusier on the waterfront. The house is reached by way of the Promenade Le Corbusier. His buildings collectively constitute a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and Gray's house itself was allowed to fall into dilapidation. It is now being rescued and restored, in large part because of the presence in it of Le Corbusier's murals. Gray's presence here has almost been wiped away. She was never a tenacious self-promoter, and was content to let Badovici have credit for some of her work, because he had encouraged her to do it, but even she felt angry and indignant where Le Corbusier's behaviour was concerned. She wrote:

A house is not a machine à habiter. It is man's shell, his continuation, his spreading out, his spiritual emanation. Not only its sculptural harmony, but its whole organization, every aspect of the whole work combined, come together to make it human in the most profound sense.⁵

This conception of architecture is emphatically not only about the masterful, correct and magnificent play of volumes brought together in light, which could be subsumed as ‘sculptural harmony'. For Gray the shell is not an element that can be isolated and admired as an object, but rather a ‘continuation'. The hermit crab lives in a shell that was made for it by another creature (usually a sea snail). As the crab grows, it needs to trade-up to larger shells, and it finds them. So in this case the shell is definitely a dwelling, but it is more usual for creatures that live in shells to make their own. The ‘fit' between a mollusc and its shell is so perfect that it is difficult to say whether the shell is part of the creature or is its dwelling. The process involves the mollusc depositing layers of calcium carbonate, which is found in rocks. Indeed it is rock. It oozes through the mollusc's skin in a mucous fluid that is composed of proteins and calcium carbonate, some of which crystallizes as aragonite, making a smooth, iridescent lining against the mollusc's body, while a rocky outer layer faces the world.⁶ Some of the proteins dissolve and are washed away, leaving the shell almost entirely composed of rock. It is in fact masonry, directed without conscious awareness, with rock molecules rather than ashlar blocks as the components, making possible an exquisite adjustment to the housed body. In some senses it is a minimal dwelling. At human scale it is the equivalent of the pithos that Diogenes adopted as his abode, or Le Corbusier's little cabanon, at Roquebrune, or the toolboxes (6 feet long by 3 wide) that Henry Thoreau saw beside the railway tracks at Concord, and imagined might serve as overnight accommodation for someone who was strapped for cash.⁷ Such a shelter would enable a person to hang on to their independence and stop them from slipping into servility and drudgery, needing to take on regular but uncongenial employment so as to be able to spend the income paying the bank the interest on its loan. If most of us live lives of quiet desperation, as Thoreau said, then this is one of the roots of our problem. If we produced our houses as naturally as we produce our bones – and we make our bones by doing something very like the mollusc's biomineralization – then we would use up much less of our life's energy and effort in paying for them. These very small dwellings would limit the activities that could take place in the home. Thoreau did not try the toolbox as a practical experiment, but did for a while live in his not-much-larger hut by Walden Pond. This was large enough to stand up in, to read and write, and to invite someone in for a close conversation. The process by which it was formed was very different from the production of a shell or our bones, and even it is excessive by the mollusc's standards.

Our external masonry is clumsier and more self-conscious than our internal masonry, which we have to carry around with us. We ask it to accommodate not only our real needs, but also our social aspirations and the possessions accumulated through a lifetime, maybe including heirlooms that have never been useful to us but which we take on with a sense of duty and familial identity. Houses often do much more than meet our need for practical and effective shelter, and it is the excess that enables most of us to pass as respectable citizens. If we were all to produce our own shell and accumulate nothing, living like Diogenes, then no status would accrue from buildings and possessions, we would have no mortgages, and the social order that we know in the West would never have emerged. Our social order is driven by consumption and desire, and most of us live on the edge of one kind of desperation or another, so as to maximize the good things that life might offer. Some people give a higher priority to possessions, some to freedom, some to pleasure, some to social status. Somehow most of us find a balance that we can tolerate, but the newspapers are peppered with stories of people for whom things did not work out tolerably. ‘Resignation,' said Thoreau, ‘is confirmed desperation.'⁸

First Move

Samuel Butler describes the improvisational quality of a first move in fine-tuning an environment. His purpose here is to demonstrate how with repetition an action moves from being the focus of conscious thought to being an unconscious habit that becomes impossible to shake. His tone is facetious, but his point is serious and fundamental. He used to work in the British Library's domed reading room at the British Museum, in the days before internet search-engines gave us access to information in a manner that is so much less place-specific. The British Library has now moved away to its own building, and the room that Butler describes (designed by Sydney Smirke in 1854) now stands as a splendid but redundant monument in the museum's central courtyard. In Butler's day it was connected with the most extensive collection of documents that was available anywhere. However, it was furnished with flat tables, and Butler explained:

I cannot write unless I have a sloping desk, and the reading-room of the British Museum, where alone I can compose freely, is unprovided with sloping desks. Like every other organism, if I cannot get exactly what I want I make shift with the next thing to it; true, there are no desks in the reading-room, but, as I once heard a visitor from the country say, ‘it contains a large number of very interesting works.' I know it was not right, and hope the Museum authorities will not be severe upon me if any of them reads this confession; but I wanted a desk, and set myself to consider which of the many very interesting works which a grateful nation places at the disposal of its would-be authors was best suited for my purpose.

For mere reading I suppose one book is pretty much as good as another; but the choice of a desk-book is a more serious matter. It must be neither too thick nor too thin; it must be large enough to make a substantial support; it must be strongly bound so as not to yield or give; it must not be too troublesome to carry backwards and forwards; and it must live on shelf C, D, or E, so that there need be no stooping or reaching too high.⁹

Eventually, Butler finds a book that perfectly meets all his needs (Frost's Lives of Eminent Christians – the ne plus ultra of everything that a book should be) and it becomes part of his habitual routine in writing to take this book from its shelf before starting to write.¹⁰ ‘It is to this book alone,' he said, ‘that I have looked for support during many years of literary labour.'¹¹ However, on returning to the library to write his piece for the Universal Review, which is here being quoted, he finds that the book has been re-shelved and is no longer on the open shelves. By this time he is so habitually dependent on it that its absence threatens to end his literary career.

Habit is the basis of Butler's unscientific theory of evolution, outlined in his book Life and Habit. Here he argues that skills like playing a piece of music on the piano, are a model for the many other habits we acquire and which we subsequently perform unconsciously. Writing is a skill that was learnt with laborious effort and much concentration on the formation of letters and words, but when we write as adults we form our letters unconsciously and think about the sense we are trying to convey with our writing, not about how to shape the individual letters. When we learn a new piece at the piano, even the first time a skilled sight-reader attempts it, involves concentration and effort. If it is a difficult piece then there will be many hesitations while the groupings of notes are deciphered and then played. With many repetitions the sequence of notes is grasped unconsciously, and the conscious mind is directed to such matters as expression rather than thinking deliberately about which note to hit in the next fraction of a second and of which we therefore remain aware. With a skill like this the learning process is apparent, so we remain aware of it. Butler suggests that some of the things we have been doing unconsciously all our lives – things like seeing, growing or breathing – were once learnt with difficulty, not by any recent relatives, but by very distant pre-human ancestors.¹² Sadly, given the attractiveness of the idea, it is not scientifically plausible, as no experimental evidence has yet been found to support the idea that learned behavior can be inherited.¹³

The idea does, however, have plausibility in two senses: first, through the development of an individual through the course of a life; and, second, in respect to the manner by which externalized objects, architectures and other technical expressions relate to memory. In respect to the first sense, we ‘inherit' at least some of the habits of our childhood in our adult selves, remaining recognizably the same characters, while also replacing every molecule in our body. ‘The child is father of the man', as Wordsworth put it.¹⁴ Just as the mollusc absorbs minerals, metabolizes them and turns them into its shell, so do we renew our bones with calcium – and there are problems if we do not. In the same way that we cannot twice step into the same river, so we are never at two points in our life the same person: there is a regular flow of molecules into and through the body, renewing our solid flesh. We encounter new ideas and make them our own. We establish new goals when the old ones are achieved, and in any given period of our lives we have many roles that can take on the character of fairly independent identities. And yet our habits continue with us – not only the inescapable universal habits like eating and breathing, but also little character-denoting habits, like the habit of wearing expensive shoes, or of preferring tea to coffee, yellow to orange, or the habit of arguing with received wisdom, or declining to engage with new ideas. We feel comfortable with some opportunities that come our way, but decline others, maybe because they are immoral or anti-social, but most likely, in the heat of the moment, because they do not seem like the sort of thing that ‘I' would do. It would involve revising one's habitual behaviour, one's sense of oneself. The things...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Illustration Credits
• Author Biographies
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Fluxions
• Part One: Places in Flux
• Part Two: Spaces of Flow
• Part Three: Envoi
• Index