Towards Anarchitecture

Obviously in this formulation it is not some abstract political concept that determines the plausibility and expediency of any intended course of action, but rather the capacity of things in the ambient universe to encourage or resist certain human responses.

Maybe it is not so much a society that is “permissive” as the things a society uses. Needs are never satisfied by “good” environments, although they are met with greater facility in such surroundings. However, the less tangible factors of custom, approbation, consent and habit also intervene. Suffice it to say here that they can be regarded as acting in a way very similar to physical resistances.

The idea of cultural relativity is based on the over-rationalized supposition that social structure is a good thing to stabilize. The idea of imposing central values on a large-scale human assortment is inadmissible because they are affected by proxy - at a distance, without the involvement of those whose lives are being changed. Effective individual and social morphology does not occur in this way, but by subtle processes of infiltration and goal-reorientation.

The social-art philosophies of Ledoux, Pugin and Ruskin were dominated by this aspect of the matter. But the modern movement, with nascent perspicacity, has dissociated itself from this kind of charism-architectural logic and, with incipient idiocy, has attached itself to another, the logic of social manipulation. It is fortunate that our incompetence as planners means this is more a matter of intention than actual effect.

It would be sheer delusion to put forward the idea that all positive interference is acceptable, and all negative interference unacceptable. Most of the deliberate and conscious formulated rules by which we live our lives are of a deliberately negative nature. They are defensible only by virtue of the belief that “freedom” and “order” go hand-in-hand. It is not necessary to structure human patterns of action to obtain anti-entropy of the overall social system.

The aptness of the computers systems to the task of ordering materials is a function of their complexity and speed of operation. It is the liberator of some of entropic man’s most distinctive characteristics: non-predictability and deviation. A good argument could be made for the Third Reich as man’s greater anti-entropic achievement.

Many opt for ordering people so they don’t make a mess, on the grounds of conceptual simplicity, but it seems to me that it should (at least in our capacity as streamlined homo faber) be opting for ordering physical support-systems to minimize or eliminate mess, on the grounds of literal humanity. Most relevant purpose might be to cause a shift of emphasis away from the canonical creed of functions and needs. The utilitarian basis of architectural functionalism has tended to simplify notions of purpose, and has given us only the ankle-cartilage of what is a much more complex affair.

The architectural see-saw is between form and function, meaning and purpose, symbol and utility, commodity and delight - up one side and down the other. It is a compelling game but we must be ready to ignore it when necessary. Keeping the game simple at the expense of its co-ordination with reality is a species of sell-out. The world is not a giant artwork any more than it is a mammoth boiler house. It is, to use a cliché, a stage … a stage for action, not our action but their action.