white pebble syndrome

nomadic banks

An MP original...

From all around the town, and from the hills above it, the good folk tumbled out of their homes, and collected in the square. The bank was in town. Anxiously, the people formed a queue, the ritual most strongly associated with this social institution.
Most had come to see the bank clerks employed in valuation: the Fortune Tellers as they were called. Behind their long trestle tables of mahogany, the Tellers would Tell, judging each object as it was presented to them, and passing comment on its interest to the bank.

It was on the basis of these proclamations that the people would decided whether to keep or destroy their belongings. Something that was useless to the bank was useless to society, because the bank was the storehouse for all social objects.
You never really owned anything anymore, but simply exchanged it for credit. An object given to the bank on loan equated to the possibility to loan something else in return. A constant fluctuation in social needs for certain items, furniture, vehicles, jewelry, clothes, ensured a constant exchange. The bank worked like a cooperative society for objects, with 80 million members...
The ease with which objects were deposited and retrieved from the bank very quickly loosened the ties people had with them. The inherent desire to hoard soon melted away.

People found that in time they did not miss any of these things they gave up, and never asked for them back. They remain to this day in the vaults of the bank, able to be viewed, like a still-living museum to our civilisation. The bank was a stepping stone to the objectless society.

back to basics

The retrospective epochal terminator, an MP orginal (more or less).

Millennium People. It is as it sounds: a blog for the People of the New Millennium.

But I thought I would just recap, for those latecomers at the back, and reiterate what MP is really all about: the uncertainty of the current architectural (and epochal) situation. Zaha's on the out, Dubai is quickly becoming a sandblasted stillborn, and I can faintly hear Ballard's Chelsea housewives murmuring into their martinis "someone really ought to do something".

Its a bad situation. Architects and theorists everywhere, lets take a moment to prop ourselves up on our unemployed elbows and take stock of the situation: the sub-prime crisis has come, and the boom has gone. Like so many Rip Van Winkels we naively now awake to the fact that China, the Gulf, and the endless stream of dubious commercial constructions we merrily knocked up, were morally moribund white elephants (or ivory towers).

Worse, the favourite pastime of so many students and young professionals – I am referring to digital formalism – has been murdered in its bed. No longer is there any hope that it will one day dominate the world of architectural construction, it has been relegated to nothing more than a stylistic dead end, like those typical of the beginning of last century (art nouveau, etc). On the upside, at least now when I speak out against meaningless form-finding I don't sound like a Luddite.

How are we rallying ourselves? MP is seeing two general trends in architectural thought emerge: the retrospective and the reactionary (I am simplifying by presenting the extremes, but I think the spectrum generally holds true).

The former have decided to seamlessly splice 1968 (and the years directly after it) to the present day. Through the re-examining of groups like archigram and the infamous lessons from Las Vegas they aim to by-pass all of that post-modernist, post-post-modernist, bullshit and reconnect with their roots. Soggy with nostalgia, they lovingly recount tales of simpler times – utopias were only a few years away and for a young architect anything seemed possible. Glorified is the architect-citizen, who told the Man where he could stick it (there is of course no mention of the architect's subsequent punishment, doomed to a half century of quibbling over occupational health and safety).

Then there is the reactionary camp, who seem to be led by the unlikely figure of Kengo Kuma (though there are certainly many others). This camp is following Toyo Ito's Digital Tarzan theories (of the city as the interface between the digital and physical realms) to their logical conclusion: by treating architecture as both a membrane for the individual/virtual and individual/real. In other words, a thinking founded in Heidegger's forest clearing (see The End of Philosophy and The Task of Thinking) and Levinas' Other.

I find this the more attractive of the two, and the discussion revolves mostly around the 'architectural object' (see Rosin-Melser's and my own exchange) and the notion of 'specular/speculative architecture'. The only problem with this movement is that it is a reaction to the current conditions. As such, it limits itself to merely describing the present. Where are the architectural revolutionaries? Where are the forward thinkers and dreamers for tomorrow?

In closing, I make mention to MP's wordy manifesto (as soon as the blog gets a regular editor it will probably be rephrased).

anti-object #3

Guest post by Max Rosin-Melser.

In the second post on the book ‘Anti-Object’ [#1 here] Jack asked the question – what is an architectural object? For this third and final ‘Anti-Object’ post I would like to build on Jack’s question and ask, what is actually wrong with the architectural object? Kuma makes the claim that moving away from a focus on the ‘object’ in architecture is not only useful, but a manifestation of new, important trends in contemporary society linking in with new media and technologies. I would like to question this idea – Why is this move away from an object-oriented architecture essential? Where does this need originate from? And is our current state of object-oriented architectural production really failing us as a people (as Kuma quite broadly claims)?

I can’t help wondering if what Kuma is proposing is more of a theoretical idea out of step with what people actually want and with what has proven to be popular with buildings of the past. Now, this is not to say that architectural theories cannot challenge the current wants of society (no one is saying people should go live in suburbs of McMansions), but, the way Kuma stresses this need to move away from the object you would think it was actually doing us and society harm. Within each section of the book there is mention of Kuma proposing some change merely based on a desire for his building to ‘not resemble an object’. This begs the question – do we really need to be saved from the architectural object? What of good architectural objects? Yes there is a lot of crap out there, a lot of bad architecture, but there are also a lot of successful object oriented buildings in the world - See Herzog and De Meuron and the almost universally loved bird’s nest for the most conspicuous object oriented architecture of contemporary times. This building, through its very object-like properties (the ‘birds nest’) has been used by the Chinese government to distill and outwardly represent notions of growth and prosperity for its country. Could a Kuma building elicit the same emotive response in its users and the society as a whole?

The architect Peter Zumthor is similar to Kuma in his focus on the subject and the experiential properties of his buildings, but rather than engineering some sort of anti-object stance, prefers to look at atmospheres . He does not try to make the claim that the object is inherently ‘bad’, but rather looks at how this type and form can be worked to evoke certain atmospheres and emotions in its users. Yes, when Zumthor puts you in a black room with only a small punched out window (as below) towards the outside he is distancing us from our environment through the use of the ‘window frame’ – But cant that be worth it sometimes? We Australians who grew up with Glenn Murcutt’s maxim drilled into our heads of ‘prospect and refuge ’ might wonder – where do you find refuge in a glass ‘optical lens’ surrounded by water? Where is there room for these very human feelings and requirements of retreat and withdrawal within Kuma’s architectural theory?

Fundamentally, Kuma sees the architectural object as separate and detached from man and society, however, this over-simplifies the role that these object-oriented buildings play in our psyche. In contrast to Kuma’s stance, Charles Jencks embraces the notion of an object-oriented architecture and highlights in his book The Iconic Building the ability of these buildings to operate as a latent signifier of divergent and ambiguous meanings. In other words, the Sydney Opera House can, to one person represent the sails of a boat, to another it could evoke an image of clouds floating and to yet another it could be interpreted as turtles... well you get the idea. And it is that inherent fluidity of meaning that brings life to the building and allows for a growing dialogue between the building and society. These objects are not detached and separate from us, but rather made and re-made in a continual conversation of use and media over successive generations. In the end I feel there is an irony present in Kuma’s work, in that he is not making anti-objects, he is just making a different type of object, and when his discussion moves on from there I think it will be rather fascinating.

anti-object #2

Brett Steele – AA head honcho – writes in the introduction to Kuma’s text that he is against “self-centred architecture… deliberately distinct from its surroundings”.
He continues:

“‘My ultimate aim’, [Kuma] writes early on in his book, ‘is to “erase” architecture’. Such an ambition couldn’t be further removed from the majority of a younger generation of digital experiementalists today, pursuing a renewal of formalism not seen within architecture for decades.”

As founder of the AADRL, and therefore one of the driving forces behind the pursuit of neo-formalism, and the advance of digital experimentalism, this comment is not without a certain hypocrisy. The younger generation are largely that way because Steele made them so. I am not making a value judgement about the worth of digital experimentalism (which has obviously been a tremendously important force in the recent history of global architecture), I am simply noting my surprise that Steele would distance himself from a movement he helped create.

+++++

In the first part, Max mostly focussed on the division of subject and object as proposed by Kuma’s text: the possibility of relating the subject to the landscape through the power of the floor plane, and the ability to blur formal boundaries of architecture by the ‘particlisation’ of materials and elements.

Both of these main points relate to Kuma’s definition of an object as being something wilfully separate from the ground plane – a finite figure cut off from the earth (as opposed to the earth itself, which is continuous in all directions and thus infinite). However, this definition also excludes burying a building. The new millennium fad of concealing buildings in the landscape by submerging them, or employing other mechanical modes for hiding their structure, does not actually change the nature of the building's limits (a wall is not less definitive because it is underground).

Max discussed what it isn’t, but what is an architectural object?

“Kuma sees new digital and informational technologies as leading us to an aesthetics of disappearance, rather than image or form” Steele notes. Images and forms are the current architectural stock-in-trade, and Kuma makes the historical reason for this quite clear: communication. At a period in Modernism when only black and white images were being published in grainy magazines, the architects that succeeded in drawing attention (and subsequently more projects) were those who could capture the essential forms of their buildings and diffuse them through B+W photographs (Barcelona Pavilion, Villa Savoye, etc). The legacy of this period is the ubiquity of the ‘metalevel’ image: an imagined point of view that portrays the whole building. This manner of viewing architecture necessarily renders it an object for consideration.

Bruno Taut, according to Kuma, lost out to rival Modernists because he “failed to understand the twentieth-century paradox, that individuals as isolated subjects shunned groups in any form. They were sustained in their mediocrity through the possession of attractive products.” Modern architecture became an 'attractive product' by appealing first to the spirit of domestic rivalry – the Modernist home was an object that could be packaged, sold, and used as a means to escape the mediocrity that was the inevitable result of the era of machine reproduction.

I mention the escape from mediocrity because Kuma lets us know that the architectural object is not, whatever Corbusier might argue, for the people. It is the production of one-of-a-kind jewels, founded on capital. It is the Burj Dubai, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Phaeno Science Museum, the Gherkin, and a million other projects – today with no exclusion of function or program.

From the text, I can only conclude this: the architectural object is full of form, but empty of meaning; found in one location, but conceived independently of place; sexy without being in the least bit seductive.

metabolism: icons that are not objects

One of Kenzo Tange's early Metabolist (not yet Structuralist) projects, 1961.

From the point of view of its visionaries, Metabolism was a failure. Only a handful of buildings identified with the style were built, and (like the Archigram movement that followed it) the vast majority of projects remain to this day just dreams – the stuff of student reviews and utopian retrospectives.

Ironically, the key to the failure lies in the very basis of the movement: ephemerality (the Structuralists, who employed more or less the same ideals but without this quality were equally unsuccessful, but for other reasons). The Metabolists were trying to use architecture as a means to physically describe conditions of the metropolis that until then had remained intangible– though nonetheless extremely real– the ever-changing and ephemeral association of people, buildings, infrastructure, goods and information. The sum of these activities might be referred to as the ‘metropolitan flux’.

They recognised that the success of a city, and in broader terms of any species, was tied to how fast and with how much ease it could adapt to the needs of the moment, how capable it was of dealing with the metropolitan flux. They consequently proposed buildings that were comprised of adaptable modules bolted to permanent frames – this year the building is a tower block, but next year it might be a school or a hospital or a factory.

And there’s the rub: psychologically, people don’t like the idea that next year their home might be a factory. They like to feel that the structure they reside in is permanent. The Metabolists made the mistake of interpreting the city as being an essentially empty field filled with urban nomads. But the metropolitan flux is far more rooted than one might think: people still have a very strong sense of ‘mine’ and ‘thine’. The absurdity of this mentality is evidenced by the fact people are willing to buy McMansions with 25 year life-spans; it is after all not real permanence that the people seek, but the semblance of permanence.

Residential fluidity is thus impossible; public fluidity is not particularly welcomed – we like our civic spaces even more permanent than our domestic ones. Statues. Monuments. Important landmarks. All these form the basis of an urban fabric, and inform our relationship to it. The conceptual eternity of public space is an important factor the citizen's perception of belonging to a city.

Somewhat behind the times, I recently discovered that Kurokawa’s Nakagin Capsule Tower is slated for demolition. It is one of the few built examples of module/modular construction, and the building is an icon of its era. So what prevents it from being an ‘object’?

Its form, while wilful, it not arbitrary and has little in common with the form-finding exercises used to produce contemporary architecture (I am not only referring to the digital curves of Zaha, but quite equally the gracious profiles of Murcutt).

The form of a Metabolist structure is dictated largely by its module. And the way of thinking about the module is a product of an agenda about the future of society. Moreover, specular/speculative architecture is almost always positive, in that it describes a response to an existing social situation. In this respect the architectural object reinforces the social status quo, and belongs to the order of social commentary.

Conversely, the social arguments of a Metabolist building are normative – they describe how things ought to be, and in this respect Metabolist architecture proposes itself as a tool for change, and thus belongs to the order of social progress.

Capsule Tower: a powerful symbol of Japan's post-war cultural revival.

specular architecture

The Guggenheim effect – where specular/speculative architecture really began.

Today I am going to build upon the thoughts of Mark C. Taylor – who said that over the last century there has been a general correlation between forms of capitalism and architectural styles: Industrial capitalism had Modern architecture, Consumer capitalism had Postmodern architecture and Financial capitalism has (or had) Specular / Speculative architecture.

He was not the first to divide up capitalism into these three phases. At the end of the last millennium, the 'Great Man' of economics J.K Galbraith wrote extensively about the shift that was taking place. In one of his last works, entitled 'The Economics of Innocent Fraud', he pointed out how far we had come since the early days, when the economy was driven by actual capitalists – individuals with money who controlled the means of production.

Over time the cost of manufacturing goods fell, and subsequently so too did their value. Maintaining a dominant position in the market by simply controlling the production of something became increasingly difficult (and I am not really even referring to the activities that prompted legislation specifically targeted at breaking monopolies). So the impetus of the leading economies naturally shifted from the people who made the most to the people who sold the most. Above all were valued those individuals who could turn a superfluous luxury into a perceived necessity.

But with the global unification of markets, the digitisation of trading, and the new era of instant communications between financial institutions, it suddenly became possible to speculate in radically new ways. Money was capable of making lots more money, loans backed by securities that themselves were backed by other loans. And the market grew, and everyone won, and (almost) no one thought it would ever end.
And so when Fannie Mae went A-over-T, and kicked off all this business, it came as a bit of a shock.

So I think Taylor is drawing a fair, even predictable, comparison between architectural styles and the economic factors that produced them: the machine and industrial aesthetic of Modernism stemming from the factories and silos; the cultural critiques and pastiche styles of Postmodernism likewise finding their root in an increasingly global society absolutely saturated by the advertisement.

The real goal of this blog is to attempt to capture an epochal philosophy before the relentless wave of progress wipes it from our minds: a time that really began in the late 70's – before I was even born – and may still not have finished, but whose peak was undeniably between the collapse of the Towers and the collapse of the Sub-Prime.

The reasons for wanting to capture this essence are manifold: architecture is my profession, and it was treated as a bitch: the speculative scapegoat. That smarts. A profession that at the time was becoming increasingly image-based, and therefore itself increasingly speculative, began to be manipulated by the financial world – as an agent of financial speculation. How many luxury apartment blocks did architects really think the world needed? But need didn't come into it. Architecture had imploded into itself, there was no moral element, simply a quest to find a new look, and a look to sell more than the competition. And this quest essentially produced the same types of stylistic dead ends that were seen at the beginning of the 20th century (art nouveau, Gaudi, Hunterwasser, and so on).

Zaha is a prime example, though she still tends to divide opinions. But I think it is fairly safe to say that her time has come and gone. She is no longer (if she ever was) at the forefront of architectural discussion. It is nonetheless undeniable that she was an architect that rose to prominence not for actually constructing anything, but simply threatening to construct anything. Her powerfully iconic (but ultimately meaningless) forms epitomise this 'object' architecture – an architecture unrelated to humanity except by the coincidence that it was us that produced it. Always seen from a bird's eye view, it is an architecture of visual appeal (specular) and conjectural possibilities (speculative).

For the next month or so Millennium People is going to tackle the meaning of the architectural 'object', and its relevance to the future of architecture (the discussion will be mainly prospective rather than retrospective).
In particular the focus will be in the fields associated with the blog: psychogeography, landscape and the city.