The Other Architect - From Vladimir Tatlin to Zaha Hadid

Zaha Hadid, 1950-2016 (Photo Steve Double, taken from ArchDaily)

This article asking "what is architecture"  had been almost complete when news about Zaha Hadid's sudden death broke. She had approached that  question so deftly, unafraid, and exuberantly. She created visionary avantgarde drawings that later became three dimensional to touch and walk through. Whether there was a building or not was not her initial concern. In a way she was the incarnation of "The Other Architect", persisting in an architecture world then still dominated by men.

Vitra Fire Station, Weil am Rhein (Germany). Hadid's Big Bang.

What is architecture? 

This question is probably not one that that would keep many people awake at night. Nevertheless, it is interesting how little agreement there is about what it is and what it isn't. Naturally, then, the same uncertainty befalls the architect as well.

Notre Dame Cathedral rose window, Paris France

An architecture center seems like a good place to explore the issue. The Canadian Center for Architecture (CCA), was founded in 1979 as a research centre and museum based on the conviction that architecture is a public concern. CCA is about to close an exhibit it was running in Montreal since October that is a good example of the varied views of the profession and how architects have defined their profession over the last 5 decades or so. The introductory text to the exhibit "The Other Architect" describes the question whether or not an architect really has to build something like this:

For as long as architecture has been reduced to a service to society or an “industry” whose ultimate goal is only to build, there have been others who imagine it instead as a field of intellectual research: energetic, critical, and radical. (CCA)

Exhibit: The other architect

In some more detail the exhibit curator, Giovanna Borasi, told the magazine DOMUS:

“To find another way of building architecture, we have to be willing to broaden our understanding of what architecture is and what architects can do. The groups represented in ‘The Other Architect’ remind us that architecture has to do more than just resolve a given set of problems – it has to establish what requires attention today.” (Borasi)

“The Other Architect,” like the case studies it examines, is a research project, concerned in its own way with contributing to a new reflection on the role of the architect, and inspiring and proposing unexpected ways of practicing architecture today. It is a way of responding to the question of how we can position architecture as an original site for the production of ideas. (DOMUS)

Three of the questions explored in the exhibit and frequently asked in the context of architecture are these:

• does architecture mean that something has to be built?
• is architecture the concept of individual authorship and creation or the result of collaborative networks?
• is architecture the art of building or is it science and research?

Most would expect that an architect's purpose is to see a building at the other end of their efforts. "The Other Architect" shows that there are other possible outcomes. In the following paragraphs these questions are approached by looking at architecture from the angle of what architects do, what scale they deal with and finally, what their intentions are.

Tatlin tower model. Musee Tingely Basel
(Photo: ArchPlan Inc.)

Architecture without buildings

One can describe the alternatives from the perspective of what architects can do. Other than designing useful buildings, architects can teach, write (Lebbeus Woods), develop theories or they can do research, even though architecture isn't science in the strict definition of the word. Or they can develop visions and ideas such as Italy's legendary Superstudio.

One kind of research is to build theoretical buildings, a practice that comes to mind when one thinks of 2004 Pritzker prize winner Zaha Hadid who had designed theoretical buildings in the tradition of Russian Suprematists and Constructivists (Tatlin's Tower) for a long time before her first design was built.  (The fire house on the company campus of Vitra was so dysfunctional as a fire station that it became very soon a museum. It was the beginning of an architectural collection of similar  experiments for Vitra and for Hadid.

[...] garnering a reputation across the world for her ground-breaking theoretical works including The Peak in Hong Kong (1983), the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin (1986) and the Cardiff Bay Opera House in Wales (1994).
Working with office partner Patrik Schumacher, her interest was in the interface between architecture, landscape, and geology; which her practice integrates with the use of innovative technologies often resulting in unexpected and dynamic architectural forms. (From the press release of Zadid's office)

On a far more practical level, but still without buildings as a result of their work, architects can hire on in city planning departments. There they also won't build anything and, instead, would be concerned with theories of a different kind such as urban design guidelines, planning, or zoning. They can also work as advisers for developers, builders or larger institutions, telling them what other architects to hire or how to proceed towards a project. Architects can become specialty experts in sustainability, commissioning (when buildings need their actual performance certified to be in line with the design specs) or write for architectural magazines. Some famous architects went into product design for furniture and even teapots, often derived from an aspiration to provide a building as Gesamtkunstwerk in which everything was styled by the same hand or design language.

Lebbeus Woods drawing

The scales of architecture

Another way of illuminating how something other than buildings can be the outcome of architecture, is to look at scale. Aside from objects and furniture, the smallest piece of architecture would be the architectural folly, design purely for form. Then the house, finally the building from small to super large. Reaching beyond the scale of an individual structure looms the large field of the relations between  buildings, usually characterized as urban design. "Place-making" is one of the more recent terms to describe the urban relationships of buildings. On a still larger scale we get to the city as a whole or even the region. At that large of a scale the complexity is best described  in terms of systems. Stan Allen, an experimental architect and fellow of the American Institute of Architects (AIA), wrote in 1996 an essay titled Field Conditions in which he postulated that "Field conditions move from the one toward the many, from individuals to collectives, from objects to fields."  Some claim that this essay moved architectural discussion away from form toward systems and networks. Even though the notion of architecture in networks definitely precedes Allen, it has become a popular view that has become almost imperative in the era of climate change and among the calls for sustainability and resilience.  What is now frequently called the "smart city" is also a matter of networks.

Architectural folly: Philip Johnson's glass house
with Any Warhol

The purpose

Certainly, traditionally architects would define as their purpose to produce buildings as a special form of art in which buildings are like sculptures a personal expression of a creative act. This ancient view was popularized in modern times by Ayn Rand's "Fountainhead" and its heroic architect Howard Roark, a book said to be based on Frank Lloyd Wright. This view tends to see architecture isolated from cultural and social trends.

The Bauhaus and parts of the modernist movement followed Louis Sullivan's phrase of  form follows function. In that view architects' purpose was to solve functional problems through design. This view includes the user in its consideration and society at large.  It takes architects out of  their ivory tower and places the profession in line with engineers, artists and other professions and into the context of social aspirations. Hadid's heroes, the Russian utopians and constructionists are examples. Consequently the Bauhaus enlarged the canvas of architects way beyond buildings and included the design of tea kettles, furniture and lettering as well. In the wake of this teaching students were taught to see architecture not unlike engineering, buildings more like bridges or machines. A famous exponent of this approach is Buckminster Fuller and his geodesic domes, Corbusier with his Habitat buildings as living machines and later Moshe Safdie with his Montreal World Exhibit building with living modules stacked up high.

Bucky-Ball. Buckminster Fuller

The social impetus became strong again in the late sixties with the student revolt, the counter-cultural movement and the subsequent nascent environmentalism in the wake of the first oil crisis. Once again, the purpose of the architect becomes a better society. To that end architects borrowed liberally from the modernists, the Bauhaus and the systems theorists. Buckminster Fuller with his multidisciplinary systems thinking was the hero. I recall from my education the  associated disciplines being invited to teach structures (Frei Otto), solving "wicked problems" (Rittel) or considering buildings as conveyors of syntax and information (Bense). These cross connections and escapes are also an aspect of the exhibit of "Other Architect".

Today we are once again at those junctures: The New York Times this week made the connection between the hippie architecture of the sixties and seventies and the architecture of the tech giants Google and Apple in an article titled the High Tech Hippies of Silicon Valley. The Maryland College of Art (MICA) has begun to teach architecture and social design making design as not only a cultural but a social task.

Place-making: Piazza di Campo, Siena

Conclusion

As is often the case, the contemporary observer has difficulties deciphering the writing on the wall because he is too close.

Even without considering the term of architecture found far outside the original field of buildings in a use of language where political advisers become the "architects" of certain policies, software has architecture and ultimately everything can be architecture, consensus on what architects do or what architecture remains further away than ever.

The quick tour through the, admittedly, pretty randomly selected choices architects have for exercising their profession, shows two commonalities among all the differences: Architects envision a future space where there is none today and they communicate it in documents. Sharing a spatial vision can happen in words, more likely, in images. It is the encoding of imagined spatial information, then, that defines the act of architecture more  than the actual realization. Initially architecture takes place ahead of reality, then it shapes reality, then us.

These layers of anticipation are a good thing in a world that recognizes the value of and the need for diversity and for feedback.

Alles ist Architektur (everything is architecture) declared Hans Hollein's already in 1968 in a manifesto. If anything is architecture anybody can be an architect. Radical democratization.

Highlandtown bus stop: Robert Venturi:
"the sign that is the building"

Or, as Alexandra Lange says about the online-illusion architecture created by quick image rendering software which can become "viral": architecture becomes "meme-tecture". To illustrate the point, Lange uses an artistic Baltimore bus stop photo, a design which is perfectly situated somewhere between art, architecture, typography, function and systems.

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA
edited by Ben Groff, JD

small edits for language 4/2/16

Exhibit webpage
Bigger than Buildings, Metropolis Magazine
Research Institute for Experimental Architecture

"Drone Hive", meme-tecture. Second place in the e-Volo competition

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