Saturday, March 8, 2008

The Critical Craft

If architecture isn't an art, as I began to argue in my previous post, then what does it mean to be a craft? Specifically, how does a craft keep from being rote? Let's use the example I trotted out last time — if we're asked to build a school, we aren't likely to wind up with a building shaped like the silhouette of a river otter and built of scavenged cell phone batteries. We're probably going to develop something that others, designers and laypeople alike, would recognize pretty quickly as a school.

And maybe we don't want that. Maybe we don't want our school to look like every other school. But we have to ask ourselves on what grounds we would argue that repetition is a bad thing. I can think of a few.
  1. that our landscape becomes placeless, that a high school in Missouri looks exactly like a high school in New Hampshire, set in the same suburban context of culs-de-sac and asphalt five-lanes surrounded by Denny's and Chevy dealers.
  2. that our work becomes careless, old jobs pulled out of the drawer and filled in with a new client's name.
  3. that our work is complicit in carrying forward inequitable social relations or unsustainable environmental practices.
And, in fact, I think I'd be willing to argue that much of the output of the architectural profession over the past 60 years or so has fallen prey to exactly these three deeper flaws, at exactly the same moment that individual expressiveness and ingenuity has become the primary currency of architecture schools. The gulf between what's taught and what's done has never been greater.

So let's think about what the opposites of those three conditions might be.
  1. that our work speaks in powerful ways about its immediate and its regional context. Boston's Commonwealth Avenue, for example, is unlike anything one would find in Phoenix or San Francisco or Minneapolis. It reflects its origins through scale and materials and proportions, and silently insists on newcomers' adherence to the pattern language. This is a distinctly Bostonian place, reflecting both the value of urban land and the New England Puritan conception of appropriate civic behavior.
  2. that our work reflects constant decisionmaking in every single detail, from gross form to materials selection to the choice of bugle-headed or round-headed screws for the baseplates of the hallway lights. To return to Comm Ave, the "rulebook" hasn't resulted in unthinking uniformity. The differences in brick detailing, entry framing, stonecutting, roof finials and glazing make each of those rowhouses a unique event. You can stop at each one along the street and spend a few minutes seeing the care with which they were assembled.
  3. that our work actively promotes social justice and environmental stewardship. If, as Jeff Stein insists, the basic function of architecture is to mark relationships, then we have the responsibility to make certain kinds of relationships more likely, and to intervene in those we see as inequitable. Think of The Met, the high school I told you about in Providence RI. They weren't just designing a different kind of school building because they wanted it to look cool; they were designing a different conception of what it meant to be a student, an adult, a family member. They were designing to disrupt old habits. Likewise, if we know that our buildings consume vast amounts of energy, produce vast amounts of waste, and drag in materials on boats from Indonesia, we have a responsibility to disrupt that behavior as well.
And here's where the "critical" part comes in. Each of us has to examine our own professional behavior, constantly, to look for and eliminate those three bad habits. We have to always look for this carelessness (literally, this lack of caring) in whatever we do, whether it's designing buildings or writing essays or teaching seminars. There's a consciousness, an ability to be present and attentive, that I think is entirely readable in all of our products. I don't know much about an awful lot of things, but I have a strong feel for when something has been done well, when it's been conceived and constructed attentively. And I also have a pretty strong radar for the rote and habitual and rushed and expedient.

I use the word "joy" a lot in my writing to mark that state of being immersed in something you care about. I think that joyful objects are as engaging (and as rare) as joyful people.

6 comments:

Eric Randall said...

So I'm guilty of 1,2 AND 3...but not when I have my OWN firm (he says)

I wonder how much of this carelessness, these bad habits, are a result of the ease of accessibility, affordability, and availability that "design" and construction has become to the common man? I'll surmise - and I think I'm right - that during the era of conscious, consistent good design (and of your cherubs and gargoyles) we thought entirely different about buildings, construction, and design. I imagine, back when, most places were envisioned with a much greater sense of permanence - and thus placeness - than we do today. I think our generation of architects are the first ones, sadly, who can fully expect and even should anticipate that what we are designing and building today will be torn down or adapted in 25 years or less. And the Wal-martization of our built environment has only helped perpetuate and even encourage these habits.

I think to change the bad habits you've outlined in your post requires something far beyond a modification of how architects are educated - we are only one complicit cog in the machine. I think those habits are a reaction to the market place. Now maybe if we all join forces and collectively agree to boycott crappy projects from crappy developers with crappy budgets on crappy sites we might be on to something.

Herb Childress said...

One of the things I've been viewing with considerable alarm in the past few years is the increasing number of exhibitions that link architecture and fashion. I think that's a horrific thought, because clothing fashions are one of the most perfectly ephemeral markets we've ever developed. The whole point of fashion is to make your wardrobe obsolete every 18 months, to make it clear that you are an object of derision if your clothes are one phase behind on the sine wave.

I agree with you that architecture, as a profession, has been dragged along in our general consumer culture of disposability. I've often thought that, if I ever hire a designer to do a house for me, one of my criteria would be that it be on the National Register of Historic Places in 300 years. (And if it made it to 300 years, it's a GUARANTEE that it would be on the national register, because it would be the only building from 2010 that still existed...)

One of problems I see is our rush to gigantism. If you want to build a development of 2,500 s.f. houses -- if that size is your primary market driver -- then you're going to use repetitive practices and cheap materials to keep the cost per square foot as low as it possibly can be. You might throw in a sop here and there -- the granite countertop, the SubZero fridge -- but the extra couple thousand you spend on that is visible, whereas the savings from plastic plumbing and production-grade cabinetry is both much larger and also invisible.

Melissa said...

This is a good topic. Not interesting, good. Who said that?

First I want to talk about this:
"1. that our landscape becomes placeless, that a high school in Missouri looks exactly like a high school in New Hampshire, set in the same suburban context of culs-de-sac and asphalt five-lanes surrounded by Denny's and Chevy dealers."

I am shocked that you would say this after our commonwealth ave project. Those houses are undoubtably repetitive! There are slight differences that create the uniquness and beauty of each but on a grand scale they are very much the same! I think the placelessness you are referring to has so much to do with context. I know you can name hundreds of places where the architecture is overall repetitive but beautiful.

"2. that our work becomes careless, old jobs pulled out of the drawer and filled in with a new client's name."

again, context. if an architect considers context, missouri and new hampshire would never be the same.

"3. that our work is complicit in carrying forward inequitable social relations or unsustainable environmental practices."
okay, I'll give you this one.

Melissa said...

oops, maybe i should have read the whole thing first.

Eric Randall said...

Hey Melissa,

Something I'm a little curious about - what did you mean when you said:

"again, context. if an architect considers context, missouri and new hampshire would never be the same."

I'm sure we are now headed WAY off the track that Herb is probably hoping for, but frankly I'm quite interested in your passion relative to these three points. If I'm reading your comments right, you seem to be taking pretty strong exception to the first two points, and yet I'm thinking about something you had said early (I can't remember if it was on the blogs, or if it was during one of our 1am career counseling sessions in studio), but (to paraphrase the best my fuzzy memory allows) I remember you were talking about the planned communities your office worked on and how - although the designs were exceptional - it pained you that they would plop these things down in the middle of an Indiana corn field with no regard for context at all. Now I'm not pretending to be the pinnacle of architectural and environmental stewardship - on the contrary, I can count on one hand the number of responsible, contextual projects I have worked on in the span of 14 years, and the projects I have worked on that violates Herbs rules 1 through 3 could fill six portfolios - but I can at least examine my body of work so far and come to the conclusion that I am doing no favors by promoting those aspects.

After all it doesn't even take a craftsman to change a title block, rotate the building 90 degrees to fit on the new site and ship it off to permit (and I've done a few of those in my career as well...)

Melissa said...

Eric -
I'm not following. Are you asking me a question or reprimanding me for doing what I do not believe in?