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TOWARDS A 20th CENTURY ARCHITECTURE_____________________________________________________ | |
| Author: | Prinsloo, Ivor |
| In: | For Us |
| Date: | 1962 |
| Pages: | 32-39 |
| _____________________________________________________ | |
TOWARDS A 20th CENTURY ARCHITECTUREIVOR PRINSLOO INTRODUCTION The September Exhibition of 1962 was a definite event resulting from a particular set of circumstances and was consciously thought of as providing a point of departure from this context. The conditions that led to the September Exhibition were such that, if the point of departure has not been generally taken, the necessity for another stand remains, whether in the individuals' insistence on the essential privacy of the explorations and concerns that only become public in the form of a building, whether by yet another exhibition — and another, or by what, because of its motivation, becomes a significant fact in itself, an evaluation of the implications of the September Exhibition. The first part of these pages from a notebook are a contribution to any assessment that may want to be made. They are simply a record of how one person saw the context of the Exhibition and what he made it mean for himself. This, therefore has relevance only where such an assessment is being made. In any other event these pages cease to have value and should be destroyed. In this case space provided for in the magazine can more relevantly be filled by any of the following, the choice to be made by the Editor, or if this is considered too dictatorial, by a Selection Committee, or if this is considered too arbitary, by drawing lots:—
A cautionary note added is that neither the Editor nor the writer may be held responsible for readers being misled by applying the literary aspects of these to architecture and that any resemblance to living persons is quite fortuitous. Any evaluation of a particular event is best done considering the context of the event in as much of its totality as possible. When the event is a very specific outcome of a definite set of circumstances then it becomes the only possible way to do so with any viability. The conditions that led to the September Exhibition were furthermore general enough to be perennial to any vested situation and would sooner or later have to be corrected for. To have accepted them then, or similar ones now, would have been to have had to agree to die a little in order to remain alive at all. This may well be the only method of survival in the long run, be that as it may, but it is definitely not the way to be recommended where values are being tested such as at a school of architecture. The year 1962 was one of singular unrest at the University. The most striking thing at that time was the feeling of a total breakdown of communication, between individuals, between groups of students, between the students as a body and the staff, between the school and architects. A great deal of it had much to do with factors affecting the general climate of the country, a growing sense of alienation within the country and as a country, an ever increasing awareness of the conflict with the developing social structure. The feeling of having to do something, beyond eminently satisfying feelings of guilt, beyond Sunday-morning protestations, to face the unanswered, often unasked, question, of "what to do?" At this time in the school the students in the first four years where [sic] all ones that had taken the first year basic design course and it was amongst these that the unrest was most noticeable. This point may be crucial to the understanding of the situation. The thing to remember, however, is that no series of fundamental revaluations of the visual environment, such as the course was, is sufficient in itself to create the conditions for a general revaluation. It was simply the trigger to a long overdue hard look at just what we were supposed to be doing, not only at the University, but in claiming a place in society as architects and by claiming to be alive as men. This hard look in its first glance was what was so damaging. The situation that occurred was simply that of students who had experienced a valuable reassessment of the visual environment in general terms that failed to find an equally valuable way of carrying this over the traditional particulars of their profession. The crucial point has always been that subtle breakthrough from the end of basic training into the second year, from the general exploration to the particular application and in spite of very brave attempts by the staff it just did not work. This is a real educational problem and is solveable. Basic design as a discipline is not at fault as has been demonstrated by other schools. Somehow there was too much resistance in the air, too much lurking mythology that did not work, residual, undefined, classical or, where defined, tending to a formalism that depended upon concepts and systems, of proportion etc., that were meaningless. People working in other disciplines had long since rejected the notion of universally known and generally accepted systems of values and it was meaningless to cling to the mythology these standards had engendered. Reaction on the part of the students was immediate in that they simply refused to take part in this levelling process, to be part of the devalued mythology that it seemed one had to support in the 'great-deception—that—is—art'. They had found certainty in some particulars, they were all imprisoned in the subjectivity of their own experiences, very much aware of the viability of their own positions, feeling that they had the strength to explore, to change and influence in a modest way, yet did not have the power to do so in terms of their expected daily concerns. To join forces as a committee representing the students, although the only way to get a general hearing, seemed foolish, quixotic in a way, a betrayal of the valuable singularity newly found, a definite invitation to the devaluation of those very concerns that were important. The axiomatical result of such a situation is towards violence and chaos on the one hand and towards total inertia on the other. Complementary to this was the existing architectural reality, of serious controversy within the Institute of Architects about issues that affected the future of young architects and some of important buildings built that were immediate examples infallible in their indication of the hopeless confusion that was present in most architectural thinking. The major error that concerned people made at that time was in seeing these buildings as deliberate illustrations of a coherent approach, the implications of which were totally at a variance with what any informed observer would expect as the logical outcome of local conditions, rather than seeing them for what they are, just plain bad building. To look critically at buildings and the profession is part of that revaluation that should be the considered duty of all students, but only insofar as it leads to efficiency. When professional status becomes an end in itself, divorced from the social reality, then it ceases to be of relevance in the process of significant building and hence of no interest whatsoever to the student or the concerned practitioner. For the student it meant wanting a position of real value in society, serving a viable function, our survival as a profession dependant upon our fulfilling a real need beyond restrictive legislation, cultural lag and the pretensions of the paying public. If this calls for a definition of what an architect is, of how he can best do what he is to do, calls for a retook at the mythology of our collective pretensions and if this redefinition of that role within which we can work most viably calls for an extension of activities beyond that defined by the Institute then let us make the adjustment ourselves rather than have it thrust at us when the balloon pops, when the cultural lag under which we shield catches up. It is surely not untenable for the student to want that he should be equipped to cope with the wider reality of his profession and whilst not postulating Utopian conditions expect more from his profession than vested professional protection. The moral injunctions of the foundation are still much with us and have yet to be met, more so now on the brink of what seems to be another age of electicism, of juke box victoriana. Objects had been found in the immediate environment that were charged with meaning. They were buildings that were tangible statements made in terms that were able to present something visually valuable, something more in accord with the sum of our personal intuitions of how things ought to be put together than those things that daily passed as examples of what architecture was about. They were concrete images that had a coherence transcending the futile abstract diversions that architects seemed to be playing when faced with similar problems. We accepted that these things may well be overstatements in our common generality but they were at least indicative of the existence and, to us, the viability of ways of doing things that were more direct, more honest in a way more to do with the particulars of the problem, far less emasculated, far less "arty" than what was then passing for architectural profundity. Above all, the value seen was that here were things that had been produced in a way that made full use of the value of place and the importance of occasion. What cannot be overstressed was that it was not merely the formal language of these buildings that impressed us, we realized the value of understatement in a climate of loaded cliche. The call was not for "more rawness, more roughness, fatter beams" .... utterances of a then still embryonic formalism, the energetic somnambulism that is the fashion today, but rather that it was possible by meeting a problem fully, in all its complexity, by solving it directly, with constant concern for its actual real use and to do this in such a way that by the sheer clarity of the organization it gains something beyond the mere solution of these factors, poetic content in a way. Was there not something to be learned from these buildings? A way to an architecture of higher complexity, hence more able to produce truly simple, clear comprehensible buildings, an architecture of greater depth, hence outliving the rapid fluctuations of our vacillating concerns, an architecture of infinitely greater craftsmanship, hence beyond the false practicality and overdetailing the dull, utilitarian concerns of substandard practices. For nothing was more obvious then, as it is now, of our total failure of being able to fulfil what is surely one of the most important tasks of human artifice, to provide a dwelling place for man that is more stable, more permanent than we are ourselves. December, 1962. Either — Or ... towards a beginning. with apologies to — saman The specific problem was how to solve the Exhibition formally, of how to present the objects found in all their richness without their losing total identity, and above all, without devalueing them for ourselves. To generalize about them in any way, even if only in terms of grouping the photographs formally, or of making the necessary translation into the logical and temporal sequence that a planned exhibition seems to imply, would rob them of even more of their inherent poetic content than had the act of selection in photographing them. There was this concern of wanting to provide a point of departure and what was important in this was that the means of postulating this formally should in itself be the first act of further exploration. It had to be more than the satirical indication of the vacuum in most architectural thinking, more than merely trying to convey information, more than trying to pose a problem, even though the problem was a first order one. It became having to present our collected and collective intuitions as a pattern of images and associations which with the physical means of construction had to work as a mutually interdependent structure. We had to construct a device to present a complex total image in all its ambiguity and in such a way that the viewer had to become involved, even if only in terms of making a definite rejection. The materials for the constructional part of the final structure were scaffolding of three lengths, two types of coupling, corrugated iron sheets, fixing bolts for the corrugated iron. They were thus standard materials, free from any complex connotations, with a limited visual value of their own. The fact that they were standard was important since one of the concerns was to emphasize the way of 'putting together' rather than the units themselves, the emphasis on the process itself, to give it visual value. A way of grouping these units so as to guarantee an eventual order that was comprehensible had to be found, a system of control towards an undefined end result and a means of being certain of the relevance of each step to the total significance of the end result, and this had to be done in such a way that experience gained as we proceeded could be fed back into the system. What is important about this is that we had to deal with the problem of planning, control and communication when working in terms of process rather than of visual end result. With the exhibition planning and control were done directly in that we built without drawings, by trial and error, and communication was done away with by virtue of the fact that we built it ourselves. This is very viable way of doing things where there is time and where errors may be corrected. What would happen where this could not be done? How could this be planned and how could control be exercised and, secondly, how could this information be communicated to another person? Assuming that we had worked out the final form the problem became easier but still not easily solveable in traditional terms of plan, section and elevation. This is a real problem and has implications beyond the particular of the Exhibition. *Building at Leicester University. Stirling and Gowan. Completed 1964. Parts of this building could not be communicated by means of drawings. This fact and the fact that it is so well built makes it more a tribute to the architects than an indictment. This complexity is partly due to the language chosen rather than to any involvement with forms resulting from a system that remains 'open'. This may be a criticism but any that may exist will have to be in these terms and the implications of this, on the context, rather than in terms of the context. In order to solve our problems at all we are having to build at a much larger scale than ever before. This increase in size usually means an increase in the complexity of the project. Because we have learned to consider the context of the single building and because we have more information that has to be taken into account we find that even at a small scale we are having to work with a more complex order. *Hunstanton Secondary School. Alison and Peter Smithson. Completed 1954. This remains one of the most significant buildings to be seen in Britain in spite of the 'Zone of Silence' that has slid around it. When it is spoken of at all it is in terms of its formal plan, its proportions, and sometimes its elegance (or lack of) all of which have nothing to do with its current significance. It is good almost in spite of these when one looks at the degrees of order that run through the building and how they work in terms of the total image that one experiences and comes away with and when one thinks of how it was made, how the details were solved utilizing full feed-back from the site. Work it out. Architectural Review, September 1954. Simplification of end result is important in so far as it is towards the most comprehensible presentation of the problem solved in its totality but it is quite valueless where it is the simplicity obtained by partially ignoring the problem by the initial act of definition or that brought about by the subjugation of the problem by a geometry or system of insufficient flexibility and magnitude to cope with all the aspects of the problem. Many developments in architecture have in part only been ways of trying to simplify so as to be able to control at a larger scale — standardization, notion of team-work etc. and these on the whole have led to a false simplification that results in standardized concepts that, when built, provide the large, unliveable 'Athens Charter' type of condition. The idea that a town can be planned by translating factors generalized from normal analysis techniques into models of statements involving thousands of people that are then shoved around on a board until they look right is an irresponsible act. There is nothing inherently wrong with the technique of shoving things around until they look right, most of the best small buildings have been done like that, but to use it at the scale that town-planning requires "is not perhaps as meaningless as a 'Triangular Circle' but much more so than 'a winged lion' ". To plan by means of trying to visualise an end result and then working towards it is becoming even less possible in architecture. We have reached the limit of our traditional techniques in control and communication and this in turn results in our having to think about design, and intuitive judgements made on the language of the building in terms of the process aspects of the language rather than the end-result aspects of the language. This shift in emphasis is what is crucial. It is part of the creative process and is that we change our focus from visual end result to the actual process stated in some way or other. The process aspect, magnitude and flexibility of systems, is most probably best explored in terms of already known disciplines but to translate these into a buildable language requires an act of intuitive decision which has to be made on the unit without compromising aspects of the end result, which must be comprehensible at certain predetermined stages and its properties at those stages known beforehand. This shift in what our intuitive judgement focuses on will change the complete range of ideas of what constitutes an adequate environment in ways that we cannot determine until we have actually taken the step. Our only guide as to the viability of this change is by seeing changes that parallel this in other fields and the effect already shown in them, increased ability but also an alienation that affects all the values the workers have. It has the quality of a dimensional change that warps all we have previously known and so affects every part of our concerns, even those most familiar. *Buildings in Holland by Duiker and Bijvoet in the early '30s. The language of the Duiker buildings is not so very different from that of the Leicester building. This does not make either any less viable. To what extent is it the result of a similar way of problem solving? Traditionally we use a symbol system that approximates the actual disposition of those things being symbolised in scale and in relative position. This is obviously a very good way of working but we have to know much more about the scope and limits of this system. We also use it for exploration, control and communication. The actual way in which we "think" when designing has much to do with the fact that we use this system. Once we start "thinking" in terms of process this system becomes very limited. One of the dangers of drawings is that, because they approximate the end result, they are often treated as ends in themselves. Especially at schools the tendency seems to be to treat drawings as things having visual value of their own accord and the value of the final project is assessed only as far as these drawings please aesthetically. The result seems to be the universal phenomenon of students rebelling against the drawing of pretty drawings, perspectives etc. by either drawing ugly drawings, perspectives etc, or by not drawing at all, all equally meaningless but quite understandable. Granted that there is pleasure derived from producing a drawing that is a rough approximation of a single aspect of what will finally be a complex object but let us be more aware of the difference. Surely the problem is that of working from experience and personal intuition and arriving at a poetic statement perceived mainly in visual terms without of necessity governing the final object by value judgements passed on visual aspects of symbols that are mainly there for communication. It is necessary that we talk about what we want buildings to do. We must be able to do so amongst ourselves and with specialists in other fields. We need a language or languages to do so more effectively. *Team 10 Primer. This is a set of collected intuitions that touches upon concepts that are well beyond our ability to work in terms of or even to speak of coherently. This increases its importance. A wealth of content rests here that needs the technique to mobilize and use it effectively and efficiently. *Farm Buildings. Garkau. Hugo Haring. 1923. What Garkau, the early Aalto buildings, the Duiker buildings, Hunstanton and Leicester have in common, rather than what is different, is significant. The aesthetic implications, iconography almost, of the elevation illustrated is worth worrying about. *lf we perceive a group of things as being disorderly it usually means that the particular order is too complex to grasp. If it is too simple and "closes" it is free of tensions hence dull, or of limited value. Only a very small number of building types can be solved by means of the recognized classical systems of order. *Degrees of order vary according to rates of change within the structure. At an elementary level it seems that the more rapid the change the easier it should be to replace units with improved versions. The cycles formed by each of these rates of change link in a certain way if the structure is coherent. These links are what we need to know about. *Degrees of order relate to change in size in organic structures. We might find that in terms of comprehending a built unit the relationship between size and degree of order may be generalizable. *The size change may be that of the person experiencing the unit; — man "sees" differently at 2, 30, 100, 2000 miles per hour; — Pancho Guides's [sic] "Directors of companies are 10' tall and typists are only 5' tall"; — without being certain whether this relates at all one wonders about what Aalto does with the varying types of seating at Saynatsalo, the subtle differentiation between the various users. This is not a form of symbolism which seems to presuppose a valid and vital body of beliefs and myths that are generally accepted which is hardly the case today. *Etc. which is after all quite obviously etc. but distinct from Etc.-etc. which seems to indicate etc. etc...... These are by no means 'new' notions, They have been stated in many forms and many times by many generations. To work consistently in terms of them remains to be done. This plea for more method is not intended to devalue the act of intuitive decision. Its just that we have techniques for analyses that are ruthless, iconoclastic, accurate but do not have a complementary capacity for a synthesis that recognizes arbitrariness and fallibility yet provides a basis for a good life. The reality we deal with is one of infinite complexity, a joy-cean moziac, yet more than mozaic, linearly ambiguous .... and if a habit of patient research is formed by schools, if ways of exploration and checking are made the basis of research and the limits and scope of varying disciplines are known it may lead to a condition of solving our formal problems in which, if the problem can be stated clearly, it can lead to an occasional magnificence that has a validity and by this very act becomes less arbitrary, if not archetypal, for the length of these concerns that may work out a particular in that which is the human condition. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * "-that begins with an M, such as mouse-traps, and the moon, and memory, and muchness — you know, you say 'things are much of a muchness' — did you ever see such a thing as a drawing of a muchness?" "Really, now you ask me," said Alice, very much confused "I don't think .." "Then you should'nt talk," said the Hatter." December 1963. |
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