Occupying Architecture

Between the Architect and the User

Jonathan Hill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780415168151
• eBook ISBN: 9781134704026
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Occupying Architecture focuses on the importance of the user of architecture. It emphasises the cross-currents between design, theory and use, and the need for a wider cross-cultural approach to architecture. Beginning with the architect, the book proceeds to explore models for architectural practice that actively engage the issue of use, and concludes with examination of the user. The authors draw on illustrations and examples from London, Las Vegas, Barcelona and Bruges to discuss how and why architecture ignores the user. The apparant contradictions between the 'producer' and the 'product' of architecture are highlighted before the activities of the architect and the actions of the user are explored.
This book illustrates that architecture is not just a building: it is the relation between an object and its occupant.

1
building an architect

Mark Cousins

I am not an architect and during the five years that I have been teaching full time at the Architectural Association I have watched architects and I have listened to them, and you have no idea what a strange experience that is. So in this text I want to try to formulate some of that strangeness. It is a strangeness that is compounded by the fact that I run the General Studies programme, which provides the historical, cultural and theoretical elements of an architectural education not directly addressed in the design units at the AA. I think that I am now even more unclear than I was five years ago as to what an architect should know. But perhaps as we progress we will see that the very idea of what an architect should know is an intrinsically complicated issue. It is not a question of taking one side or another in a set of arguments.

Let us try to give this some kind of architectural authority by looking at the chapter ‘The Education of an Architect’ in the first book of Vitruvius’ The Ten Books of Architecture, in which he discusses not what the practice of architecture is, but the education of an architect, which, in a way, is an odd place to start. Let me quote: ‘The architect should be equipped with knowledge of many branches of study and varied kinds of learning, for it is by his judgement that all work done by the other arts is put to the test.’¹ This knowledge Vitruvius calls not the combination of theory and practice, but the child of practice and theory:

Practice is the continuous and regular exercise of employment where manual work is done with any necessary material according to the design of a drawing. Theory, on the other hand, is the ability to demonstrate and to explain the productions of dexterity on the principles of proportion.²

Vitruvius then divides the topic. He says, in everything, but particularly in architecture you may look at a subject-matter from two points of view. Either the thing itself, what he calls the ‘thing signified’,³ or what gives the thing significance which is, for him, the more dignified part of the relation. Famously he gives a list of what the architect should be able to do:

Let him be educated [not educated in something, just educated]…skilful with the pencil, instructed in geometry, know much history, have followed the philosophers with attention, understand music, have some knowledge of medicine, know the opinions of the jurists, and be acquainted with astronomy and the theory of the heavens.⁴

Now, it is not just that this seems an odd list. I do not mean that one can not reconstruct it historically. There is something curiously missing: there is no architecture.

Let us now go through the way in which he glosses each section. ‘Let him be educated.’ Vitruvius gives an extraordinary reason why the architect should be educated, which I have no doubt was true for the author, and in a curious way may be quite true of architects, or some architects, at the moment. Architects should be educated on the grounds that they should be able to write treatises such that they will be remembered. There is not the slightest suggestion in Vitruvius’ work that an architect would be remembered for his building. It is not even clear that, in Vitruvius’ mind, there is an architect to a building, in the sense that we would say that it is designed by a specific person. But, according to Vitruvius, if you wish to be remembered as an architect you should be able to write an eloquent treatise which guarantees your memory. As always in antiquity, to be remembered is perhaps one of the strongest motives.

‘Skilful with the pencil, instructed in geometry.’ All he really says about this is that it would enable the architect, as if it were an optional extra, to make plans. And, actually he says in the same breath, arithmetic is also quite useful as this enables you to charge the client the correct amount. It is not given any great emphasis. Why should the architect be well versed in history? His knowledge of history should be able to entertain visitors to his building such that he would be able both to make and explain ornamentation: that is the story of this, this is in memory of that. Why should the architect study philosophy? Because ‘it makes an architect high-minded and not selfassuming, but rather renders him courteous, just, and honest without avariciousness’.⁵ That is not quite my experience of the world of architectural theory. The reason for understanding music is that one should know something of harmony because this is indispensable to building ballistic machines, and also extremely useful in a proper knowledge of acoustics. The whole question of medicine is useful only so that the architect will be able to site buildings in a healthy place. Knowledge of the work of the great jurists comes down, he says, essentially to drawing up contracts. It is really getting ridiculous by the time Vitruvius reaches astronomy. Here, he says, it would be helpful to know the theory of the sundial.

It does seem to me that this is one of the most ludicrous chapters of a famous book ever written. But the question I want to ask is—why? There are really two features of the chapter. One is the absolute absence not only of architecture, but of a concern for what architecture is or might be. Second, the assumption that architecture is an intrinsically weak discipline. If architecture is anything to Vitruvius here, it is a combination of other knowledges. After all, no one in Vitruvius’ time would remotely imagine writing a text on philosophy, or medicine, or the law in the same manner. All these texts would be written with grandeur, spending, perhaps, many pages defining the object of the practice and its relation to the practice. In contrast, Vitruvius can offer only a practical rag bag of things that an architect should know, that in no way elaborate the theory or the practice of architecture.

Actually, I do not think that the teaching of architecture, or rather the formulation of architecture as something like a teachable subject, is all that different at a formal level now. If you ask people what ought to be on the curricula of architectural education, it is extraordinary how quickly bits get plugged in and drop off. It is remarkable, for example at the AA, the way in which suddenly all the books on deconstruction are not taken out of the library and you cannot find any book on contemporary biology for weeks. You wonder what sort of a subject it is where people were passionately reading the texts of Jacques Derrida in the late 1980s and really quite abstruse stuff about shoals of fish in the mid-1990s? I think Vitruvius, in some ways, has some of the same problems.

It is clear that Vitruvius’ text, unlike a text on law or perhaps a text on medicine, is quite unable to close the gap between talking about architecture as an organised, formal, academic knowledge and what actually happens. There are other disciplines, unlike law and unlike medicine, which remain, perhaps, constitutively secret. We might also, sociologically, think that it is in those forms of knowledge that remain not just a secret but somehow secretive, that, as a necessary consequence, there is an enormous gap between the popular expectation of, for example, what an architect is, what an architect does, and what architectural design is. I think it is quite difficult to find a topic as exemplary as architectural design in disconfirming the popular view of it, of disconfirming a public fantasy of what it is presumed to be, and what architects think they are doing, and maybe do not know what they are doing, as they do it.

I am suggesting that there may be, what we might call, ‘weak disciplines’ which does not of course make them weak. It means that the public, visible part of the curriculum, which it might, in practical terms, be necessary to know, none-the-less does very little to define the nature of the practice. As a consequence there emerges an almost unbridgeable gulf between the popular conception of what happens and what actually happens. It is not just a question of information either. It is not possible to explain simply architectural design. If an architect tried to explain what he or she does, they would find it almost like trying to tell a dream. If asked ‘Well, what is it you actually do when you are designing?’ an architect might start, as one can when telling a dream, and then suddenly get to the point when you think no, that is not it, that is not it at all, that is not quite what I meant; and you realise the other person is by now completely baffled. It is around this area that I would like to think in the following pages.

Maybe there is something between, what I am calling, a ‘weak discipline’, which I do not think is weak institutionally, but is weak in the way I have tried to identify, and in contrast with other disciplines. There are various components to this. The first one could specify in formal and philosophical terms, if we ask the question—is architecture a knowledge? I do not mean knowledge of architecture, but is architecture a knowledge? Is architecture a specific kind of appropriation and representation of objects? I think the answer is, kind of, yes and no. In terms of the philosophy of science, if you asked somebody at University College London, on the scale of dignified forms of knowledge, where did architecture come? I think they would first of all question what you meant. What do you mean, is architecture a knowledge? Most philosophers of science are used to interrogating a practice for its content and knowledge according to the question—to what extent does it conform to solid and truthful knowledge? An example would be the sorts of propositions which you would find in the natural sciences, especially in physics. It is still the case that, in the philosophy of science, physics continues to maintain a certain regnant dignity.

Now, it is obvious that architecture is not, and could not be, a knowledge of that kind. It cannot pretend to be scientific knowledge. It does not make propositions of that kind. Now, we do not want to go too far in to the philosophy of science, but one of the problems of the philosophy of science is that it often assumes that propositions that are not scientific are somehow basically flawed and inadequate. This seems to me an extremely foolish way of treating human discourses. I certainly think there is a difference between the discourses of the natural sciences and those that are not. Perhaps one very brief, simple way of characterising the difference is that the discourses of the natural sciences are purely concerned with objects. That is to say they are concerned with certain types of objects specified in and by a knowledge, such as physics or biology, and the relationships between objects in that discursive field.

No other object other than an object enters these discourses. There are, however, other types of knowledge where the definition of the object of knowledge includes the subject. In these types of knowledge you could either say that there is a subject as well as an object, or that there is an object of which the subject is a part. Clearly the discourse of art is of this kind because, fundamental to it, is the effect of an object on a subject. It also makes very little philosophical sense to treat architecture as a purely physical object because architecture is the effect of that object on a subject. And here, I think in terms of the notion of occupation, the subject of architecture is the subject who experiences architecture. Otherwise you have only a theory of the creation of architecture. Architecture is too important to be left to a theory of its creation.

Amongst the humanities it is perfectly possible to produce, and to defend, a rigorous conception of the object of the practice of architecture as the effects of objects upon a subject, without trying to claim this as scientific knowledge. It is a knowledge, but it is a knowledge of a particular kind. It is a knowledge of an object but only when it is represented in, and by, and for the subject. Now, in a way, what I have said is not very different from the problem as Kant saw it in The Critique of Judgement.⁶ He is concerned to specify the relation (and I do not want to join him, but for him it is a relation of aesthetic pleasure) and he does it in such a way that it is both rigorous and distinct from, what we might call, the natural sciences and their way of posing the issue of knowledge. The problem with the Kantian discussion of art and of architecture is that there is only one condition on which you can accede to it. Kant says that in order to be within aesthetic pleasure you must approach the object in a mental state which he calls that of being disinterested—of having stripped away your appetite. As he says, for example with respect to a painting, there are various things you might want to do with it. You might want to own it, you might like it because it reminds you of someone you knew. All sorts of relations, associations and appetites will be brought to the object but none of these count in terms of the subject’s relation to the art object or the architectural object. Only when they are stripped away in a mode of contemplation, of disinterestedness, can you call this the purified state of the subject’s relation to the object.

Many of Kant’s arguments in The Critique of Judgement are quite defensible and quite useful, but unfortunately the central one clearly will not do, especially in the twentieth century—the idea that one’s fundamental relation to an object is of disinterest. On the contrary, it seems to me that, almost by definition, we have to treat our relation to the art or the architectural object as one of desire. I do not wish simply to use the word for the sake of using it. I want to use it because I hope it will illuminate something.

What on earth would it mean to talk about architectural desire? Let us try to answer that by asking about the origin of desire in general. Let me try to get through this quite quickly. Think of a baby. Let us imagine the relation between a mother and baby in the first months of life, in the period that Winnicott used to call primary maternal preoccupation, in which, before the baby could ever experience a need, the mother had got there first. The relation between the mother and baby can be an entirely happy, fluent circuit of need and satisfaction. Or rather, if we put that in logical terms, the need is never represented because it is immediately satisfied. This is a sort of just-so story of desire, I am not trying to talk about how empirically awful life is for mothers and babies. One day, however, there is a catastrophe, a necessary and constitutive catastrophe. The baby has a need and it is not satisfied. Total catastrophe strikes the baby at this point. The baby is expelled from somewhere and is precipitated into a completely other zone. A zone in which the baby has to spend the rest of his or her life. Let us call this zone the ‘zone of representation’. Why call it representation? According to Freud, the first thing that the baby will do, on not getting a feed, is the easiest thing, which is to hallucinate a feed. You hallucinate what you need. The trouble is that hallucinations do not contain milk. So the baby is caught from now on in a circuit not of need and satisfaction, but of desire which is based on a lack, towards an object which in fact will not really satisfy. It is an economy of non-satisfaction.

From this point on human beings set out on a destiny of non-satisfaction. And they think that they desire objects, but those objects are not only themselves, they are always substitutions for something else which has been lost. Indeed that something that has been lost is the very dimension which supports the apparatus of desire. Let us call that dimension the lost object. It is important to recognise that the lost object is not a thing. You cannot find it, although people waste their lives looking for it because it is the dimension, the condition, under which desire for objects in general arose. It never was a thing. It only was a thing in retrospect once you have been expelled. None-theless the whole relationship between objects in the world is now shadowed by the wish for the lost object. So much so that you might almost say that the desire that we have is shadowed, even though we can specify very clearly that the desire is for this thing or that person, by a doppelganger desire which states ‘if I get that I will have everything’. Everything will be all right. For example, you lose your keys and the experience of losing your keys is so awful, and you so wish to find them, that you actually begin to think—if only I had my keys everything would be all right. Only when you find your keys do you realise that it is not much better at all. Finding the keys did not put everything right. This example is a minor daily occurrence in the adventures of the lost object.

What I am trying to talk about here, in a way that Kant was quite unable to, is that our relations to objects take place within a world of desire and representations, which is shadowed all the way by the world of the lost object. It is in this sense that some of our fundamental relations with objects show themselves. Freud says, for example, that no one has ever found an object, they have only refound it. Every desire for a representation, every desire for an object, including every desire to make an object at an unconscious level, is also a desire to refind in the new object the object which is lost.

Infants are confused and fairly stricken by this. Parents try to console them and cheer them up and they do so in a way that only makes the problem worse because what they say in effect is, ‘Look, I know it’s dreadful, you have lost that, you have had to enter the world of representation and desire but however awful it is, now you are here you can have anything you want.’ And in effect the infant says, ‘Anything? You mean really anything?’ ‘Absolutely. I know it is awful for you but God knows you are owed some compensation.’ At which point, as Freud states, in effect what the baby says is ‘OK, I’ll have mummy’ or daddy as the case may be. And the parents are then provoked by the child, who is maybe three or four years old, to say, ‘Sorry, that was something else we forgot to tell you. They are off limits for a start’ In terms of this brief history of child development, the infant is now so completely baffled that he or she spends the next five years worrying about model planes or wanting a pony. It is all just too awful to consider until they are re-awoken by their hormones a bit later. They would just rather forget the whole lot. And indeed every eight-year-old just wants to avoid any mention of sex—kissing is silly, the whole thing is revolting. The catastrophic effects of this, I want to suggest, are very real and mark us all for the rest of our lives, as we walk about as ex-children. That is to say, we repeat those same relations and it should come as no surprise to us that we do this in architecture as well.

Let us think for a moment, then, what it would be to want to make something. Making something will always have a paradoxical component to it. On the one hand it will be full of the strong urge to make something that is outside and beyond that economy, and at the same time to recapture the lost object. Something of these pressures is at work when we are confronted with a new and very strong art or architectural object, in which the object seems at once completely new and, to some extent, you wonder where it has been up until now. It is as if the strong object always gets there in the nick of time. But your relation to it as an object is caught between both recognising its extreme novelty, because I think there cannot be anything better psychologically than the production of new objects but nothing more difficult than the production of new objects, and at the same time an unconscious recognition that the newness is itself related to the domain of the lost object. And so an experience is carved out in which you cannot really tell whether the novelty or the antiquity of the experience is the one which predominates. Indeed, if one pushed this further, one might ask the question, in respect to making something, what is it that is missing?

Those knowledges which I called ‘weak knowledges’ contain real and indeed the most valuable knowledge but do not measure up to the way the philosophy of science characterises truthful utterances. And there is a further category which Freud movingly speaks about. It is what he calls theories of impossible professions. What is it to imagine an impossible profession? Now, obviously the model, for Freud, is the pra...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1: Building an architect
• 2: Curriculum vitae
• 3: ResponseAbility
• 4: Architecture of the impure community
• 5: Contaminating contemplation
• 6: Space within
• 7: Shared ground
• 8: An other architect
• 9: The landscape of luxury
• 10: The knowing and subverting reader
• 11: Body architecture
• 12: Striking home
• 13: Doing it, (un)doing it, (over)doing it yourself