Situatedness in architecture

Situatedness in architecture 

It seems obvious that a building should relate to its immediate environment - morphologically, geometrically, symbolically and probably in many other ways. Yet at the same time architecture is full of concepts and ideas that have proved to be quite portable: classical temples have been built in the same way all over the ancient world; Palladian villas were transported from northeast Italy to England and beyond; modernist designs have been repeated with little variation in several continents. Is situatedness in architecture a myth? Or is this yet another example of stubborn demarcation in architectural theorising? Why should it be either this or that? There are many reasons for combining and mixing, both practical and cultural. Once again I fear the value judgements are hastily attached to descriptive analyses to either praise or dismiss without any grounded arguments.

Precedents and references

Precedents and references

Design precedents are something that has been on my mind for a long time - not that I've done much work about them. The main reason is that precedents require quite a lot of work: collecting information in some detail; organising collected information in a way that makes factors, features and internal relations explicit; building on this organisation to make some of the reasoning behind the design; connecting the precedent to its own precedents as well as antecedents (including new designs). These tasks are quite demanding.

However, probably the biggest problem is the loose manner in which even design theorists treat precedents: they might call any reference a precedent, ignoring the need for structural similarities that reveal rather than mythologise. This is probably indicative of the weaknesses of architectural and design theory: theorising comes easy in creative areas. Any successful designer or teacher can find an audience and present some view that immediately becomes gospel. Forget validation and verification, the view doesn't even have to have internal consistency. In such as mess, the really worthwhile ideas (and there are enough of these to develop a real domain theory) simply disappear in a sea of vogue and nonsense. What's the use of trying to have a proper definition of precedents and references in this framework?

Expectation, prejudice and observation

Expectation, prejudice and observation 

Van Leeuwenhoek was no scientist; he was an amateur but apparently a highly skilled one in both modifying and using optical equipment. Through his skill and persistence he became a scientific celebrity. These facts are widely known. What many people may not know, through, is his initial goal in microscopic observation: to find the secret of pepper. At the time, spices were brought to Europe from Asia at great cost and with considerable trouble. If Europeans managed to unlock the secrets of spice flavours, they could reproduce them locally, without the expense and perils of foreign travel and commerce.

In accordance with the beliefs of the time, Van Leeuwenhoek expected to find the secret of pepper in the form of its microscopic structure. The taste was sharp, so he expected to see sharp edges and corners in the particles of the stuff. Instead, he was surprised by images of a wide variety of "little animals". The rest is history but what would have happened if he had ignored what he actually saw, if he dismissed the "little animals" as irrelevant noise and became fixated on sharp things, searching desperately for anything that could be presented as evidence? To his credit, he became fascinated by what he saw and did not try it to fit it to then fashionable notions.

Observation and theory

Observation and theory 

One reads mostly observations; theories are thin on the ground and often thin in content, too. Scientists appear rather reluctant to dare or to deviate from a grey average. They're even reluctant to write in the first person; it's always "one". Who's that one? Anyone? Everyone? I don't care. I should be able to voice my own opinion, to try and work out the significance of even small things I do and enrich the frameworks within which I'm working, not just apply, observe and report.

Interestingly, in design and the arts (and possibly also economics and politics), people are too quick to theorise and generalise. The tiniest hypothesis can be turned into an unassailable belief or even truth. In this respect, the sciences and the arts may be drifting even further apart. The former observe and the latter make, the former with little room to develop thoughts that appeal and inspire, the latter with little reflection in order to make their products truly relevant.

My own position is probably the trickiest.  need the validated theories of scientists to make sense of what happens in my own area but as soon as I apply them, I realise how partial or underdeveloped most are: laboratory results with many limitations and restrictions, sufficient for one or another aspect but not for all. At the same time, in my area people just want easy solutions, prescriptive or proscriptive ways to innovate and impress.

Popularisation

Popularisation

Not so long ago, when a particular founding father of my area was mentioned in a discussion (often unfavourably), someone would say it and the others would concur: yes, but he's doing a great job popularising design computing. It was a strange reaction: it combined negative undertones with a genuine pleasure that someone was trying to explain the value of the area to a wider audience. I must admit that I liked him; I wouldn't trust him (as most of the founding fathers) but I enjoyed his style.

Some time after his early death, I tried to re-read his books. I was rather disappointed. There was too much futurology for my taste but what made me really uneasy was the rhetoric: it was the usual architectural stuff, attempts to impress through references, clever observations and limitless, speculative theorising. It's forgettable stuff, after all. I'm not saying this just about this particular author. Many areas like design computing become too desperate to become accepted, to be admired by a target group - in this case, architects. On the one hand, it is only logical: this is the wider audience - schools of architecture and architects in practice. To succeed, design computing had to become accepted as a way of designing, appeal to architects who would then use it to compose. Only then would design computing achieve its true goals. The rest (visualisation, communication, information management) are mere efficiency improvements that have little to offer to the core of architecture.

Now that there's little resistance to computing in architecture, design computing still remains in the periphery. Eminent architects may use computers to design but most are just clever users. I guess that popularisation didn't work as expected, perhaps because the wrong target group was chosen: people who couldn't care less or who didn't have the power to change or interest in change. Another possibility, of course, is that popularisation mostly promotes the populariser, making him a known figure for what others have done. So, what do I do with his books? I gift them to colleagues who come late to matters digital and they are thoroughly impressed. He was really good at that, after all.

Uses of theory

Uses of theory 

Architectural theory has often been used to distinguish between tendencies, styles and architects, while one would expect a domain theory to unify, without morphological or other prejudice, to uncover common elements and explain underlying factors. Instead, architectural theory is laden with manifestos and polemics, attempts to justify and promote. Comparisons are often made only to damn opponents or subjugate the past to arbitrary conclusions.

One might appreciate architects' passion for their ambitions and preoccupations but when it comes to theory, a dispassionate attitude would be better. If I were cynical, I might claim that there is little that qualifies as theory in architectural writing. Statements, opinions and the like appear to carry too much weight if uttered by the currently famous but who does still remember those who used to be famous a few decades ago, let alone read what they had written?

I've tried to return to such texts and most of them seemed too dated and superficial. Yesterday's news may wrap today's fish but architectural theories of the past don't even merit such a re-use. They just gather dust in some neglected corner of a library. Very few show any interest because such theories fail to establish continuity, to develop lines along which they are propagated to reach us in the present (except of course the stubborn attachment of many teachers, especially to what they'd learned as students).