"Over the past few decades, architecture as an idea and practice has increasingly limited its definition of itself.  In the foreseeable future, the instrumentality of architecture-that is, change  that challenges the dominance of commercial institutions, their aims and values-will diminish.  While the present day seems to be a time of unparalleled innovation and freedom of choice, the reality is that architectural styles and forms are often the seductive packaging and repachaging of the same, proven, marketable concepts.  The speed with which 'radical' designs by celebrity architects achieve acceptance and popularity demonstrates that formal innovation has itself become an important commodity.  However, beneath the cloak of radicalism, the conventions of existing building typologies and programs, with all their comforting familiarity, still rule-and sell.  What is desperately needed today are approaches to architecture that can free its potential to transform our ways of thinking and acting."  -Lebbeus Woods, New York, April 2008 

"We live in a time in which contemporary architectural culture has nearly surrendered itslef to the pervasive circumstances of global economies and the imperatives of their accelerating markets, technologies and development.  Architectural culture is, undoubtedly, growing more and more global, generic, and market driven."  -Brett Steele, London, April 2008

"By believing passionately in something that does not exist, we create it.  The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired." 

-Franz Kafka

The above passages affirm the following ideas about the state of contemporary architecture :

1]  Architecture, in order to be built, must acquiesce to market forces.

2]  The majority of 'architects' have become mere aestheticians, space planners, or information managers.

3]  High-profile architects, having once retreated into the academy, are designing works that seem radical, but are actually completely normative, from a use, construction processes, contractual, or economic standpoint.  The spatial gymnastics on the roof or facade serves as a mask, enshrouding a normative, proven process.

How can we overcome these failings as a profession?

1]  By embracing banality.  Contractual apparatuses, fee structures, design and procurement schedules et al. need to be examined with the same fervour applied to other academic pursuits.  If we can engage market forces intelligently, then we will have renewed freedoms.

2]  By remarrying intelligent tectonics to human occupation, to use, thereby re-engaging form.  We must stop fetishizing the tools and put them to work.  

If we can transform our profession, by attempting these tasks, daunting though they may be, then we will have the ability tp push forward radical, progressive architectural form and ideas while combating dilution by the market and refusing overt, pervasive, unethical commercialization. 

On Tabula Rasa

One of the critical fallacies within modernist architecture was the rejection or dismissal of time as an element intrinsic to the holistic design process.  As if the Parthenon is not falling apart, many works strove to consciously ignore prior historical, social, economic or ecological contexts while evoking a sense of permanence and timelessness.  Irregardless of simple material properties and the Law of Thermodynamics, people change, use patterns are fluid not static, building life cycles are increasingly being designed for shorter and shorter time spans.  Not only is this incredibly short sighted and wasteful, but it has created a pervasive methodology in architecture and the construction system at large that is centered on delivering a static product.  Architects design objects rather than processes, and consequently the building begins to deteriorate as soon as it is finished construction.  

This manifests itself in our contractual apparatus, which is designed for one final set of contract documents.  And it manifests itself in the studio, where there is not enough time to commit fully to one design, never mind sequential iterations.

What if we imagine a reversal of this line of logic?  What if instead of a tabula rasa, we were to use a palimpsest as an analog?  Taking into consideration the historical, social, economic and ecological conditions of the site and brief, rather than just superficially grazing over them, and thinking about the afterlife of the building and site as opportunities to strategize economic models as well as future use patterns and relocating and reusing raw material.  

The palimpsest model is not new.  It's used subconsciously all the time in renovations.  However, what would it be like to conceive of a 'ground up' project as future palimpsest prior even to schematic design?

How would the contractual apparatus change?  How can we design building tectonics that can be easily changed or manipulated to serve a different spatial configuration?  How do entropic physical properties of material effect use patterns?  How can iterative architecture begin to inform future entrepreneur endeavors by a constantly changing clientele?  

On the "Natural"

"Here was neither peace, nor rest, nor a moment's safety. All was confusion and action, and every moment life and limb were in peril. There was imperative need to be constantly alert, for these dogs and men were not town dogs and men. They were savages, all of them, who knew no law but the law of club and fang."  - Jack London, The Call of the Wild  

Somewhere, somehow, along the tangled web of human development we got this fantastic notion into our heads that there is such a thing as 'nature,' meaning:  Na-ture: [n] 1. the material world esp. as surrounding humankind and existing independently of human activities. Or 2. the natural world as it exists without human beings or civilization.  <http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/nature>  As opposed to ‘man-made’, or the artificial, meaning:  ar-ti-fi-cial: [n] made by human skill [as opposed to the natural].  <http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/artificial>

I propose that this construct, being itself artificial, is illogical, out-dated, and counter-productive both ecologically and ecologically, for two reasons.

The first is simply, from a physical and material perspective, the realm of human intervention is incredibly intertwined with the ‘natural’ [if untouched, ‘pure’ ecosystems actually exist anymore to be a factor in world ecology] as to be inextricably linked.  One might say, from chemical and physical processes, they might be the same phenomena, indivisible except as an abstraction.

The other reason is that this abstraction seems to create an odd division that sets the natural against or in opposition to human economic development.  Ecological systems are to be mined, or plowed as resources, but not enhanced for the future.  You can be either ecologically savvy, or economically prosperous, but you can’t be both.  A seemingly pervasive ‘us against them’ mentality, that actually prohibits mankind from achieving an ultimately sustainable ecological and economic model.  This is a fallacy.  As with any economic model, if you reinvest in the means of production, you see the return in dividends.  Good stewardship is the best capitalistic policy.   More investigation into the origins of this.  

On Liability

"I believe our profession is actively running as far and as quickly as we can from liability.  And as we run from liability we are finding ourselves marginalized from the most core fundamental elements that allow us to do good design.  Now, we are an intelligent group, so we have re-branding that retreat as conquest, and we have created an artificial schism between creation and execution.  Precisely because execution attracts liability, and execution requires expertise.  So we have created a false condition in which we overvalue individual creative acts and shun those processes by which we could execute those individual acts.  Now saying this is as implausible a proposal as saying that three minutes of fornication is the creative act and 40 weeks of gestation, and, God forbid, twenty-four hours of child labor, are merely execution.

So what do we, in essence, need to do as architects?  We need to stitch together these two independent roles as individuals: project architects and project managers.  And in particular we need to stitch creation and execution back into the authorship of processes, not the authorship of objects.  

Now, in order to author processes, we have to assume liability.  And if we assume liability, we have to be sure that we are very good at navigating everything from contracts to fee structures, to complex programmatic analyses before design, to dreaded escalation and cost analysis.  All the way through probably the most important thing: the ability to author design and procurement strategies.  And if we can do that, we will be in a prime position to accept liability and therefore in a prime position to return back to the center of design, and therefore actually to have renewed freedoms."  -Joshua Prince-Ramus, Yale Building in the Future Symposium, October 2006 <http://www.rex-ny.com/approach/yale-building-in-the-future-symposium> 

Sounding the retreat into the Ivory Tower means that when you peek out to try and build a building, it must be built in a completely normative way [no matter how unconventional it seems aesthetically] because you do not have the expertise to deal with the contractual apparatuses or construction systems in any meaningful way except to acquiesce.   Taken in this light, what is difference between the Denver Art Museum and a WalMart big box?  

AA_01

Architecture is an outdated word.  A building is not architecture simply because an architect designs it, but rather because it comes to be validated by somebody with credentials.  It is at once straight-jacketed by a hyper-academic oppressive tonnage of historical theory, and thrown around carelessly as a part of a branding scheme.  It has connotations of elitism that distance it from almost everyone in society, but also is used as a buzzword to sell mediocre condos.  Projective practice intentionally goes beyond the traditional boundaries of the disciplines ivory tower, while actively engaging building systems.  Therefore making itself the not only the center of production, but the center of production’s production.  Projective practice is different than architecture because it self-consciously adapts itself to fit with and have influence within its context, rather than either distancing itself from or kowtowing to current systems.  Projective practice is not architecture because it requires a completely different shift in fundamental thinking and a complete reorganization of both the architect’s role and the content of what and how they produce.  

On Grass

Architecture, mostly, is obsessed with spectacle.  So used to hearing the word ‘no’, when finally engaged with a design problem, architects overact and pack as many of their best ideas into the project as possible. The result culminating in jewel-box, high-bandwidth buildings whose worth is measured in press coverage. Often overlooked by the critics celebrating or admonishing a given work is the banal canvas upon which these master strokes are applied. So many hundreds of thousands of square miles of the world is covered with grey concrete, black asphalt, white gypsum walls, and green grass. These default surfaces exist as an unremarkable backdrop that allows the formal gymnastics of architecture to occur on.

We are missing the point. The high-performance works can exist only in contrast to a low performance setting. However, these seemingly innocuous surfaces covering the planet are the real site of architectural production. The engagement of the ‘banal’ [sites, systems, products, methods] is more profitable than staging actions and events which move through them.

To ignore this seemingly dumb landscape by simply adding dramatic projects onto it, whether “minimal” or “excessive,” amounts to little more than retransmitting generic architectural calculations. What really matters in any calculation is not the particular result, but the frame of reference, the assumptions built into the system of counting. To produce the kind of hesitation in the everyday flow that is the mark of the thoughtful architect may require resisting the temptation to simply add, to cultivate the capacity to say less or even to say no.

On 'Urban' Infrastructure

Singular 'genius' works of architecture seem to be accomplished more easily in autocratic states with monopolist economies.  Evidently, when there are less chefs in the kitchen it is easier to push through more radical ideas with the intesity and speed of economy necessary to see them through to fruition. This is not new.  Look at the Constructivists in Communist Russia, or the appropriation of the Rationalists by Mussolini.  

Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris failed to appeal to Paris' planning board, but succeeded in Chandigarh.  Kahn's most prolific work was done in Dhaka, not Connecticut.  CCTV went up in Beijing, while the WTC still languishes in bureacracy.

Inversely, democracies actually present a series of barriers to producing singular works of intrepid architecture.  Witness the aforementioned debacle of the WTC, or remember the recent block of Nouvel's tower at MoMA.  There are simply too many planning boards, municipal agencies and departments, historical preservation societies, community board meetings, for unconventional architecture to push forward undiluted.

However, these same barriers to singular works, are in place to ensure the quality of urban life and space as a knit fabric rather than for a select few.  

Recently Tom Mayne, has had the following to say about Dubai:

“There is no connected tissue,” he said. “It might work today, but the prognosis is not good for the future.

“It’s not going to work on many levels, from social to infrastructure and ecological. It’s going to be a disaster in ecological terms.

“The political class is no longer in charge of cities… which means there is no planning. Los Angeles is a prototype for that. The private sector rules. It takes hours to get downtown in LA as there is no public transport.”  <http://www.bdonline.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=426&storycode=3124669&c=2>

Which leads to the following questions:  

If great works of heroic architecture must be supported by a hinterland of support infrastructure, that is obviously lacking in a place like Dubai, where is the tipping point when these works outstrip the urban resources needed to sustain them?  How long and under what circumstances can they last until the realization that a socially unsustainable construct is also an economic and ecological one?  [Remember the speculative fiasco of the "Palm Fronds," also in Dubai.]

If our best and brightest are interrested in architecture as a self-referential dialog, and are willing to acquiesce to unethical and unsustainable processes to accomplish that dialog, what does that say about the nature of the profession?  If architecture's supposed purpose is to benefit all who come in contact with it, where is the social contract in works of ego?  

Does architecture have a Hippocratic Oath?

On Voting

Abstaining a vote is not a rejection of the principles of democracy. Rather it is a refusal to mandate politicians who superficially court and privately contempt.