5 Still Architecture
No building No program No site No client No problem No solution No budget No approvals No explanations No promises No agendas No aspirations No consensus No instruction Not right Not wrong Still architecture. January 1
1. Introduction
This book is about our architectural culture today. Itʼs a collection of topics, aphorisms, assertions and allegations. Itʼs a diary that records what once seemed true, or a collection of postcards addressed to the future. January 2
Design was once the solution. Design is now the problem.
January 3
I love design. Itʼs the only reason I am an architect. But we should be suspicious of the way design culture is currently configured. We canʼt go on like this. January 4
The most important issue our architecture faces is the relationship between design culture and the wider culture design operates in.
January 5
We donʼt need yet another clever design. We need to reframe design.
January 6
2. Modernism
Looking again at Le Corbusier. An entire cosmology of solutions for a problem context that no longer exists. Did it ever?
January 7
A myth of modernism was that a few ʻMastersʼ discovered fundamental principles which would lead architecture out of the irrelevance of styling.
January 8
The unintended irony of contemporary architectures derived from modernism, stripped of its ethics and reduced to a style.
January 9
ʻThe Modern Movementʼ can be understood as a ʻrear guardʼ action to assimilate new realities into architecture, in the face of a situation which threatened to make it irrelevant.
January 10
It is hard to remember that at one time architects were believers, following in the footsteps of ʻMastersʼ. There is no one we care to follow today.
January 11
Modern architecture was animated by the idea that design was a force of liberation, every project a prototype for the construction of a better world.
January 12
At one time, the capacity for a design to serve as a model for architects was its validation. For architects today, only the unique and un-repeatable have value.
January 13
Our inability to acknowledge the possibility of right and wrong in architecture, is a consequence of the rejection of the modernist scripture, and itʼs saints, parables and commandments.
January 14
It is hard to remember the excitement a previous generation felt about modernism. A generation that hadnʼt failed enough to know not take itself too seriously.
January 15
ʻMankindʼ, ʻthe futureʼ, ʻthe cityʼ, ʻour eraʼ, ʻtruthʼ...... The subjects for architecture that no longer exist. The earnest vocabulary that embarrasses us now.
January 16
We witness a continuing shift from ambitions for architecture to ambitions for careers in architecture.
January 17
It was as if, by design, you could make everything all right.
January 18
Q: After all, what did we think was going to happen? That a building was going to change the world? A: Yes.
January 19
3. Autonomous Architectures
Modern architecture was an attempt to disavow the autonomy of architecture.
January 20
Architects searched for the magic key that would expose the one true connection between reality and the architecture they made.
January 21
Modern design process was always somehow a process of derivation from site, from program, from techniques, from the zeitgeist, etc. Our contemporary design is usually and essentially about the arbitrary.
January 22
The inability of architecture to actually, completely, and directly, connect to a situation. Its necessary autonomy.
January 23
We have largely abandoned the belief that architecture should somehow align with the way things should be.
January 24
Was there ever a single architectural idea able to resist being used to make a bad building?
January 25
The (im)possibility of inoculating a project against itʼs assimilation.
January 26
All the great buildings that remained outside of the ʻofficial cultureʼ of architecture as delineated by museums, publishing and awards.
January 27
A truly radical architecture might precipitate a protest, an arrest, a threat, a murder. Most of what we do passes un-noticed.
January 28
The most significant developments in building culture emerge without notice, because we canʼt understand they are relevant to architecture.
January 29
Architecture is anxious to assimilate the tools and knowledge of other disciplines, but never seems to have anything to teach.
January 30
Architects looked outside of architecture for answers, but the answer may have been always already there in its practice.
January 31
4. Anonymous Architectures
The hundreds of territories of anonymous work in design that proceed without notice.
February 1
The ordinary practice of making ordinary buildings occurs in private.
February 2
The loading dock in the museum thatʼs the same as the one in the department store. Zero ʻDesignʼ.
February 3
The rooms in every building that will never be photographed.
February 4
The work not recognized as being architecture; even by its author.
February 5
At this moment, the necessity of a quiet practice of architecture.
February 6
The ethical necessity of choosing to remain anonymous in a time flooded with self-aggrandizing hype.
February 7
The architect who refused to allow photographs of her building to be published.
February 8
She practiced civil engineering. It was only years later that they realized her designs for gas and water were a long sly commentary on Duchampʼs Étant donnés.
February 9
The possibility of a private architecture. An ongoing inner monologue that has its own meaning and value.
February 10
The evidence for an architecture is out there. We just need to get out of our offices more often.
February 11
A hypothetical architectural practice whose presence is predicted, but not yet seen. Like the Higgs-Boson particle.
February 12
In the end, all he ever really wanted was to be a famous architect. Sadly, this was accomplished.
February 13
5. The Limits of Architecture
The small pond that architects swim in.
February 14
Architects design the 2% of a project that has not been somehow determined by others.
February 15
Our architecture is either gift wrapping or editing.
February 16
Buildings are an evidence of what a culture agrees is possible and correct.
February 17
Every design, to be realized, must pass through the gauntlet of conventions and expectations that delimit the buildable.
February 18
Architecture is on a short leach.
February 19
Every building is a kind of model of the conditions that made it possible.
February 20
Every architecture has to give up to get.
February 21
A building can be only a few of all things possible in the world.
February 22
We keep thinking architecture will make everything all right, or that a design will finally satisfy us. But, of course, it never does.
February 23
Look at any building. Most of it was designed ʻby othersʼ, not architects. The engineering, component parts, systems, details on shop drawings, general arrangements dictated by clients, etc. February 24
Look at any magazine. Apparent surface differences mask the reality that all architecture produced within a particular economy is necessarily and essentially the same.
February 25
Radical options are possible in architecture, but always necessarily marginal.
February 26
Compared to the effects of consumer culture, what actual effect has our frustrated hand wringing, ernest speeches, critical writing and anxious thoughts had on architecture?
February 27
The attempt to locate the freedom of architecture in its status as an art form is a cage we put it in.
February 28 / 29
“The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees oneʼs self from the chains that shackle the spirit.”
March 1
Formal experiments enabled by software serve to promote the illusion that progress in architecture will come through liberation from conventional appearance.
March 2
6. Architecture is Plural
If architecture is the system of values that engage with making buildings, there have been many different architectures.
March 3
Architecture is a plural word.
March 4
A design solution is always somehow a provisional answer, a product of the moment it was conceived, and an imposition on the future.
March 5
Buildings last longer than the ideas that made them.
March 6
Our idea ʻArchitectureʼ is a network of signs and relations within our culture.
March 7
Conventional histories of architecture disguise the fact that the subject ʻarchitectureʼ keeps changing shape.
March 8
Architecture as we know it will pass in time.
March 9
Nothing demands the perpetuation of our architecture.
March 10
Everything we value about our architecture will be extinguished and superseded by another architecture, completely indifferent to its predecessor.
March 11
Societies that thrive without architecture as we know it. People that donʼt see the point of architecture. Clients who distrust architecture.
March 12
Dead programs: Dungeon Castle Fortress Moat Palace Department Store Monument March 13
Some architectures are impossible in certain places. Others proliferate like a contagion.
March 14
Most of what we consider to be ʻarchitectureʼ is the product of urban culture.
March 15
Building culture is made up of multiple and overlapping sub-cultures which sometimes interact with ʻarchitectureʼ.
March 16
It might be that Architecture can be about anything.
March 17
It is possible there are no ʻnaturalʼ tasks for architecture.
March 18
Modes of engagement with buildings, outside of ʻarchitectureʼ. Engineering, labour, fabrication, operation, economics, regulation. Think about the architecture of each of these.
March 19
The Architectures, ʻurban interventionsʼ and ʻhappeningsʼ realized by children: Snow forts Tree houses Chalk on pavement Pillow castles Lemonade stands March 20
The tools and concepts used to understand an architecture are unique to that architecture.
March 21
For every architect there is a building.
March 22
The ʻtraditionalʼ architects who complained that ʻmodernisticʼ architecture would be the ruination of everything they valued were perfectly correct.
March 23
The end of hand drawing as a value in architecture signalled the end of an architecture.
March 24
7. Alienation from Architecture
A sad side effect of my education as an architect was that it left me permanently alienated from the design values of the people I came from. A change: from from ignorance to knowledge, or one mentality to another.
March 25
Buildings are entwined with almost every dimension of our lives. Itʼs strange then, how disconnected the temperament of ʻArchitectureʼ can be from the ordinary pleasures of life.
March 26
The way we talk and think about architecture seems stilted, and dislocated from our own feelings.
March 27
The dissonance between the way architecture is conceived and the lived reality of buildings.
March 28
The dissonance between the way the world seems to be and the way architecture imagines things to be.
March 29
The necessary disjunctions between what clients want from us and what architects want to do.
March 30
The square that will never be used, the bench no one will sit it, the flag pole for a government no one believes in, the architectural ʻstatementʼ no one understands. The empty signals that populate our designs. March 31
The pleasures of a well considered and well made building are mostly unknown to us.
April 1
Architects who spend years imagining a building and then, maybe an hour observing it being used.
April 2
The inevitable compromises a design suffers after the ribbon cutting, and the architects have left the building.
April 3
To be fed up with the way things are but co-opted the instant you change. To want to speak - but lack words. To know you still donʼt understand anything.
April 4
8. Contemporary Values
The banal expectations of consumer culture infecting a now antiquated idea of professionalism. “I pay. You deliver.”
April 5
“Be realistic. Change is inevitable. The market-place demands we destroy your neighbourhood. Resistance is futile.”
April 6
There are two dominant logics that apply to our buildings. The logic of cost efficiency, and The logic of control.
April 7
No one truly believes anything anymore; excepting the logics of efficiency and control.
April 8
In a world where virtually every design dimension is subject to control, the arbitrary becomes a value.
April 9
If the dominant value in our building culture is efficiency, it may be necessary to become ʻinefficientʼ if we want to change architecture.
April 10
Anything that appears in excess of ʻminimum requirementʼ is ʻwastefulʼ and therefor subject to interrogation.
April 11
The point at which the cost and complexity of a design slides into decadence.
April 12
Our moral objection to waste often translates into a dread of ʻexcessʼ of any sort in ʻordinaryʼ buildings. We maintain a depression / war-time footing, a stance of poverty.
April 13
The function of ugliness in public works is to demonstrate that the minimum socially acceptable effort has been expended on nonfinancial considerations. Ugly proves frugality.
April 14
It appears as if: The purpose of art is to decorate. The purpose of music is to entertain. The purpose of design is to distract.
April 15
If budget and schedule are so important why do architects get so little of them?
April 16
Cost / benefit studies are necessary to the argument for sustainable design, because a consideration of human values and the threat to our continued existence is not good enough reason.
April 17
Cities engaged in spectacular building projects that display status, by titillating and astonishing their audiences. Shock and awe.
April 18
We can only understand the ʻhistoricʼ districts of cities as pleasant and entertaining diversions, or marketing opportunities.
April 19
The negativity that can proceed any thinking about architecture. After all, a building is usually the last and most expensive resort to addressing a need. A liability. A risk. April 20
9. Design Process
An architecture is the conception of all the buildings a way of thinking can engender. The point before a particular design solution discovers its identity.
April 21
The impossibility of designing something without having a pre-conception of it engendered by design culture.
April 22
A strategy of architectural design, while making it possible to conceive it, necessarily filters out the possibility of ʻotherʼ architectures.
April 23
A way of designing something is the path to a destination, that makes it impossible to visit other places.
April 24
Design worked ʻas ifʼ. As if the building was a Greek temple, as if the building was a platonic solid, as if the building was factory made, as if the building simply folded, as if inside was outside, etc. This strange and perpetual inability for architects to actually engage with reality. April 25
The irrational decision making in our design processes, facilitated by half-truths, imaginary criteria, manipulative arguments and wilful personalities.
April 26
The necessity of every proposition we make in architecture being provisional or improvised.
April 27
Every design remains un-built, because every design is subject to arbitrary vicissitudes which make it impossible to be realized in toto.
April 28
Itʼs somewhat unlikely that any building achieves much more than addressing the practical problems set for it.
April 29
The design of a building or a chair is allowed to aspire to be a statement within design culture. The design of a pump is not entitled to this aspiration.
April 30
We expend all our energy on how to realize a building, rather than what building to realize.
May 1
We all know how to make buildings but weʼll never agree how to design them.
May 2
Design as the practical activity of deciding how things should be brought together exists largely independent of ʻDesignʼ culture.
May 3
Architecture is a thought-process that runs obliquely to the dozens of other processes required to realize a building.
May 4
Almost every one of our buildings is a proto-type and there-by prone to error. This risk is minimized by using conventional processes and solutions. These conventions constitute a meta-design for our architecture. May 5
Buildings are a relatively primitive exercise. Why are they so hard to execute?
May 6
All the debates, lectures, and crits we attended, and the designs we made in school that had virtually no impact on the actual inventory of buildings we realized.
May 7
Was all that talk about architecture simply the stories we told ourselves, and sometimes believed?
May 8
Is architecture simply what we do to entertain ourselves, because buildings are mostly boring?
May 9
10. “Good Design”
The values and conventions that constitute ʻGood Designʼ. At best - a common language that allows us to share ideas. At worst - a brainless collection of cliches.
May 10
At this moment, even a carefully considered design threatens to collapse into self-parody.
May 11
ʻDesignʼ ended when ʻDesigner Waterʼ became a joke.
May 12
What happened to the good in ʻGood Designʼ?
May 13
Whatʼs so good about ʻGood Designʼ?
May 14
Much of what passes for ʻGood Designʼ is actually the ability to convincingly ape appearances.
May 15
Architecture is more than ʻGood Designʼ.
May 16
ʻGood Designʼ is essentially a matter of achieving things that are unusual compared to ordinary practice.
May 17
ʻGood Designʼ is by definition rare. Scarcity is required for ʻGood Designʼ to distinguish itself from ʻother designʼ. ʻGood Designʼ wants to be scarce.
May 18
If there is such a thing as ʻgood designʼ, then there must also be ʻevil designʼ.
May 19
11. Design is....
ʻDesignʼ is a way to disguise the blunt realities of building production.
May 20
Design is the (hollow) core of the profession of architecture.
May 21
ʻDesignʼ is a ʻbonus featureʼ.
May 22
ʻDesignʼ is a ʻloss-leaderʼ which serves to achieve specific strategic objectives.
May 23
ʻDesignʼ is a game of one-upmanship that perpetuates the conditions its players despise.
May 24
ʻDesignʼ is the remnant of an asphyxiated decorum.
May 25
ʻDesignʼ is a way to signal status.
May 26
ʻDesignʼ is used as a sign of itself.
May 27
ʻDesignʼ is nostalgic for the time when it was possible to believe design mattered.
May 28
ʻDesignʼ is the ability to replicate the patterns and figures that signal ʻDesignʼ.
May 29
ʻDesignʼ is a sub-section of the marketing department.
May 30
ʻDesignʼ is one of many options available to clients.
May 31
ʻDesignʼ is architects employing gestures and strategies whose origins and meanings they only dimly understand.
June 1
12. Trivial Differences
The time when novelty was honoured because it demonstrated an advance in our knowledge of architecture.
June 2
Novelty in architecture was once a consequence of new thinking to suit new conditions. Novelty is now a prerequisite.
June 3
The marketʼs demand for novelty is the main driver for ʻdesign innovationʼ.
June 4
Design is no longer a substantive issue of building culture.
June 5
ʻDesignʼ is a game of trivial differences.
June 6
Differences in ʻdesign philosophyʼ serve to differentiate competitors in a crowded market place.
June 7
Certain architects insistence on refusing to repeat themselves is a concession to market demand for novelty.
June 8
A consistent ʻsignatureʼ style is a strategy to satisfy market demand for the appearance of the architect / author.
June 9
All architects want to be interesting and unique in exactly the same way.
June 10
The continuing pretence that what we are doing today is always somehow ʻbetterʼ than what came before.
June 11
The prime value in award winning architecture today is ʻdifferenceʼ. Difference from conventional practice, Difference from other buildings, Difference from your last design.
June 12
Various design approaches distinguished mainly by their difference from one another. Does anyone actually believe any one of them is better than another?
June 13
If we subtract the impulse to be ʻdifferentʼ ʻinterestingʼ or even ʻgoodʼ, what is left of our architecture?
June 14
No one actually expects anything we architects say to each other will change anything.
June 15
Aside from addressing a multitude of # prosaic requirements, what do we actually expect a building to #be able to do? What real difference does our idea of ʻdesignʼ actually make?
June 16
ʻArchitectureʼ today is an empty rhetoric of forms; an amalgam of signs signifying ʻdesignʼ.
June 17
Any moderately skilled architect who pays attention to magazines, can ʻdoʼ ʻgood architectureʼ.
June 18
The endless succession of idea competitions, pilot projects, reports, prototypes and exhibitions. None will have any impact on the conditions that make buildings happen. None that anyone seriously expects to change anything. June 19
ʻMovesʼ, ʻStrategiesʼ, ʻInteresting Conceptsʼ, ʻInnovationsʼ, that in the end amounted to some nice photographs, a magazine article, an award or two, and then a monograph. What actually happened? June 20
Our solutions are in a desperate search for problems.
June 21
Proclamations of good intentions, made because thatʼs what architects are supposed to do, not because anyone really believes they will have any effect.
June 22
The feeling that our skilled, committed, intelligent, beautiful, and maybe even heroic architecture has somehow become a parody of itself.
June 23
The fetish with detailing is a symptom, that the details are all that is left for the architects.
June 24
13. Image
Image is the king of our architecture.
June 25
Most of our ʻarchitectureʼ today is the design of dramatic and theatrical effects intended to titillate.
June 26
The incestuous relationship between our idea of architecture and wealth.
June 27
Increasingly extreme formal effects in architecture are a symptom. Like a fish jumping is the symptom of a hook.
June 28
The impression, looking at magazines, that ʻdesignʼ is essentially a question of composition and detail. “Is that all there is?”
June 29
The attempt to recover the value of architecture through the craft of building, engendered buildings hand made, expensive, relentlessly beautiful, disassociated from ordinary use-value and somehow decadent.
June 30
Photography is the opiate of the masses of the profession of architecture.
July 1
Did I love architecture, or did I love pictures of buildings?
July 2
What we think of as ʻarchitectureʼ is often actually ʻarchitectural photographyʼ.
July 3
Our architecture is largely ʻretinalʼ. Compositions validated by photography.
July 4
Our idea of architecture dove-tails with the aesthetics of photography. The ability of photography to collapse architecture into graphics. The ability of buildings to be photogenic.
July 5
The reality that the purpose of architectural photography is to flatter.
July 6
Almost every photo of a building that architects examine has been staged like a fashion shoot.
July 7
Photography is still the primary way architectural culture is disseminated, received and understood.
July 8
Our architecture happens because of photography.
July 9
A building known only to those who use it canʼt be ʻArchitectureʼ, because our Architecture is defined by its representation.
July 10
One of the agendas of ʻdesignʼ is to construct images which assert position and status within the field of architecture.
July 11
From the photographic evidence, most buildings can only be seen in fair weather or at dusk, and consist of lobbies and big rooms.
July 12
We always know what a building will look like. We never know what it will be like.
July 13
14. Practice
ʻDesignʼ is reputedly the core of the profession of architecture and yet it occupies a very small part of the landscape of practice.
July 14
It isnʼt impossible to work outside conventional practice, just unlikely, and always necessarily marginal.
July 15
The transition from an architecture founded on a personal commitment, to an architecture founded on contracted and managed services. From the person-made to the system-made.
July 16
Larger and larger firms working over expanding territories. Clients with international scopes of interest. Common software platforms. The flow of information. The relentless logic of the economy of architectural practice. July 17
A typology of practices as represented in media: the small young eager ʻdesignʼ firm, the established practice that does ʻinterestingʼ work, the ʻsignatureʼ architect.
July 18
Resistance to change is a legitimate ethical position. But impossible in practice. We canʼt refuse to upgrade the soft-ware.
July 19
In a ʻserviceʼ model of practice, architects who insist on adhering to principles, or maintaining certain values, are not ʻteam playersʼ.
July 20
The logical consequence of the systems that engender buildings is the dispersion of authorship and responsibility for design. At best; Architect as coordinator. At worst; Architect as decorator.
July 21
The end of the profession of architecture is forecast by: Its waning status and power. The invasion by specialists. Contemporary procurement practices. The structure of contractual relationships.
July 22
The feeling of what itʼs like to work in an architectural practice is largely engendered by the controls imposed on the practice of design.
July 23
Architectural practice today is largely a matter of completing contracts to the satisfaction of the various agencies that have control over its realization.
July 24
Architects now operate largely in a techno / bureaucratic / service model of practice, with ʻdesignʼ understood as a more or less optional ʻextraʼ, concerned with appearance, applied as social conventions or clients demand.
July 25
The legitimacy of the discipline of architecture depends on the capacity of the architect to refuse to comply.
July 26
The organization of professional practice is largely determined by the fact that it needs to be profitable to sustain itself.
July 27
The common refusal to acknowledge the tension between the idea of professionalism, and the practical requirement that practice must be firstly a commercial enterprise.
July 28
Economic vitality comes from the ability to adapt to new circumstances. For architects, this means being ready, willing and able to abandon values, methods, people. Everything we cherished.
July 29
15. Being an Architect
Architecture is a profession without a discipline.
July 30
It can be a tough and dirty business. Aggressive competition. Hostile situations. Unreasonable contractual conditions. And then, the occasional circumstances that make the miracle of a great building possible. July 31
Famous architects are freaks. To be very good at a certain kind of award winning architecture you have to believe with all your heart that itʼs the most important thing in the whole wide world. I donʼt. August 1
Your fate as an architect, is often decided by people who are ignorant of architecture. Such as it ever was.
August 2
Considering the tens of thousands of hours of intellectual and physical labour that goes into a building of any significant size, the pleasures of architecture seem a meagre pay-off.
August 3
To be assaulted every day with the evidence in built form of greed, of lost opportunities, of ill conceived propositions, of ignorant assumptions, and of venal opportunism.
August 4
A typology of architects: the monster with a comically large ego the young innovator the wise man the strategist the ʻdesignʼ guy with funny glasses the technocrat the thoughtful humanist the manager the rain maker August 5
One good building, followed by years of relentless and cynical self-parody.
August 6
The confident and complacent assumptions about “the way things really are” that architects work within, by choice, or by force. We should be doubtful, challenging and questioning.
August 7
The systems that seek to obviate the requirement for intelligent human judgement.
August 8
The four worst things an architect can be: Impractical, Rigid, Spendthrift, Disorganized.
August 9
Some human values alien to our architecture: Civility Kindness Modesty Faith Love Sacredness August 10
16. The cultural economy of Architecture
Most buildings are adaptations or copies of other buildings. Such as it ever was.
August 11
When we finally stop trying to make ʻArchitectureʼ what will our buildings be like?
August 12
Another month, Another magazine, Another sad parade of novelties and ʻinnovationsʼ. Another year, Another award, Another comfortable litany of predictable choices. August 13
Publishing and awards and schools and lectures and exhibits are important to ʻofficialʼ architectural culture, because they delineate the dimensions of that culture. ʻUnofficialʼ building culture proceeds without notice.
August 14
Architecture as delineated by official organs of architectural culture has common characteristics. It must be: Novel, Marginal, Uncommon, Abnormal, Photogenic.
August 15
The books, articles, exhibitions and lectures that are the currency and capital of official culture, which is never spent to achieve practical effects.
August 16
Challenges to architecture are typically allowed to occur only within the limited but comfortable confines of schools, publishing, conferences, and exhibitions.
August 17
Awards seek to prove that ʻgood designʼ is always possible when it is actually often impossible or irrelevant.
August 18
As states become wealthy they start to make ʻArchitectureʼ. Now there is lots of contemporary ʻArchitectureʼ in China, but still none in Chad.
August 19
Itʼs a relief to work for clients who simply want you to get the job done, compared to the ones who demand ʻArchitectureʼ.
August 20
Our cultural economy demands that ʻimportantʼ public buildings display audacious and easily described form-ideas.
August 21
17. The economy of Buildings
Look at any large city as you arrive by air. Hundreds of square kilometres of organized landscape. Thousands of buildings of all shapes, sizes and purpose. Only a tiny fraction will ever be permitted to enter the conversation on design. August 22
City districts that are enclaves for those who can afford to live there, sustained by an invisible infrastructure of workers and services and factories in remote locations.
August 23
The cost of a car is the de facto entry fee to living in suburbs. No money. No car. No car. No access.
August 24
The insistence on the autonomy of ʻarchitectureʼ from the dirty realities of building production serves to perpetuate those dirty realities.
August 25
Talk about buildings not architecture. Understand what is rather than what should be.
August 26
Instead of trying to understand ʻArchitectureʼ, We might start by trying to understand buildings.
August 27
Architects who imagine that the main problem for architecture is design; when the real problem is the conditions that precipitate design.
August 28
Buildings are completely enmeshed in a network of relations, which are inherently resistant to change. Only a change in these relations will precipitate a change in architecture.
August 29
The conditions within which architecture occurs constitute a meta-design within which all practice operates in.
August 30
We refuse to examine and challenge the basis for the problems architecture purports to address.
August 31
To understand an architecture, understand the conditions that make it possible. To change architecture, change the conditions that make it possible. To make an architecture, make the conditions that will make it possible. September 1
The substantive attributes of every building (purpose, cost, location) are always already given in advance of an architects design.
September 2
Legal Frameworks, Cultural Demands, Economic Imperatives, and Software, are the actual planes of influence on architecture.
September 3
The great swaths of ignorance in our accounts of architecture. Almost nothing written about: The client The organization of practices The workers that construct buildings The impacts of forms of contract The effects of economic conditions. September 4
Practically speaking, building design, is for us, largely a question of selecting and coordinating a combination of products and systems.
September 5
The logic of the market, and the continuing rationalization of building production, has at its core the threat of making every value architects persist in holding an obstacle to be overcome; or simply irrelevant. September 6
The pressure to integrate all facets of building production means that historic boundaries between disciplines, suppliers, designers, and fabricators will be eventually dissolved.
September 7
The compelling logic of integration of all aspects of building production, propels the convergence of interests around building production. Architecture becomes singular.
September 8
The actual programme for almost every building today is to create space that is conditioned, serviced and controlled; embellished as decorum demands. Eventually, there will be only one building type - the warehouse.
September 9
18. Ethics
An ethical architectural practice means we are compelled to be informed and to act critically.
September 10
The beautiful buildings that enabled ugly agendas.
September 11
Evil architecture does not recognize itself.
September 12
The Engineering design ethic is about predictability and efficiency, made possible by breaking up every problem into quantifiable parts.
September 13
The Architectural design ethic increases the scope of the project until it reaches the boundaries set by budgets and schedules.
September 14
The market place demands that the limits of action in architecture be defined by what is legal, rather than what is ethical; ethics in architecture portrayed as ʻpersonal opinionʼ, or ʻtasteʼ.
September 15
Our insistence on considering every aspect of design in terms of cost efficiency renders no-cost decisions apparently trivial.
September 16
The success of a new trend in architecture is precipitated by a collusion of political, economic, technical, and social circumstances.
September 17
Our territory of architectural practice is largely delimited by legal limits and economic imperatives. We rarely choose to be bound by ethics.
September 18
The refusal to recognize our humanity within the processes and constraints that we impose on making buildings.
September 19
The venal and mortal sins we architects committed in the names of reason, profit and efficiency, and because we chose to follow orders.
September 20
The necessity of the un-built, and the un-buildable as the conscience of architecture.
September 21
The necessity of disrupting complacent pattern following that stands in for actual design thinking.
September 22
The necessity of describing and interpreting the reality of building as we find it today.
September 23
The necessity of architects refusing to participate in bankrupt cultural practices.
September 24
It seems only a foolish architect would believe in something enough to sacrifice everything for it.
September 25
Who is brave enough to be a fool for architecture?
September 26
When will the architects protest in the streets?
September 27
19. Control
Architects quixotic dream of completely integrated systems of building delivery compared to the actual power of ad hoc systems.
September 28
Every design system is a form of tyranny that seeks to master through control.
September 29
Architects impulse to control reality/experience itself, by controlling every aspect of a design.
September 30
For us today, being a ʻGoodʼ architect is largely a matter of being able to exert complete control over every aspect of a project.
October 1
Our instinct to somehow pre-figure experience with higher and higher levels of ʻrealisticʼ representation comes from a logic of power and control.
October 2
Architects who force a project to conform to their vision, through the power of personality or the black-mail of reasoning.
October 3
The tug-of-war between schools and the profession means that each side will assume positions that serve their own strategic interests in the struggle for domination of the culture of architecture.
October 4
Ways of thinking about architecture that are successful because they are easy enough to be readily assimilated, and hard enough to define a boundary between those who know and those who donʼt.
October 5
The mood of a certain kind of design for which it is important to appear serious, profound, ʻdeepʼ, as a strategy of legitimation.
October 6
The hot-house / fortress culture of the school of architecture. Itʼs dangerous outside.
October 7
The serious writing on architecture that seems perpetually disengaged from the reality of contemporary building production.
October 8
Bored professors playing with ideas; like cats playing with a mouse.
October 9
20. Power
The practical evidence shows that the purpose of architecture is to serve the interests of patron-clients.
October 10
Architecture is necessarily conservative.
October 11
Architecture is bound to support and collaborate with established structures of power and control.
October 12
The cost of buildings means that they are always already enmeshed with the interests of those with money to spend.
October 13
Architecture is controlled by those most likely to gain from it.
October 14
Buildings are instruments of the powerful.
October 15
The ongoing alliance of planning and design professions with political and economic power.
October 16
A service / business model of architectural practice, is necessarily compliant with the systems that engender the built environment.
October 17
Architects who dance, like trained bears entertaining a mob.
October 18
Going to their office was like visiting the Kray twins.
October 19
Whose interests are served by architects current situation?
October 20
Little that architects say will be allowed to have a substantive or material impact on the vast majority of buildings.
October 21
The asymmetry of scale between design firms and multi-national suppliers of products. Who is the tail? Who is the dog?
October 22
The territory of ʻarchitectureʼ that we are permitted is everything irrelevant to the objectives of those who control buildings.
October 23
21. False Worlds
The presumption that the purpose of a theory of architecture is to elucidate the correct way to design buildings. An actual theory of architecture would be a comprehensive model of the ecology of building, with both explanatory and predictive powers.
October 24
Almost everything we know about architecture comes through a narrow filter of words and images.
October 25
Almost every building we architects describe or study has already been deemed worthy of consideration. We know almost nothing about the other buildings.
October 26
Our horizon of understanding architecture is set by our definition of ʻgoodʼ architecture.
October 27
Our rejection of ʻbadʼ or ordinary design means we are mostly ignorant of it.
October 28
We confuse well-meaning advocacy for ʻgood designʼ with the study of actual design.
October 29
Awards and magazines and galleries serve to maintain the illusions necessary to keep architects in their place.
October 30
Our unwillingness to seriously study ʻbad designʼ means we are ignorant of the ecology of building, and therefore unequipped and unable to have any real effect on building.
October 31
Architects tendency, “... to cling to an emotionally satisfying outcome and to dismiss any information that contradicts it.”
November 1
We keep writing about architecture as we wish it was, rather than as it is. We keep designing architecture for the world as we wish it would be, rather than as it is.
November 2
Architecture as the practical and legally defined practice of designing buildings exists independent of ʻArchitectureʼ as mediated by publishing and awards. We know almost nothing of the former. And the later comes only in disguise.
November 3
Our idea ʻGood Designʼ consists of trite assumptions, self-serving pronouncements, weary conventions, half-truths, good photos, and cool graphics.
November 4
Our idea ʻDesignʼ isnʼt a useful way to understand or describe the great majority of buildings.
November 5
The more we talk about ʻDesignʼ the less we are able to change it.
November 6
All the words and images that maintain the illusions necessary to the status quo.
November 7
The self-deluding myths that make up most of what architects think and say.
November 8
In architecture, if we stop the tired rhetoric, the blah, blah, blah, the false analogies, and the striving careerism that passes for intelligent work, whatʼs left?
November 9
22. Consciousness
Drugs and buildings are two different ways to alter reality.
November 10
Perception is created by difference, so that the stable and permanent character of buildings makes them mostly invisible to consciousness.
November 11
Every building is insidiously and apparently ʻnaturalʼ. As if, it was always there, and could be no other.
November 12
A demolition. Itʼs almost impossible to remember what it was like when a building was there.
November 13
The existence of a building is an assertion of its legitimacy.
November 14
Every building is a validation of the conditions that made it possible.
November 15
Every building is an affirmation of the world, or a prescription for it.
November 16
Our interventions in the world construct the mental landscape we inhabit.
November 17
The world as built is a model of the ideologies that made buildings possible.
November 18
A city is a way of constructing the minds of the people that live in it.
November 19
Almost every single thing that makes up a city was once decided on and then documented.
November 20
If you want to change your mind, change your city.
November 21
The mentality of a place is engendered by its design.
November 22
An Architecture creates a consciousness.
November 23
Architecture is a form of consciousness.
November 24
Sometimes the material is the teacher. Sometimes the tool is the teacher. Sometimes the maker is the teacher. Sometimes the patron is the teacher. Sometimes the architect is the teacher. Sometimes the building is the teacher.
November 25
23. Transcendence
The world is that it is, without intent. Architecture occurs at the intersection of the world as it is, and our intentions and our imagination.
November 26
By some crazy miracle, we ended up together for a moment on this earth. Architecture is the part of a building that celebrates this fact.
November 27
The wonder that there is anything at all, and that there was ever a world, and that we are here, and that by witnessing the world we actualize it, and that architecture can sometimes make us realize this. November 28
Architecture is the silent witness, the evidence of an economy, the manifestation of a world imagined.
November 29
Buildings record the particular smell of a time that can be retrieved, but not replicated, because we donʼt believe these things anymore.
November 30
When it seems ʻall that is solid melts into airʼ, the distinctive value of architecture rests in its physical presence, its relative permanence, its realization in a specific place and its resistance to mediation. Architecture should smell. December 1
The ineffable character of the experience of a building is the ʻghost in the machineʼ of drawings and specifications. A few lines and notes engendering a consciousness.
December 2
The feeling of the taste of a memory, a passage of music, long shadows of a golden summer evening, an empty room, that vanishes the instant you sit down to design. December 3
The shadow of a tree on a wall. A quiet morning moment away from the office. A glimmer of the possibility of something else.
December 4
Every building is contaminated by architecture.
December 5
Every building is a testament to the power and limits of human intelligence, and the frailty of human endeavours.
December 6
Every building is a pathetic monument to its eventual collapse.
December 7
Architecture is always and necessarily provisional, and fallible, because it is a product of our minds.
December 8
Architecture is as big and mysterious as life. Iʼll never know the all of it.
December 9
Fantastic buildings that achieved perfect and complete indifference to aesthetic judgement.
December 10
24. Projects
Dare to make a fool of yourself for your architecture.
December 11
Copy the design of another architect. Adapt as required, but preferably not at all.
December 12
Design an ugly building. Make a good ʻbadʼ design. Assert new values.
December 13
Insist on designing an un-buildable project.
December 14
ʻBe realistic, demand the impossible.ʼ
December 15
Design a building that canʼt be photographed.
December 16
See what a building looks like when you strip away the pretence of making architecture.
December 17
Photograph the mechanical rooms of famous buildings.
December 18
Dare to be an ordinary architect.
December 19
Throw a grenade into everything that is complacent and self-serving about our idea of architecture.
December 20
Substitute a detective story for the text of an issue of your favourite architectural magazine.
December 21
Replace all the pictures in an issue of Architectural Record with pictures of other buildings, which may vaguely resemble the text.
December 22
Use broken glass. Design a leak. Demolish a wall.
December 23
Write a biography of an architecture that describes its inner desires and the sub-conscious impulses unknown even to its architects.
December 24
Change the mental space of architecture.
December 25
Change architecture by changing the way it is understood.
December 26
Be open to both the suffering and joy you might make as an architect.
December 27
Be old enough to know you have been a fool. Be old enough to forgive yourself for it.
December 28
When you know that your very best will never equal your ambitions, fail as best you can.
December 29
Remember the architects, who did their best, who believed, who sometimes triumphed, who were kind, who were brave, who gave as good as they got, and who persisted in spite of everything. December 30 - for Alex Rankin
Coda
Q: Then what to do? A: Keep working.
December 31
Martin Tite 1997-2013
1. Introduction January 2 - January 6 2. Modernism January 7 - January 19 3. Autonomous Architectures January 20 - January 31 4. Anonymous Architectures February 1 - February 3 5. The Limits of Architecture February 14 - March 2 6. Architecture is Plural March 3 - March 24 7. Alienation from Architecture March 25 - April 4 8. Contemporary Values April 5 - April 20 9. Design Process April 21 - May 9 10. “Good Design” May 10 - May 19 11. Design is.... May 20 - June 1 12. Trivial Differences June 2 - June 24 13. Image June 25 - July 13 14. Practice July 14 - July 29 15. Being an Architect July 30 - August 10 16. The cultural economy of Architecture August 11 - August 21 17. The economy of Buildings August 22 - September 9 18. Ethics September 10 - September 27 19. Control September 28 - October 23 20. Power October 10 - October 23 21. False Worlds October 24 - November 9 22. Consciousness November 10 - November 25 23. Transcendence November 26 - December 9 24. Projects December 11 - December 30 Coda December 31
Revision 3