Spatial Agency: Other Ways of Doing Architecture

Nishat Awan, Tatjana Schneider, Jeremy Till

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134722563
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Architecture
• Thema: Architecture générale

This book offers the first comprehensive overview of alternative approaches to architectural practice.

At a time when many commentators are noting that alternative and richer approaches to architectural practice are required if the profession is to flourish, this book provides multiple examples from across the globe of how this has been achieved and how it might be achieved in the future.

Particularly pertinent in the current economic climate, this book offers the reader new approaches to architectural practice in a changing world. It makes essential reading for any architect, aspiring or practicing.

1

The Motivations of

Spatial Agency

If you ask a potential architecture student why they want to study architecture, the most common response is along the lines: “I want to design buildings and make the world a better place.” Implicit in this answer is the assumption that there is a causal link between designing a building and making the world a better place, and it is this link that architects cling to through the thick and thin of practice. Where a poet might condense grief in to a few lines, a photographer depict suffering or a novelist expound at length on sadness, it would be strange to see an architect who deliberately set out to inflict misery on its occupants, or who designed a project that purposely made the world a worse place. Architects start out instinctually optimistic, and even if this hope is tempered and frustrated over time by the barriers that have to be overcome, the initial motivation of betterment still remains. Although immediate goals such as getting the building completed on time, satisfying the client or just plain survival might occupy the daily attention of the architect, they are normally overseen by higher aspirations, however vaguely defined.

The question then arises as to exactly what constitutes “better”, and what means are used to achieve it? The answer may be suggested in the second most common response to why students want to study architecture, namely “because it is a combination of art and science”. Architectural hope is here invested in the muse of artistic genius combined with the authority of scientific reason, and the accompanying focus on aesthetics and technique, which become the primary measures of architectural achievement. As we have seen, spatial agency does not so much dispense with these measures, but supplements them with many others, and so expands the definition of what might constitute “better”. Rather than connecting architectural optimism solely with the look and making of stuff – most clearly in the timeworn affiliation of happiness with beauty – spatial agency holds to the idea of betterment but associates it with a more fluid set of processes and social conditions.

Our apparent scepticism of the efficacy of beauty as a medium for the greater good does not imply the corollary of the promotion of ugliness. Instead it comes from a belief that beauty has been used too often as an excuse to retreat from some of the more contested areas of contemporary life, as if a timeless sense of beauty will lift us from our daily grind. It may be that the connection between beauty and betterment is so taken for granted that the motivation to make the world a better place is surreptitiously replaced with the more simple, and more controllable, motivation of making beautiful stuff, in the belief that architects can do good by doing what they do best, namely designing delightful things.

To argue that there is not a direct, causal, link between beauty and happiness, or at a wider level between aesthetics and ethics, is not to argue for the dismissal of the role of aesthetics and tectonics, but to more realistically understand the role they play in the context of the much wider set of social conditions to which architecture contributes. This effectively relieves the pressure on the design of the perfected object beautiful, and of its reception as the be-all and end-all of architectural culture. By all means craft the building, compose the elevation, worry over the detail, but at the same time see these as just some tasks in service to another. Beauty may be one approach to achieving betterment, but it is not a sufficient one. When Zygmunt Bauman writes that “beauty, alongside happiness, has been one of the most exciting promises and guiding ideals of the restless modern spirit,” ¹ what he is pinpointing is the hope that beauty holds out but may never deliver. The excitement is there in discussions of new formal and technical possibilities, which tend to dominate architectural discourse, but they represent a false hope because they are conceived of away from the world in which the results are eventually located, and so the beauty, and its associated hope, is scarred by other actions. In contrast, the motivations of spatial agency arise not from without but from within the contested areas of spatial production, and have more explicit aims than the fuzzy hope to make the world a better place. Because the motivations for spatial agency are more grounded and more focused, it is also likely that the resulting actions and results will be more resilient in the face of worldly contingencies.

In what follows, we identify five issues that have motivated the examples of spatial agency in the book: politics, the profession, pedagogy, humanitarian crises and ecology. It is not as if these issues are in any way mutually exclusive, but for the sake of clarity they will be taken one at a time.

Politics

To say that architecture is political is to state a truism; to say that architects tend to avoid politics is to assert a generality. Architecture is immanently political because it is part of spatial production, and this is political in the way that it clearly influences social relations. The extent and form of this influence is open to debate, as will be seen in the varying approaches to the political taken by spatial agents, but what is common to them all is an acknowledgement that the production of space is inherently political and that to participate in its production entails not only the taking into account of momentary social responsibilities but also the appreciation of long-term consequences. Architecture or, more precisely, space affects and effects social relations in the most profound ways, from the very personal (in a phenomenological engagement with stuff, space, light, materials) to the very political (in the way that the dynamics of power are played out in space). Adopting the feminist maxim (“the personal is political” ²) buildings conjoin personal space and political space. In recognition of the role that architecture plays in part of (and it really is only part of) the production of that social space, designers have to face up to the responsibility of affecting the social dynamics of others in ways beyond the delivery of beauty. The key political responsibility of the architect lies not in the refinement of the building as static visual commodity, but as a contributor to the creation of empowering spatial, and hence social, relationships in the name of others.

This acknowledgement differs from the attitude of many contemporary architects, whose very silence on the political status of their work is indicative of a certain unease, in which the projection of a personal belief (of the politics of left or right) onto the public is seen to challenge the objective view that professionals are meant to bring to the table. The shift in the professions from their original role as keepers of a particular branch of socially important knowledge into expert agents for an increasingly technocratic society has been accompanied with a suppression of a sense of social duty, and with it a waning of political intent.³ The result is either an uncomfortable silence or else the transfer of politics from the dynamics of society to the statics of the object.⁴ When challenged about the lack of social relevance in their work, progressive formalists will respond, “but there is a politics of aesthetics,” which is true, but these politics are usually conducted on their own self-referential terms.

The eschewal of politics may also arise out of the apparent failure of the more overtly political mission of the golden age of modernism in the 1930s and 1950s, when architecture was employed as both instrument and representation of social reform. It was a doctrinaire alliance, with the ordering tendencies of modernist architecture eliding with those of modernity, and the progressive aesthetics of modernist architecture signalling a societal break from the burdens and injustices of tradition. Charles Jencks’ announcement of the death of modernism in the opening pages of his book The Language of post-modern Architecture, with the description of the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe estate in St Louis, brilliantly conjoined social demise with architectural failure.⁵ He draws on the myth that design was primarily responsible for the societal collapse on the estate (overlooking the contributing institutional, racial and economic factors⁶), and so at a stroke demonises architecture’s association with social issues and then breaks any attachment in his replacement of modernism by postmodernism. The latter, now apparently rid of political bonds, was free to explore new stylistic avenues – the “language” of the book’s title. But just to push aside politics does not mean that they go away. Quite the opposite. As Mary McLeod notes in her seminal article, Architecture and Politics in the Reagan Era, the retreat of postmodern architects into discussions of style was accompanied by a capitulation to the political forces of Reaganism. “Architecture’s value no longer lay in its redemptive social value,” she argues, “but rather in its communicative power as a cultural object”, and this power has significant value in the economics of that and this era.⁷

The recent turn identified by certain theorists towards a pragmatic laissez-faire does not avoid this trap, but is maybe more honest in its recognition of architecture’s complicity with prevailing political and economic forces.⁸ Thus in a recent interview, Rem Koolhaas notes that “our position is that, once unleashed, whether you want it or not, (globalization) is what is ‘normal’, so you have to inscribe yourself within it rather than try to work against it or to stop it. Not uncritically, but...” ⁹ There is a sense of realism in the so-called “projective” architecture of the 2000s that moves architecture out of the cul-de-sac of “critical” architecture, where architectural theory resided in the 1980s and 1990s, and moves it into the fast lane of late capitalism. But such is the speed of the traffic that architects are left with little choice but go with the flow, sometimes enjoying the new formal possibilities that the speed throws up, sometimes finding the gaps in the traffic that allow them to explore new social potentials. In the former category one might place the work of pragmatic formalists such as Foreign Office Architects,¹⁰ in the latter the earlier cultural work of OMA such as the Kunsthal in Rotterdam or the Seattle Public Library. However, what is missing in all this new pragmatism, whether of the “stars” or the “mainstream” (who have been pragmatic all along), is a sense of political or ethical intent. Roemer van Toorn is clear about the dangers of the laissez-faire in this respect: “instead of taking responsibility for the design, instead of having the courage to steer flows in a certain direction, the ethical and political consequences arising from the design decisions are left to market realism, and the architect retreats into the givens of his discipline. In that way... projective practices... are formalistic.” ¹¹

Many of the examples of spatial agency specifically do not accept a laissez-faire attitude: they might be pragmatic, but never are formalistic for the sake of form; they start out with a clear transformative intent and do try to produce work that has both a political and ethical content, challenging the perceived and real limitations of each new project. In this, the pragmatics of spatial agency are different from the pragmatism of architecture. Where the latter resigns itself to the wider forces – “why resist what cannot be resisted?” – and so effectively withdraws from the political, the former engages but in a manner that avoids modernism’s alliance with epic social reform, be it of the left or of the right – and not only because most projects are much more modest in scale. If modernisms politics were naïve in their resort to notions of social determinism or grand spatial utopias which were meant to deliver social utopias, then the politics of spatial agency need to be more knowing and nuanced, adapting to their circumstances. Here the politics of spatial agency fit well with Roberto Mangabeira Ungers call for realistic trajectories of context change,¹² in which he identifies that even in the seemingly most intractable situations, there are opportunities for destabilisation and transformation. “Even the most entrenched formative ...