please allow me to introduce myself

I'm a man of impeccable taste; I've even got a diploma that says so. five years of my life I've spent in a government-sponsored correctional institution to make sure I have good taste. and I like things that are to my taste, or what I like to think of as my taste: neat, slender and ordered. so how come I like this:

Parkway* in Camden?














this is not the kind of of bad taste architect's prefer to quote when trying to be edgy or showing off their oh-so-risky guilty pleasures (which I'm fully aware is kind of what I'm doing just now). Parkway is just too banal for that: there's nothing clever about it, and nothing particularly upsetting either. it's just a stretch of road lined with terraced houses of yellow London brick. the houses themselves aren't particularly coordinated with parapets changing level more or less with each building and on the ground floors there are shops. fronting the shops are hideous shop fronts in every kind of garish font imaginable.

I was on my way to visit Long & Kentish's Jewish Museum and when arriving I was presented with a sombre door set in a rendered ground floor wall. and this is something I could have designed myself, this is what I really like. I even remember being impressed by the detailing of the door. so how come – when I later look at it in photographs – it looks so dull? I mean, I still am impressed, and feel this is what I like, but it looks objectively dull. in a lot of ways there's nothing particularly wrong with dullness, one might even say there are certain activities that need the dullness to preserve an air of dignity, but if this would be all there were to cities then they'd be terrible places to spend your life. a city needs the unplanned, the ugly, the left over.

what I'm getting at is this: at times when work are hard to come by voices are raised to protect the function of the architect. unfortunately I think the result would be utterly horrible. that is to say it would be charming, beautiful, well thought through and very tasteful - but also dead. because to a profession educating someone means to train them so they have the skills society expects of that profession. unfortunately, when it comes to architects, that also means to train their taste, to teach them to appreciate what an architect is supposed to appreciate. what an architect is supposed to appreciate is the well behaved modernism so beloved of the progressive upper middle classes at the beginning of the 20th century. I think (or deludes myself into thinking) that's what I've liked all my life – so I'm fine with that – but what about other people whose tastes aren't catered for in architecture schools, why shouldn't they be allowed to influence what our cities look like? and when they try to, by changing their shop front say, why should their wishes be mediated through consultants who have been trained to have good, government approved, taste?

*the first time I heard the name Parkway was in the St. Etienne song London Belongs to Me, and I must say that compared to the loveliness of that song the reality is pretty meagre, but as a city street I find it quite exciting.

itchycoo park

I like brutalism.

a good few architects like brutalism.

some non-architects like brutalism.

a huge amount of people use the word concrete in a derogatory way. for the sake of the argument I'll assume these people don't like brutalism, probably not even the brick brutalism of Klas Anshelm, GKC or Bernt Nyberg.

how is the architect supposed to relate to the views of the public?

how do you avoid making a bland populist design? should you avoid making a populist design? as whatever you do will be the part of the daily lives of thousands of people, what responsibility do you, as an architect, have to those people?

some of these problems were dwelt upon a long time ago, as far back as in the 18th century but that time in writings on landscaping. there is a quote from sir Uvedale Price in Nikolaus Pevsner's Visual Planning and the Picturesque which quite clearly explains the difference between landscaping on the one hand and food and drinking on the other, but it could as well be used to discuss the differences between architecture on the one hand and art or music on the other:

'it can hardly be doubted, that what answers to the beautiful in the sense of tasting, has smootheness and sweetness for its basis, with such a degree of stimulus as enlivens, but does not overbalance those qualities; such, for instance, as in the most delicious fruits and liquors. take away the stimulus, they become insipid; increase it so as to overbalance those qualities, they then gain a peculiarity of flavour, are eagerly sought after by those who have acquired a relish for them, but they are generally less adapted to the general palate. this corresponds exactly with the picturesque; but if the stimulus be encreased [sic] beyond that point, none but depraved and vitiated palates will endure, what would be so justly termed deformity in objects of sight.'

and that cuts straight to the heart of the matter, the issue of architecture's ubiquitiouness, how it is impossible to escape. it is no problem to me – a meagre whisky drinker at the best of times – if the person sitting next to me on the tube likes to drink whisky that tastes like pouring an entire fishing village down your throat, because I won't have to experience it myself. and for those amongst us who like our buildings a little rougher, a little more elemental, I guess we might be seen as having 'acquired a relish' for this. and once we're hooked we just go deeper and deeper until finding the ultimate trip: usually a stage involving Lewerentz's flower kiosk, or in partciularly bad cases Anshelm's extension to Lewerentz's last flat. but at times it can be wise to remember Price's words and try to put a restrain on ourselves. maybe try to be a little more populist and not let the roughness be all encompassing. because as beautiful as those buildings can be to the person looking for that kind of thing just as overpowering can they be to the person coming there just looking for a book, or to get a medical examination.

I know we should design buildings able to stand for hundreds of years, and that during that time taste changes and they may become cherished by thousands – however rough or smooth they are – but I'd say that as a rule of thumb the closer a building is to everyday life the less challenging it should be. and the further removed from the matters of living and the closer it is to ritual and memory the rougher it can be. thus the only sorts of buildings entirely in the realm of architecture in the views of Adolf Loos – the monument and the tomb – can be as rough and uncompromising as the architect feels like.

come to think of it, if you subscribe to that view the Monument to Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht would pretty much be the perfect monument. too bad the rest of Mies' work seems to be monuments too, and smooth ones at that ...

who do you think you are?

the more I think about it, the less certain I become that architects are the ones most suited to write about architecture. architects are way too caught up in the actual making of buildings to be able to analyse them in a good way. it's very presumptious of us to not only think we're the ones best suited to design buildings but also to be able to analyse them properly. especially considering just how complex they are, both as technical systems and as the backdrop against which we all live our lives.

but who, then, would be better suited?

an art historian? the ones I've come across have always been too focused on the visuals and on the 'intention' behind different parts of a building for me to take seriously. and as we know there's a lot of post-rational explanations put forward by architects so that they won't have to say they just liked something. an architectural historian would make more sense in the way that most of them are educated as architects and thus – at least partly – aware of what it is to design a building. they are also aware of some of the constraints society put upon us in the form of regulations and maybe even the constraints procurement brings to a building. but as they're educated within the discipline they know the hidden codes (the 'lore of operation', in the words of Reyner Banham), and are thus not able to analyse a building for what it is, without an overlay of Architecture. they can be great for that, though, – analysing a building and it's relation to other buildings in the canon of architecture – but that's not what I'm after.

I'm looking for someone that writes about architecture and how it interacts with its users and its surroundings. someone caring as much about the performance as about the art of a building. maybe what I'm actually after is a novel, any novel really, or even just films. but most definately not those films so adored by architects, say Playtime. not the arty, very stylish and artificial films but films where people move about in buildings, unconsciously: most films. or maybe that's just me that having very naïve view of what it's like to make a film? maybe all films are so choreographed there's nothing unconscious about them?

I don't know, maybe I've just spent a little too much time reading history books about the Modern movement recently. it is an odd thing, though: history books dedicated to the frozen moment a building is new. history ignoring the passing of time, a history of Platonic Forms rather than of anything in the world of substances. I guess it's an acknowledgement that architecture is mainly ideas, but with the tiny problem that as soon as you start analysing built works you're no longer dealing with the idealised but rather with the incredibly mundane.

ps.
I know, I know, the theoretical hunt for someone 'unspoilt' is futile and history is full of examples of people trying and failing. more importantly architectural history is full of people trying and failing, but that's for another post some other time (and that'll be an opportunity to revisit Reyner Banham).