Architecture and Collective Life

Penny Lewis, Lorens Holm, Sandra Costa Santos, Penny Lewis, Lorens Holm, Sandra Costa Santos

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000457506
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

This book addresses the complex relationship between architecture and public life. It's a study of architecture and urbanism as cultural activity that both reflects and gives shape to our social relations, public institutions and political processes.

Written by an international range of contributors, the chapters address the intersection of public life and the built environment around the themes of authority and planning, the welfare state, place and identity and autonomy. The book covers a diverse range of material from Foucault's evolving thoughts on space to land-scraping leisure centres in inter-war Belgium. It unpacks concepts such as 'community' and 'collectivity' alongside themes of self-organisation and authorship.

Architecture and Collective Life reflects on urban and architectural practice and historical, political and social change. As such this book will be of great interest to students and academics in architecture and urbanism as well as practicing architects.

Part I

Contradictions in a common world

Chapter 1

Introduction

Penny Lewis

DOI: 10.4324/9781003118985-2

You can think about architecture in many ways, but essentially, architectural inquiry falls into two camps. On the one hand, we write about buildings and places as designers and critics – making judgments about the qualities of a building in relation to the wider achievements of the discipline. These judgements are made based on an understanding of the legacy of the discipline across national boundaries and across time. We often observe and measure the quantities and qualities of a building or a city according to values that are historically specific and enduring. Vitruvius’s firmness, commodity and delight remains a touchstone, to which we plug in contemporary concerns and judgements, for example, on sustainability and accessibility. At its core, this area of analysis is concerned with functional, formal, organisational, material and aesthetic questions, and the architect, the building or the city is the subject of inquiry.

In the second type of thinking, architects, urbanists, historians and critics are joined by geographers, urban theorists, social scientists, lawyers, philosophers, activists and policy makers. In this camp, architecture is both an expression of cultural impulses and something that shapes them. Architecture is understood as a product of its time and the conventions of the day. The vast majority of people in this second camp hold to the modernist idea that architecture expresses the ‘spirit of the times.’ However, they may also embrace the post-modern thesis that suggests that architecture is grounded on the longstanding values and associations accrued over time.

Hannah Arendt argues that individuals and communities are conditioned by the places in which they reside. “Men are conditioned beings because everything they come in contact with turns immediately into conditions of their existence,” she writes in The Human Condition.¹ This study is based on the understanding that, to paraphrase Churchill, “we shape our buildings and afterwards they in return shape us.”² Buildings and spaces are cultural products that provide an ‘unconscious record’ of the institutional and public values of their commissioners, and all buildings are in some way ‘public’ in that they are commissioned from within public systems that have very strong regulatory frameworks (e.g. today, safety and sustainability).

Figure 1.1 Chen Yang Jackson Heights, NYC 2021

The content of this book straddles both camps, architecture as subject and object and as discipline and society. This distinction between creating conditions and being subject to conditions is central to the idea of architecture as a public or collective art. Architecture is both a public and simultaneously a private act, the product of communal needs or aspirations and the expression of private individual/institutional wealth. The authors, who participated in the AHRA conference in Dundee November 2019, are concerned with how we shape buildings and space and how these formations reflect and shape our lives. It’s unusual to find both aspects of the discourse in one text, but between the two ways of thinking, there is a great deal of cross over; however, they are distinct and have a different purpose and output and it’s worth making the distinction as well as enjoying the transgressions.

This tension between private interests and public needs is at the centre of city development, planning and architectural practice. This relationship impacts on every architect’s and citizen’s sense of what is possible. Colquhoun argues that the Modern Movement began life in the 19th century as a critique of poverty but adapted to become a tool for the reorganisation of the city to suit the interests of monopoly capitalism or state bureaucracy.³ The idea that architecture will always be bent to the interests of the powerful is a compelling one; yet, the city is also the site of many different individual and shared interests, and it is sometimes a site of resistance. Life in the contemporary city demands a degree of public consensus and ownership in order to operate effectively. The relationship between the practice of architecture and the reproduction of political authority is nuanced and takes many different forms. Architecture is neither the medium nor the message, but it does align with the process by which the powerful assert their interests, and equally, it reflects the ways in which nations and communities arrive at a consensus on how to live together.

If today, architecture speaks to us – it speaks of the mediation of cultural values and the difficulties, we currently experience in arriving at a consensus. These complex and shifting processes of negotiation are evident in the planning process, and they have also been highlighted by the recent Covid-19 shutdown. We have witnessed the policing of the lockdowns, the construction of the Nightingale Hospitals and rise of urban road closures as acts of planning in the absence of a public consensus. Architecture murmurs something about the contradictions of our world but we are never quite in earshot. Architecture is ‘read’ and ‘interpreted’ in many ways regardless of the intentions of the architect or urban designer – contradictions abound. For Joan Ockman, there is the splendid and palpable contradiction between the interests of the residents of Greenwich Village in 1960 and the ambitions of post-war planners. For Alexander Michael Catina, the managerial language of placemaking sits in stark contrast to the reality of the High Street. Reiner de Graaf argues that happiness indicators mask the real meaning of the largely vacant real estate sculptures of Manhattan. Many of the essays in this book speak to the difficulty in establishing a sense of what is needed in the face of conflicting, shared and private interests. To talk about collectivity in these situations may seem naïve; in fact, one of the contributors to this book, William Orr, accuses the conference organisers of naivety. Despite his polemic, there is some weight to the idea that there is something essentially public about architecture and urban design and so one element of its practice is collective. Isi Metzstein, one of Scotland’s most widely admired post-war architects, made a point of telling students that there was no such thing as a private building. Even a rich man’s rural villa must have an approach and a public face and consequently a public responsibility.

Aldo Rossi said: “Architecture gives concrete form to society, it is intimately connected more than any other art or science...The contrast between the particular and the universal, between individual and collective, emerges from the city and from its construction, its architecture” (Aldo 1966 p21)⁴.

Whether architecture provides a coherent expression of the needs and values of society at any given time depends on the authority of the people commissioning buildings and the level of consensus in society. Arendt argues that, from the middle of the 18th century, the flowering of music, poetry and, particularly, the novel, coincided with “a striking decline of all the more public arts, especially architecture” (Arendt 1998 p39). According to Arendt in the 19th century, architecture struggled to perform a public function because cultural life was focused on the private and intimate realm, an area in which there was little space for the practical arts. The public realm (where architecture had meaning) was increasingly seen as a place for the regulation of human behaviour and the promotion of conformity rather than a space for free association. This shift meant that there was very little opportunity to build with a clarity of intentions or as an expression of a public consensus. The production of In What Style Should We build? in 1828 by Heinrich Hubusch and Augustus Pugin’s role in the so-called Battle of the Styles in the mid-19^th century Britain seem to support Arendt’ thesis⁵.

One period that seems to run counter to Arendt’s thesis is the one in which she lived as an American citizen in New York (1945–1975). We know it as the post-war period, but increasingly, authors such as Thomas Piketty have reclassified it as a golden age of social democracy. Whatever name you give to the three decades, it is evident that post-war reconstruction demanded a high level of state investment in housing, infrastructure and (in Britain and Europe) social welfare. On both sides of the Atlantic, economic expansion meant that there was a clear sense of public good often articulated through modernist built form. Reinier de Graaf refers to this period in which there was a positive environment for both commissioning and architectural production. For Piketty the three decades in which social inequality was tackled by the state sit in stark contrast to the Thatcherism and so-called neo-liberalism from 1980 to the present, in which the state appeared to retreat and social inequality grew.⁶ Piketty’s schema is mirrored in the fate of the architectural profession which found itself cast out of the public sector from the 1980s and became increasingly frustrated by the difficulty in producing high quality publicly funded buildings as the state’s political priorities shifted. However, this narrative of a golden state-led post-war expansion brought to a brutal end by the miserable economic liberalism of Thatcher has many limitations. First, it’s important to remember that the profession itself was articulating doubts about the capacity of the State to meaningfully meet public needs before Thatcherism⁷. Second, critics from the 1970s often described the so-called golden age as one in which technocrats in local authorities and City Hall used planning policy to take power out of the hands of the urban poor, the working class and radicals. The grass roots organisations of the 1970s, the squatters and the anti-redevelopment campaigners provide evidence to suggest a collusion between capital and state.

The 1951 Festival of Britain is often seen as marking the start of a new era, but it can also be seen as marking the high tide of cultural consensus in the UK. After 1951, a commitment to the modernist functional city with its national infrastructure, innovative building types and new open public realm began to erode pretty quickly. Although we interpret the buildings produced in the 1960s and 1970s as products of the post-war consensus, it’s also the case that this consensus was dissipating rapidly and modernist architecture and planning was increasingly cast as an alienating and disruptive cultural force rather than a emancipatory one⁸.

Some of those architects most closely associated with modernism, e.g. Le Corbusier and Team 10, were concerned to address symbolism and meaning alongside function, while the writings of Jane Jacobs, Robert Venturi and Colin Rowe articulated anxieties about the modern state and its planning in a more direct way. Joan Ockman’s essay in this book describes the early ambiguities about state modernism in the work of Rudofsky and Van Eyck.

Colquhoun argues that the modern planning systems that emerged from the start of the 20th century undermined the possibility of giving form or meaning to the public realm and generated a more explicit split between private and public space⁹. Team 10’s enthusiasm for clusters, repetitive units and ‘association’ bear witness to a general concern that something had been lost when 19th-century urban forms were replaced by less clearly defined modern ones. This anxiety about the organic and creative autonomy of the urban population was reflected in the work of French researchers at new research bodies such as CERFI, which featured in the AHRA co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Part 1 Contradictions in a common world
• Part 2 New geography and the planners
• Part 3 Authority
• Part 4 The welfare state
• Part 5 Autonomy and organisation
• Part 6 Practice and life
• The Wally Close
• Tenement: The collective close
• Index