‘’There once was a small boy who lived in a place that seemed like a long way from everywhere.
Each morning he rose long before sunrise to begin his chores. At sunset he crept wearily back into his bed.
At sunrise he would gaze across the valley. In the distance he could see a house with golden windows. He promised himself that some day he would go there and see that wonderful place.
One morning his stern father was away at market. The boy knowing this was his chance stole out of the house and headed towards the house with the golden windows.
As he neared the house he realised that there was something very wrong. He saw no golden windows. Instead there was a place in need of repair surrounded by a broken fence. He knocked on the door, a boy close to his own age opened it.
He asked the boy if he had seen the house with the golden windows. The boy nodded and pointed back to where he had just come from. The setting sun had turned the windows on his house to gold.’’
Anonymous
I too imagine that better things must be happening elsewhere and in the case of architecture in Scotland this is undoubtedly true. However the story of the House with Golden Windows tells us that searching somewhere else for an answer to our issues is doomed to both superficiality and missing the value of our own voice. The development of an authentic and meaningful architecture can only come from within a culture. Architecture gains its authenticity from the well it springs from, not from imported visions, regardless how exotic and seductive they may appear; the beauty and craft of Scarpa’s work stems from the opulence of his Venetian heritage, Lewerentz’s intensity is born of a northern melancholy and Siza’s poetry belongs in the brightness of a southern Atlantic coast.
The threat and challenge to all things local and distinct is globalisation, globalisation of form and ambition. Much celebrated contemporary architecture is marked by an obsession with formal gymnastics and manipulation supported and marketed by an increasingly agile computer aided industry. So-called iconic architecture is peddled by itinerant architectural celebrities who journey to foreign courts bearing sparkling wonders. The cult of the celebrity is endemic in our culture and spreading; their every move is documented and discussed at length. The fêted few are engaged in an exclusive and self-indulgent game where the startling image or extravagant visualisation wins. Architectural publications flow unabated, spreading the current crop of seductive images to insatiable consumers. I speak as a self-confessed monograph junkie, who in weaker moments can easily succumb to the enchanting narrative of the architectural sirens.
Juhani Pallasmaa writes in his seminal text The Eyes of the Skin1,
‘’In western culture, sight has historically been regarded as the noblest of the senses, and thinking itself, thought of in terms of seeing. Already in classical Greek thought, certainty was based on vision and visibility……………………........
The ocular bias has never been more apparent in the art of architecture than in the past 30 years, as a type of architecture, aimed at a striking and memorable visual image, has predominated. Instead of an existentially grounded plastic and spatial experience, architecture has adopted the psychological strategy of advertising and instant persuasion; buildings have turned into image products detached from existential depth and sincerity.’’
The pre-eminence of the visual in our contemporary culture comes at the expense of ideas: ideas of how ordinary people actually live or might live. Concentration on the visual, the aesthetic, could be seen to reduce the work of the architect to that of a mere stylist only capable of making buildings either visually arresting, in the case for the iconic, or neighbourly, in the case for the contextual. We judge what is interesting and valuable by its visual impact, either by being striking or by being invisible. Designers may have always been prone to easy seduction but it is now a phrase that resonates through the halls of the planners and the drawing rooms of the amenity groups. How often have we lost a project because it had low wow factor? The search for the appropriate and subtle relies on an empowered and discerning client; they may be as illusive as a great architect.
The fixation with image is connected to the cult of the self, to a loss of the collective; it is concerned with the individual. It is concerned with personal self-gratification and gain. A simple series of aerial images of Edinburgh’s urban form reveal a gradual loss of shared, social patterns in favour of the exclusive and the particular. This is seen as a breakdown in the balance of public and private space not to mention the quality of each.
Edinburgh, Old Town, 1500’s – 1700’s, a dense medieval street pattern within defined and defining city walls that produced, along with squalor, a vertical layering that was in part responsible for the Scottish Enlightenment. Aristocrat and pauper, intellectual and tradesman lived literally on top of one another. The High Street was the ultimate social condenser.
’Here I stand at what is called the cross of Edinburgh, and can, in a few minutes, take 50 men of genius and learning by the hand’’2
Edinburgh, Newtown, 1765 – 1850, a neo-classical plan for the affluent that imagined terraced houses masquerading as palaces fronting private estate-like shared gardens. Here the well off played out their aristocratic fantasy surrounded by mature planned landscapes and refined Georgian architecture. The price of this splendour and the resulting migration of the educated rich was the decline of the Old Town and with it the social stew that had proved so culturally fertile.
Edinburgh, Bruntsfield and Marchmont, 1850’s, again shared terraces this time consisting of communal flats for the middle classes with private shared back gardens and public parks close by. These tenement blocks are notable for their use of generous bay windows, a device that allow residents to observe the street scene and be seen in return.
Edinburgh, The Grange, 1860’s, Victorian suburbs to the south of the city sees large individual houses within extensive private gardens. The villas are set back from the street and their neighbours. Already the idea of collective space is vanishing. There is no beginning and no end to the development pattern; all green space is private to the individual houses. The rich have removed themselves completely from the city.
Edinburgh Costorphine, 1930’s, the Grange on a budget, the individual house and garden are smaller but the pattern is the same as the Grange. The speculative developer apportions all the land to the individual purchasers. There is no public space then to be concerned about in terms of ownership and maintenance; all is profit.
Edinburgh, Bughtlin, 1990’s, suburbia at it’s most banal, the car and the individual have complete autonomy. The scene degenerates into a quagmire of houses and tarmac. Public space is reduced to turning space for cars, defined by the road engineer’s radii and visibility splays. Green space is confined to edging the roads. Buildings appear like aggregate in a matrix of tarmac; there is no proposition for public and private, front or back; in short there is no architectural idea or collective responsibility.
Edinburgh Southfields, 1960’s, Roland Wedgewood Architect. Immediately adjacent to the last scene is, at last, an architectural idea for social housing from a more enlightened generation. Terraced houses combine to form a continuous wall. Within the wall, the terraces are lined by private gardens that in turn open onto communal landscaped space. The inner green courts are extensive and secure. The individual contributes to an idea of shared space that benefits the community.
There is a growing sense that the primacy of the search for the iconic form is beginning to be questioned. Architects who place the human condition and common sense at the centre are beginning to find a voice. Concerns about the environment and the loss of local difference and character are becoming more newsworthy. The ordinary is slowly being seen to be of value as people turn from a prolonged period of decadence. Maybe sustainability concerns are the impetus we need to return to humanist practice.
The voices that inspire seem to all come from practice at the edge, either geographically or professionally. Dislocation and distance seems to help gain a critical perspective. Important work is being created in Scandinavia, Switzerland, Austria, Northern Italy, Portugal and Spain, away from the commercial centres. Iconoclast in chief Peter Zumthor, secreted away in a Swiss canton in monastic isolation with a group of close collaborators, has crafted a series of buildings that are marked by their exploration of the material and the sensual.
‘’Something new does not stand beside the old but grows out of it and is interwoven with the old.’’
Zumthor’s work along with a select band of older architects, Luigi Snozzi, Alvaro Siza, Sverre Fehn, Jorn Utzon, the Smithsons et al have influenced a younger generation of architects who themselves now not only teach, they write and most importantly they build. They build sparingly at the moment but the rapacious commercial world is very quick to recognise talent and convert it into a product that sells. They must be on their guard.
Within the main centres however loose groupings of younger architects have also created their own territories and agendas in contrast to the prevailing commercial culture. In London architects such as Sergiston Bates and Caruso St John under the influence of elders Tony Fretton and Florian Biegel write eloquently and build poetically. Their architecture is directed at the London that exists beneath the synthetic surface of the City.
From amongst these refreshing voices I have chosen three, each of whom raises an issue that is critical to this debate.
Valerio Olgiati writes3 about architecture as a continuing tradition:
‘’I tend to work with the same idea from project to project. I think of my work as a body of work that is something larger than each individual project. I do not plan change. Changes that appear from project to project are caused by the particularities of the task at hand, not by me changing my architecture for each project. It is possible that my architectural idea in my mind does not work at all for a given project. That is the moment when I have to invent something new. But that is how I approach it. I do not get up in the morning and strive to reinvent a new architecture.’’
Sou Fugimoto writes4 about the primitive:
’To consider innovative architecture of the future is astonishingly equivalent to reflect on primitive architecture. That is because architecture transpires wherever people exist. Thus novel architecture must be a conception of a place for humanity that is fundamentally new.’’
Peter Markli writes5 about social responsibility:
’The question of the collective conception of architecture affects the political understanding of our work. I believe that the contemporary architectural debate is marked by a certain cynicism. Put in somewhat simplified terms:
architecture is no longer a primary agent of social change – innovation almost always proceeds from the dynamic of an unfettered, globalised economy. Architects are latching onto the whole set of characteristics of this development – its speed, its absence of boundaries, it’s aggressive fragility – and pouring them, in a distinctive narrative furore, into absolute formalistic images.’’
I am not talking about architects as social workers, or artists, or developers. I am concerned about architects regaining the practice of architecture, of having the courage and skill to talk about architecture as a cultural responsibility. Architecture we are told will be lost to the engineer who is better placed to deal with sustainability just as it was claimed architecture has have been lost to the project manager or the surveyor in the recent past. Architecture can never be lost to anyone, architecture exists beyond any definition the professions, including the architecture profession, might give it.
Pallasmaa1 writes:
’The timeless task of architecture is to create embodied and lived existential metaphors that concretise and structure our being in the world. Architecture reflects, materialises and eternalises ideas and images of ideal life. Buildings and towns enable us to structure, understand and remember the shapeless flow of reality and, ultimately, to recognise and remember who we are.’’
Atelier 5, Terraced Houses, Flamatt, 1961
Glen Affric Youth Hostel, circa 1950’s
There are two images that haunt me or rather console me, in a way both reveal an idyllic sense of harking back to simpler times when the greatest possession was a bag of sweets and the greatest danger was wasps. I suppose like the boy in search for the House with the Golden Windows they represent something that is actually unattainable. They do however place building as a central figure in the scene, a key reference point.
Familiar strangers are people we see in our everyday lives who connect us to a place; the business man we always pass at 8:15, the group of school kids we pass on the Mound, we do not know them intimately but we would miss them if they were not there. Familiar strangers offer a refuge from the unknown without the risk of becoming known. Buildings too ground us in a particular place. They bond you by being there, by their familiarity, by their reticence as opposed to the unknown faceless structures or strident iconic forms that assault the senses. For the most part architecture is about making the familiar building; houses, offices, shops and hospitals. These building types form the backdrop to our lives.
Maybe my images reveal naïve clues for a more sustainable future; windows that open, cycling, walking and simple construction. They probably reveal the hopeless sentimentalist in me. However they have a powerful and primitive sense of time and place. They pull us in; we are lost in a narrative we instinctively understand. We know what has happened and what is about to happen: in Flamatt a mother is preparing pasta, drinking a glass of wine and listening to the radio, she calls the kids from the balcony for their evening meal. In Glen Affric the sun is going down as these children wearily return to beans on toast and mugs of tea, sitting at a communal table, full of tales of their day’s walk.
The scenes have a dignity and stillness that both lifts and calms the spirit. There is none of the exhausting wilfulness of much celebrated architectural design. There is no trace of the desperate search for that never seen before gesture. Sou Fujimoto’s architecture has this quality, as does Valerio Olgiati’s, as does Peter Markli’s, a sense that space, people and experience are connected.
George MacKay Brown6 writing in Northern Lights, Shetland: A Search for Symbols reveals how extra ordinary, ordinary life is.
‘’A blight on much modern art is an all pervading snobbery and elitism, and cult of personality – ‘ the famous poet’; ‘ the world-renowned sculptor’. We should think rather of art as being, in Thomas Mann’s words, ‘’anonymous and communal’’ a whole community contributes to the making of a poem……………..to see the symbol in the common objects of daily life is to know a depth and enrichment.’’6
A new and emerging architecture in Scotland needs to regain architectural culture itself. It needs to make an ethical stance and create work that once more returns to placing people first through dignified and appropriate design. As a small nation on the edge of both Europe and the profession, I believe we are well placed to make a significant contribution to the developing debate.
Neil Gillespie
ISBN 978 1 905061 18 1 _ copyright The Lighthouse
www.thelighthouse.co.uk
Notes:
1 The Eyes of the Skin, Architecture and the Senses, Juhani Pallasmaa, Wiley-Academy 2005.
2 Quote from a tourist in 1750 on Parliament Square from Edinburgh World Heritage Site publication.
3 Valerio Olgiati, Conversation with Students, edited by Markus Breitschmid, Virginia Tech Architecture Publications, 2007.
4 Primitive Future, Sou Fujimoto, INAX Publishing, 2008.
5 Approximations The Architecture of Peter Markli, Edited by Mohsen Mostafavi, AA Publications 2002.
6 Northern Lights, George Mackay Brown, Polygon, 2007Northern Lights, George Mackay Brown, Polygon, 2007.
Illustrations:
Images of Edinburgh_Google Earth.
Terraced Houses, Flamatt, 1961, Atelier 5 GA, Global Architecture, ADA Edita Tokyo. Co ltd, Photographs by Yukio Futagawa, 1973.
Glen Affric Youth Hostel.
Unknown.
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