Narrating Architecture

A Retrospective Anthology

James Madge, Andrew Peckham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134189663
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architektur
• Subtopic: Architektur Allgemein

This anthology brings together the best and most interesting papers from the first ten years of The Journal of Architecture, published together for the first time in a single volume.

Covering a wide range of topics of central importance to architecture today, the papers also address the related topics to which architecture and architectural studies are inextricably linked. The invited authors draw on sociology, philosophy, cultural studies and the sciences to round out the collection and highlight the breadth and vitality of modern architectural studies, offering perspectives from different disciplines as well as different corners of the globe.

Part 1
Architects and the practice of design

This section is identified with contemporary preoccupations related to design as an activity. Taking issue with different aspects of Modernist orthodoxy, a set of interests intersect.

One paper is informed by themes associated with the cultural legacy of Gottfried Semper. Gevork Hartoonian's elaborate exegesis on Frank Gehry: roofing, wrapping, and wrapping the roof concludes by addressing the ‘formal voyeurism vested in computer-generated images’.

The other two contributions are concerned with different interpretations of what might be termed 'creative' wilfulness (displaced, internalised or contextualised). Karin Jaschke in Architecture as artifice revisits the 'configurative design' (misconstrued as 'structuralist') of van Eyck and Hertzberger. Its surreal connotation, and Situationist affiliations, are seen to promote a psycho-spatial playfulness (cathartic or otherwise) at odds with structural 'discipline'; reassuring to its architects, as much as its occupants. Robert Levit's Language, sites and types, in contrast, judiciously interprets Siza's compositional strategies, which are seen to be informed by a series of ambivalent dualities. Identifying archaeological metaphors intrinsic to a ‘nagging self-consciousness’, a complex set of ‘uncoordinated orders’ are revealed in his work.

In Hartoonian, Jaschke and Levit's texts, one might tentatively identify a critical perspective, or the subject of an architectural practice, that embodies a sense of unease about its own plausibility. This prompts a discursive inquisitiveness about the consequences of a particular logic, narrative explanation, or articulation of form. While wary of appropriating, too literally, aspects of literary metaromantic discourse (theorised by Paul Hamilton), a common reflective mode and sensibility informs their practice of criticism, and the qualities of the architectural design presented here.

Language, sites and types: a consideration of the work of Álvaro Siza

Robert A. Levit

Siza’s architecture is remarkable for its precise accommodation to sites. Since the 1970s it has shown a more explicit reliance upon typological forms. Both aspects of his work suggest an architecture anchored to history. Yet, for all the importance that site and type seem to play in Siza’s work, they emerge as strange protagonists. Although tightly calibrated to site, Siza’s architecture reveals the remoteness of the past, establishing an intricate contrast between itself and the underlying site. Types are deployed, but the hierarchies of our movement through them, of implied architectural promenades, seem to occur against their grain – as if the historical orders manifest in types were inherited instruments of a remote and somewhat alien past. This article delineates these phenomena in Siza’s work, and reveals their genealogy in the historical milieu out of which Siza emerged.

I would like to start my discussion of the Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza’s work by first considering some texts frequently cited in discussions of his projects: one by Siza himself, one by his mentor Fernando Távora, and another, a poem, by Portugal’s most celebrated poet from the first half of the twentieth century, Fernando Pessoa.

‘My architecture does not have a pre-established language nor does it establish a language. It is a response to a concrete problem, a situation in transformation in which I participate. … In architecture, we have already passed the phase during which we thought that the unity of language would resolve everything. A preestablished language, pure, beautiful, does not interest me.’

Álvaro Siza, 1978¹

‘Those who advocate a return to styles of the past or favour a modern architecture and urbanism for Portugal are on a bad path … “style” is not of importance; what counts is the relation between the work and life, style is only the consequence of it.’

Fernando Távora, 1962²

Tenho tanto sentimento Tenho tanto sentimento Que é frequente persuadir-me De que sou sentimental, Mas reconheço, ao medir-me, Que tudo isso é pensamento, Que não senti afinal. Temos, todos que vivemos, Uma vida que é vivida E outra vida que é pensada, E a única vida que temos É essa que é dividida Entre a verdadeira e a errada. Qual porém é verdadeira E qual errada, ninguém Nos saberá explicar; E Vivemos de maneira Que a vida que a gente tem É a que tem que pensar. I’m so full of feeling I’m so full of feeling I can easily believe I must be sentimental But when I mull this over I see it’s all in thought, I felt nothing whatsoever All of us spend One life living it, Another, thinking it. And the only life we have Is split between The true one and the false. But which is true And which is false Nobody can explain. And as we go on living, The life we spend’s the one That’s doomed to thinking. Fernando Pessoa^3

All three texts reveal currents of feeling and thought that are distrustful of language. Pessoa poses his point, in his broad appeal to the reader – ‘all of us,’ that is – as a general human condition. He suspects that in all of us thoughts run like a parallel stream beside a ‘life that is lived’. Language has its own independent logic. We tell stories about ourselves, define experiences, judge events, and give voice to our feelings. Yet what we tell ourselves follows on the structure of language as given to us. The murky liquid dynamism of life is poured into the ready mould of language without convincing us that something is not left out in the shape assumed. The events of our life take on the form of known narrative structures. We see taking form in ourselves the shadow of a bildungsroman, a cinematic melodrama or life as advertised. Ready words name our sentiments, and we love, we miss, and we grow angry according to the elaborate histories connected to the words that name these sentiments. Meaning – even that conveyed by a rudimentary individual word – is divided up in certain arbitrary ways, as a simple attempt at translation from one language to another readily demonstrates. Although inevitably and endlessly falling prey to the preformed patterns of thought, intimations of another life shimmer out of thought’s reach on the horizon of consciousness. (Pessoa’s trickiness lies in not calling that sense of the incommensurate the glimmerings of a truer life, but pointedly supposing that no such judgement is possible: ‘But which is true / And which is false / Nobody can explain’.)

Álvaro Siza’s and Fernando Távora’s statements suggest that something analogous has occurred in architecture. Távora rejects what he calls ‘style’, which is really expression that no longer seems properly linked to its content – expression that seems superfluous to meaning, mere flourishes. He favours something instead that will grow out of the relationship between ‘work and life’. Siza, a student of Fernando Távora and a lifelong friend, echoes the older architect’s sentiment: he rejects ‘pre-established language’ and seeks to respond to a ‘concrete problem, a situation in transformation in which I participate’. In architecture they aim for that utopia where form would be neither an arbitrary inheritance nor an arbitrary system, but would grow directly out of our needs, and those needs’ interaction with our environments, and most generally (if also most vaguely) out of who we are.

Yet what does all that mean? It reminds me of an analogous ambition ascribed to the ‘American action painting’ of Pollock, Kline, de Kooning et al. by their champion and critic, Harold Rosenberg. He said that this painting ‘at its inception was a method of creation – not a style or look that pictures strove to achieve’.⁴ The paintings were records of human gesture unmediated by the treacherous pressure of thought and preconceived images.

But what could this mean in relationship to architecture, an art that is by its very definition premeditated? First we draw, then someone following what amounts to instructions must build. Architecture is neither a very spontaneous process nor is it very receptive to those patent contrivances that try to transpose ‘automatic’ drawings to the built realm. To understand how these statements, or theoretical ambitions, relate to architecture, and to understand what consequences they finally had on Álvaro Siza’s work, we shall have to trace two parallel histories. The first relates to the understanding developed by the previous generation of Portuguese architects – among whom Távora played a significant role – of Portuguese vernacular architecture, and of the impact it had on their thinking. The other historical thread that needs pursuing relates to the development of the architectural promenade: there the notion of a mobile subject reflected a changed perception of the subject and its relationship to the architectural object. Of particular importance will be the conceptual precedent set by the way these changes inscribed themselves in Le Corbusier’s work.

In the Portugal of the 1940s and 1950s, two developments lent depth to the feeling of at least one group of architects that the country’s architecture was falling into a set of empty stylistic patterns. The fascist dictatorship of the Estado Novo (as the regime was called) had adopted a narrow range of models by reference to which they were able to promulgate a homogeneous state manner – monumental, even when small; quasi-neoclassical in appearance; modern in functional considerations (Fig. 1). Following a familiar fascist pattern, it proffered this architecture as the sole and unique representation of a single and historically homogeneous Portugal. It did not matter that this architecture, drawn from a version of the past adapted to contemporary programmatic demands and the heroic goals of the state’s self-representation, looked little like any of the traditional Portuguese architecture from ...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Introduction
• Foreword
• Illustration credits
• Part 1 Architects and the practice of design
• Part 2 Architecture and the discourses of science
• Part 3 Issues of materiality
• Part 4 Narratives of domesticity
• Part 5 Problems of building
• Part 6 The sociology of architectural practice
• Part 7 Identity and the appropriation of place
• Index