A call to arms

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Comment by Peter Adlard on March 11, 2010 at 9:22pm

Re 'A call to Arms' I've been having the same discussion via a series of extended emails with a learned colleague. There's an urgent need for the practice of architecture to be identified/described as opposed to the technology of architecture, for the values of great architecture to be upheld, and for achitects to identify a higher road that they can travel after ten years of crass commercialism has watered our profession down and reduced us to be creators of semi-conscious crap. We've abandoned the hard-learned lessons of history - of the languages of architecture, even those languages that are only recently described - and we're floundering at the mercy of bureaucrats who's appreciation of their environment is limited to the straight black margins of their designated performance criteria.

Again, is it time for a counter-culture to lead us away from the doldrums?

Comment by Peter Adlard on March 11, 2010 at 9:13pm

Sarah, I hear Phillip Newmarch when he says that clients build buildings - we celebrate the patrons nowadays and not the architects (perhaps that's a function of the political climate - we don't celebrate people but push them down, subvert them with organsiations, cultures and agendas). But (pardon the grammar) I hear your argument as well - not the one you write about, but the one your defense and vigour make - that architects have the traiining to champion design above conformity. It's very hard to remember at times, when even a brick wall seems beyond the purse of the client, but essential. I believe we're in for a rough ride institutionally in the near future, when architects are going to have to become public professors of the tennets of good architecture, if only to survive (some of us are already fighting that battle tooth and nail),a nd that should drive home to us what we believe in as we wade in. An informed public is essential. Top Billing and All Access aren't doing anybody any favours, and certainly the prevalent culture in our media is kitch and uninformed. Time for a counter-culture to develop?

Comment by Edmund Hall on November 6, 2009 at 4:01pm

The November/December 2008 SAIA Architecture magazine special issue opens with a paper by Dr Nicolas Coetzer exploring the 'design pedagogy of the Bartlett School of Architecture " and an "essentialised UCT model"
You read and reflect on the paper and decide for yourself if or how we are educated influences the result.

Comment by Edmund Hall on October 23, 2009 at 3:25pm

Unaccustomed as i am to academic "archibabble & specificiese" i am delighted to read Sarah's and Paul's exchange as it has neither, is more real and can be read & easily understood.

Comment by Silent Bee on August 1, 2009 at 1:06pm

Posted a link to this blog on my blog -- http://yourarchitectureisbad.wordpress.com

Comment by Lisa Taylor on July 15, 2009 at 2:27pm

Hi Sarah
Just read your article in Leading Architecture "Culture of display, culture of concealment" Not sure if anyone is aware, according to Joburg bylaws we cannot have pavement shops/cafes. This is a bylaw created by Paul Kruger as he did not want the “decadent culture of Europe”
As to the remainder of the article I cannot agree more. In the Authors’ Preface of Johannesburg Style. Clive Chipkins mentions a well heeled bus passenger saying Johannesburg has not style! I also love Herman Charles Bosman’s “every citizen was imbued with the one laudable desire of making all the money he could in the shortest possible time” That’s Joburg!
Love the pink Paul Smith building – a vast improvement on the fake Georgian look.

Comment by Sarah Calburn on April 7, 2009 at 2:11pm

Hi Philip! Glad you added a cutting paragraph - thanks. Cutting is good and desirable and what I wanted.. To be excoriated back. To get some discussion going. .So far no one has breathed a word... ..was beginning to wonder if anyone thinks at all ? (joking).. had a look at your painting walls post - nice, fab pics - of course i wonder slightly why you referred me to it apart from causing me to say: - yes - nice.. - The thing is that i would of course suddenly find myself wanting to say most urgently that murals have been co-opted - certainly in joburg - as the easiest and most painless way of contributing what passes for 'public art' in this town -- wallpapering over the social cracks I am tempted to say... (Public) art reduced to (and misconstrued as) (wall) decoration. Usually mosaic. Argh. The (defensive) wall being our most successful and unchallenging (and deeply divisive) spatial tactic. Well - not tempted. Am saying. What is interesting is when one starts to think about traditional murals as complex cultural signifiers and not simply decoration - which becomes therefore open to surface (mis)appropriation - which the village and township african murals could not, I don't think, be happily or satisfactorily reduced to...anyway. And its insane that CT has outlawed graffiti. Well - another blow to freedom of expression, and participation in one's city.

Let me talk to what you have written: In relation to your para 1 - I don't accept, ever, that it's clients who build things. Clients pay for our expertise in order to build things. Clients come to architects in order to build things. It is up to us to expand and extrapolate upon the client's generally meagre and un-fully-imagined architectural desire. I say this: always give the client MORE than they hoped for, MORE than they bargained for, MORE than they could ever imagine. And do this within the budget. If you can't meet the budget (which is almost always based on the client's un-informed knowledge of building costs and bulging accommodation brief), then your only option is to expand the client's desire to accomodate the potential of the project. i.e. your duty becomes that of inspiration, alongside education into architecture. Now - we could argue inspiration: It is to be hoped that your inspiration is not simply formal and expensive and shallow. Your inspiration should be ground breaking, contributive, innovative, critical, challenging...both to local culture, and to global culture. Otherwise the client could just get on with it and design and build the damn thing himself. Generally I can see no 'architecture' in most commercial work. It looks, in fact, as if the client HAS built it himself - out of mal-formed appropriations, copies of yesteryear, copies of next year, damaged and dog-eared photocopies of other places... As far as I can make out, architects have lost that imperative to extend imagination, to extend possibility, to extend challenge - have - more accurately - abrogated it in the interests of easy pickings. Clients are there to be extended, I believe. At least that is always what I try for. My motto has been for a while: Never give the client what they want. If they knew what they wanted, they wouldn't need an architect. I am not as poor as a churchmouse. And I am not out of work. I finance my life through my work. We can change it - we, and only we.We are the holders of a very particular kind of knowledge. Our duty is to use and extend that knowledge. To treat our profession as research, as a field of experimentation.

Para 2: I think architects did use to have that imperative. What do we study in the history of architecture? We study the architects and the artists, and if you're getting a good education, you study them in the context of their patrons and the prevailing politic. The developers were the patrons. These patrons were willing to be extended, and the more extended, the more out there, the better they looked. Medicis?? I come back to paragraph 1. The role of developers needs to be subverted - recast as patrons, as enablers - and it's only us who can do it. The following sentence is by Jean Pierre de la Porte from some recent correspondence with me regarding possible futures for south arican architecture: "(If) The avant-garde legitimised itself as more than a sect of advanced taste and style by undertaking research, by institutionalising itself as an experiment (science institutionalised its subversiveness this way in the 17c and it still rocks the citadel) a huge public debate is launched and fuelled so that stupidity and greed can no longer be passed off as utility and public interest. Politicians become afraid of flying in the face of a developed architectural public opinion, developers fear an informed consumer." Developers FEAR AN INFORMED CONSUMER. I like it.We are here cast as the direct consumer of the developer, are we? Interesting. And but. We are accountable. We have responsibility. We become empowered again, as architects, as clients, as consumers.
Further on patrons: If our city managers could start to see themselves as "urban curators", we start to breed a different scenario, where architecture is encouraged - where experiment and imagination is encouraged. Please refer to Melbourne in this regard, and specifically Leon van Schaik. A totally ground breaking city strategy has come into being - and don't you think we need this in our over burdened, iunder-engaged and poverty stricken cities - povery stricken in all senses. Public space. Public engagement. Spatial engagement. Enough with the walls and the walled off minds. Defend yourselves, at all costs. Paint that wall. (OK, OK, couldn't resist!)
Further: I don't care what the materials. This kind of thinking has got nothing whatsoever to do with expensive material. You can reconfigure a chicken coop into a computer terminal. Innovation, extension of mind, imagination is all I care about.You can do these in corrugated iron, in anything at all. Witness your Painting Walls page.

Oh God. Paragraph 3: Can I extend your sentence to say that architecture is not only the way people experience their buildings, it is the frame for the way in which people experience their lives, themselves? It is, whether people realise it or not, the spatial framework / enclosure in which they think their thoughts...live their lives... Would you not, therefore, have to say, then, that architecture is capable of contributing to the shaping of those thoughts? Think about your memories: Do you remember the physical space of those memories as much as you remember the feeling, and the sounds, the tastes which accrete around those memories? I wonder how your memories might be influenced or changed by the spaces in which those memories were formed? I agree that these understandings are highly diverse and complex. Our minds are the same: highly diverse and complex. We are human. What we all share, however, is the experience of the human body in space. This renders us capable of quite a lot of understanding of eachother, even if only from this perspective. I hope that you are not advocating some sort of PC line. Which would function as an excuse. Are you?

Architecture is a spatial language. It translates concept (all kinds of concept) into spatial form. This is a highly specialized language which is particular and specialized through all the facets of architectural education. Informal architectures are crucial and not to be discounted, as they stem from direct translation with whatever means come to had.. Which, so often, they are - discounted. Please have a look at my Rapid Thought Transport series, particularly the Diepsloot design workshop, which you might be interested to participate in?

Time to be an architect.

Swish? Thats not what I try for, I don't think. I am interested in everything. Style is the last of my worries. This is the best definition of style I have ever read: written by the closest thing I have to a hero, the philosopher Gilles Deleuze: "Style is a linked series of postures". It is, in the end, a summarising, a re-cognition. It is not a generator.

Whew.

Comment by phillip newmarch on April 7, 2009 at 1:18am

May I reply to your "particularly excoriating paragraph" with this "extremely cutting" one? (pardon me for judging my own work)

I think I know several architects who are indeed "active makers and thinkers and challengers of our rapidly weakening urban environments". But either they have other jobs, or they're as poor as churchmice.
We do have to accept that it is clients who build things, not architects. Our cities are what they are because that 's the way our society is. Sure, we can change it. Fifty years of hard work did bump it up a step or two, but it is pretty stubborn.

Have architects "handed over their historic prerogative as “urban visionaries” to developers and urban managers", or have they just lost the battle? Did they ever really have that prerogative, or is it that they like to see it that way? Either you live in the wealthy world and do stuff with glass and stainless steel, or you have see what you can do with second-hand corrugated iron.

Is "Architecture is a highly specialized spatial language"? I would have said it is simply the way people understand their buildings, and that is something we know very little about. I think it is not "highly specialized" but rather 'highly diverse' and complex. Our lives and atitudes frame architecture , rather than the other way round. You won't change the world by putting it in a dfferent box.

I looked at your website, and I'll grant you it looks very swish. But have a look at the Painting Walls blog. Where is the real invention?