We have no choice but to break from the past, but the danger that I see, which is even greater than inaction, is movement in the wrong direction. If we change only for the sake of change towards some blind faith in “progress” then we once again trade the sword for the gun for the atom bomb...The only reference point that we have is the past, so to forget about it is to stumble blindly into the future.
I went to a steel fabricator a while back. While most of the students on the trip were memorized by all the cool robotic welders, I was stuck on a series of photos on the wall. One from the 50's with 100 workers one from the 70's, the 90's, and finally 2010. Each picture had less and less workers and more and more machines until the most recent- where there were only about 8 people. Sure machines are more efficient and more reliable (they don't need heath insurance an all), but is this better. It's a slippery slope- we haven't even tapped into the potential of quantum computing and nano technology yet...
If we could solve problems with simple and well established solutions than why reinvent the wheel. I don't fuck around with my grandma's meatball recipe...it's good so I keep it. When I see Dubai I ask why, and when I see Sanaa Yemen I ask why not (without all the crazy oppressive stuff of course). We do not have to copy the past, but there is a hell of alot to learn from. The most progressive thing to say may be to say “fuck progress.”
Just wanted to add to that....The friggin smart phone did not make my life any "better." Video games made kids into lazy zombies, and the internet takes up at least 4 hours a day of my life....Damn I sound like an old man but I'm only 32.....
1. reactionary traditionalists
2. a large middle ground of moderates (embodied in the OP)
3. reactionary progressives
Speaking for item 3, they see risk as necessity. Progress is not a smooth process. One has to ignore history at times. A more challenging discussion would be on the future, with little emphasis on "the way things were".
Instead, there's more talk of how we can solve problems in the present without being so derivative of past or existing tactics. Not for the sake of novelty, but because presentness is always changing.
not sure If I agree with those categories for one main reason- the word "progress." It all depends on how this is defined. Being open to change and believing in progress are 2 different things. I would say that living in an adobe hut and growing your own food is more radical than living in twisted tower with a green roof. It is more radical because it is further from the status quo of the present. What is progress? I may define it as gaining more consciousness. Someone else may define it as advancing technology or growing the economy...If I live bymy definition of it, then I am being a reactionary progressive since progress is a subjective term.
That's pretty interesting,
Im tempted to put the adobe hut in category 1. But If you were to lead an experimental lifestyle (its ok if its somewhat isolated) that was pursuing new things, than it could more likely fall into category 3
These days the twisted tower with a green roof is definitely in category 2.
the public is not against wal-mart for instance ( because the shed is representative of a modern cornucopia of some sort ? ). in same way the public is also stubbornly not against car-dependent housing in american suburbs; nor are they against strip malls and all the rest of the detritus of modern life. the public has not chosen paris, except in paris (and that was not a pubic choice but the result of dictatorship). everywhere else its the complete opposite. more to the point, mcdonalds will not improve with a classical facade so am not sure what role style is going to play if we decide to turn this into a discussion about populism.
You're clearly forgetting and casually ignoring generational struggles in this. If Gen-Y and the Millenials had to choose between owning a car and having internet and or a cellphone, ~two-thirds of them would choose the internet.
Skin-deep architecture is not particularly an issue. It's that many different building uses are largely incompatible with suburbanism and with urbanism.
A recent article point out how little planning and architectural consideration is giving to industrial areas and undesirable commercial services— how many new urbanist and neotraditional planning proposals have even included a strip club, a concrete plant or even an automotive repair shop?
And in these urban planning schemes, from Foster + Partners to West 8, is there ever any consideration for the turning radius of a semi-truck or green belts for rail switching yards? Do transects exist for smokestack height? How about neighborhood plans that discourage drunk driving by removing restrictions on liquor licenses?
Planning and architecture largely ignore [legal] filth and debauchery— if architecture and planning are about meeting needs, how come so few projects deal directly with one of mankind's biggest desires?
The desire to fuck.
That desire largely requires traditional urbanism either directly or indirectly— whether you're meeting your potential fuckee at a suburban megachurch or a seedy downtown discotheque, they both require scalable high-density infrastructure capable of handling hundreds to thousands of people.
And when you have hundreds to thousands of people congregating in any one place, you create business— whether that business is buying food or drinks, looking to fuck or making new social, personal or business, relationships to produce even more business that will enable you to eat and fuck.
Architecture is about fucking.
Twentieth-century planning and architecture is largely devoid of fucking.
This has been a very interesting discussion, but it seems to be generating a bit more heat than light. If I may re-frame a bit, I think the fundamental issue here is one of individual and cultural values, and where the creation of architecture fits in respect to those values.
"Classical" architecture (broadly speaking) was historically very much organic to the cultures that created it. It expressed, in a very tangible and direct way, how European cultures saw the world and their place in it. Walk through old Vienna, and you could directly experience how the Austro-Hungarian Empire saw itself at the end of the 19th Century. It's a compelling vision: one of a humane and orderly world in which the values of European Monarchical Christendom reached an apogee. I don't blame Rob Krier for admiring it and seeking to emulate it. It was beautiful and extraordinary. So too for many of the pre-war political and cultural capitals of Europe.
But they are corpses. The cultures from which they grew are essentially dead. Whether by suicide or murder, World War I and the Progressive Era killed them all. World War II, and the combined American-Soviet conquest of Europe, merely buried them. Those cultures are gone. Apart from a shared language, there is essentially no cultural continuity between the Vienna of 1912 and the Vienna of 2012. Even less between the Venice of 1612 and the Venice of today. Modern London isn't even recognizably English in any pre-modern sense, except only in the ruins and embalmed cadavers of the past. Universalism, relentless and remorseless, conquered and disposed of them all, leaving monuments like the Millenium Dome in their place.
And this is really what we need to be talking about: architecture is the reification of culture. If our architecture is not satisfying our souls, why not? If it isn't properly expressing our culture and shared values and treasured relationships among us, then we can do better. But what if our architecture IS expressing and embodying those values very well, and yet is still inhumane and fails to satisfy? Then we have a much bigger problem.
In recent years, it's becoming more obvious that the issue architects must grapple with is the latter, not the former. The culture of Modern Universalism is bankrupt and inhumane. This doesn't mean that we need to drag out the corpses of dead cultures and re-animate them in a doomed effort to restore past glories. Classicism in modern practice is just the re-animation of zombies, and you can tell just by looking at them that the products of such historicism fall square in the Uncanny Valley. They are dead. Remember them fondly, respect them, learn from their embodied wisdom, but let them lie.
The cultures of the past may have been flawed and ultimately destroyed by those flaws, but they knew who they were and what was important to them. Their architecture reflects that in very tangible ways. For us, who live in an era of decadent, mass-produced, Orwellian mendacity about everything our culture is or aspires to be, that clarity of the past is often attractive. But that's a cognitive trap. Don't fall into it.
What we need something new, but not just new for newness-sake. That's the opposite cognitive trap: the Nietszchean apotheosis of originality now so prevalent in the architectural profession as pure self-indulgence. Just because it's original doesn't make it good. Just becaues it hasn't been done before doesn't mean it should be done. Just because it doesn't make any sense doesn't make it profound.
We need something better, confident in its cultural foundation, intelligible, elevating the spirit, more humane, true to our nature as we are: beautiful and satisfying and uplifting and nurturing. And at the same time, we need a re-invigorated culture that is not based in the destructive fantasies and myopic quantifications of utopian Universalism and its myriad corrupt offshoots. No matter how hard we work at it, if the underlying cultural and individual values we seek to express and reify in our attempts to rehumanize architecture are foolish, banal, even self-destructive, then we will fail.
So start with what's important - really important, not just what you've heard on TV or in a classroom or an NYT op-ed ought to be important - and work your way out from there. Do that, and any discussion of style, or originality, or historicism becomes entirely moot.
And this is really what we need to be talking about: architecture is the reification of culture. If our architecture is not satisfying our souls, why not? If it isn't properly expressing our culture and shared values and treasured relationships among us, then we can do better. But what if our architecture IS expressing and embodying those values very well, and yet is still inhumane and fails to satisfy? Then we have a much bigger problem.
But.....Our culture is like an addict in denial quickly approaching an inevitable death, if we are a good friend we will stop enabling it and help it address its problems. If the problems are aproaching faster than the ability of the culture to exert their will on solving them, then we need to act against their will.
This senario is a huge problem and puts architects and urbanists in an impossible position that we never have been in before. For the first time ever we need to defy a fundamental law of architecture that was illustrated by Mies- “Architecture is the will of the epoch translated into space.” well the will of the epoch is in direct conflict with a more powerful will -the will of nature. Global warming, resource depletion, water scarcity, etc..etc... will destroy us whether the popluar culture believes it or not. This reminds me of the tortoise and the hare...I agree that slow and steady usually wins the race, but if there is a fire appraoching faster than the tortoise can move, well then we get roasted tortoise. We need to be careful though that we don't create new problems by a blind faith in progress and technology.
So yes, we need to change and should not be conservative, but I think many of these problems can be solved by adopting old ideas, and yes exploring new ones too. Farmers markets are making a come back...that's one of the oldest ideas. Rainwater harvesting is really old. Passive heating and cooling is really old, infact ecological urbanism is really old take a look at the Chinampas in Tenochtitlan- this could easily fit into Mostafavi's book. We need to do something better and bigger and quick, but if the solution can be found in history than we should adopt it. This is not to say everything in history is relevant to the present, but if we completely cut ourselves off, we lose thousands of years of knowledge at a time when we need all we can get.
My colleague Steve Mouzon has formulated a very sensible approach to sustainability based upon traditional principles, called the Original Green. His premise is that before we became so dependent on petrochemical energies, before what he calls "the Thermostat Age", people had no choice but to build buildings and cities that we're inherently sustainable. He maintains that there is an accumulated wisdom in the DNA of traditional architecture and urbanism that is deeper and broader than high-tech green approaches ("gizmo green"). He's not arguing against technological approaches, but he argues that gizmo-green is a subset of the Original Green, and that systems that rely on synthetic materials, which require petrochemical energy input to produce, will be less and less viable as oil supplies wain.
This kind of plain-spoken sustainability is just what you were talking about in your last paragraph. The most influential of his premises for me has been the notion that for architecture to be sustainable, it must be lovable.
EKE,
what is so lovable,durable, sustainable about masonry clad buildings? Tossing a clay brick into a coal-powered kiln, then firing it up to 2,000˚F, emits about 1.3 pounds of carbon dioxide.
Old solutions to new problems can be ok, but that website is beyond unimaginative
it used to be that cities were deathtraps and farmhouses were often not much better than caves. we should be careful of sanitised versions of the past. those examples in the website look nice but lets remember when many of those places were built the sewage was the street and people carried leather umbrellas around because homeowners would throw sewage from their windows. they work now because of continual upgrades and improvements not because of some embedded superior knowledge that we have allowed to lapse. most of us would be appalled to live in them as they were intended.
speaking of shit and beauty, the louvre's hall of mirrors was used as an open public toilet so visitors to the royals needed to be careful of shit and piss on the floors of the gold-walled palace. that was the reality all over. all this talk of ages of wisdom is really questionable.
storing water is brilliant. all the other technologies of conservation are also a good idea, and of community building too. but if we look to the past it is useful to be objective about what we are really looking at and not just fill in the images with what we want the world to be today.
Paulie-
How much carbon dioxide production do you suppose it takes to create miles of extruded aluminum shapes, metal cladding, plastic moisture barriers, etc?
too much, I share your critique of those material systems, but I'm skeptical of green-washed traditionalism. Now I know you didnt read the article because it talks about using microorganisms to grow materials. Its something on the technical side which transcends aesthetization attempts, but could be used for design effect.
I honestly think tradition and classicism will be here forever. And that website does a good job of proving that.
this thread is still going? if there ever was a reason to legitimize lack of imagination it's the regurgitation of classicism and tradition. The gathering of collective knowledge is an excuse to stagnate in the middle ground heading to nowhere.
Comparing the contemporary to microwaves is utterly biased as well. A better analogy would be computers and what they have done for our industry.
Case in point, don't copy, don't try to be like me. This thread is a sneaky one, masquerading as something else while it preaches Leon Krier.
hi Paulie-
I did read your article. Very interesting. I think a technology like that could be an incredible resource in the future, and nothing that I'm advocating would preclude it.
I don't agree that approaches such as Original Green are "green washed traditionalism". On the contrary, it is the very opposite of green-washing. It's a bedrock, foundational sustainability based on non-technological principles. What could be more fundamental than that?
what is so lovable,durable, sustainable about masonry clad buildings? Tossing a clay brick into a coal-powered kiln, then firing it up to 2,000˚F, emits about 1.3 pounds of carbon dioxide.
aluminum's embodied energy is about 200x more than brick - steel is more, glass is more, plastic is more than both steel and glass... concrete is less (but the process in creating it is pretty onerous). but if we're splitting hairs, the least offensive materials are "sustainable" wood products.
masonry does have a pretty lousy R value, though, but it does work well as a heat sink...
Paulie - that seems pretty interesting - although you'd have to be careful about the aggregate... my guess is that forms would be created in a similar way to concrete - or maybe like gourd training?
Modern indoor plumbing becomes a posibility in NYC and Chicago in 1860's. First steel skyscrapers follow 10 years later. Framework for modernism was born.
Before this, life expectancy was 45, and everyone eventually died from a horrible disease.
Lack of human scale in modern architecture can be attributed to another invention, which is the automobile.
Classic architecture doesn't exist any more. The skilled labor is gone. Revisionists and historic romantics are reinvisioning a mirage that never truly existed.
"Classic architecture doesn't exist any more. The skilled labor is gone."
I know you would like this to be true, because it fits nicely with your futurist narrative, but it's not.
toasteroven,EKE
Yes its developing research, but I don't think they used traditional architecture as a foundation or basis, or aluminum for that matter.
While the process could be used to create traditionally inspired buildings, I really think that would betray the method of production and limit new complimentary design endeavors.
Fundamentally, man can be driven by a desire to create, not just re-create. It stems from a discomfort with the present, the past, etc. Not to take too much away from traditionalism, I'm always impressed by its resilience.
paulie - I didn't say anything about sticking it in fypon and making Corinthian columns out of it.
What is bothering me is people's interpretation of classicism and tradtionalism. My take is that classicism is about ideal geometries based on human scales, chiaroscuro, sculptural volumes, the problems of symmetry and balance, etc... (things you find in a lot of architects' work - even today)... and traditionalism is about using forms and materials and construction methods that have been adapted to a particular climate and culture (which actually still exists in many parts of the western world - and many contemporary architects working outside the west employ in their work). I think people are confusing this with romantic facade-centric neo-classicism and faux-traditional shit made out of vinyl - which I hope EKE doesn't do. This discussion should be about form and tectonics, craftsmanship, and an appreciation of older buildings and urban spaces. I think we're getting tripped up on semantics.
What I really don't understand is why people react so strongly against something that preserves a certain character and scale within a neighborhood (even though it's interior is thoroughly modern, and it's exterior only mimics form and utilizes similar materials) - and yet they like these overly aggressive, cynical, and disenfranchising buildings like Morphosis' cooper union building, or OMA's seattle library.
I think the real problem is that we haven't figured out how to humanize large "modern" spaces.
why does the symbol of abundance look like this when everything else looks like that? I think this is relevant to the discussion...not sure how... Maybe it exposes the public mindset of classical vs. new in some way?
I saw the Hunger Games. I'd say that the cornucopia is a classic NewSpeak image. A classical symbol of abundance that's been deconstructed into its metaphysical opposite: the place where items are dangled in front of contestants in a brutal game, like bait, to lure them into danger for the enjoyment of a voyeuristic elite. How perfect that it should look like the latest faceted parametric lump. :)
Barragan, Alto, Ando, Zumthor, etc... All found inspiration in history and tradition and still did innovative work, and of course Kahn as toaster pointed out. I think some people are taking all of this too literal.
Architecture evolves. This is a process of trial and era from generation to generation. All some of us are saying is that we build on that and not just keep starting over from scratch. Like EKE said, architecture has a DNA.
"All cities are geological. You can’t take three steps without encountering ghosts bearing all the prestige of their legends. We move within a closed landscape whose landmarks constantly draw us toward the past. Certain shifting angles, certain receding perspectives, allow us to glimpse original conceptions of space, but this vision remains fragmentary. It must be sought in the magical locales of fairy tales and surrealist writings: castles, endless walls, little forgotten bars, mammoth caverns, casino mirrors.
These dated images retain a small catalyzing power, but it is almost impossible to use them in a symbolic urbanism without rejuvenating them by giving them a new meaning. There was a certain charm in horses born from the sea or magical dwarves dressed in gold, but they are in no way adapted to the demands of modern life. For we are in the twentieth century, even if few people are aware of it. Our imaginations, haunted by the old archetypes, have remained far behind the sophistication of the machines. The various attempts to integrate modern science into new myths remain inadequate. Meanwhile abstraction has invaded all the arts, contemporary architecture in particular. Pure plasticity, inanimate and storyless, soothes the eye. Elsewhere other fragmentary beauties can be found — while the promised land of new syntheses continually recedes into the distance. Everyone wavers between the emotionally still-alive past and the already dead future."
toast: "My take is that classicism is about ideal geometries based on human scales..."
Classicism never had to deal with gas engine scale. If it did, it would look more like this:
In illustration above, both buildings are miserable failures due to access requirements, urban detachment, etc... It's just that the one on the right looks spectacularly pathetic.
I wonder if that's really classicism- more likely pastiche - because elements are supposed to scale up the larger the building gets... although - come to think of it, mies solved that problem by abstracting the order and turning the entire building into a column - I think the seagram building is doric.
In my opinion, the NCAS report on the Gehry Eisenhower Memorial is a sadly mixed bag, with some genuine critique blended with lots of hysterical hyperbole and unfortunate ad hominem attacks on Gehry and his team. I am disturbed by their report, because the legitimate points in opposition to the Gehry proposal have been broadly overshadowed by the distraction of the hysterical stuff and the overwrought tone.
Martin Pedersen's Metropolis piece is also filled with ad hominem, unfortunately. Far from "peeling back the drapes", the only substantive point of his brief essay is that the NCAS is dominated by people with conservative political affiliations, as if this disqualifies their critique, ipso facto.
Even if that were a valid point, the problem is that it's not at all clear that the NCAS is dominated by people with conservative political affiliations. I followed Pedersen's link to the NCAS website, and looked at their "Leadership" page. Out of ten Board of Directors members listed, only two were affiliated with any the organizations Petersen lists as presumably-offensive conservative groups. Out of 27 total persons listed on the site, only six of them were listed as affiliated with those organizations. Out of hundreds of listed affiliations.
This kind of stuff is really silly, on both sides of the debate. I know lots of traditional architects who are political leftists. And I know lots of modernist architects who are rightists politically (my partner in our office, as a matter of fact).
In my opinion should get back to talking about what is best for Washington DC.
Response to Donna, re: Traditional Architecture
We have no choice but to break from the past, but the danger that I see, which is even greater than inaction, is movement in the wrong direction. If we change only for the sake of change towards some blind faith in “progress” then we once again trade the sword for the gun for the atom bomb...The only reference point that we have is the past, so to forget about it is to stumble blindly into the future.
I went to a steel fabricator a while back. While most of the students on the trip were memorized by all the cool robotic welders, I was stuck on a series of photos on the wall. One from the 50's with 100 workers one from the 70's, the 90's, and finally 2010. Each picture had less and less workers and more and more machines until the most recent- where there were only about 8 people. Sure machines are more efficient and more reliable (they don't need heath insurance an all), but is this better. It's a slippery slope- we haven't even tapped into the potential of quantum computing and nano technology yet...
If we could solve problems with simple and well established solutions than why reinvent the wheel. I don't fuck around with my grandma's meatball recipe...it's good so I keep it. When I see Dubai I ask why, and when I see Sanaa Yemen I ask why not (without all the crazy oppressive stuff of course). We do not have to copy the past, but there is a hell of alot to learn from. The most progressive thing to say may be to say “fuck progress.”
Damn can't edit....
Just wanted to add to that....The friggin smart phone did not make my life any "better." Video games made kids into lazy zombies, and the internet takes up at least 4 hours a day of my life....Damn I sound like an old man but I'm only 32.....
There appears to be a few categories:
1. reactionary traditionalists
2. a large middle ground of moderates (embodied in the OP)
3. reactionary progressives
Speaking for item 3, they see risk as necessity. Progress is not a smooth process. One has to ignore history at times. A more challenging discussion would be on the future, with little emphasis on "the way things were".
Instead, there's more talk of how we can solve problems in the present without being so derivative of past or existing tactics. Not for the sake of novelty, but because presentness is always changing.
This is an old and tired debate.
not sure If I agree with those categories for one main reason- the word "progress." It all depends on how this is defined. Being open to change and believing in progress are 2 different things. I would say that living in an adobe hut and growing your own food is more radical than living in twisted tower with a green roof. It is more radical because it is further from the status quo of the present. What is progress? I may define it as gaining more consciousness. Someone else may define it as advancing technology or growing the economy...If I live bymy definition of it, then I am being a reactionary progressive since progress is a subjective term.
That's pretty interesting,
Im tempted to put the adobe hut in category 1. But If you were to lead an experimental lifestyle (its ok if its somewhat isolated) that was pursuing new things, than it could more likely fall into category 3
These days the twisted tower with a green roof is definitely in category 2.
thats true...
the public is not against wal-mart for instance ( because the shed is representative of a modern cornucopia of some sort ? ). in same way the public is also stubbornly not against car-dependent housing in american suburbs; nor are they against strip malls and all the rest of the detritus of modern life. the public has not chosen paris, except in paris (and that was not a pubic choice but the result of dictatorship). everywhere else its the complete opposite. more to the point, mcdonalds will not improve with a classical facade so am not sure what role style is going to play if we decide to turn this into a discussion about populism.
You're clearly forgetting and casually ignoring generational struggles in this. If Gen-Y and the Millenials had to choose between owning a car and having internet and or a cellphone, ~two-thirds of them would choose the internet.
Skin-deep architecture is not particularly an issue. It's that many different building uses are largely incompatible with suburbanism and with urbanism.
A recent article point out how little planning and architectural consideration is giving to industrial areas and undesirable commercial services— how many new urbanist and neotraditional planning proposals have even included a strip club, a concrete plant or even an automotive repair shop?
And in these urban planning schemes, from Foster + Partners to West 8, is there ever any consideration for the turning radius of a semi-truck or green belts for rail switching yards? Do transects exist for smokestack height? How about neighborhood plans that discourage drunk driving by removing restrictions on liquor licenses?
Planning and architecture largely ignore [legal] filth and debauchery— if architecture and planning are about meeting needs, how come so few projects deal directly with one of mankind's biggest desires?
The desire to fuck.
That desire largely requires traditional urbanism either directly or indirectly— whether you're meeting your potential fuckee at a suburban megachurch or a seedy downtown discotheque, they both require scalable high-density infrastructure capable of handling hundreds to thousands of people.
And when you have hundreds to thousands of people congregating in any one place, you create business— whether that business is buying food or drinks, looking to fuck or making new social, personal or business, relationships to produce even more business that will enable you to eat and fuck.
Architecture is about fucking.
Twentieth-century planning and architecture is largely devoid of fucking.
I have found that most planning commisions and planning departments, are against fucking.
related - interesting recent article in design observer about the current state of architectural education.
This has been a very interesting discussion, but it seems to be generating a bit more heat than light. If I may re-frame a bit, I think the fundamental issue here is one of individual and cultural values, and where the creation of architecture fits in respect to those values.
"Classical" architecture (broadly speaking) was historically very much organic to the cultures that created it. It expressed, in a very tangible and direct way, how European cultures saw the world and their place in it. Walk through old Vienna, and you could directly experience how the Austro-Hungarian Empire saw itself at the end of the 19th Century. It's a compelling vision: one of a humane and orderly world in which the values of European Monarchical Christendom reached an apogee. I don't blame Rob Krier for admiring it and seeking to emulate it. It was beautiful and extraordinary. So too for many of the pre-war political and cultural capitals of Europe.
But they are corpses. The cultures from which they grew are essentially dead. Whether by suicide or murder, World War I and the Progressive Era killed them all. World War II, and the combined American-Soviet conquest of Europe, merely buried them. Those cultures are gone. Apart from a shared language, there is essentially no cultural continuity between the Vienna of 1912 and the Vienna of 2012. Even less between the Venice of 1612 and the Venice of today. Modern London isn't even recognizably English in any pre-modern sense, except only in the ruins and embalmed cadavers of the past. Universalism, relentless and remorseless, conquered and disposed of them all, leaving monuments like the Millenium Dome in their place.
And this is really what we need to be talking about: architecture is the reification of culture. If our architecture is not satisfying our souls, why not? If it isn't properly expressing our culture and shared values and treasured relationships among us, then we can do better. But what if our architecture IS expressing and embodying those values very well, and yet is still inhumane and fails to satisfy? Then we have a much bigger problem.
In recent years, it's becoming more obvious that the issue architects must grapple with is the latter, not the former. The culture of Modern Universalism is bankrupt and inhumane. This doesn't mean that we need to drag out the corpses of dead cultures and re-animate them in a doomed effort to restore past glories. Classicism in modern practice is just the re-animation of zombies, and you can tell just by looking at them that the products of such historicism fall square in the Uncanny Valley. They are dead. Remember them fondly, respect them, learn from their embodied wisdom, but let them lie.
The cultures of the past may have been flawed and ultimately destroyed by those flaws, but they knew who they were and what was important to them. Their architecture reflects that in very tangible ways. For us, who live in an era of decadent, mass-produced, Orwellian mendacity about everything our culture is or aspires to be, that clarity of the past is often attractive. But that's a cognitive trap. Don't fall into it.
What we need something new, but not just new for newness-sake. That's the opposite cognitive trap: the Nietszchean apotheosis of originality now so prevalent in the architectural profession as pure self-indulgence. Just because it's original doesn't make it good. Just becaues it hasn't been done before doesn't mean it should be done. Just because it doesn't make any sense doesn't make it profound.
We need something better, confident in its cultural foundation, intelligible, elevating the spirit, more humane, true to our nature as we are: beautiful and satisfying and uplifting and nurturing. And at the same time, we need a re-invigorated culture that is not based in the destructive fantasies and myopic quantifications of utopian Universalism and its myriad corrupt offshoots. No matter how hard we work at it, if the underlying cultural and individual values we seek to express and reify in our attempts to rehumanize architecture are foolish, banal, even self-destructive, then we will fail.
So start with what's important - really important, not just what you've heard on TV or in a classroom or an NYT op-ed ought to be important - and work your way out from there. Do that, and any discussion of style, or originality, or historicism becomes entirely moot.
And this is really what we need to be talking about: architecture is the reification of culture. If our architecture is not satisfying our souls, why not? If it isn't properly expressing our culture and shared values and treasured relationships among us, then we can do better. But what if our architecture IS expressing and embodying those values very well, and yet is still inhumane and fails to satisfy? Then we have a much bigger problem.
Great point!!!
But.....Our culture is like an addict in denial quickly approaching an inevitable death, if we are a good friend we will stop enabling it and help it address its problems. If the problems are aproaching faster than the ability of the culture to exert their will on solving them, then we need to act against their will.
This senario is a huge problem and puts architects and urbanists in an impossible position that we never have been in before. For the first time ever we need to defy a fundamental law of architecture that was illustrated by Mies- “Architecture is the will of the epoch translated into space.” well the will of the epoch is in direct conflict with a more powerful will -the will of nature. Global warming, resource depletion, water scarcity, etc..etc... will destroy us whether the popluar culture believes it or not. This reminds me of the tortoise and the hare...I agree that slow and steady usually wins the race, but if there is a fire appraoching faster than the tortoise can move, well then we get roasted tortoise. We need to be careful though that we don't create new problems by a blind faith in progress and technology.
So yes, we need to change and should not be conservative, but I think many of these problems can be solved by adopting old ideas, and yes exploring new ones too. Farmers markets are making a come back...that's one of the oldest ideas. Rainwater harvesting is really old. Passive heating and cooling is really old, infact ecological urbanism is really old take a look at the Chinampas in Tenochtitlan- this could easily fit into Mostafavi's book. We need to do something better and bigger and quick, but if the solution can be found in history than we should adopt it. This is not to say everything in history is relevant to the present, but if we completely cut ourselves off, we lose thousands of years of knowledge at a time when we need all we can get.
jlarch-
My colleague Steve Mouzon has formulated a very sensible approach to sustainability based upon traditional principles, called the Original Green. His premise is that before we became so dependent on petrochemical energies, before what he calls "the Thermostat Age", people had no choice but to build buildings and cities that we're inherently sustainable. He maintains that there is an accumulated wisdom in the DNA of traditional architecture and urbanism that is deeper and broader than high-tech green approaches ("gizmo green"). He's not arguing against technological approaches, but he argues that gizmo-green is a subset of the Original Green, and that systems that rely on synthetic materials, which require petrochemical energy input to produce, will be less and less viable as oil supplies wain.
This kind of plain-spoken sustainability is just what you were talking about in your last paragraph. The most influential of his premises for me has been the notion that for architecture to be sustainable, it must be lovable.
http://www.originalgreen.org/
EKE,
what is so lovable,durable, sustainable about masonry clad buildings? Tossing a clay brick into a coal-powered kiln, then firing it up to 2,000˚F, emits about 1.3 pounds of carbon dioxide.
Old solutions to new problems can be ok, but that website is beyond unimaginative
Have a look here
it used to be that cities were deathtraps and farmhouses were often not much better than caves. we should be careful of sanitised versions of the past. those examples in the website look nice but lets remember when many of those places were built the sewage was the street and people carried leather umbrellas around because homeowners would throw sewage from their windows. they work now because of continual upgrades and improvements not because of some embedded superior knowledge that we have allowed to lapse. most of us would be appalled to live in them as they were intended.
speaking of shit and beauty, the louvre's hall of mirrors was used as an open public toilet so visitors to the royals needed to be careful of shit and piss on the floors of the gold-walled palace. that was the reality all over. all this talk of ages of wisdom is really questionable.
storing water is brilliant. all the other technologies of conservation are also a good idea, and of community building too. but if we look to the past it is useful to be objective about what we are really looking at and not just fill in the images with what we want the world to be today.
Good lord, Will. I'm not talking about going back to a time when there were no sewers. Don't be silly.
Paulie- How much carbon dioxide production do you suppose it takes to create miles of extruded aluminum shapes, metal cladding, plastic moisture barriers, etc?
too much, I share your critique of those material systems, but I'm skeptical of green-washed traditionalism. Now I know you didnt read the article because it talks about using microorganisms to grow materials. Its something on the technical side which transcends aesthetization attempts, but could be used for design effect.
I honestly think tradition and classicism will be here forever. And that website does a good job of proving that.
oh
my
gawd
this thread is still going? if there ever was a reason to legitimize lack of imagination it's the regurgitation of classicism and tradition. The gathering of collective knowledge is an excuse to stagnate in the middle ground heading to nowhere.
Comparing the contemporary to microwaves is utterly biased as well. A better analogy would be computers and what they have done for our industry.
Case in point, don't copy, don't try to be like me. This thread is a sneaky one, masquerading as something else while it preaches Leon Krier.
hi Paulie- I did read your article. Very interesting. I think a technology like that could be an incredible resource in the future, and nothing that I'm advocating would preclude it. I don't agree that approaches such as Original Green are "green washed traditionalism". On the contrary, it is the very opposite of green-washing. It's a bedrock, foundational sustainability based on non-technological principles. What could be more fundamental than that?
if there ever was a reason to legitimize lack of imagination it's the regurgitation of classicism and tradition.
uh - what about Louis Kahn's monumental classicism?
oooh - symmetry!
"perfect" geometries:
traditional forms:
what is so lovable,durable, sustainable about masonry clad buildings? Tossing a clay brick into a coal-powered kiln, then firing it up to 2,000˚F, emits about 1.3 pounds of carbon dioxide.
aluminum's embodied energy is about 200x more than brick - steel is more, glass is more, plastic is more than both steel and glass... concrete is less (but the process in creating it is pretty onerous). but if we're splitting hairs, the least offensive materials are "sustainable" wood products.
masonry does have a pretty lousy R value, though, but it does work well as a heat sink...
Paulie - that seems pretty interesting - although you'd have to be careful about the aggregate... my guess is that forms would be created in a similar way to concrete - or maybe like gourd training?
Modern indoor plumbing becomes a posibility in NYC and Chicago in 1860's. First steel skyscrapers follow 10 years later. Framework for modernism was born.
Before this, life expectancy was 45, and everyone eventually died from a horrible disease.
Lack of human scale in modern architecture can be attributed to another invention, which is the automobile.
Classic architecture doesn't exist any more. The skilled labor is gone. Revisionists and historic romantics are reinvisioning a mirage that never truly existed.
"Classic architecture doesn't exist any more. The skilled labor is gone." I know you would like this to be true, because it fits nicely with your futurist narrative, but it's not.
Section 07 64 23 "Cornices and gargoyles" by EKE
:)
Haters gonna hate.
toasteroven,EKE
Yes its developing research, but I don't think they used traditional architecture as a foundation or basis, or aluminum for that matter.
While the process could be used to create traditionally inspired buildings, I really think that would betray the method of production and limit new complimentary design endeavors.
Fundamentally, man can be driven by a desire to create, not just re-create. It stems from a discomfort with the present, the past, etc. Not to take too much away from traditionalism, I'm always impressed by its resilience.
uuhhh I was not a classicist/traditionalist, I was a rebel, a method of distraction to create dialogue aside from dogmatic modernism.
There's a difference between reinterpretation and regurgitation.
"original green" is an overpriced getaway destination to regurgitation land.
haters gonna stagnate.
duty now for the future!
Anyone see "The Hunger Games" ?
Interesting how all the architecture is "classical" except the cornucopia. Why?
paulie - I didn't say anything about sticking it in fypon and making Corinthian columns out of it.
What is bothering me is people's interpretation of classicism and tradtionalism. My take is that classicism is about ideal geometries based on human scales, chiaroscuro, sculptural volumes, the problems of symmetry and balance, etc... (things you find in a lot of architects' work - even today)... and traditionalism is about using forms and materials and construction methods that have been adapted to a particular climate and culture (which actually still exists in many parts of the western world - and many contemporary architects working outside the west employ in their work). I think people are confusing this with romantic facade-centric neo-classicism and faux-traditional shit made out of vinyl - which I hope EKE doesn't do. This discussion should be about form and tectonics, craftsmanship, and an appreciation of older buildings and urban spaces. I think we're getting tripped up on semantics.
What I really don't understand is why people react so strongly against something that preserves a certain character and scale within a neighborhood (even though it's interior is thoroughly modern, and it's exterior only mimics form and utilizes similar materials) - and yet they like these overly aggressive, cynical, and disenfranchising buildings like Morphosis' cooper union building, or OMA's seattle library.
I think the real problem is that we haven't figured out how to humanize large "modern" spaces.
I've never used Fypon, or vinyl siding, ever. :)
I saw the Hunger Games. I'd say that the cornucopia is a classic NewSpeak image. A classical symbol of abundance that's been deconstructed into its metaphysical opposite: the place where items are dangled in front of contestants in a brutal game, like bait, to lure them into danger for the enjoyment of a voyeuristic elite. How perfect that it should look like the latest faceted parametric lump. :)
Barragan, Alto, Ando, Zumthor, etc... All found inspiration in history and tradition and still did innovative work, and of course Kahn as toaster pointed out. I think some people are taking all of this too literal.
Architecture evolves. This is a process of trial and era from generation to generation. All some of us are saying is that we build on that and not just keep starting over from scratch. Like EKE said, architecture has a DNA.
EKE that's interesting...makes sense.
From Ivan Chtcheglov's Formulaire pour un urbanisme nouveau
"All cities are geological. You can’t take three steps without encountering ghosts bearing all the prestige of their legends. We move within a closed landscape whose landmarks constantly draw us toward the past. Certain shifting angles, certain receding perspectives, allow us to glimpse original conceptions of space, but this vision remains fragmentary. It must be sought in the magical locales of fairy tales and surrealist writings: castles, endless walls, little forgotten bars, mammoth caverns, casino mirrors.
These dated images retain a small catalyzing power, but it is almost impossible to use them in a symbolic urbanism without rejuvenating them by giving them a new meaning. There was a certain charm in horses born from the sea or magical dwarves dressed in gold, but they are in no way adapted to the demands of modern life. For we are in the twentieth century, even if few people are aware of it. Our imaginations, haunted by the old archetypes, have remained far behind the sophistication of the machines. The various attempts to integrate modern science into new myths remain inadequate. Meanwhile abstraction has invaded all the arts, contemporary architecture in particular. Pure plasticity, inanimate and storyless, soothes the eye. Elsewhere other fragmentary beauties can be found — while the promised land of new syntheses continually recedes into the distance. Everyone wavers between the emotionally still-alive past and the already dead future."
toast: "My take is that classicism is about ideal geometries based on human scales..."
Classicism never had to deal with gas engine scale. If it did, it would look more like this:
In illustration above, both buildings are miserable failures due to access requirements, urban detachment, etc... It's just that the one on the right looks spectacularly pathetic.
I wonder if that's really classicism- more likely pastiche - because elements are supposed to scale up the larger the building gets... although - come to think of it, mies solved that problem by abstracting the order and turning the entire building into a column - I think the seagram building is doric.
there are better renditions of the connective tissue in other arts...
another write-up in metropolis, peeling back the drapes on the anti-modern/tea-party leaning nat'l civic art society
http://www.metropolismag.com/pov/20120417/not-so-hidden-agend
In my opinion, the NCAS report on the Gehry Eisenhower Memorial is a sadly mixed bag, with some genuine critique blended with lots of hysterical hyperbole and unfortunate ad hominem attacks on Gehry and his team. I am disturbed by their report, because the legitimate points in opposition to the Gehry proposal have been broadly overshadowed by the distraction of the hysterical stuff and the overwrought tone.
Martin Pedersen's Metropolis piece is also filled with ad hominem, unfortunately. Far from "peeling back the drapes", the only substantive point of his brief essay is that the NCAS is dominated by people with conservative political affiliations, as if this disqualifies their critique, ipso facto.
Even if that were a valid point, the problem is that it's not at all clear that the NCAS is dominated by people with conservative political affiliations. I followed Pedersen's link to the NCAS website, and looked at their "Leadership" page. Out of ten Board of Directors members listed, only two were affiliated with any the organizations Petersen lists as presumably-offensive conservative groups. Out of 27 total persons listed on the site, only six of them were listed as affiliated with those organizations. Out of hundreds of listed affiliations.
This kind of stuff is really silly, on both sides of the debate. I know lots of traditional architects who are political leftists. And I know lots of modernist architects who are rightists politically (my partner in our office, as a matter of fact).
In my opinion should get back to talking about what is best for Washington DC.
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