Is 'exhibitionist' architecture on its way out? asks Deyan Sudjic
With Thomas Heatherwick's 'B of the Bang', an intricate starburst of steel tubes as tall as a 20-storey block of flats being craned into position this weekend in Manchester, it's too soon to write off Britain's love affair with the architectural icon.
Whatever the outcome of the bad-tempered row that is raging in the narrow world of architecture about the merits of exhibitionistic, iconic design, Heatherwick's spectacular piece of architectural sculpture, a belated celebration of the Commonwealth Games, looks certain to be a crowd pleaser.
It's a whimsical reproach - if anything that weighs 300 tonnes can be described as whimsy - to those in the self-styled sensible corner of the argument, lead by Graham Morrison, partner in Allies and Morrison architects. Morrison managed to get up the noses of a broad spectrum of his colleagues by denouncing the cult of the icon in a speech at the Royal Academy last month. He described Will Alsop's so-called Fourth Grace in Liverpool as elephantine and unworthy, and questioned the architectural quality of Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. His words moved the normally affable Piers Gough - who is currently working on an extraordinary development of high-rise apartment towers in Hove with Gehry - to suggest that there would be no danger of anybody crossing the street, never mind a continent, to see anything that Morrison had ever designed. And the correspondence pages of the architectural press are still full of splenetic architects from both sides of the divide laying into each other.
The blob builders, characterised as the childish and the egotistical in pursuit of the unbuildable, seem to be getting the worst of it. The sensible tendency meanwhile is presented as a bunch of philistine and repressed killjoys.
Maybe it's the sense that any job that a competitor is building is one that they are not, and so amounts to bread snatched from their children's hungry mouths that makes arguments between architects so savage.
But it looks very much as if Morrison got his timing exactly right. His outburst was closely followed by the news that the Heritage Lottery fund had finally put Daniel Libeskind's plans for an £85 million addition to the Victoria and Albert Museum out of its misery by turning down an application for a grant for the second time. It was perhaps a kindness to Libeskind. What had looked like a brave, challenging breakthrough when it was first mooted the better part of a decade ago, was in danger of turning into a costly anachronism. Immediately afterwards, Liverpool unblushingly announced that it had suddenly realised that the Alsop plan for the Pierhead it had, until two days earlier, been stoutly claiming was essential to the renaissance of the city centre had neither a workable budget, nor a viable purpose, and cancelled it.
John Prescott's brave attempt to persuade the rich to commission Zaha Hadid and Frank Gehry to design country houses for them, by smoothing the path to developments on agricultural land, would suggest that we haven't heard the last of buildings that look like dead lobsters quite yet.
But there is no doubt that there is a change in the architectural climate. And not just in Britain. Greece, which was so seduced by the idea of creating an instantly recognisable architectural landmark that it risked turning the Olympics into a fiasco with a stadium roof that looks like a giant mollusc, is unlikely ever to commission Santiago Calatrava again. His structure will, by all accounts, be left all but invisible in the kitsch hoopla of the opening ceremonies this weekend.
In America, the reactions to Chicago's costly and much delayed attempts to recast its lakefront with a spectacular Gehry-designed bandstand and a giant Anish Kapoor architectural sculpture, have been notably unenthusiastic. The designs, cutting edge when they were commissioned, are not any more.
Architecture is characterised by long periods of intellectual inactivity, followed by moments of sudden movement. Six months ago everybody and his dog wanted an icon, now it is just as much a piece of received wisdom that the icon is all over, and the very word has become too embarrassing to use. In the years leading up to 1900, the world was swept by the luxuriant tendrils of art nouveau structures. Then, suddenly, they disappeared.
We are now at another of those moments, when architecture suddenly shifts course. But what is going to replace the icon? If the answer is yet another fleetingly fashionable Next Big Thing that will end up looking just as dated in another five years, then the rejoicing of those who are already dancing on the icon's grave will be decidedly premature.
here is a lttle copy-paste job from somewhere on the net, that gives a little background to my above post.
The Negation of the Negation
The general pattern of historical development is not one of a straight line upward, but of a complex interaction in which each step forward is only achieved at the cost of a partial step backwards. These regressions, in turn, are remedied at the next stage of development.
The law of the negation of the negation explains the repetition at a higher level of certain features and properties of the lower level and the apparent return of past features. There is a constant struggle between form and content and between content and form, resulting in the eventual shattering of the old form and the transformation of the content.
This whole process can be best pictured as a spiral, where the movement comes back to the position it started, but at a higher level. In other words, historical progress is achieved through a series of contradictions. Where the previous stage is negated, this does not represent its total elimination. It does not wipe out completely the stage that it supplants.
"The capitalist method of appropriation, which springs from the capitalist method of production, and therefore capitalist private property, is the first negation of individual private property based on one's own labour. But capitalist production begets with the inevitableness of a natural process its own negation. It is the negation of the negation," remarked Marx in volume one of Capital.
Engels explains a whole series of examples to illustrate the negation of the negation in his book Anti-Duhring. "Let us take a grain of barley. Millions of such grains of barley are milled, boiled and brewed and then consumed. But if such a grain of barley meets with conditions which for it are normal, if it falls on suitable soil, then under the influence of heat and moisture a specific change takes place, it germinates; the grain as such ceases to exist, it is negated, and in its place appears the plant which has arisen from it, the negation of the grain. But what is the normal life-process of this plant? It grows, flowers, is fertilised and finally once more produces grains of barley, and, as soon as these have ripened, the stalk dies, is in its turn negated. As a result of this negation of the negation we have once again the original grain of barley, but not as a single unit, but ten, twenty or thirty fold."
The barley lives and evolves by means of returning to its starting point - but at a higher level. One seed has produced many. Also over time, plants have evolved qualitatively as well as quantitatively. Successive generations have shown variations, and become more adapted to their environment.
Engels gives a further example from the insect world. "Butterflies, for example, spring from the egg through a negation of the egg, they pass through certain transformations until they reach sexual maturity, they pair and are in turn negated, dying as soon as the pairing process has been completed and the female has laid its numerous eggs."
So, the "cycle" initiated by the bilbao is vaning. While the situation is pretty clear in the world of built buildings and the real environment (now when even the chinese have cancelled the next major exotic landmarks), what about the profession in general; will this mark the decline of fashion-architecture, architecture as an openly image-driven artform? and what comes next... social consciousness?
well, social consciousness would be a repeat of the 50/60's attitute, so that would be fitting with the spiral theory...it would be good if the profession started regaining its position in the public eye. I think that what we had before wasnt really architecture populuarity, just a few rock-stars that happened to be architects.
how do we go around teaching people what we really do and make them understand they need us? do they neer us?
Yes, the 50/60's might be doing a comeback: witness the renewed interest in the smithsons (for example). also motivated by their passing, but suddenly these projects feel and sound pretty fresh...
Should we engage the public by imitating the popular stars of massmedia and by inducing envy/star-eyed admiration snake into the life of ordinary folks? This approach might produce it's own limits, and it's not a widely available option: if your not doing stuff for prada, your doing it for "nobody".
A raised social consciousness, architecture as answer to politics and the social situation might just be the answer. This does not necessarily lead to reactive architecture; through participation in real events and analysis (also for purposes other than info-fueled form generation) architects could possibly see further and transform the bright future into a built today. laa-di-daa. well, it would be worth striving for.
earnest, fresh faced humanism vs zeitgist diagram dollies = super pluralism, has since CIAM. no one needs us, no one wants us, we're either a doormat or an obstacle, we can't win. just take the money but don't take it too seriously, how interesting. architecture the most explicit sign of routes for roots? "the street" mall undercover of humanism. where did you go mrs. jacob-san our profession turns its lonely eyes to you, woowoowoo...
a few years ago, during a conversation about the reasons why in the uk only 4% of new built was designed by architects,my then tutor John Pardey told me "you should design for yourself, not for society or anyone else". at than time that statement almost got me to tears, nowadays i kinda understand what he meant, yet i cannot shake the feeling that, being the link between quality of the built environment and quality of people's life, we have a responsability
the main problem is that so far we've always been followers: followers of phlosophies, of artistic movement, of social an political currents. i guess the new data-driven architecture has one merit: freeing architecture and its built form from direct dependace to a driving philosophy. i (like to) believe its the embrional status of a new paradigm without paradigm...
righteous: i like the zei-gist, i hope it wasnt a spelling mistake.
The greatest obstacle for social architecture is it's need for a vision of society. We don't have that, or even a beginning of an idea. The data driven drivel is also just taking "what is" (and by that I mean everything that the prevailing powers, legislation and economic currents want us to see), pumping it full of air and getting a construction of sorts. It's not ideology free, even if it's very detached from ideology. It's "whatever" architecture.
i believe there is a split here.within the data driven architecture, you have two distinctive currents: a more direct approach, where the data actually shapes the building, and more subtle one, where the data collected is a chance o exploring the site, its vectors and powers at play, in order to act upon them.
the second developed from the first, so obviously there are more examples of the former, but i like to believe that that could be a way foward.
have a look at this:
he explains what i mean much better than i ever could.
i believe social architecture failed BECAUSE of its vision of society. it didnt only want to solve problem, but to sell a new way of life to people who, in the end, didnt buy it. i hope that whatever architecture comes next, its not driven by utopia, visions or dogmas, but a will to better the situations it act upon, just that. the time to sprinkle a better future on top of the masses is over.
poiesis=making, but poiesis is also, at one level removed from itself, that of re-making,...Aristotle's mimetic.
auto-poiesis..self-remaking. not just selfmaking. The remade is a self replicating corporeal evidence of laws and primordial. The recursion that schumacher enunciates is buried in the stranger grounds of the presocratics' 'phusis' (and incurring Heraclitus' 'polemos') incurring ..the event of unconcealment, the act of a thing making itself known. When a thing remakes itself through re-reproduction...when elements gather themselves (through sameness (parminedes) and volatile discontent (Heraclitus)) into entities that have been preordained by the necessity of this occurence (this then diverges into the so called top-down Platonic approach and bottom-up Arsitotelian approach..and therefor a split between study of numbers and study of essences (science)). Our scientifically-proximate notions of structures and systems (as shown in schumacher's near-reverential references) are just as abstract and mytho-patho-logical as that of the ancients'..and very much their offspring.
What interests me personally in this theology of architectural oppotunism (also raised up in the Columbia univ. studio thread) is not just the cling to the objectifying (and therefor absolving) predilection that might pardon the incongruities of the failures of rhetorical architecture (modernist...and as an extension, postmod) ..but also the manner by which it rips the human away from the centre of the discourse. In fact, it was expressedly pointed out in the article that there is NO central/izing voice. I find that quite moving, and quite anti-humane (the bleeding heart stuff) and poetically 'nihilistic'. Humanity has failed, and therefor we must now elect the machinery of systems and a system of machines to produce , define and refine a new poetic.
As far as I could understand he suggests that "external" data is irrelevant. Only architecture and its formal-theoretical internal discourse is valid as inspiration and goal for architecture. The data used by the data-people belongs in other disciplines, inspired by the economic and political data-fetish. Thus making data people irrelevant, as they try to communicate with language from other disciplines.
There is a strange moment in the text when I'm reading about architecture as a discipline in relation to other disciplines and suddenly. I'm reading about buildings. He seems to directly translate the organisation of disciplines/society to the organisation of buildings. Im not sure he's aware of the leap.
When he suggests that the level of sophistication can be measured by its autonomy from other systems I suddenly understand all the nonsense at the Bartletts end of year shows. The more difficult to understand the better the architecture... nice formula youve got there.
are you guys talking about Team Ten or just any architecture with a collective vision, because that would cover everything pre 20th century. in any case, even if we didn't buy "social" architecture, we certainly didn't go hungry. as DIT pointed out, the rule based thinking of structures and systems are underpinned by and aspire to scientific "objectivity", whose representative powers are predicated upon a reality of numbers. this is the data bigness is refering to, the world seen through the patterned diagrams of economic, social and political numbers. but the diagram's success in selling architecture tells us more about our capability and willingness to understand a particular message than the extent of choices available to us. the medium is the message, the effect of the diagram supercedes content - legitimated by our amenity with predictable systems and theories.
this is not to say that diagrams are wrong, only that they're not ideological free and somewhat miss the wood for the trees.
the diagram cannot affect the pyschology of the user, that requires the sort of human interpretation by which claims to universality (being applicable to all) and objectivity (being value free) such as your common sense "just the will to better the situation" are lost. in fact, if we take this design though common sense (what i presume you to mean by dogmatic utopian vision free) we find it grounded more in a social "id" informed by the slowly vanishing threads of collective memory than in the forests of data.
schumacher's story of a poetics that reveals nothing but itself, sporadically irritated by other navel gazers is an unpleasant vision.
one answer fits all, hopey6u can guess who i am answering to
(DIT, sorry, the level of your discourse is far too high for me, i really struggle to read through your lines, absolutely no sarcasm here)
external data is not irrelevant. but its not the beginning nor the end of architecture.you dont eat data and shit buildings.
other disciplines are not irrelevant, yet their content needs to be fiiltrated. i agree when he sais that you can judge architecture only through architecture. autopoiesis, self organization, which in no way entiles isolation from external influences, just a constant filtration of such stimuli.
architecture as a node that's organized in its own set of rules, with its own hierarchy (or set of hierachies)
the human interpretation you talk about is EXACTLY the type of filter i am refering to , data and common sense( the diagram cannot affect the psicology of the user, but sometimes it can make for a more functional building, that can also be made "poetic" or beautiful"). they do not exclude each other.sounds like you can immagine only a datatown OR a village of mud huts (oh-so-phenomenologicalisticexpiralidocius)
i thought shumacher was making an argument for an integration of the two, not exclding one in favour of the other, but i might be wrong.
so ok, then what do you do? you can criticise my approach (my humane autopoietic reading of data, my wanting to use architecture to answer questions about architecture (the city) asked by architecture (the brief) and to judge them thru architecture, since i thought architecture was what we do) for all its worth (nothing).
here is a good reading site. this ain't amazon.com. free of charge with thousands of articles. from adorno to spinoza. 19th century to now. check out all the usual suspects. your prof. doesn't want you to know this site. don't judge by name.. http://www.marxists.org/index.htm
Quickie: there is always a vision of some kind (even if we are not articulating it in familiar ways), even when architects don't want to present/compose their vision(s) for society and hide in the data-bush claiming neutrality. We have to uncover our worldviews that dictate the architectures we are making. This view has everything to do with how we live in our societies; with the daily touch of gravel and smell of spring air. and: vision doesn't equal utopia, that's why they are separate words.
Helsinki: you're right, the moment you set yourself a goal to reach with what you do, you create a vision. yet, yo should be able to let the place you are bulding in dictate our vision of society, otherwise our architecture will always be a regionalism playing away from home.
"you should always look through the eyes of a foreigner, everywhere you go"
i have no beef with the idea that autopoiesis or self-organisation is a constant filtering of relevant information, but the terms in which that information is presented always restricts the effects you can examine. you seem to be describing a perfectly normal design cycle except for your "data" mantra and auto-poiesis spiel. data is a very ambiguous word, it would cover pretty much everything, but it's scientific undertones lend it some of the "objective" cachet we crave so much. though i've hung my argument on the exchange of scientific values for social ones, this discussion is more about the ambiguity of schumacher's vocabulary, which has become a different beast in bigness' hands.
in the original text autopoiesis is the absolution of responsibility and conciousness: "Luhmann's ... refusal to imply consciousness as the agent and medium of "distinction", "(self)-observation", "(self-)reference" ect. Instead the bearer (quasi-subject) of these "operations" is the social system which in turn is nothing but the self-constraining recursive network of those very operations." in this sense the greek meaning of poiesis as "making" seems misleading given schumacher's emphasis on the biological processes - in the absence of consciousness, these have no memory and reveal nothing.
in the vocabulary of autonomy and irritation, schumacher's reflexive agents behave according to complexity theory. everyone has maximum autonomy and dealing with externalities is the active preservation of autonomy. complexity theory is one of the tail ends of the enlightenment project, the reasonable explanation for everything has turned out to be: numerous simplicity makes complex unity. accepting this means architecture becomes a project of complete emancipation, objectively/automatically fending off external demands whilst pursuing its own self-references.
this is where the language of autopoiesis impinges on the design cycle, recursive decision making becomes self-referencing and the extensive design process dealing in relevant particulars becomes an intensive hermetic universal system governed by abstract rules. the former's subjective contingency borrows the objective aura of the latter's supposed autonomy.
"i thought shumacher was making an argument for an integration of the two"
a more semiotic way of looking at it is through the scale of the paradigmatic, on one side, and the syntagmatic on the other. The paradigmatic, of course, is responsible for abrupt changes, for discord, for the violent incorporation of previously-deemed irrelevant data. It is, moreso, the moment at which a previous worldview disintegrates to lead to another worldview (another syntagm). The syntagmatic holds itself together through an agreement between parts to operate in accordance to, and as a reflection of, principles that have been installed through a previous paradigmatic revolution. Schumacher is trying to negotiate, in a different medium, a ground trodden by many.Unquestionably, the philosophers of science, Popper and Kuhn, come into the foreground. Popper's model of 'falsification' (the sieve through which natural selection of scientific truths/data pass through) in achieving an end result of ideological harmony between facts, figures and observations and Kuhn's tidal history of scientific revolutions... <=those are attempts at coming to terms with making sense of how relevance (and irrelevance) evolves within systems (of science and history in this case)...It is traceable to the semioticians' constructs of the linguistic...of making sense how language, as another(and perhaps the primary) system evolves,develops and changes through its own self-referential interiority. of how different items interact at different times to alter the assumed mythical 'norm' (the 'norm' like the 'present' is a fleeting non-entity). There is a marked difference though, Popper is much more positivist and less 'subtle' in his sensibility....Pierce's complex architectures of significations indicated, early on, that there was a perplexing problematic that seperated the corporeal-ity from the systems (language in this case) that refer to it.
Schumacher's basic concern is the same as upstairs...When to include and when to exclude date, what constitutes relevance? He refers to a system that is open through its closure...i.e a system that can re-define its logic through a constant/continual and dynamic reworking of its interiority. The interesting question is though..how does the paradigmatic creep in and 'alter' a system..how can 'external/irrelevant' data be incorporated, made sense out of? I would say that this is where Schumacher's system is at its weakest in naively postulating an exterior "environment" that is only linked to the interior (the discursive 'autopoietic') through a language of 'colloqualism' and 'irritation'....It is possible, in language, to link any words together within the space of a few other words...it is the same with human geneologies,genetics and relationships. Someone I know must know someone who knows someone who knows the president of the United States (And I am not american and have never been to the US). There is a limited degree of seperation possible..as much as entropy pushes us forward into increasing complexity and diversity, there is (the other way around) increasing chances for us to collide into our origin, our 'genesis'. I am much morelikely to meet a distant cousin in the US now than I would have a century ago.
this is to illustrate that elements within one system might be elements in another and that therefor the idea of 'closure' is one of those half-mythical ideas that should be taken with a pinch of salt....and more substantially, that any element of one system vibrates sympathetically within any other element in another (or another system) and this vibration can cause (with increasing vibrations from elsewhere) another system to form.
ouch, you spoilt it for me.
i had taken what i wanted from the text, and i having read it a while ago, i forgot how self justifing it was. i stand by my vision, yet from now on i will watch mysel from quoting schumacher.
any architecture based on a singular analysis of the world (scientific, poetic, phenomenological) results in the endself referencing and hermetic.
A quiet war over iconic visions
Source: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/...
Is 'exhibitionist' architecture on its way out? asks Deyan Sudjic
With Thomas Heatherwick's 'B of the Bang', an intricate starburst of steel tubes as tall as a 20-storey block of flats being craned into position this weekend in Manchester, it's too soon to write off Britain's love affair with the architectural icon.
Whatever the outcome of the bad-tempered row that is raging in the narrow world of architecture about the merits of exhibitionistic, iconic design, Heatherwick's spectacular piece of architectural sculpture, a belated celebration of the Commonwealth Games, looks certain to be a crowd pleaser.
It's a whimsical reproach - if anything that weighs 300 tonnes can be described as whimsy - to those in the self-styled sensible corner of the argument, lead by Graham Morrison, partner in Allies and Morrison architects. Morrison managed to get up the noses of a broad spectrum of his colleagues by denouncing the cult of the icon in a speech at the Royal Academy last month. He described Will Alsop's so-called Fourth Grace in Liverpool as elephantine and unworthy, and questioned the architectural quality of Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. His words moved the normally affable Piers Gough - who is currently working on an extraordinary development of high-rise apartment towers in Hove with Gehry - to suggest that there would be no danger of anybody crossing the street, never mind a continent, to see anything that Morrison had ever designed. And the correspondence pages of the architectural press are still full of splenetic architects from both sides of the divide laying into each other.
The blob builders, characterised as the childish and the egotistical in pursuit of the unbuildable, seem to be getting the worst of it. The sensible tendency meanwhile is presented as a bunch of philistine and repressed killjoys.
Maybe it's the sense that any job that a competitor is building is one that they are not, and so amounts to bread snatched from their children's hungry mouths that makes arguments between architects so savage.
But it looks very much as if Morrison got his timing exactly right. His outburst was closely followed by the news that the Heritage Lottery fund had finally put Daniel Libeskind's plans for an £85 million addition to the Victoria and Albert Museum out of its misery by turning down an application for a grant for the second time. It was perhaps a kindness to Libeskind. What had looked like a brave, challenging breakthrough when it was first mooted the better part of a decade ago, was in danger of turning into a costly anachronism. Immediately afterwards, Liverpool unblushingly announced that it had suddenly realised that the Alsop plan for the Pierhead it had, until two days earlier, been stoutly claiming was essential to the renaissance of the city centre had neither a workable budget, nor a viable purpose, and cancelled it.
John Prescott's brave attempt to persuade the rich to commission Zaha Hadid and Frank Gehry to design country houses for them, by smoothing the path to developments on agricultural land, would suggest that we haven't heard the last of buildings that look like dead lobsters quite yet.
But there is no doubt that there is a change in the architectural climate. And not just in Britain. Greece, which was so seduced by the idea of creating an instantly recognisable architectural landmark that it risked turning the Olympics into a fiasco with a stadium roof that looks like a giant mollusc, is unlikely ever to commission Santiago Calatrava again. His structure will, by all accounts, be left all but invisible in the kitsch hoopla of the opening ceremonies this weekend.
In America, the reactions to Chicago's costly and much delayed attempts to recast its lakefront with a spectacular Gehry-designed bandstand and a giant Anish Kapoor architectural sculpture, have been notably unenthusiastic. The designs, cutting edge when they were commissioned, are not any more.
Architecture is characterised by long periods of intellectual inactivity, followed by moments of sudden movement. Six months ago everybody and his dog wanted an icon, now it is just as much a piece of received wisdom that the icon is all over, and the very word has become too embarrassing to use. In the years leading up to 1900, the world was swept by the luxuriant tendrils of art nouveau structures. Then, suddenly, they disappeared.
We are now at another of those moments, when architecture suddenly shifts course. But what is going to replace the icon? If the answer is yet another fleetingly fashionable Next Big Thing that will end up looking just as dated in another five years, then the rejoicing of those who are already dancing on the icon's grave will be decidedly premature.
yes, the beauty of dialectic materialism.
here is a lttle copy-paste job from somewhere on the net, that gives a little background to my above post.
The Negation of the Negation
The general pattern of historical development is not one of a straight line upward, but of a complex interaction in which each step forward is only achieved at the cost of a partial step backwards. These regressions, in turn, are remedied at the next stage of development.
The law of the negation of the negation explains the repetition at a higher level of certain features and properties of the lower level and the apparent return of past features. There is a constant struggle between form and content and between content and form, resulting in the eventual shattering of the old form and the transformation of the content.
This whole process can be best pictured as a spiral, where the movement comes back to the position it started, but at a higher level. In other words, historical progress is achieved through a series of contradictions. Where the previous stage is negated, this does not represent its total elimination. It does not wipe out completely the stage that it supplants.
"The capitalist method of appropriation, which springs from the capitalist method of production, and therefore capitalist private property, is the first negation of individual private property based on one's own labour. But capitalist production begets with the inevitableness of a natural process its own negation. It is the negation of the negation," remarked Marx in volume one of Capital.
Engels explains a whole series of examples to illustrate the negation of the negation in his book Anti-Duhring. "Let us take a grain of barley. Millions of such grains of barley are milled, boiled and brewed and then consumed. But if such a grain of barley meets with conditions which for it are normal, if it falls on suitable soil, then under the influence of heat and moisture a specific change takes place, it germinates; the grain as such ceases to exist, it is negated, and in its place appears the plant which has arisen from it, the negation of the grain. But what is the normal life-process of this plant? It grows, flowers, is fertilised and finally once more produces grains of barley, and, as soon as these have ripened, the stalk dies, is in its turn negated. As a result of this negation of the negation we have once again the original grain of barley, but not as a single unit, but ten, twenty or thirty fold."
The barley lives and evolves by means of returning to its starting point - but at a higher level. One seed has produced many. Also over time, plants have evolved qualitatively as well as quantitatively. Successive generations have shown variations, and become more adapted to their environment.
Engels gives a further example from the insect world. "Butterflies, for example, spring from the egg through a negation of the egg, they pass through certain transformations until they reach sexual maturity, they pair and are in turn negated, dying as soon as the pairing process has been completed and the female has laid its numerous eggs."
So, the "cycle" initiated by the bilbao is vaning. While the situation is pretty clear in the world of built buildings and the real environment (now when even the chinese have cancelled the next major exotic landmarks), what about the profession in general; will this mark the decline of fashion-architecture, architecture as an openly image-driven artform? and what comes next... social consciousness?
well, social consciousness would be a repeat of the 50/60's attitute, so that would be fitting with the spiral theory...it would be good if the profession started regaining its position in the public eye. I think that what we had before wasnt really architecture populuarity, just a few rock-stars that happened to be architects.
how do we go around teaching people what we really do and make them understand they need us? do they neer us?
Yes, the 50/60's might be doing a comeback: witness the renewed interest in the smithsons (for example). also motivated by their passing, but suddenly these projects feel and sound pretty fresh...
Should we engage the public by imitating the popular stars of massmedia and by inducing envy/star-eyed admiration snake into the life of ordinary folks? This approach might produce it's own limits, and it's not a widely available option: if your not doing stuff for prada, your doing it for "nobody".
A raised social consciousness, architecture as answer to politics and the social situation might just be the answer. This does not necessarily lead to reactive architecture; through participation in real events and analysis (also for purposes other than info-fueled form generation) architects could possibly see further and transform the bright future into a built today. laa-di-daa. well, it would be worth striving for.
earnest, fresh faced humanism vs zeitgist diagram dollies = super pluralism, has since CIAM. no one needs us, no one wants us, we're either a doormat or an obstacle, we can't win. just take the money but don't take it too seriously, how interesting. architecture the most explicit sign of routes for roots? "the street" mall undercover of humanism. where did you go mrs. jacob-san our profession turns its lonely eyes to you, woowoowoo...
a few years ago, during a conversation about the reasons why in the uk only 4% of new built was designed by architects,my then tutor John Pardey told me "you should design for yourself, not for society or anyone else". at than time that statement almost got me to tears, nowadays i kinda understand what he meant, yet i cannot shake the feeling that, being the link between quality of the built environment and quality of people's life, we have a responsability
the main problem is that so far we've always been followers: followers of phlosophies, of artistic movement, of social an political currents. i guess the new data-driven architecture has one merit: freeing architecture and its built form from direct dependace to a driving philosophy. i (like to) believe its the embrional status of a new paradigm without paradigm...
righteous: i like the zei-gist, i hope it wasnt a spelling mistake.
i'd like to ride the (mini) wave of this happy accident, but in all fairness, ooops (:;
archinect honesty price of the day goes too...
the righteous fist of archinect...your name
:)
The greatest obstacle for social architecture is it's need for a vision of society. We don't have that, or even a beginning of an idea. The data driven drivel is also just taking "what is" (and by that I mean everything that the prevailing powers, legislation and economic currents want us to see), pumping it full of air and getting a construction of sorts. It's not ideology free, even if it's very detached from ideology. It's "whatever" architecture.
i believe there is a split here.within the data driven architecture, you have two distinctive currents: a more direct approach, where the data actually shapes the building, and more subtle one, where the data collected is a chance o exploring the site, its vectors and powers at play, in order to act upon them.
the second developed from the first, so obviously there are more examples of the former, but i like to believe that that could be a way foward.
have a look at this:
http://freespace.virgin.net/patrik.schumacher/Autopoeisis.htm
he explains what i mean much better than i ever could.
i believe social architecture failed BECAUSE of its vision of society. it didnt only want to solve problem, but to sell a new way of life to people who, in the end, didnt buy it. i hope that whatever architecture comes next, its not driven by utopia, visions or dogmas, but a will to better the situations it act upon, just that. the time to sprinkle a better future on top of the masses is over.
oh, and by the way, the word he meant is autopoiesis, but he gets the spelling wrong thruout the text.
Dr. Bigness.
speaking of iconic, have a look at these entries for the wtc...
http://www.wtcsitememorial.org/ent/entI=706058.html
http://www.wtcsitememorial.org/ent/entI=790736.html
http://www.wtcsitememorial.org/ent/entI=832533.html
this is very iconic as well..i was looking for this one. thanks for bringing the link up.
http://www.wtcsitememorial.org/ent/entI=350103.html
hence poetic
poiesis=making, but poiesis is also, at one level removed from itself, that of re-making,...Aristotle's mimetic.
auto-poiesis..self-remaking. not just selfmaking. The remade is a self replicating corporeal evidence of laws and primordial. The recursion that schumacher enunciates is buried in the stranger grounds of the presocratics' 'phusis' (and incurring Heraclitus' 'polemos') incurring ..the event of unconcealment, the act of a thing making itself known. When a thing remakes itself through re-reproduction...when elements gather themselves (through sameness (parminedes) and volatile discontent (Heraclitus)) into entities that have been preordained by the necessity of this occurence (this then diverges into the so called top-down Platonic approach and bottom-up Arsitotelian approach..and therefor a split between study of numbers and study of essences (science)). Our scientifically-proximate notions of structures and systems (as shown in schumacher's near-reverential references) are just as abstract and mytho-patho-logical as that of the ancients'..and very much their offspring.
What interests me personally in this theology of architectural oppotunism (also raised up in the Columbia univ. studio thread) is not just the cling to the objectifying (and therefor absolving) predilection that might pardon the incongruities of the failures of rhetorical architecture (modernist...and as an extension, postmod) ..but also the manner by which it rips the human away from the centre of the discourse. In fact, it was expressedly pointed out in the article that there is NO central/izing voice. I find that quite moving, and quite anti-humane (the bleeding heart stuff) and poetically 'nihilistic'. Humanity has failed, and therefor we must now elect the machinery of systems and a system of machines to produce , define and refine a new poetic.
Regarding Schumacher
As far as I could understand he suggests that "external" data is irrelevant. Only architecture and its formal-theoretical internal discourse is valid as inspiration and goal for architecture. The data used by the data-people belongs in other disciplines, inspired by the economic and political data-fetish. Thus making data people irrelevant, as they try to communicate with language from other disciplines.
There is a strange moment in the text when I'm reading about architecture as a discipline in relation to other disciplines and suddenly. I'm reading about buildings. He seems to directly translate the organisation of disciplines/society to the organisation of buildings. Im not sure he's aware of the leap.
When he suggests that the level of sophistication can be measured by its autonomy from other systems I suddenly understand all the nonsense at the Bartletts end of year shows. The more difficult to understand the better the architecture... nice formula youve got there.
are you guys talking about Team Ten or just any architecture with a collective vision, because that would cover everything pre 20th century. in any case, even if we didn't buy "social" architecture, we certainly didn't go hungry. as DIT pointed out, the rule based thinking of structures and systems are underpinned by and aspire to scientific "objectivity", whose representative powers are predicated upon a reality of numbers. this is the data bigness is refering to, the world seen through the patterned diagrams of economic, social and political numbers. but the diagram's success in selling architecture tells us more about our capability and willingness to understand a particular message than the extent of choices available to us. the medium is the message, the effect of the diagram supercedes content - legitimated by our amenity with predictable systems and theories.
this is not to say that diagrams are wrong, only that they're not ideological free and somewhat miss the wood for the trees.
the diagram cannot affect the pyschology of the user, that requires the sort of human interpretation by which claims to universality (being applicable to all) and objectivity (being value free) such as your common sense "just the will to better the situation" are lost. in fact, if we take this design though common sense (what i presume you to mean by dogmatic utopian vision free) we find it grounded more in a social "id" informed by the slowly vanishing threads of collective memory than in the forests of data.
schumacher's story of a poetics that reveals nothing but itself, sporadically irritated by other navel gazers is an unpleasant vision.
one answer fits all, hopey6u can guess who i am answering to
(DIT, sorry, the level of your discourse is far too high for me, i really struggle to read through your lines, absolutely no sarcasm here)
external data is not irrelevant. but its not the beginning nor the end of architecture.you dont eat data and shit buildings.
other disciplines are not irrelevant, yet their content needs to be fiiltrated. i agree when he sais that you can judge architecture only through architecture. autopoiesis, self organization, which in no way entiles isolation from external influences, just a constant filtration of such stimuli.
architecture as a node that's organized in its own set of rules, with its own hierarchy (or set of hierachies)
the human interpretation you talk about is EXACTLY the type of filter i am refering to , data and common sense( the diagram cannot affect the psicology of the user, but sometimes it can make for a more functional building, that can also be made "poetic" or beautiful"). they do not exclude each other.sounds like you can immagine only a datatown OR a village of mud huts (oh-so-phenomenologicalisticexpiralidocius)
i thought shumacher was making an argument for an integration of the two, not exclding one in favour of the other, but i might be wrong.
so ok, then what do you do? you can criticise my approach (my humane autopoietic reading of data, my wanting to use architecture to answer questions about architecture (the city) asked by architecture (the brief) and to judge them thru architecture, since i thought architecture was what we do) for all its worth (nothing).
But i would like to hear an alternative.
here is a good reading site. this ain't amazon.com. free of charge with thousands of articles. from adorno to spinoza. 19th century to now. check out all the usual suspects. your prof. doesn't want you to know this site. don't judge by name..
http://www.marxists.org/index.htm
Quickie: there is always a vision of some kind (even if we are not articulating it in familiar ways), even when architects don't want to present/compose their vision(s) for society and hide in the data-bush claiming neutrality. We have to uncover our worldviews that dictate the architectures we are making. This view has everything to do with how we live in our societies; with the daily touch of gravel and smell of spring air. and: vision doesn't equal utopia, that's why they are separate words.
Helsinki: you're right, the moment you set yourself a goal to reach with what you do, you create a vision. yet, yo should be able to let the place you are bulding in dictate our vision of society, otherwise our architecture will always be a regionalism playing away from home.
"you should always look through the eyes of a foreigner, everywhere you go"
i have no beef with the idea that autopoiesis or self-organisation is a constant filtering of relevant information, but the terms in which that information is presented always restricts the effects you can examine. you seem to be describing a perfectly normal design cycle except for your "data" mantra and auto-poiesis spiel. data is a very ambiguous word, it would cover pretty much everything, but it's scientific undertones lend it some of the "objective" cachet we crave so much. though i've hung my argument on the exchange of scientific values for social ones, this discussion is more about the ambiguity of schumacher's vocabulary, which has become a different beast in bigness' hands.
in the original text autopoiesis is the absolution of responsibility and conciousness: "Luhmann's ... refusal to imply consciousness as the agent and medium of "distinction", "(self)-observation", "(self-)reference" ect. Instead the bearer (quasi-subject) of these "operations" is the social system which in turn is nothing but the self-constraining recursive network of those very operations." in this sense the greek meaning of poiesis as "making" seems misleading given schumacher's emphasis on the biological processes - in the absence of consciousness, these have no memory and reveal nothing.
in the vocabulary of autonomy and irritation, schumacher's reflexive agents behave according to complexity theory. everyone has maximum autonomy and dealing with externalities is the active preservation of autonomy. complexity theory is one of the tail ends of the enlightenment project, the reasonable explanation for everything has turned out to be: numerous simplicity makes complex unity. accepting this means architecture becomes a project of complete emancipation, objectively/automatically fending off external demands whilst pursuing its own self-references.
this is where the language of autopoiesis impinges on the design cycle, recursive decision making becomes self-referencing and the extensive design process dealing in relevant particulars becomes an intensive hermetic universal system governed by abstract rules. the former's subjective contingency borrows the objective aura of the latter's supposed autonomy.
"i thought shumacher was making an argument for an integration of the two"
a more semiotic way of looking at it is through the scale of the paradigmatic, on one side, and the syntagmatic on the other. The paradigmatic, of course, is responsible for abrupt changes, for discord, for the violent incorporation of previously-deemed irrelevant data. It is, moreso, the moment at which a previous worldview disintegrates to lead to another worldview (another syntagm). The syntagmatic holds itself together through an agreement between parts to operate in accordance to, and as a reflection of, principles that have been installed through a previous paradigmatic revolution. Schumacher is trying to negotiate, in a different medium, a ground trodden by many.Unquestionably, the philosophers of science, Popper and Kuhn, come into the foreground. Popper's model of 'falsification' (the sieve through which natural selection of scientific truths/data pass through) in achieving an end result of ideological harmony between facts, figures and observations and Kuhn's tidal history of scientific revolutions... <=those are attempts at coming to terms with making sense of how relevance (and irrelevance) evolves within systems (of science and history in this case)...It is traceable to the semioticians' constructs of the linguistic...of making sense how language, as another(and perhaps the primary) system evolves,develops and changes through its own self-referential interiority. of how different items interact at different times to alter the assumed mythical 'norm' (the 'norm' like the 'present' is a fleeting non-entity). There is a marked difference though, Popper is much more positivist and less 'subtle' in his sensibility....Pierce's complex architectures of significations indicated, early on, that there was a perplexing problematic that seperated the corporeal-ity from the systems (language in this case) that refer to it.
Schumacher's basic concern is the same as upstairs...When to include and when to exclude date, what constitutes relevance? He refers to a system that is open through its closure...i.e a system that can re-define its logic through a constant/continual and dynamic reworking of its interiority. The interesting question is though..how does the paradigmatic creep in and 'alter' a system..how can 'external/irrelevant' data be incorporated, made sense out of? I would say that this is where Schumacher's system is at its weakest in naively postulating an exterior "environment" that is only linked to the interior (the discursive 'autopoietic') through a language of 'colloqualism' and 'irritation'....It is possible, in language, to link any words together within the space of a few other words...it is the same with human geneologies,genetics and relationships. Someone I know must know someone who knows someone who knows the president of the United States (And I am not american and have never been to the US). There is a limited degree of seperation possible..as much as entropy pushes us forward into increasing complexity and diversity, there is (the other way around) increasing chances for us to collide into our origin, our 'genesis'. I am much morelikely to meet a distant cousin in the US now than I would have a century ago.
this is to illustrate that elements within one system might be elements in another and that therefor the idea of 'closure' is one of those half-mythical ideas that should be taken with a pinch of salt....and more substantially, that any element of one system vibrates sympathetically within any other element in another (or another system) and this vibration can cause (with increasing vibrations from elsewhere) another system to form.
ouch, you spoilt it for me.
i had taken what i wanted from the text, and i having read it a while ago, i forgot how self justifing it was. i stand by my vision, yet from now on i will watch mysel from quoting schumacher.
any architecture based on a singular analysis of the world (scientific, poetic, phenomenological) results in the endself referencing and hermetic.
thanks righteous.
i guess i might have taken the marxism out of the text:)
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