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    11 views9 pages

    5.black Box

    Uploaded by

    Tereza Gouveia Vasconcelos

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
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    ESSAYS by REYNER BANHAM setecreoey MaryBanham Paul Barker Sutherland Lyall Cedric Price Foreword by Peter Hall UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berieley Los Angeles London A Black Box The Secret Profession of Architecture The difference between Wren and Hankemocr,| have ally decided, Is that Haws. moor wos an erhitect and Wren was not. This judgment may seem fothardy, but ts not deliberately perverse. thas boen forced on me by some months of visting the Loy bing chante which gave me a chance to revisit St Paul's and sundry Cty churches had not seen since student days. And struck me that even when Wren was being a clover as he was in widening the central by n each arcade at St Mare- Bow, ora inventive ashe was in the upperparts of St Steghen Watrook, he st was "ot doing lhatever i want Hawksmoor had done to make great architecture out ot ‘2s humdrum a concept asthe interior of St Mary Wooinoth, ‘Tho diction | am making is not beween cterent temperaments o levels of ce- ative genius, but between fundamental modes of designing. Nor ae the consequences ofthe architectural mode necessarily beautiful. Some prety ugly stuff happens inthe lantem ofthe mausoleum of the Duvich Art Galery, or instance, yt the resut eaves 1S Inno doubt tht Si John Soane was an absolute echitect. ‘Whatever tis mode attitude or presence maybe, one can recognise it~ the bot Origine appeared in New Statesman and Society, £2 October 1990, pp 22-25, 6 opereul : _ prot inners dr wen ok mitre, Petra ohn sted ener oni bse achat _Tateoer hase rte full edi te i titan sai ois ii ca oir an one lr been Svorglysufsesting. That wiance on enxiton alone leaves postrodemism in the same relation to architecture as feriale impersonation to femininity. It is not archi paecucnest aaa) "Tose este aaron aati "tak Enc”. ingot ouput oi trom nfs careNS,Nsrato be mse “good design”, since architecture Is often conspicuously present—in the work of Lutyens forinstance—in buildings that are pretty dumb designs from other points of butt doesnot mpl that te two are ineompate; simply atone can have ehierwthout tne othe. The stution has been much muda bythe tendency ofthe maderm movement, since the time of Willa Mri, to gather up all decent buicings into te nbc of (Gareitetre Ts was a wa, tendly and egaltarian hing odo, bt must row Seem as histercally rude an as perilously cont 9 Nols even’ sition that Lincoln Cathedrals architecture and bicycle shed isnt SE pce xtc etary ut cnr ofan scans Pe age aha a eer per mete eer Soon ors. Howcahe miley cir Doe Ste or eente (Gon? wnat one can know by practised observation, however and what Pevsner may ‘even have meant) that cathedral (ncudinguslyones) are generally designed | atari posses es ‘Such isthe cutural prestige ofthe purely architectural mode, however, within the protected area of “westem civilisation”, that most of us get brainwashed into believing that itis smnonymous with “good design” or even “the design of buildings”. The mod- ‘em movement has done itself litle good in promoting this muddle, because t thereby «undermines one ofits own most useful polemical device. For in spite ofthis inclusi "Istapproach, there has been a long tradition—from before Adolf Loos to after Cedric | Price—of using comparisons with certiably nor-architectural objects, from peasant | crafts to advanced electronics, to reveal how bad regular architectural designing had “pecome. Quite alot of these paragons were indeed buildings, and good ones at that, [ost eir tical power and let the body of architecture confused rather than reformed yndsome ones) are more commonly 292 ABLACK Box istic mariage-ofconvenience, Throw out al the Zulu kraals, graimelevators, hogans, lunar excursion modules, cruckhouses, Farman biplanes and s0 forth, and look again at \Whet then would cstinguish the products ofthis black box rom those of other thinkaole moses? Functional or environmental performance? Besut at frm or de | [pesotsmace? rato mates sac which the architectural profession habitually congratulates itself, but a Buckminster Fuller dome or an Eskimo glo can usualy best architecture on al six counts, and 59 can alot of other buildings, ships, airlines, inatables and animal as. So why 60 We ot admit th Toe fist professions (such as electrical and mecnerical engineering notoriously avid such overall responsible, peterng «4-10 remain at one remove from the wrath ealents as “consultant”: hed guns whe, {ke nor war cimial, "wer carving ot order. Ort bo less ofensve to °S engineers, oa of men who are oo prone to ey for instance, "You design your con cert hal any old shape yu tke, andi ty and sort out the acouts,” rather than “That's stupa shape fora concert hl, hs wil worka fot beter” However Is not what makes them architects, as Lethaby seems to have per ccelved in his arguments The more revealing of "these stores tendtoorgnate rom thet cuca ttuceforming situation, the design ‘rtm the architectural school studio:> Thhy sy Cr 2 vn =F. urges se we Ina telling example from my own experience, | once found myself defending point by point a student design for a penthouse epartment that had been failed by my ace. | demic colleagues. | secured their agreement that it fulfilled all the requirements of the | programme. was convenient in its spatial dispositions, wel it, buildable on the root we UES OP PAL TAGE) GROUSE Ye barns Meee Y | De ne ii it i i SW RE Fi: caea bees as pennies bien wets tert apes to be institutional toilet paper, an “insult to architecture”, the year master announced, thus making it clear thet, for him, the effective design of buildings was apparently na ‘One could easily multiply such instances where, it seems, some secret value sys- esac roca ronnie coosinc “Gs Par rtince nicl ietevin ected ig bod ‘one case in five) that the} failed “because | don’t draw in the frac ley aswontne ests feat oom area SBS Eitbnluth ernenerrer store ne aver ea nacinareate, ees rere egeee eee omen Peete eeecein rae eee ae cccers iar aeere epee oat eee meme rie See ae eee a) saad rend ate orarapnd yaaa mabey Shon Sl enter ool onan mimes #2 Skee pen rer kalba hr en carn rome a Fm oso grr) ac ar ie ven lin phair hotel beri a Ae cera actecte want "nagein is inde intra enitorsm then Teonneptnen eter ese acs gars errs most anni Ree ae tet ca eer neato oe Fer an oer noe eeny=n ce aetalgad pelea iano Fe es tg lr toda iment er Pos hack Ge Dries At ines Oc Cabs tsar sos oi, ‘erences and scruples, not to say obsessions, that one does not commonly find in "lr ernwig sev Cpa ome ae deta te ste tte oma Aovozne wnat issn oe ogy cmon an ey afte ba we empath Tee ‘a kind of plckiness over details that shows up in regular engineering only when a total stranger wanders in rom another fol, as did Henry Royce or Etore Bugati in the early days of the automobile. Forth souces of these aiferences of pfessonl bev one need ok 0 ‘urther than the place where architects are socialsed into ther profession the studio. [Anthropologists have been known to compare the teaching stu toa tribal long- house; the place and the rituals pursued there are almost unique in the annats of waster education, One of the things that sustains this uniqueness | 2. \ 20)". That is where 1 (Ree: AL fre ce eer, Cassa. he ciscouragement need be no more tan volo or oblique, but when schools were under radical pressure inthe eal seventies, rary students will have hears something which | personally heard at that time, the blunt cirective: "Don't bather with al thet environmental tut, ust get on with the _ ewe’ sve oo msbecate bow wth etn awe recently been vochsafed an accidental view of what the contents ofthat black box might be, because ofan interesting story that has emerged from recent writing by, and ‘about, Christopher Alexander and his “timeless way of building”. Looking back on the early days of his “pattern language”, he revealed one ofits apparent failures to his biographer, Stephen Grabow: Bootig copies ofthe pattem language were Heating up and down tne west coast nd people would come and show me the projects they had done, ana | began tobe more and rorenont a Aap attestation eR | Gauri. su song erect nt the canons of macertuy erence. Now. fone nope ha the pater language would be a evlstonary way design tng beings, new pari In ercitecture comparable wt the Copericanrevol- ‘ion in cosmology, then clear te projet had failed ana further research was indeed reed tn anther et he ale of the pater langunge to change he nature | ofarontecurl design cul be seen as something of um an unwitting St | aporoxmaton desertion of what xchtects actualy do when hey do architecture certainty doesnot ly wth wha rect normaly can ha they do (expt and Impl receures area variance in mary profession), but may sil rove at least an araogy wth te mental sets that stcentssvbiminlyacquein the tuo longhouse. fan. ‘The heart of Alexander's matters the concept ofa pattem, whichis #6) i a Sa ONES ‘2s “comfortable window-seat” or “teshold or “light on two sides of a room fs soared" aden Suh beled pt cent on ‘seem to hear an echo here of Emesto Rogers Claiming long ago: “There is no Such thing as bad architecture; only good architecture ‘and non-rchitecture.” And in general, 28 an outsider who was never socialsed inthe tribal longhouse, it seems to me that Alexander's patterns are very like the kind of 296 THE 19805 packeges in which architects can often be seen to be doing their thinking, partesary atthe sort of second sketch stage when they ae reusing some of what was sketched ‘outin the fist version. ‘Such paterns-—perhaps even a fite set of pattems—and ther imperatives seem “tobe sharedbyallarctets and ate, n some Sense, what we eens n Hovis: | moor an donot fd in Wren. This snot to say that Alexander's accidental revelation ‘exhausts the topic, Fr from t; fora start, itis stil much too crude to explain anything really Subtle. Being cast na prespiv—e, rather than descriptive format, avoids | such questions show such patios are formed, and hee nd cannat support he vind of anthropological investigation that has revealed the workings of other secret cub | tures tous inthe pa "contents ‘While we await their eventual revelation, what are we to make of architecture? No tonger seen asthe mother ofthe arts, or the dominant mode of rational design. 20> pears as the exercise ofan arcane and privileged aesthetic code. We could, perhaps treat it as one of the humanities, tal or quai, since its traditons aro ofthe same antiquity and classicist dervation as the others (it even has apart share in @ ruse, Melpomene). We could stop pretending that tis "a blend of ert and science”. ‘but a discipline ints own right that happens to overlap some ofthe teritory of paint: ing, sculpture, statics, coustios and soon. And we could Nat the vulgar cura mpe- tfalism that leads the wits of general histories of architecture to co-opt absolutely ‘everything built upon the earth's crust into their subject matter. i, earn yay awit inet th Umber bling of orem Euepe, forinstace, oe | aarp of Gane const realy belogundertherutc ofarcttetr a al «La caput tat Gotnccathdrle were not ery beau”, ntareiecue | Le Corsi fet tat Goi comes wor recuse troy nr ot made ofthe ur geomet fs hate onan he Caer rons au pena fone curt apr os Neth 1. | tnt exgoned sours and servos, sem to deve fm asia lesskit sen ‘trent tot aritactue ia Hom masony hel together by any, ants votes fect eset econ might decelve and confuse ourselves less if we stopped tere, to cram the whole globe into its intellectual portfolio. We could recognise that the Mes tory of erchiteture is no more, but emphatically no fess, tan what we used to Deieve ‘twas: the progression of those styles and monuments ofthe European mamnsteam- trom Stonehenge to the Staats¢alere, that define the modest bullding art at ours alone. 297 ABLACK BOX ‘Wie mignt then have a better view ofthe true value and splendours of the building wien ChaesEones, or stncesugrcoeted te desig as. he Oat We mig lobe re secu laced ost he meters of ou om bldg wt be {ning wih the persstene of ronng—

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