Postmodern Architecture – Effetism
The sole raison d’être of a building is to explore that which only a true work of architecture can discover. A building which does not express some unknown segment of existence is immoral. Revealing knowledge is architecture’s only reality. The sequence of discovery, not the sum of what is built, is what constitutes the history of modern architecture. The truth of architecture is contextual, but not nationalistic. There are analogues between meaningful work in India, Europe and Latin America. It is only in such a cross-national context that the value of work can fully be revealed and understood.
The rise of the sciences has propelled man into the tunnels of specialized disciplines. The more he advances in knowledge, the less clearly can he see either the world or his own self, and he is plunged into what Milan Kundera calls the ‘forgetting of being’. Architecture followed suit with modern man living in Spanish Colonial houses and working in monumental Roman IT centers. Perhaps at night he would buzz over to the Corinthian Club for an intoxicating Cuba Libre. Everything is false and make-believe. All is ‘seeming’; nothing is ‘being’. Imagineering has become the science of pretending and even one’s life becomes a pretense. In the modern world commercial building sells dreams, fashions, pretending and imagining what is not. Modern housing estates are investment parks branding fantasies. Shopping centers are becoming amusement parks for escape. When you are depressed and your love has left you, go buy some clothes, a CD or some software.
If Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, along with Cervantes and Descartes, were modern men, then the end of their legacy ought to signify more than a mere blip in the evolution of architectural hype and forms. It should mark the death of the modern era. In fact what is happening is a form of terrorism. It is attempted murder, but the movement still lives. We know that architecture is as mortal as the human race itself. We have schools of architecture where there has been no birth, much less a murder. As a model of the human spirit, grounded in the relativity and ambiguity of things human, architecture is incompatible with the mercantile universe. Architecture is not the vocation of cutting and pasting, of advertising, graphic design or of branding. This incompatibility is deeper than the one that separates a human rights campaigner from a torturer; or a secular man from a fundamentalist. It is an incompatibility with the very nature of artistic expression, as opposed to just a moral or political paradigm; because the world of the various truths of architecture and the world of commercialism are molded out of entirely different substances. The new world of marketing, of salesmanship, of the new economy based on consumer products, and of the new urbanism, is a totalitarian world. This ‘Postmodern’ world deals with issues and decisions around them in terms of black and white, good and bad, right and wrong, and The Truth. Branding has no place for ambiguous messages. The branding experience is not an exploration, an adventure or a journey. It is a statement pounded into one’s head again and again through cut-and-paste graphics and cute ideas. Architecture deals with nuances, relativity, personal perceptions, human experiences and ambiguous lyricism. The commercial and the mercantile world excludes relativity, doubt, questioning. It can never accommodate the spirit of architecture.
The Modern Architectural Agenda
Modern architecture does not mean a bunch of modern buildings. It is a state of mind, conceptualized within a social, economic and historical framework. Modern architecture is a reality only because it emerged through an agenda of change and actions with a mission and a vision. The modern vision of architecture is to create a better world, an ideal world, or even a perfect world, equally for all citizens. That mission can be seen in the spirit of Leonardo da Vinci’s Ideal City designs and the designs of many of his predecessors and followers. Humanism, the human being in the center of things, has been the flag that rallied thousands of young architects to the cause of modern architecture. Civil life, city life, urban life and urbanity have been the central focus of this cause. Civic spaces, boulevards, parks, gardens, riverfronts and concepts for entire cities have been on the palette of architecture for centuries; but at the heart of these utopian dreams is simply a journey toward the good life. This is a journey that everyone has a right to experience.
Often this work invokes nostalgia for a simple, green, clean rural life lost in the rush toward industrialization and urbanization. Even through the design of sophisticated country villas, architects have attempted to illustrate a possible future. Arcadia, a romantic image of a lost rustic world of perfection, a world at peace within itself, has been a binding artistic force linking learned people in hamlets, farms and cities. The city planning and urban design agenda are not those of great design statements and heroic monuments, but the plans that fit ‘everyman’ into a world of beauty, work, recreation, household life and reflection. Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse, or Radiant City, was an abstract concept where masses of people could live and work. It was a place where each sought her or his own individual opportunities. Wright’s Broadacre City put the same search into an American context and made a statement of an ideal way of living, which fit everyone into the template of ideal life. Neither of these ideal plans was meant to be built as a solution to problems. They were emblematic gestures encouraging thought about new options. In the midst of the last century, Jose Lluís Sert sponsored some of the first charters of good urban design and planning. He founded the first course in urban design at Harvard. In my own studio we have promoted The Principles of Intelligent Urbanism through our planning work in Sri Lanka, India and Bhutan.
While creating a harmonious living environment for all is central to our agenda, technology is of equal importance to the agenda. What Le Corbusier said of the house – ‘a machine to live in’ – applies equally to the city. But again, this is a symbolic statement, meaning that if shelter (or place) is to be accessible to all it will have to designed and produced like cell phones, bicycles and airplanes, not like a high art sculpture, a great painting or a handmade ceramic bowl.
To push this agenda is to fight other agendas. Mercantile architecture has its own rationale, its own framework and its own agenda. Commercial architecture follows the rule of Floor Space Index, cheap materials, flashy façades and creating false dreams. There is also the academic agenda of writing and theory, a museum agenda of the high priests of art, and a media agenda of making and breaking artists. All of these agendas share a commercial goal. All of these agendas make alliances and strategies for dominance. Thus, we cannot be silent spectators to life and the continuous changes going on around us. We must be participants in it. Architects are meant to be leaders, not followers.
Letter
Imagineering and the Creation of Space
A number of urban theorists have raised a core question regarding the determinants of urban form, urban planning and design. The most notable question is the assumption that rational decision making by professionals would continue to be the method of designing urban spaces. New theorists propose that urban form could become just another commodity – a product to be consumed if not produced for profit. Or perhaps, as illustrated by Blake in God’s Own Junkyard (1964), our urban environment may become just a by-product or, worse still, the flotsam of the production and consumption process.
The Power of Design
In Delirious New York (1978), Koolhaas substantiates the formative role of ‘business’ and ‘the market’ in shaping large projects. No one really doubts that capitalism is the catalyst in molding its own artifacts and in guiding the plans of ‘people’s governments’ as well. But capitalism goes beyond just profits: it is about ruling and about the ‘practice of power.’ Capitalism is more than just making an efficient factory, or a profitable office building; it surpasses inventions, copyrights, packaging, marketing, sales and profits. It is about images that express decision-makers’ roles, and their domains of power. The idea of the Chrysler Building, the Bank of China and the Rock
efeller Center is as much about imagery as anything else. These buildings create iconic images of New York and Hong Kong and the forces which move those societies. Without these images, aggressive competitors would well have swallowed up these entities long ago. The same is true of nation states. In international politics and multinational business alike, there is a hazy line between survival and successful imagery.
I propose we extend the argument into the realm of domains of power and how governments, corporations and other large institutions use urban spaces and urban places to temper these domains.
Autonomy and the Size-Hierarchy Scale
There is another issue that needs to be addressed here – the determinism of urban designers. The issue of artistic autonomy has been brought into question. While the Great Man Theory, according to postmodernists may belong in the trash-heap of history, there lingers an issue of the role of articulate and considered decision making by professional teams and their integrity in a process. Corporate Imagineering – the deployment of virtual reality versus the creation of genuine expressions – has been mooted as an integrated solution. I would like to propose that the larger the artifact designed the less would be the autonomy or the singular role of any one ‘creator’. For that matter, even the autonomy of any major professional design team would reduce in proportion to the size and scale of the artifact it creates. Opposed to this is transforming ‘designed experiences’ into ‘branding experiences’, devoid of human scale, proportion and cultural content.
I feel Team 10 was exploring this dilemma way back in the 1960s, and that they were saying, ‘If no one is going to be responsible, if no one is going to be the designer, then it would only be through the creation of a value system, with related principles, that we can get quality out of large, urban infrastructure projects’.
Much of Team 10’s work was in the form of experiments with smaller projects that would generate these principles. Aldo van Eyck’s parks, his orphanage, and the Free University of Berlin by Candilis-Josic-Woods come to mind as significant experiments in this direction. There was also a concern that ‘methods,’ the International Style and other cookbook schools of thought were devoid of the kind of value base and lyrical expressions that urban fabric requires.
At the lower end of this size-hierarchy scale, an individual can still design coffee cups, chairs and houses. The issues arise in the design of larger slices of urban fabric. While an artist can design one’s own chair, or make a sculpture, they cannot compose a town. This size-hierarchy scale seems to make eminent good sense, because a town design impinges on more people than a chair, and there are more technology options that will affect the lives and consumption patterns of thousands of households, enterprises and individuals in a town. On the other hand, the likes of General Motors should not become the ‘artists’ either, effectively lobbying governments on the kinds of subsidies to be placed on energy, various transport modes, roads and urban layouts.
What is disturbing is when thinking trends, corporate interests, and political naïveté begin to converge. The American creed of the New Urbanism, like the creed of CIAM, carries with it the danger of cookbook rules for urban design. Even Smart Growth, while reaching back to the panacea of formulae, labels non-believers as ‘libertarian.’ In case you do not know, in Americanese that is a bad word for extreme individualism, or neo-conservatism in the sense of advocating individual freedom over the common good. There is indeed a deeper issue here which urban designers and planners must address. Is autonomy what we are really looking for in the design process? Or, are we looking for design that responds to some kind of social and contextual contract, to principles and to ways of thinking, and not bureaucratic rules?
Anything Goes! Ugliness can be Pop Art!
Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown began to look at urban landscapes in much the same spirit that Andy Warhol looked at cans of tomato soup – as a form of pop art, or relevant cultural expression. A Coke can is, no doubt, an important part of popular iconography. But we cannot call it ‘popular art’. The 1960s protest symbol, the raised fist, is ‘popular art’. Unlike people’s art, we are getting flooded with corporate, common images, which are thrust on the popular imagination. Times Square is a gross example of this, but it is happening in less obvious ways in every setting. I have always had a deep, intuitive sense of doubt about Warhol, Brown and Venturi. In their desire to be catchy – to grab the public eye – they were dignifying ugliness, aligning with a way of thinking. Warhol mimicked and mirrored corporate generated images, not art that emanated from folk ways or common people’s lives. Brown and Venturi glorified the ‘leftovers, junk and trash’ of America’s consumer society. Interesting idea, but that’s about all there is to it.
Koolhaas’ barons of New York City wanted their mega-projects to serve as icons of their families’ names and prestige while simultaneously profiting. But this was more in the spirit of Renaissance patronage for self-promotion than for advertising products or making spaces into products or mundane branding experiences. There is legitimacy in this kind of vanity and hubris – a facile marriage between art and ego.
Walt Disney Incorporated was, and is, on a very different path. It has designed several ‘brand name,’ spatial products, each with its own market niche and commercial value, packaged and marketed with great success. They each sell under names we all know, ranging from Mickey Mouse to the Pirates of the Caribbean. The Disney Company has opened a real estate division, Disney Development Company, which has moved ‘Imagineering’ off the film sets and into the streets – the New Urbanism marketplace. The Millennium Village of Celebration, Florida, near Disney World in Orlando, was their first product. While Levittowns were in the same genre – packaging the American Dream into an affordable commodity – the Millennium project rests more on imagery than on mere functional factors like good location and affordability. Studies like the Tastemakers and the Levittowners explored the use of ‘packaging’ and marketing to create consumer products out of urban fabric. Our concern here is thus a long-standing one.
Given that urban design and city-planning fall at the ‘high end’ of the hierarchy of autonomy in art, it is clear that few individuals will sit alone and compose large-scale urban scenarios. What are the alternatives to corporate domination and its commercial iconography?
Benign neglect;
Participatory design;
Indigenous accretion;
Professional planning, and value based design teams; and/or
The individual visionaries.
All five are becoming ever more illusive propositions. Most likely a combination of these alternatives would be employed by large corporate or government entities.
How Spaces Use People
In fact it is not so much the process of space creation as the way the spaces are used, which should really matter. In this sense we should be more concerned with ‘conception’ than production. Or, conversely, how spaces use people should be a concern to us. Do we conceive this at the outset? Disney creates the spaces, the characters and the storyline. Disney begins with terms of reference, performance standards and a clear brief on the product elements and characteristics, with a clear focus on the targeted consumers. In fact the consumers and what the product must do to them is the core of the brief. There is something here to be learned from corporate animations. As designers we must know what our compositions are doing, how they move people, how they play with emotions and experiences. What is objectionable, though, is that the Disney design method rejects context completely. If a lake is needed machines are brought in and one is made. If a lake is in the way it is filled! In a similar way, people are conceptualized and made into the set characters. While the project makes the same claims of higher density, footpaths and common open spaces that most New Urbanism communities do, one questions the kinds of social interaction that may emerge. The high costs, isolation fro
m work places and limited housing design types lead one to conclude that the community will be one for older, well-to-do Anglo Saxons. The Millennium project raises numerous social issues about heterogeneity, about occupational and job opportunities and about variety in communities. American cities have always been cosmopolitan; a mix of Yankees and immigrants. In the Disney illusion there are no ‘new comers’, only old investors. It is a product, not a community.
Some spaces are convivial and catalyze social interaction. They make interaction happen. Some spaces temper one’s curiosity and direct one’s interest. Other spaces respond to the need for variety and diversity. A spatial system can ‘set up’ sequences of events, expectations and experiences which challenge the user’s spatial intellect. As an urban designer, one can create ‘hang-out nooks,’ steps to sit and sun oneself on, corners to hide in with a friend, and low walls to sit on and talk. A courtyard can be an empty, dull shell, or a lively outdoor café. There can be a sidewalk, and then there can be a sheltered arcade, with interesting little vendor stalls. Some spaces are of human scale, making one feel a part of the ambience. Others are monumental and tell us of our insignificance. Their scale offends and alienates. Or they are grey areas, devoid of any character or quality and abusive to the human spirit.
Letters To A Young Architect Page 13