Architectural advancement through performance
Introduction
Contemporary architecture culture has become obsessed with the notion of novelty. This fixation, compounded by staggering technological advances and infinite access to data, has resulted in a gross surfeit of architectural approaches. Paradoxically, this proliferation of supposedly differentiated tactics has led to precisely the opposite of its intended effect; the more these ostensible innovations strive to be dissimilar, the more alike they seem. Vittorio Gregotti (1996) aptly referred to this phenomenon as “the process of homogenization set in motion by diversity turned into pure ideology.” As these boundless options are proliferated and promoted as a naturalized state, a critical capacity for judgment becomes all the more important in discerning between the valuable and ephemeral. Yet, this indispensable faculty has been largely supplanted by a blind sense of acceptance of various architectural ideas, irrespective of their material importance. Without an essential ability to judge architecture based on distinguishing performative characteristics, architecture has the potential to blend into an inconsequential environment of similitude. Gregotti (1996) argues that this condition “is gradually becoming conventional, assuming the form of a tacitly conditioned freedom that makes it impossible to establish authentic difference”. Inclusiveness displaces criticality and meaningful difference is lost in the name of unfettered access.
The dilemma of difference
Robert A. M. Stern’s built architectural contributions are as notable as his academic ones; he has been able to simultaneously and successfully embody the dual role of adept architectural historian and architectural history maker. His architectural and academic works stand as reciprocal enrichments of the built urban environment, especially within New York City. To mark the publication of his millennial installment of the renowned New York series, a roundtable discussion organized by the Temple Hoyne Buell Center was held at Columbia University’s Wood Auditorium at Avery Hall on January 25th, 2007. Writers and historians of New York architecture, including Tom Wolfe, Robert Beauregard, Kenneth Jackson, and Joan Ockman, had the opportunity to discuss Stern’s New York 2000: Architecture and Urbanism Between the Bicentennial and the Millennium (2006). This most recent edition in Stern’s New York series was an anomaly in a number of revealing respects; it was the first to include color images, the most comprehensive of the series (weighing more than ten pounds), and the first to be written within the moment it was attempting to historicize. In response to a question raised by Ockman concerning the challenges confronting a historian in this last respect, which she referred to as the writing of an “instant history” or “writing the history of the immediate past as opposed to the most distant past in the previous volumes,” Stern responded:
It is very difficult to write about the recent past, but it seemed to me as the initiator of the series as a whole, its natural conclusion … I owed it to the series, if you will, to the intellectual construct [of the series] to tackle the recent past … The amount of information out there is staggering and it makes it possible to practically chart the thing block by block and you get caught up in this incredible array of information trying to put it together in some type of meaningless [audience laughter followed by swift correction] – meaningful way.
This telling Freudian slip underscores the precise dilemma facing historians of architecture and architects alike. The impulse to completely catalog a moment in time or space is complicated by the necessity of critical judgment. Previously, the technological means for quickly culling or creating images had not been available. The sheer temporal commitment that was required to discover an image of a past architectural era or to create one for a proposed project, necessitated patience and in turn some degree of selectivity. Rem Koolhaas’s S,M,L,XL (1998) ironically celebrates this dilemma and ushered in a new publishing paradigm. The tome sometimes seems to resemble an attempt to publish the internet or to prioritize the rich diversity of images over their specific qualitative worth. Critical discrimination is sacrificed in the name of inclusive completion. Authentic difference is relinquished in the name of what Gregotti (1996) would term “inconsequential originality”. When speaking of the image-saturated society, Roland Barthes (1982) voiced a similar concern that it is “as if the universalized image were producing a world that is without difference”.
The sociologist Richard Sennett (1992) claims that the modern urban inhabitant confronted with this constant bombardment of images and information, accelerated by the technological advances of the car, necessarily simplifies his environment through passively glib judgments. This perspective is often assumed by the architectural authors of this environment where instantaneous judgment becomes reflexive action. The careful considerations required to address the complexities of the urban condition are abandoned. This reaction is the physical analog to surfing the internet where thoughtful analysis is increasingly untenable and yet all the more pressing. Someone like Robert Moses epitomized this perspective by incising simple lines, in the form of highways, through densely entrenched swaths of New York City. Ironically, he never actually learned to drive, further enforcing the passivity of such a perspective and the pitfalls of its makings. The ease with which images can be created, proliferated, and consumed jeopardizes the worth of the image itself and the architecture it represents.
Diagram and image
One dominant response to the overwhelming nature of today’s inundation of information is the ubiquitous implementation of simplified diagrams to explicate the design process. Bjarke Ingles and his renowned firm have taken this stance to its logical extreme. Whole buildings emerge unabashedly as literal extrusions of two-dimensional typographical characters. The REN Building, for example, is literally the Chinese character meaning “people” rendered in three-dimensions. Moreover, the original design was not even intended for its ultimately proposed site. It was originally intended as a competition entry for a hotel in the north of Sweden. When it was not selected as the winning entry, it was later recycled a continent away for the World Expo 2010 in Shanghai. Notwithstanding the fortuitous and unintended resemblance to a Chinese character, the lack of specificity inherent in its design makes it necessarily indifferent to the context in which it is situated. This project can be interpreted quite literally as anything, anywhere; from two-dimensional Chinese character to three-dimensional built form, vascillating between various scales without the burden of architectural materiality. Physical building and virtual diagram collapse into one fleetingly consumed proposition.
The hazard of this sleek and attractive reduction of complexity is that the resultant architectural forms are not imbued with the material realities which constitute their ultimate creation. The material means with which the building will be made become an afterthought to its graphic articulation. By prioritizing the emblematic representation of a building over its architectural constitution, it runs the risk of losing lasting formal or performative value beyond the graphic realm in which it emerges. Pier Vittorio Aureli (2005), in his deeply insightful essay “After Diagrams,” subtly surveys this dilemma and posits that with the contemporary use of the diagram, “the iconographic persuasion, or better yet, its graphic decor, becomes the main essence of its content”. The building is no longer exclusively about the experiential aspects of architecture, but equally concerned with the simplified symbol of its explanation. He continues by rightly asserting:
The power of the diagram is its ability to evoke the reshaping of an entire situation with one simple gesture. Thus, the most problematic aspect of the diagram is its capacity to immediately subsume something that is absolutely irreducible to any representation.
The use of the diagram tacitly assumes that the material substance of architecture can be easily superseded with a symbol of its development. This aids in the ease with which an urban inhabitant can now consume his environment. The daunting complexity of the urban environment, Sennett recognized, no longer needs to be confronted, experienced, and critically judged, but rather passively consumed. Kenneth Frampton, in reference to Lewis Mumford, posits that “the darker side of the information age resides in our incapacity to assimilate the unending proliferation of data that is placed at our disposal” (Gregotti 1996). The diagram allows one to comfortably disregard the physical experience of an increasingly complex and contradictory material reality. It diminishes the design process into an exercise of avoidance. All of the decision-making and careful considerations constituting architecture are subservient to a single distillation of its non-material identity.
This trend has also marked the increasing infringement of graphic design on architecture per se. In Adolf Loos’s strikingly prescient 1910 essay “Architecture,” he raises this issue that still dominates the discipline of architecture today:
The architect has reduced the noble art of building to a graphic art. The one who receives the most commission is not the one who can build the best but the one whose work looks the best on paper … But for the old master builders the drawings were merely a means of communicating with the craftsmen who carried out the work, just as a poet has to communicate through writing. However, we are not so totally devoid of culture as to get a boy to take up poetry just because he has a calligraphic hand.