Always Distinguish(ed).

More than three years ago, when I finished my Master’s thesis for architecture, I decided that I would never talk about it again… I actually went so far as telling job interviewers that they could read about it in my portfolio, but that I did not want to explain it to them (and they still hired me)!

Well, in this exclusive, I’m going to break the silence. You see, I’ve noticed more and more through this field-switch of my own—from architecture to theology and philosophy—that the cultural and intellectual crisis (or movement, or development, depending on your own  opinions) that I perceived through the lens of architecture, surely enough, can be observed in other fields as well.

In other words, let us begin with some of my thesis research.  Some background is necessary at first.  In the “world” of architecture, there are more than a handful of architects interested in some edgy stuff in the way of what is called ‘programming’.  If you remember, Louis Sullivan (1856-1924), author of one of the world’s first “skyscrapers”—the Wainwright Building here in St. Louis—and the hand behind the pen of the phrase “form ever follows function,” gave voice to the ideas that would take the world of architecture by a Modernist storm.  Though Sullivan died almost a century ago, his words ring out through history.  Sullivan’s intentions in these words were most certainly other than what they are often taken to mean today, and yet they are but the first whisper of what would become a great cry against sentimental aesthetics.

Form following function, indeed, is no “new” idea.  The form of any created artifact with a functional intention is inevitably dictated by its purpose.  To separate the two is to render the work impotent—like making a chair out of sugar cubes or glass shards.  But Sullivan’s Modernist successors would construe his words to demand the stripping of anything ’superfluous’ of structure and function from buildings.  If you don’t believe me, just ask Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers about their Centre Pompidou (pictured above right).  Now, granted, Pompidou is a bit tongue-in-cheek, and a better example would perhaps be the sleek and orthogonal steel, glass and concrete of the international style, but the point is that this over-emphasis on function dictating the shape and appearance of buildings came to a head in the last century and carried itself over even into the Postmodern styles of the latter half.

This denuding of ornamentation was exemplified by later iconic statements such as “less is more” and surely enough, “God is in the details”.  Both quotes end up exulting the details themselves as a kind of obsessive-compulsive ornamentation: Mies van der Rohe’s designs were extremely difficult to execute because of their precision.  They can appear, to the uninitiated eye, as rather bleak, sterile, elitist… or simply ugly.

Consider Mies’ campus design for Illinois Institute of Technology (pictured at left) which is exemplary of the fusing of the German Bauhaus and international style in the United States.  The drawing itself speaks volumes about Modern architecture’s presumptuous intentions: the rectangular and simple buildings seem to float like dominoes on an air hockey table, rising up above their grungy neighborhood surroundings like the architectural liberator of Chicago.

See also Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin (pictured at right) for urban Paris which planned to replace entire sections of the city’s landscape with an entirely new and much larger-scale project composed of glass cruciform skyscrapers surrounded by highways, parks and airstrips (and this is philosophically telling: Corbu’s skyscrapers were called none other than CARTESIAN sky-scrapers!).  The parks are meant to re-introduce the human scale—how lovely.    Each ‘function’ or ‘program’ (that is, use of a space) is segregated and neatly packed into a glass box.  All of this was done with the automobile, the true motor behind architectural modernism, in mind.  Most of the 20th century hero architects, like Wright, Corbu and Mies, had some forays into massive urban planning (daydreaming about cities of the future) especially funded by none other than—drumroll—automobile manufacturers (hey, architects got to eat too).  For more on Corbu and technology, read my post “Because Writing the Word Modernism Is Fun…“

Now, it’s true, I’ve been really down on Mies van der Rohe and Corbu up to this point—but, that’s what blogs are supposed to do, right, be critical?  But, I have a point in all this, so bear with me.  At this point, I want to focus more closely on the design for IIT’s campus because it contains within it a paradigmatic building for Modernism, and even contemporary state-of-the-art architecture, and… inevitably my thesis.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s design for the architecture school building at IIT’s campus, S. R. Crown Hall (pictured at left), consists of two levels, the upper level being an entirely open and column-free space for architecture studios.  It was called a “universal space”.  This was achieved by way of steel trusses spanning over the roof (see the beams that seem to pop up over the building?).  Now, the structure is clear, the function is clear, the intention is crystal-clear.  The building, I can’t deny, is marvellously executed.  But here’s the crux of this post (I know, 12 minutes later)… Mies’ “universal space”, entirely open, free to interpretation, without limits in its use, is the beginning of something entirely different for architecture.

Which leads me to my thesis (finally, you say).  It should come as no surprise that my thesis bordered more on urbanism than architecture, or rather, it was precisely that no-man’s-land between the human scale of architecture and the communal scale of urbanism that attracted me.  “Up from the Road” it was called, and its intentions, at least, were golden.  Take a strip of would-be interstate in my hometown, Memphis, and find a way to use it to re-habilitate the texture of the damaged urban landscape.  You see, as you might have already, interstates and highways in general had a tendency at their inception to bore their way through cities in a rather destructive manner.  For the sake of progress, they left a ruinous path through the dense patchwork of American cities—but gosh if I couldn’t make it to work on time from my suburban chalet.  Memphis’ own Sam Cooper Boulevard was a piece of “living” history: one of the first interstates in the country to be stopped by a local initiative, I-40 stopped dead in its tracks at the edge of Overton Park in Midtown Memphis.  Now, it was never finished, but a four-mile strip of 6-lane highway remained.  For almost fifty years now it has served as a highway to Midtown, carrying mostly local traffic.  On weekends and at off-peak hours it is rather empty.  My thesis, among other things, proposed ways of re-using the road surface for other purposes.  Think universal space here.

And there you have it: the universal space becomes the point of encounter between the generic and the specific, infrastructure and detail, the massive scale and the exquisitely ornate human scale, the imposition of a global network on the local bricolage.  Ah, now you’re talking my language, you say.  The concrete monster, the autistic and monolithic freeway system speaks of imposition, globalization, generic, and incites the local, grassroots, human, yes, yes YES!  Fight the man!!!––wait, just a second.

Recent years have seen an upsurge of interest in urbanism, from the New Urbanism of Seaside, Florida to plans to rebuild New Orleans, there is renewed attention paid to public space and communal usage.  The urban plaza, especially those of Europe, have become iconic again for urban design.  Public spaces, urban spaces—what is called “negative” space on a field-ground diagram of a city (where buildings are shaded and open areas and streets left white)—is the place to be, in short.  My thesis was certainly about finding a way to create public, specific, local space within the generic language of the interstate highway system.  Now, whether or not it succeeded is not particularly important.  I want to draw attention, rather, to the interests… the process, if you will, because here I think is the connection with theology/philosophy.

So, at this point I want to introduce yet another project: Foreign Office Architects’ Yokohama International Port Terminal (below left).  Here is an excerpt from their own writings about the project:

“We started with certain principles and later combined and changed them. The changes are never visual or aesthetic; they are always technical or practical. We do not believe in the origin or in the end of a project. We believe in the medium of the process. We are totally opportunistic. The end is determined only by external forces, like deadlines of the contractors or the client.”  (emphasis added)

Notice two particularly important statements: “the changes are never visual or aesthetic” (sound familiar… an extrapolation of “form follows function” maybe?) and “we believe in the medium of the process” (the architects are less interested in the completion of the project and more in the design and building of it).  The project lives on precisely because of its flexibility, its capacity to change drastically over time according to use and interpretation.

Where are we going?  Well, one more thing.  I researched, for the thesis, some infrastructural and manufacturing terms like ‘post-fordist’ infrastructure and ‘just-in-time’ manufacturing.  Particularly interesting was Stan Allen’s “Infrastructural Urbanism” in his magnificent book Points + Lines: Diagrams and Projects for the City.  Allen and other writers such as Gandelsonas led me along a path that saw America’s own particular development of urban space as linear.  As opposed to the more European standard of plaza/square surrounded by buildings, America was built up around Main Streets and Broadways.  But, that’s a bit off topic.  Allen and others like Reiser + Umemoto talk about generic infrastructures and their ability to respond to local contingencies and adapt to topography and urban environments (for the liturgical buffs, here Re: Inculturation) while maintaining continuity of the system.  Allen focuses specifically on a ‘bottom-up’ infrastructure which establishes a loose envelope of fixed points of service, access and structure setting technical and instrumental limits to other designers’ work on the same site.

There seemed to be, in my summation, an important shift in design which suggested a re-arrangement of the relationships between form, structure and program (anticipated use).  Skipping ahead to the end of it all, we can observe a sort of massive shift in systems.  We see it in governments (post-Franco Spain’s de-centralization into autonomous communities), we see it in urbanism, in the way our cities exist (freeway systems connecting sporadic suburban technoburbs in the outskirts of a de-centralized city), in our architecture, in our liturgy (inculturation, adaptation, structure and form), even in the way we eat (organic foods, homegrown, free-range, small farms and free-trade coffee)… in short, in a variety of our systems today, we can observe a sort of de-centralization.  Now, this is a generalization, and becomes even more so the more that I add other disparate systems.

My whole point is this: much of this work done toward adaptation, local color, contextualism, autonomy, individuality, particularism, regionalism, etc. often over and against universal structures and the imposition of what are seen as inhuman infrastructures, and so on… stems from a general rejection of the Modernist movement. Sure, it took long enough, but Postmodernism came around to reject Modernism’s till then unabated hunger for the novel and universal, the panacea to end all panaceas, the search for the global solution, only to fall on its own rather Modernist foothold.

The organic revolution, as I’d like to term it rather irresponsibly and just for fun at the moment, is something that, I think, comes out of this.  The desire to create buildings and spaces, for example, or inculturate-able liturgies, that anticipate future uses in their own vagueness draws a fine line between what can reasonably be called organic and what is decidedly and unabashedly manipulated and imposed.  What do I mean?  In some way, the organic fuses together form and function.  In some other ways, organic connotes the lack of the artificial, the exterior.  In another way, it is about harmony and continuity, the necessary and natural.

When the Church, for example, stipulates that something should be organic, I have the urge to laugh.  Not because I think that the Church is silly for saying this, but because in reality, I think she’s saying something that is not coming across as clearly as it might.  The organic does not come about by imposition, whether it is on the local or global scale… by defintion, the organic comes about by necessity (not argued, rationalized necessity but real necessity)…by natural processes, over a long period of time, and is RARELY observable while in progress.  Does this mean that we cannot intervene?  I don’t think so… what is it to be a human author if it is not intervention in nature?  What is human art but the manipulation and imitation of nature?  A fin de cuentas, we’re going to have to answer the question: what is organic?

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