The Wardman Wire

One of the minor interests for the Wardman Wire is architecture. I haven’t written about it very much recently, so I’m be doing a three or four articles over the next few days inspired by articles I have seen in the last few weeks.

Architecture Today is “the monthly magazine presenting the most important projects in the UK and the rest of Europe.” I’ll be looking at three articles Today, I have an example to show that architects are just as capable of writing rhubarb as sociologists, radical feminists or Parliamentary “draftspersons” (when guided by Ministers in a hurry).

From an article in Architecture Today by Irina Davidovici:

You will need some resolve to get to the end of this. And you don’t need to know what “City, Type and Place” are - actually they are terms used in the debate about how urban architecture can create cities that are good for people to live in.

They don’t put the whole thing on the web, so I’ve excerpted the first few paragraphs.

We start off (in the contents list) quite well:

“Three house projects by Steven Taylor Associates - in Bethnal Green, Shoreditch and Rainham - investigate the nature of familiar urban type while retaining individuality and character…”

But the subhead in the article starts a slippery slope…

“Typology: Steven Taylor’s work on the house type and urban intensification suggests a timely and important alternative to empty formalism”.

Er. Fair enough.

“The continued growth of cities and the demand for densification (ed:a Bushism?) force architects to deal, still, with issues one might have believed were long exhausted. The discourse around city, type and place, ongoing since the theoretical revisions of a commercial and dehumanised modernism in the 1960s, maintains its relevance in spite of countless misinterpretations, of which postmodern historicism is one of the least favourable.

Interpreting … “as cities become more and more dense, how they can be designed well as places for humans to live and work in is a continuing debate that started in the 1960s; ‘postmodern historicism’ was not a good answer to this dilemma.”

Type, that famously ambigous staple of 1970s theory, contains the promise of reconciliation between form-making and the deeper layers of a collective urban consciousness, allowing architects to foray a rich repository of images held in common and manifested in the heterogeneous substance of the city. Unfortunately, its widely interpretative range combined with the need to assert one’s creative individuality has led contemporary architecture ever further from the delicate balance of architectural autonomy, towards the production of objects that demand attention though their own formal inventiveness rather than anything to do with cultural context. The disappearance of the traditional city as a unified object of study and its replacement with the dissonant co-existence of various ‘urban realities’ in close proximity to each other has likewise thrown in doubt the relevance, or very possibility, of a local culture, allowing global networks of virtual information to be created in its place - with the same demand for formal artefacts as a result.

Need some help here. If anyone can translate this into less than 75 words of something resembling English, I’ll link back to you.

The loss of theoretical ground suffered by type and place is nevertheless constantly challenged by the reassuring fact that, concretely, we are still collective beings relying by the points of orientation provided by familiar, ordinary, urban environments. The deep structures of culture which type promised to reveal are still in place, in spite of architecture’s current fixation with abstract form and creative individuality.

I think she means … “Although we have stopped thinking about designing places for human beings to live in, people still want to live in places they are comfortable and familiar with. Human community still matters, even though some architects seem to have turned out to be more interested in monuments to themselves.”

So it is with gratitude one notes the continuing preoccupation with the fundamentals of human existence in architecture that is often small in scale, modest in scope…

“I am pleased that architects designing small schemes are still interested in people.”

…yet absolutely rigorous in its search for collective intelligibility.

What?

There may be some good stuff in there as the article continues, but I feel as if I am wandering around in a jungle looking for Angkor Wat.

We may - however - have found the new Zaha Hadid of architectural descriptions. Here’s the existing Zaha we know and enjoy:

The Centre for Contemporary Arts addresses the question of its urban context by maintaining an indexicality to the former army barracks. This is in no way an attempt at topological pastiche, but instead continues the low-level urban texture set against the higher level blocks on the surrounding sides of the site.

Damn it, Zaha. Use English.

The solution? Personally I would recommend a 6 month placement on the Daily Mirror. Or perhaps 30 minutes giving testimony to a Commons Committee - but that would be painful.

So I’m pleased to award Irina Davidovici a John Prescott Award for Linguistic Rhubarb beyond the Call of Duty.