Actions of Architecture

Architects and Creative Users

Jonathan Hill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134437047
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Drawing on the work of a wide range of architects, artists and writers, this book considers the relations between the architect and the user, which it compares to the relations between the artist and viewer and the author and reader. The book's thesis is informed by the text 'The Death of the Author', in which Roland Barthes argues for a writer aware of the creativity of the reader. Actions of Architecture begins with a critique of strategies that define the user as passive and predictable, such as contemplation and functionalism. Subsequently it considers how an awareness of user creativity informs architecture, architects and concepts of authorship in architectural design. Identifying strategies that recognize user creativity, such as appropriation, collaboration, disjunction, DIY, montage, polyvalence and uselessness, Actions of Architecture states that the creative user should be the central concern of architectural design.

SECTION 1

the role of the user

1.1

the passive user

FATHER FIGURES

Reyner Banham discusses his relationship with modernism¹ and its architects in the introduction of Age of the Masters: ‘I had the good luck to meet all of them – Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius, Richard Neutra, Mies van der Rohe – and for me, as for three generations of architects, they were father-figures who commanded awe and suspicion, affection, respect and the normal pains of the generation gap.’² The masters referred to in the book’s title are the heroes of modernism and, in this quotation, their inferiors are other architects and architectural critics. Later on the same page Banham writes: ‘architecture must move with the times because it helps to create the times … It is more than a commentary on the human condition – along with war and peace and love and death and pestilence and birth, abundance, disaster and the air we breathe, it is the human condition.’³ According to Banham, architecture is a heroic endeavour made by architects, guided by the masters:

If, at the present time, many of us (including architects) begin to doubt if architecture has the resources to accomplish the tasks which its times demand, and to which the ambitions of the Masters committed it, one should note that architects seem to be the only people to notice that some of these tasks even exist, let alone might be accomplished. Their arrogance is appalling, but also encouraging. The demand of the Masters of the Modern Movement that architecture should respond unreservedly to the present time, however deep its roots were struck in past traditions, has forced their followers to accept moral responsibility for virtually the whole of the human environment.⁴

Banham, however, recognizes that the moral authority of the architect, a tradition he associates in the twentieth century with modernism, has been under question since 1960: ‘The gravest of all doubts was whether – or how – architects could continue to sustain their traditional role as form-givers, creators and controllers of human environments.’⁵

It is rare today to find a belief in the moral authority of the architect equivalent to that expressed in modernism and Age of the Masters but the hierarchy of architect and user is evident in the discourse of architects even if it is expressed with less conviction. Two related ideas maintain this hierarchy. The first, the denial of the user, assumes that the building need not be occupied for it to be recognized as architecture and the second, the control of the user, attributes to the user forms of behaviour acceptable to the architect. To imply that they can predict use, architects promote models of experience that suggest a manageable and passive user, unable to transform use, space and meaning. In this chapter, I discuss four models of the passive user, each the foundation of ideas evident in the present day. The first three – functionalism, the relationship of the director to the actor, and the contemplation of art – are advantageous to architects, the fourth – habit – is less so.

FUNCTION TIMES ECONOMICS

The principal concern of functionalist theory is the relationship between a form and the behaviour it accommodates. Robert De Zurko identifies the origins of functionalist ideas in classical philosophy and medieval theology.⁶ Larry L. Ligo writes that De Zurko discusses functionalist theory in terms of:

three analogies whose origins he finds as far back as classical antiquity: the organic, the mechanical, and the moral … The organic analogy calls attention to qualities that architecture has or should have in common with nature as represented by either plant or animal life. The organic analogy began as a simple comparison of external forms and their relation to function; it developed, especially around 1750, toward a comparison of the process by which natural and created forms grow … The mechanical analogy, the history of which is not quite as long as that of the other two, draws a parallel between characteristics of buildings and characteristics of machines; although in our century the forms of machines have been seen to influence the forms of buildings, historically this analogy has had more to do with the principle of mechanical efficiency.⁷

Ligo adds that the moral analogy states that ‘forms of buildings should reveal honestly their structural roles’ and ‘instill moral and ethical ideals in those who see and use them’. He identifies each of De Zurko’s analogies in twentieth-century functionalism.⁸

Functionalist theory first became of importance to architects in the nineteenth century. Manfredo Tafuri defines Durand’s architecture at the beginning of the nineteenth century as ‘formally codified building types’.⁹ Referring to Durand, Alberto Pérez-Gómez writes: ‘The architect’s only concern should be … the most convenient and economical “disposition”. Here is the direct precedent of twentieth-century functionalism … The architecture of the Industrial Revolution owed to Durand the first coherent articulation of its principles and intentions.’¹⁰ The advent of industrialization intensified the classification of buildings by functional type and the quantification of space and labour, which Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis define as ‘a rhetoric in the service of the mercantile class seeking to legitimize the norm of efficiency as the highest in all facets of human life’.¹¹

Giving Louis Sullivan, Le Corbusier and Gropius as examples, Ligo writes: ‘It is clear that none of these … thought of purely practical, utilitarian considerations as the totality of architecture.’¹² However, citing Le Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture as an example, Ligo writes: ‘It must also be admitted that the number of narrow functionalist statements in any one architect’s writing probably outnumbered the statements about more profound aspects of architecture.’¹³ The intentions of some functionalists were more clear-cut. Hannes Meyer proposed an organizational, non-aesthetic role for buildings: ‘All things in this world are the product of the formula: function times economics. So none of these things are works of art. Building is not an aesthetic process.’¹⁴ In conclusion, Ligo writes that ‘the idea of absolute functionalism’ became ‘a synonym for “modern architecture”’.¹⁵

THE PRINCIPLES OF BUILDING MANAGEMENT

With a few exceptions, such as Le Corbusier’s Le Modulor, early twentieth-century modernists ignored visual references to the body; instead, they focused on the actions of the body.¹⁶ 1918 marked the end of a military war and the further development of an ideological war fought on economic, political and social grounds and defined by the threat of social revolution and turmoil. In an attempt to avert social crisis Taylorism and Fordism, amongst other practices, were proposed as models for the regeneration of society and architecture. Le Corbusier was one early and influential advocate of Taylorism.¹⁷

The Principles of Scientific Management, the conclusion of Frederick W. Taylor’s studies since the 1880s, was first published in 1911. Through the expert analysis of labour, Taylorism calculates the optimal efficiency of each task in a production process. Named after Henry Ford, Fordism is a highly centralized, rationalized and rigid form of production which creates a limited range of products through the use of special-purpose machinery, market research, prototypes and the standardization and fragmentation of tasks according to Taylorist principles.

Three projects illustrate the connections between Fordism and functionalism. The Weissenhof Siedlung, Dessau-Törten housing and Frankfurt Kitchen are each analogous to a part of the mass production process, respectively the prototype, production line and scientific management of labour. Each has a distinct relationship with the user. One purpose of a prototype is to gauge potential users’ enthusiasm for a product, which may be modified according to their response. The user is absent from a production line but appears at the end of the construction process as a consumer. In the scientific management of labour, the user is a subject of analysis.

In his development of the Model T Henry Ford built a wooden prototype in 1908.¹⁸ The Weissenhof Siedlung in Stuttgart, a 1927 building exhibition organized by the Deutsche Werkbund and curated by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, is equivalent to the prototype of Fordist production, built to test a product before it goes into mass production. Many noted modernist architects designed housing at the Weissenhof Siedlung, including Mies, Walter Gropius, Ludwig Hilberseimer, Le Corbusier, J.J.P. Oud, Hans Poelzig, Hans Scharoun and Max Taut. In both the automotive and architectural prototypes, aesthetics are as important as structural or material integrity.¹⁹ Buildings are rarely designed according to the rigorous criteria proposed by functionalists. The Weissenhof Siedlung indicates that functionalism is itself an aesthetic.

1.1.1 L...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• The Reader/Viewer/User’s Guide
• Section 1: The Role of the User
• Section 2: Montage After Shock
• Bibliography
• Index