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.
The two-dimensional visual representation used to depict a building has come to supplant the material experience of the building itself. This phenomenon moves beyond the abundant diagrams used to explain a building’s genesis and into the realm of glossy images that pervade marketing material. Rendered images of buildings appear long before they are constructed. One of the consequences of this approach is that by the time the building is actually built, it runs the risk of being outmoded. This is compounded in especially byzantine political conditions like those of New York where projects are subject to lengthy bureaucratic processes. However, even in China, which has a reputation for dictatorial efficiency, delays can bring out the schism between a work promoted too soon and the reality of the finished product. Koolhaas famously rejected a number of New York City commissions in favor of projects within China, most notably the CCTV tower series of lectures, publications, and interviews extolled the virtues of the project long before it was complete. The novelty of the architectural form itself had run its promotional course prior to its actual debut. The diagrams of the programmatic and structural feats of the CCTV which had been ceaselessly circulated almost surpassed the now moderately marginalized monolith that sits in Beijing. Even with a building exemplifying such true formal originality, the curse of pre-emptive promotion had endangered the material force of the form itself. The massive building had almost been overshadowed by the obsessive imaging of its formation.
Scientistic style
Another commonplace brand of conflation has emerged between the technological means of communicating building and the building itself. Instead of simplifying the complex contemporary condition with the diagrammatic image, the scientistic style seeks to ostensibly analyze it and produce a superficially rational result. Technological innovations within computing have led to greater ease in the execution of construction documentation for architects. However, as the architect has become conversant in this new form of dimensional drafting he has also become equally enamored by its technocratic image. Along with precision and productivity has come the fetishization of digital computing. This now allows the architect to assume a new role as a quasi-scientist who can disregard the objective rigor of the scientific method, but reap the visually striking benefits of its three-dimensional rhetoric. Algorithms and parametric processes are able to generate form with virtuosity and seeming scientific legitimacy the architect could only have imagined in the past.
An exemplary project of this sort is Thom Mayne’s 41 Cooper Square in New York City (Figure 13.1). The large incision in the façade appears to be as arbitrary as it was computationally challenging to conceive. The building appears to be striving to represent the complexity of the urban condition, but not in a comprehensible way. The form appears highly specific, yet has no specific explanation. It proposes no concerted solution, but rather an authorless expression of the dilemma itself; the discomfiting contemporary condition laid bare in frozen form. With the Cooper Square project, the desire to arrest an undulating digital surface mid-stream was prioritized over the material constitution of the building and its ultimate physical presence. The material, structural, and physical inefficiencies inherent in such an elaborate form become evident when considering its cost. When it was announced that Cooper Union will no longer be offering free tuition for the first time in its 150-year history, one cannot help but look to the Cooper Square project as an emblem of indifference towards the material reality of architecture.
FIGURE 13.1 41 Cooper Square at the Cooper Union designed by Thom Mayne of Morphosis
Source: author.
Another fundamental impetus behind this trend is the abstention of authorship. These types of scientistic propositions seem to largely generate themselves and as such are impregnable to direct criticism. The form is a consequence of a largely anonymous computational process beyond the ability of an architectural author. The architect is then isolated from criticism because the complexity of his work’s formal genesis prohibits the comprehension of any specificity; each formal move has no explanation per se, but rather has emerged from an autonomous virtual space. Both the design decisions and the culpability associated with those choices can be conveniently jettisoned by the architect. Managing the results of a digital process can result in arbitrary outcomes that do not necessarily account for the material realities inherent in built form. Definitive decisions can be ceded in favor of passive detachment, much akin to the avoidance afforded by the diagrammatic approach to architecture as a simplified solution.
We occupy an age of near epistemological conclusion where an excess of information has produced an environment of indifference. Coping with the amount of knowledge at our disposal is as formidable as it is overwhelming. Architects of the past faced the opposite dilemma encountered by practitioners of today. Knowledge was so scarce that mere access could empower an individual to imbue his creations with originality. Thomas Jefferson’s copy of Palladio’s Quattro Libri likely contributed more to his architectural achievements than any inherent innovations of his own invention. Knowledge was passed preciously along as a commodity rather than a fragment to be summarized in a sea of information.
At the same time as Jefferson was building his celebrated Rotunda at the University of Virgina, the British scientist Michael Faraday was across the Atlantic embarking on his famed experimentations in electromagnetism. What is revealing about Faraday is that he was not formally trained as a scientist, yet he was able to make some of the most significant scientific contributions of his age. Lacking any formal education, Faraday was so mathematically inept that he resorted to sketching diagrams of metal filings that formed various patterns around magnetic poles in place of developing the proofs to explain the phenomenon he witnessed. These simple graphics are still found in today’s advanced textbooks and persist as instrumental tools in explicating the foundational discoveries of magnetic forces. Akin to Jefferson, Faraday’s contributions were able to arise in an era where Moore’s law had yet to be fully realized. An environment of epistemological scarcity in the past provided an opportunity for what we would consider a layperson to make an original discovery of lasting historical value. Contributions of this magnitude today can only be the result of either extreme expertise through specialization or management of human resources.
Conclusion
The most original projects today are able to thoughtfully resolve the complexity of our current condition through architectural performance on formal and material grounds alike. They are able to reconcile the necessary technical demands of a building with the formal elegance that activates the perspective of the subject. Faraday’s discoveries are at work in one such significant example: Herzog and de Meuron’s SBB Signal box 4 in Basel, Switzerland (Wang 1998). The copper clad bands that wrap the twisted shape both protect the sensitive electrical equipment within from electromagnetic fields and provide a material dynamism to the form of the building. As the subject shifts around the building, the thin twisted slats of copper dynamically alter the material appearance of the mass. The material form of the building actively expresses the shifting position of the viewer in a haptic personification of movement. Complex infrastructural and urban issues are resolved elegantly with a singular formal and technical solution. Herzog and de Meuron’s work has long been marked by this type of consistent sophistication and restraint. Jacques Herzog argues that:
Today our designs look much more spectacular and nobody can criticize us for lack of inventiveness or richness of form. Actually the problem is the richness itself, countless variations that flood the world of architecture and art, and generate a kind of blindness. The problem, as always, is to escape the tyranny of innovation.
(Herzog et al. 2004)
References
Aureli, P. V. (2005) “After Diagrams.” Log 6: 5–9.
Barthes, R. (1982) Camera Lucida. New York: Hill and Wang.
Gregotti, V. (1996) Inside Architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Herzog, J., J. Wall, and P. Ursprung (2004) Pictures of Architecture, Architecture of Pictures: A Conversation between Jacques Herzog and Jeff Wall, moderated by Philip Ursprung. New York: Springer.
Koolhaas, R. (1998) S,M,L,XL. New York: Monacelli Press.
Loos, A. (1910) “Architecture.” Reprinted in T. and C. Benton and D. Sharp (eds), Form and Function: A Source Book for the History of Architecture and Design 1890–1939. London: Crosby Lockwood Staples, 1975, pp. 41–44.
Sennett, R. (1992) The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity and City Life. New York: W. W. Norton.
Stern, R. A. M. (2006) New York 2000: Architecture and Urbanism Between the Bicentennial and the Millennium. New York: Monacelli Press.
Wang, W. (1998) Herzog and de Meuron. Basel: Birkhäuser.
Critics write what media publish; both criticism and media require newsworthy targets. Essays in this Part III of the book, such as Ashraf Salama’s thorough analysis of published reviews of the design of Cairo’s Al Azhar Park, explore the social and cultural consequences of this limitation, since the overall efficacy of built environments clearly depends not only on how good or bad buildings look or on who designed them, but on how well or poorly they perform. In addition to mechanical operations – air quality, thermal efficiency, water management, and energy – the evaluation of performance requires empirical methodologies and data that assess the impact of buildings on people – their perceptions, productivity, health, and salubrity, among other factors. One consequence of architecture’s historical orientation to the values and aspirations of high design is the intellectual and academic marginalization of research and scholarship that study how people actually use buildings, how well they serve their needs and expectations, and how a building’s total performance conditions its design success or failure. Cases where critical acclamation conflicts with the experiences of use and public perception abound – in Seattle, Rem Koolhaas’s Central Public Library, completed in 2004, and Frank Gehry’s Experience Music Project, completed in 2000, still polarize the consuming public, dividing critics and admirers brandishing vocabularies that condemn or celebrate building form and building and performance.
Integrated design and practice needs integrated architectural criticism
This segregation of methodologies and vocabulary is not limited to public debate surrounding marquee architecture. Likewise influencing the future of criticism is the shift that takes place internally, within architecture’s professional culture and the industries that surround it. Paolo Tombesi cogently describes the current threshold dividing past and future practices:
In the end, it is up to [schools] to facilitate the adoption and dissemination of a cultural paradigm in which architects may find themselves in a (group) discussion on buildings but also industrial systems, on spatial semantics but also procurement strategies, on materials but also industrial relations and training programs, on project budgets but also project priorities. Of course, implementing this agenda requires adjusting curricula [and] devising teaching strategies that can expand the idea of design as an activity broader than architectural design … As suggested, this might involve questioning the epistemology of design vis-à-vis the domains it intersects rather than treating its architectural component with blind reverence; it might also involve overcoming the cultural separation that has long beset the analysis of intellectual work in construction, possibly by revealing design’s social heterogeneity and by adopting analytical instruments capable of decoding the actual value of particular patterns of work; and it could require presenting construction, management, real estate, or other enterprises that are not strictly architectural as legitimate concerns of one’s professional dimension as an architect.
(Tombesi 2010)
Tombesi’s formidable analysis of the economics and culture surrounding design labor echoes the observations offered by Ursula Baus and Ulrich Schramm in this volume in their argument to extend and integrate the compass of architectural criticism to include “all phases of the building life cycle.” Tombesi likewise calls for the radical integration of architecture with other professional vocabularies responsible for the production and maintenance of built environments. At issue, as always, is the relationship and distribution of risk, responsibility, and reward. Tombesi argues that increased intimacy with the construction industry offers architects obvious benefits – more influence over quality, greater public awareness, and less triviality.
Tombesi’s essay characterizes one strand of an ongoing discussion among educators and practitioners increasingly concerned about how to engage the built environment both within and beyond the traditional architectural vocabulary. Design criticsm at both smaller and larger scales of production – personal teletechnology, for example, or public space in cities – already integrates social, economic, and environmental evaluation. Architectural criticism has long integrated history, anthropology, sociology, and political science – the seminal works of Joseph Rykwert and Richard Sennett come to mind (Rykwert 1988; Sennett 1991). Environmental psychology has also established a firm foothold in academia, in part through the growth and success of the 46-year-old Environmental Design Research Association; similarly, the convergence of landscape architecture and urban design fostered the emergence of a sub-discipline, landscape urbanism, which has more recently expanded into the field of urban ecological design. As Frank Duffy notes in this volume, a new, twenty-first-century criticism might likewise and more fully integrate the migration of principles and methodologies across and among more obvious, adjacent professional discourses, such as construction management, building product manufacturing, supply chain systems, real estate studies, public health, and environmental science.
On the one hand, leaders in architecture, planning, urban design, landscape architecture, real estate, and construction management increasingly acknowledge the central importance of integrated practice, which seeks to engage and apply “disruptive technologies” – e.g. building information modeling (BIM), 3D printing, and rapid prototyping – within well-established practices increasingly dependent on both empirical research and design inquiry. This approach presupposes not only new contractual structures, but also a new kind of technical and scientific understanding that can command and maximize the full potential of increasingly transformative digital tools. Among other capabilities, these tools permit the construction of virtual buildings and urban districts in highly adjustable digital environments, assembled into data-rich models, which therefore provide an opportunity for unprecedented analyses of the behavior and performance of buildings, landscapes, cities, and regions, in advance of capital investment and implementation.
On the other hand, many educators argue that architectural education should intensify its emphasis on design-in-itself as the defining subject of our contemporary professional curricula and criticism. Given the current limits of the curriculum – in the US these limits are defined by the National Architectural Accrediting Board (NCARB) and by the professional regulation it serves – this needn’t suggest further displacement of building science and technology. On the contrary, the expansion of design methodologies in architecture to a broader range of physical and organizational problems suggests an opportunity to integrate, not exclude, empirical evaluation and data. With that said, academics who regard architecture as an autonomous branch of the humanities fiercely defend their detachment from technocracy and commercial practice; their responsibility is to incessantly provoke, displace, and often scandalize the complacency, habits, and ruling assumptions of commercial practice. Historians, theorists, and critics abhor banality; their job is to question the profession’s aesthetic and ethical compass.
Emerging models of integrated architectural criticism
Yet integrative design thinking – generously redefined at the scale of built environments – ostensibly reconciles aesthetics and performance, opening doors to the novel exploration of their critical synergies, as Kiel Moe has ably demonstrated in his seminal study of thermally active surfaces in buildings (Moe 2010). Moe’s methodology blends philosophy, social and historical analysis, scientific principle, building performance evaluation, architectural history, and high design theory, providing an entirely new model of integrative architectural criticism and scholarship that greatly expands the potential benefits to readers. Moe models an iconoclastic alternative to contemporary criticism, defining his scope on thermodynamic principles that encompass diverse urban and ecological contexts, therefore expanding his audience to include not just teachers and students of architecture and trailing culturati, but also middle-ground practitioners, mechanical engineers, building owners, developers, and occupants, anyone for whom heat and energy matter.
Looming behind these concerns of course is global economic and environmental uncertainty. The next few years will be especially decisive for built environments disciplines, since disruptive technologies like BIM and mass customization increasingly shift early design decision-making from the individual architect to an interdisciplinary team, including developers, contractors, engineers, consultants, and specialists.
How well is traditional architectural criticism addressing the traffic across traditional disciplinary boundaries? Without exception, conversations with professional leaders in architecture, planning, landscape, and construction confirm the recognition that grand challenge problems – the environment, energy, urbanization, information, and health (all solvable, but not by any one discipline working alone) – require deep, structural collaboration; and that leadership in the built environment professions increasingly demands the effective and even radical integration of diverse methods, practices, vocabularies, and services.
There are many reasons to seek structures that better leverage new forms of criticism and media attentive to this level of interdisciplinary exchange. The digital age recently witnessed the passing of one of its pioneers, Jack Wolf, emeritus professor at the University of California San Diego, whom the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers called “one of the most productive cross-fertilizers in engineering research, successfully importing techniques used in one field to obtain unexpected results in another” (Martin 2011). His life’s work reminds us that computer science began as a hybrid discipline born out of the convergence of mathematics and electrical engineering; likewise the word “bioengineering,” a burgeoning discipline and locus of hundreds of millions of dollars in sponsored research, was not in common use before the second half of the last century. Moe’s work on thermodynamics in architecture, among other convergences described in this and following parts of this book, holds out hope that similar hybrid methods and vocabularies will transform our understanding of built environments and the complicated social, natural, and cultural systems in which they always already find themselves immersed.
References
Martin, D. (2011) “Jack Wolf, Who Did the Math Behind Computers, Dies at 76.” The New York Times, March 20.
Moe, K. (2010) Thermally Active Surfaces in Architecture. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.
Rykwert, J. (1988) The Idea of a Town: The Anthropology of Urban Form in Rome, Italy, and the Ancient World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Sennett, R. (1991) The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities. London: Faber and Faber.
Tombesi, P. (2010) “On the Cultural Separation of Design Labor.” In P. Deamer and P. G. Bernstein (eds), Building (in) The Future: Recasting Labor in Architecture. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, pp. 117–36.