Books by Gordon Shrigley
Insignificance. A short discourse on the physical and ideational economy of line within architectural representation, Sep 1, 1998
A detailed study of the language of linear representation within the practice of architectural dr... more A detailed study of the language of linear representation within the practice of architectural drawing.
The work offers a detailed analysis of the ideological and physical basis of line through the study of a small selection of drawings by the architects, Hans Schmidt and Paul Artaria, Walter Gropius, Max Bill and Riegler and Riewe.
Published by Solitude Editions, Stuttgart, 1998 in English and German.
Hold On, We’ve Lost The Thirteenth Century!
Twenty years ago Capitalism basked under the belie... more Hold On, We’ve Lost The Thirteenth Century!
Twenty years ago Capitalism basked under the belief, that with the fall of Communism, the West had effectively won the Cold War and henceforth, all the various forms of economic models, ranging from the German, Scandinavian to the Anglo Saxon, as practiced by the United Kingdom and the United States of America, could have free reign.
Under the spell of this moment of exuberance, the various regulatory controls of the ‘Free Market’, accrued since the Great Depression of the 1930’s; the Bretton Woods Agreement, the Glass–Steagall Act etc. were consigned to the dustbin of history by the principle world economies. As the consensus was at the time, that Capitalism had won and so no longer needed to be constrained by the various regulatory frameworks designed to regulate the financial market.
Since the time of the Big Bang therefore, Capitalist economies around the world have increased their Gross National Product to a degree largely unknown before (global wealth doubled between 2000-2006 from $36 trillion to $70 trillion) and the golden boy of all economies, the financial sector, increased in size exponentially, as the new freedoms, under what was described at the time as ‘light touch regulation’, allowed vast profits to be made.
In 2008 however, we all watched in amazement at how quickly this edifice of unassailable wealth and prosperity appeared almost overnight to start to crumble, into what most economists tend now to agree was the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930’s.
This is not the place to attempt to explain either why this state of affairs came about or even to suggest possible ways forward. But I think it safe to say that nevertheless, these events have created within the established and new Capitalist democracies (mainly drawn from former East European states), a deep sense of unease as to why the various forms of democratic accountability, that had won the ideological war with Communism, were nevertheless unable to control and regulate the economy, so as to avert such a financial disaster?
Perhaps then the West had not won after all, but had only managed to outlast the various forms of autocratic rule by chance or by simply muddling through? If we accept that this may indeed be the case, we may have to review how we see ourselves, and our future under a new light. Should we carry on as before? If not what are the alternatives? And how are we to judge ourselves without the mirror of Communism?
Such questions are perhaps best put to one side, for in the end we are but Architects who neither have the economic nor ideological expertise to intervene in such discussions.
Nevertheless, as this years research task was to design an archive building to house the various Parliamentary Acts and discussion papers that enshrine our democracy in Vellum, some important questions needed to be asked by each researcher, on the state of Liberal Democracy before pen was simply put to paper.
For it is clear I would suggest, that if we had been asked to design a Parliamentary Archive immediately after the fall of Communism, a certain flag waving would have been in order and so forgiven, as most Architects I believe would have sought to express the exuberance of this moment through the various forms and materials at their disposal. Can we though still act in such a manner today? Is it still clear to us that the democratic tradition is without fault? Is flag waving still appropriate?
To answer these questions, each of the Parliamentary Archive proposals described within, all radically explore in their own innovative and kooky ways, how Architecture can be used to both parody, deconstruct and perhaps ultimately extend the death throes of the Democratic Project.
Gordon Shrigley, 2014
Architecture is a form of cultural practice that classically bridges between the disciplines of F... more Architecture is a form of cultural practice that classically bridges between the disciplines of Fine Art and what we have come to understand as the Social and Physical Sciences, and hence in previous epochs, the tension between these two very different ways of looking at the world has been creatively maintained within the theory and practice of architecture.
Sadly however, after the heroic period of modern architecture, when the more experimental architects practiced as mixed media artists, the discipline of architecture has been subject to the murderous influence of the social scientist alone, who managed to convince a whole generation that our role was to re-engineer the human soul, not through poetry, painting or the conflagrant rhetoric of the manifesto, but only via the dead hand of the clipboard. This has resulted in a profession that is more technocratic in nature than artistic, that values the grey horizons of the middle manager over the wild anarchic free play of the avant-garde and that sees everyday life as something to be mapped, observed, analysed and ultimately controlled.
Why is this important? Why bring such a sense of melodrama to our well-tended gardens?
Simply because the Faustian bargain we chose as architects to make also entailed that we agreed to forever think of the language of architecture, simply the language of line, as no more important than a line that traces in a graph the Gross National Product of the latest Five Year Plan. Yes, line was recoded as if a tool, as an ideationally transparent medium, that is well suited to the job in hand, but is certainly not worthy of attention in and of itself.
Such willed blindness towards the very medium that makes architecture possible has also entailed that architects still hold to an essentially 19th century bourgeois idea of the subject in relation to language i.e. I have an idea in my head and I use line to express it. This way of understanding the world of the linear, employs line as mere utility as opposed to thinking how lineature structures the space of the imagination, yes, how it creates the sense of the possible.
The language of architecture has on the whole therefore throughout the 20th century consciously set itself apart from the radical theories of language as developed within the disciplines of Linguistics, Semiotics, Anthropology and Post Structuralism, so leaving us, at the beginning of the 21st century, a rotting infantile corpse of a discipline that is only now, recognizing its intellectual paucity.
What is the alternative? How are we to reestablish what is particular to our profession? How are we to radically rethink line? Through the eyes of another discipline? Or can we, as the masters of line, think what it is to have wedded ourselves to lineature, in a mode of address, a new lexicon, that is a result of the analysis of drawing practice and not from a desire to gain the respectability rightly due to others, by crudely appropriating their language. Yes we need to found new readings of lineature, a new plurality, with its own terms of reference, ways of speaking and sense of permanent revolution.
It is with these thoughts in mind that each student researcher starts the year by experimenting with a style of drawing developed by another artist, for example the work of Albrecht Dürer, Hanne Darboven, Francisca Goya, Peter Roehr, Jorinde Voigt, Robert Oppenheim and Georges Seurat, so as defamiliarise their relationship to the very act of expression itself.
Initial graphic studies are then applied to a series of architectural propositions that seek to test the limits of each student’s experimental language, framed within this year’s research theme:
Popular memory and the deep structures of lineature.
Gordon Shrigley, 2013
Rue Des Martyrs [revisited].
To enter the world of drawing is to give up an element of groundi... more Rue Des Martyrs [revisited].
To enter the world of drawing is to give up an element of grounding, in what we understand to be day to day reality.
The authorial activity that is able to translate simple marks upon the picture plane into coded relational lines within the picture plane, is a process whereby the author moves slowly into the simultaneous reality of the space of the drawing, a space which paradoxically knows no hard and fast borders or a sense of its own mortality. This is not a representation, this is simply the true condition of architectural drawing.
To draw then is to both dream through line and to use line as a simple mimetic code. One involves a partial surrender, so as to let line follow its own path and the other holds onto the physical world, attempting to translate complex phenomenon into a universal language that is readable across time and space.
Yet these two ways of working with line appear as a contradiction. How is it possible to let line dictate both how the composition develops and also to consciously use as if a tool? The answer lies I think in a certain intimacy with the codes, which allow one to employ line without having to constantly ask, how should I use this line to show this or that detail? This may suggest that by working with an abstract language over time, similarly to written language, one develops an ease with its cold structures and internal expectations, to the extent they become deeply ingrained within ones consciousness. The same process therefore which allows me to write these words without having to constantly check my grammar, spelling or if the words are working for me and expressing what I want to say, is the same process whereby I can draw lines which have a direct relation to the material world of objects, without having to constantly check whether the lines are running away with themselves and are describing characteristics to objects which they are not capable of.
The greater the intimacy with the codes of architectural representation therefore, the more one is able to let go of first order intentionality, so as to feel the strength of line seducing you to explore it discrete world, distinct from its character as an instrumental tool. Simply the more one draws, the more ones work is inevitably situated within the realm of desire, of jouissance. For the sooner one leaves simple ideology behind and gives up the attempt to use line to express an external idea, the sooner one realises that to draw is to enter into a tense negotiation between the infantile ordinances of line and the authors particular neurosis. The author may choose to use line as a simple tool, but I think that author will never discover the surprising play of line and will be forever limited in their conceptions. It is our contention therefore that by giving up a certain amount of intentionality, that one is able to start to investigate how line pushes and pulls the architectural imagination. This not a contradiction, but a tension which allows one to fall into the world of line, yet always with one foot placed firmly within the simple mimetic tradition of architectural representation. To choose to explore one path to the exclusion of the other is to step into the field of other related disciplines and so is to give up the hard won title of an architect.
This quality to architectural practice is perhaps unique in that it collapses two seeming opposites, the transcendent and the relational and I think therefore, we should build on this opportunity and try not to deny it by convincing ourselves that it is possible to practice either pure aestheticism or blind instrumentality. For just perhaps, this is one key to a future that can work outside of the easy oppositions, which we are constantly plagued by.
Gordon Shrigley, June, 2011
The works contained within this volume are an attempt to see and experience the hochschule für ge... more The works contained within this volume are an attempt to see and experience the hochschule für gestaltung, from the inside, by the patient practice of drawing and redrawing the lines that constitute it.
Gordon Shrigley, 2006
From: Spatula How Drawing Changed The World, edited by Gordon Shrigley and including works by Monika Aichele, Barry Dainton, Annette Geiger, Dominique Lämmli, Ulrike Noack, Christophe Marchand-Kiss, Sarah Treadwell, Daniel Welton, Judith Zaugg and Slavoj Zizek., May 12, 2004
What is a line? What possibilities does it offer? Is line really a simple tool or does our addict... more What is a line? What possibilities does it offer? Is line really a simple tool or does our addiction to drawing and thinking through line, structure the way we see the world in any way?
To start to answer these questions we have invited artists and writers to discuss through words and images how line effects the practice and thinking of their subjects. Depending on who is doing the talking of course, line may be made to signify any number of different material and conceptual processes. Accordingly Spatula has been designed to provide the reader with an extensive range of examples of talking through line, from the deadpan world of science to the carefree irreverence of the cartoon.
Spatula includes work by the following authors:
Monika Aichele, Barry Dainton, Annette Geiger, Dominique Lämmli, Ulrike Noack, Christophe Marchand-Kiss, Gordon Shrigley, Sarah Treadwell, Daniel Welton, Judith Zaugg and Slavoj Zizek.
Essays and Articles by Gordon Shrigley
Drawing Matter website, 2023
This text is the final instalment in a series by Gordon Shrigley titled 'Materia' in which the ar... more This text is the final instalment in a series by Gordon Shrigley titled 'Materia' in which the architect meditates on the physical and semiotic nature of a number of everyday construction products.
Drawing Matter website, 2023
This text is the fourth in a series by Gordon Shrigley titled 'Materia' in which the architect me... more This text is the fourth in a series by Gordon Shrigley titled 'Materia' in which the architect meditates on the physical and semiotic nature of a number of everyday construction products.
Hackney Gazette, 2022
Architectural review of Evelyn Court, completed in 1933 by architects Burnet, Tait and Lorne Arch... more Architectural review of Evelyn Court, completed in 1933 by architects Burnet, Tait and Lorne Architects for the 4 Percent Industrial Dwellings Society.
Drawing Matter website, 2022
This text is the third in a series titled 'Materia' in which I meditate on the physical and semio... more This text is the third in a series titled 'Materia' in which I meditate on the physical and semiotic nature of a number of everyday construction products.
Hackney Gazette, 2022
To counter the tradition of the ‘hidey-hole’, Modernist architects radically opened up the interi... more To counter the tradition of the ‘hidey-hole’, Modernist architects radically opened up the interior to public view through large areas of glazing, metaphorically inviting the street to enter the house.
Drawing Matter website, 2022
This text is the second in a series by Gordon Shrigley titled 'Materia' in which the architect me... more This text is the second in a series by Gordon Shrigley titled 'Materia' in which the architect meditates on the physical and semiotic nature of a number of everyday construction products. Forthcoming texts will include thoughts on oxide-red paint, in-situ concrete, fired brick, plate glass and plastic.
Hackney Gazette, 2022
Architectural review of 54 Ivy Street, Hoxton by Sam Jacobs Studio.
Hackney Gazette, 2022
Hackney Gazette architectural review.
Drawing Matter website, 2022
Drawing Matter have kindly agreed to host a series of articles on everyday constructions material... more Drawing Matter have kindly agreed to host a series of articles on everyday constructions materials, which will include over the coming months, short essays on corrugated iron, brick Commons and plate glass. The first article is on render, a material tradition that encompasses a myriad of manifestations, including the simple daubing of mud onto a wall, the Mediterranean vernacular, early Modernism, the Porto school and the more fantastical forms of ‘hard liquid’ that we find within Parametric drawing practice, is discussed within the frame of a short meditation.
See: www.drawingmatter.org
Hackney Gazette, 2022
Architectural review of Principal Tower, Shoreditch, London by architects Foster and Partners.
Hackney Gazette, 2021
Architectural review of 13 Stean Street and the Fletton brick by anonymous architects, Hackney, L... more Architectural review of 13 Stean Street and the Fletton brick by anonymous architects, Hackney, London.
Hackney Gazette, 2021
Architectural review of HKR Hoxton by architects Hawkins Brown, London.
Hackney Gazette, 2021
Architectural review of Taylor and Chatto Court for the Hackney Gazette.
Drawing Matter, 2021
The fourth in a series of ongoing publications on the Drawing Matter website of excerpts from my ... more The fourth in a series of ongoing publications on the Drawing Matter website of excerpts from my 1998 book Insignificance, which talks about the self-reflexive use of line within architectural representation.
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Books by Gordon Shrigley
The work offers a detailed analysis of the ideological and physical basis of line through the study of a small selection of drawings by the architects, Hans Schmidt and Paul Artaria, Walter Gropius, Max Bill and Riegler and Riewe.
Published by Solitude Editions, Stuttgart, 1998 in English and German.
Twenty years ago Capitalism basked under the belief, that with the fall of Communism, the West had effectively won the Cold War and henceforth, all the various forms of economic models, ranging from the German, Scandinavian to the Anglo Saxon, as practiced by the United Kingdom and the United States of America, could have free reign.
Under the spell of this moment of exuberance, the various regulatory controls of the ‘Free Market’, accrued since the Great Depression of the 1930’s; the Bretton Woods Agreement, the Glass–Steagall Act etc. were consigned to the dustbin of history by the principle world economies. As the consensus was at the time, that Capitalism had won and so no longer needed to be constrained by the various regulatory frameworks designed to regulate the financial market.
Since the time of the Big Bang therefore, Capitalist economies around the world have increased their Gross National Product to a degree largely unknown before (global wealth doubled between 2000-2006 from $36 trillion to $70 trillion) and the golden boy of all economies, the financial sector, increased in size exponentially, as the new freedoms, under what was described at the time as ‘light touch regulation’, allowed vast profits to be made.
In 2008 however, we all watched in amazement at how quickly this edifice of unassailable wealth and prosperity appeared almost overnight to start to crumble, into what most economists tend now to agree was the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930’s.
This is not the place to attempt to explain either why this state of affairs came about or even to suggest possible ways forward. But I think it safe to say that nevertheless, these events have created within the established and new Capitalist democracies (mainly drawn from former East European states), a deep sense of unease as to why the various forms of democratic accountability, that had won the ideological war with Communism, were nevertheless unable to control and regulate the economy, so as to avert such a financial disaster?
Perhaps then the West had not won after all, but had only managed to outlast the various forms of autocratic rule by chance or by simply muddling through? If we accept that this may indeed be the case, we may have to review how we see ourselves, and our future under a new light. Should we carry on as before? If not what are the alternatives? And how are we to judge ourselves without the mirror of Communism?
Such questions are perhaps best put to one side, for in the end we are but Architects who neither have the economic nor ideological expertise to intervene in such discussions.
Nevertheless, as this years research task was to design an archive building to house the various Parliamentary Acts and discussion papers that enshrine our democracy in Vellum, some important questions needed to be asked by each researcher, on the state of Liberal Democracy before pen was simply put to paper.
For it is clear I would suggest, that if we had been asked to design a Parliamentary Archive immediately after the fall of Communism, a certain flag waving would have been in order and so forgiven, as most Architects I believe would have sought to express the exuberance of this moment through the various forms and materials at their disposal. Can we though still act in such a manner today? Is it still clear to us that the democratic tradition is without fault? Is flag waving still appropriate?
To answer these questions, each of the Parliamentary Archive proposals described within, all radically explore in their own innovative and kooky ways, how Architecture can be used to both parody, deconstruct and perhaps ultimately extend the death throes of the Democratic Project.
Gordon Shrigley, 2014
Sadly however, after the heroic period of modern architecture, when the more experimental architects practiced as mixed media artists, the discipline of architecture has been subject to the murderous influence of the social scientist alone, who managed to convince a whole generation that our role was to re-engineer the human soul, not through poetry, painting or the conflagrant rhetoric of the manifesto, but only via the dead hand of the clipboard. This has resulted in a profession that is more technocratic in nature than artistic, that values the grey horizons of the middle manager over the wild anarchic free play of the avant-garde and that sees everyday life as something to be mapped, observed, analysed and ultimately controlled.
Why is this important? Why bring such a sense of melodrama to our well-tended gardens?
Simply because the Faustian bargain we chose as architects to make also entailed that we agreed to forever think of the language of architecture, simply the language of line, as no more important than a line that traces in a graph the Gross National Product of the latest Five Year Plan. Yes, line was recoded as if a tool, as an ideationally transparent medium, that is well suited to the job in hand, but is certainly not worthy of attention in and of itself.
Such willed blindness towards the very medium that makes architecture possible has also entailed that architects still hold to an essentially 19th century bourgeois idea of the subject in relation to language i.e. I have an idea in my head and I use line to express it. This way of understanding the world of the linear, employs line as mere utility as opposed to thinking how lineature structures the space of the imagination, yes, how it creates the sense of the possible.
The language of architecture has on the whole therefore throughout the 20th century consciously set itself apart from the radical theories of language as developed within the disciplines of Linguistics, Semiotics, Anthropology and Post Structuralism, so leaving us, at the beginning of the 21st century, a rotting infantile corpse of a discipline that is only now, recognizing its intellectual paucity.
What is the alternative? How are we to reestablish what is particular to our profession? How are we to radically rethink line? Through the eyes of another discipline? Or can we, as the masters of line, think what it is to have wedded ourselves to lineature, in a mode of address, a new lexicon, that is a result of the analysis of drawing practice and not from a desire to gain the respectability rightly due to others, by crudely appropriating their language. Yes we need to found new readings of lineature, a new plurality, with its own terms of reference, ways of speaking and sense of permanent revolution.
It is with these thoughts in mind that each student researcher starts the year by experimenting with a style of drawing developed by another artist, for example the work of Albrecht Dürer, Hanne Darboven, Francisca Goya, Peter Roehr, Jorinde Voigt, Robert Oppenheim and Georges Seurat, so as defamiliarise their relationship to the very act of expression itself.
Initial graphic studies are then applied to a series of architectural propositions that seek to test the limits of each student’s experimental language, framed within this year’s research theme:
Popular memory and the deep structures of lineature.
Gordon Shrigley, 2013
To enter the world of drawing is to give up an element of grounding, in what we understand to be day to day reality.
The authorial activity that is able to translate simple marks upon the picture plane into coded relational lines within the picture plane, is a process whereby the author moves slowly into the simultaneous reality of the space of the drawing, a space which paradoxically knows no hard and fast borders or a sense of its own mortality. This is not a representation, this is simply the true condition of architectural drawing.
To draw then is to both dream through line and to use line as a simple mimetic code. One involves a partial surrender, so as to let line follow its own path and the other holds onto the physical world, attempting to translate complex phenomenon into a universal language that is readable across time and space.
Yet these two ways of working with line appear as a contradiction. How is it possible to let line dictate both how the composition develops and also to consciously use as if a tool? The answer lies I think in a certain intimacy with the codes, which allow one to employ line without having to constantly ask, how should I use this line to show this or that detail? This may suggest that by working with an abstract language over time, similarly to written language, one develops an ease with its cold structures and internal expectations, to the extent they become deeply ingrained within ones consciousness. The same process therefore which allows me to write these words without having to constantly check my grammar, spelling or if the words are working for me and expressing what I want to say, is the same process whereby I can draw lines which have a direct relation to the material world of objects, without having to constantly check whether the lines are running away with themselves and are describing characteristics to objects which they are not capable of.
The greater the intimacy with the codes of architectural representation therefore, the more one is able to let go of first order intentionality, so as to feel the strength of line seducing you to explore it discrete world, distinct from its character as an instrumental tool. Simply the more one draws, the more ones work is inevitably situated within the realm of desire, of jouissance. For the sooner one leaves simple ideology behind and gives up the attempt to use line to express an external idea, the sooner one realises that to draw is to enter into a tense negotiation between the infantile ordinances of line and the authors particular neurosis. The author may choose to use line as a simple tool, but I think that author will never discover the surprising play of line and will be forever limited in their conceptions. It is our contention therefore that by giving up a certain amount of intentionality, that one is able to start to investigate how line pushes and pulls the architectural imagination. This not a contradiction, but a tension which allows one to fall into the world of line, yet always with one foot placed firmly within the simple mimetic tradition of architectural representation. To choose to explore one path to the exclusion of the other is to step into the field of other related disciplines and so is to give up the hard won title of an architect.
This quality to architectural practice is perhaps unique in that it collapses two seeming opposites, the transcendent and the relational and I think therefore, we should build on this opportunity and try not to deny it by convincing ourselves that it is possible to practice either pure aestheticism or blind instrumentality. For just perhaps, this is one key to a future that can work outside of the easy oppositions, which we are constantly plagued by.
Gordon Shrigley, June, 2011
Gordon Shrigley, 2006
To start to answer these questions we have invited artists and writers to discuss through words and images how line effects the practice and thinking of their subjects. Depending on who is doing the talking of course, line may be made to signify any number of different material and conceptual processes. Accordingly Spatula has been designed to provide the reader with an extensive range of examples of talking through line, from the deadpan world of science to the carefree irreverence of the cartoon.
Spatula includes work by the following authors:
Monika Aichele, Barry Dainton, Annette Geiger, Dominique Lämmli, Ulrike Noack, Christophe Marchand-Kiss, Gordon Shrigley, Sarah Treadwell, Daniel Welton, Judith Zaugg and Slavoj Zizek.
Essays and Articles by Gordon Shrigley
See: www.drawingmatter.org
The work offers a detailed analysis of the ideological and physical basis of line through the study of a small selection of drawings by the architects, Hans Schmidt and Paul Artaria, Walter Gropius, Max Bill and Riegler and Riewe.
Published by Solitude Editions, Stuttgart, 1998 in English and German.
Twenty years ago Capitalism basked under the belief, that with the fall of Communism, the West had effectively won the Cold War and henceforth, all the various forms of economic models, ranging from the German, Scandinavian to the Anglo Saxon, as practiced by the United Kingdom and the United States of America, could have free reign.
Under the spell of this moment of exuberance, the various regulatory controls of the ‘Free Market’, accrued since the Great Depression of the 1930’s; the Bretton Woods Agreement, the Glass–Steagall Act etc. were consigned to the dustbin of history by the principle world economies. As the consensus was at the time, that Capitalism had won and so no longer needed to be constrained by the various regulatory frameworks designed to regulate the financial market.
Since the time of the Big Bang therefore, Capitalist economies around the world have increased their Gross National Product to a degree largely unknown before (global wealth doubled between 2000-2006 from $36 trillion to $70 trillion) and the golden boy of all economies, the financial sector, increased in size exponentially, as the new freedoms, under what was described at the time as ‘light touch regulation’, allowed vast profits to be made.
In 2008 however, we all watched in amazement at how quickly this edifice of unassailable wealth and prosperity appeared almost overnight to start to crumble, into what most economists tend now to agree was the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930’s.
This is not the place to attempt to explain either why this state of affairs came about or even to suggest possible ways forward. But I think it safe to say that nevertheless, these events have created within the established and new Capitalist democracies (mainly drawn from former East European states), a deep sense of unease as to why the various forms of democratic accountability, that had won the ideological war with Communism, were nevertheless unable to control and regulate the economy, so as to avert such a financial disaster?
Perhaps then the West had not won after all, but had only managed to outlast the various forms of autocratic rule by chance or by simply muddling through? If we accept that this may indeed be the case, we may have to review how we see ourselves, and our future under a new light. Should we carry on as before? If not what are the alternatives? And how are we to judge ourselves without the mirror of Communism?
Such questions are perhaps best put to one side, for in the end we are but Architects who neither have the economic nor ideological expertise to intervene in such discussions.
Nevertheless, as this years research task was to design an archive building to house the various Parliamentary Acts and discussion papers that enshrine our democracy in Vellum, some important questions needed to be asked by each researcher, on the state of Liberal Democracy before pen was simply put to paper.
For it is clear I would suggest, that if we had been asked to design a Parliamentary Archive immediately after the fall of Communism, a certain flag waving would have been in order and so forgiven, as most Architects I believe would have sought to express the exuberance of this moment through the various forms and materials at their disposal. Can we though still act in such a manner today? Is it still clear to us that the democratic tradition is without fault? Is flag waving still appropriate?
To answer these questions, each of the Parliamentary Archive proposals described within, all radically explore in their own innovative and kooky ways, how Architecture can be used to both parody, deconstruct and perhaps ultimately extend the death throes of the Democratic Project.
Gordon Shrigley, 2014
Sadly however, after the heroic period of modern architecture, when the more experimental architects practiced as mixed media artists, the discipline of architecture has been subject to the murderous influence of the social scientist alone, who managed to convince a whole generation that our role was to re-engineer the human soul, not through poetry, painting or the conflagrant rhetoric of the manifesto, but only via the dead hand of the clipboard. This has resulted in a profession that is more technocratic in nature than artistic, that values the grey horizons of the middle manager over the wild anarchic free play of the avant-garde and that sees everyday life as something to be mapped, observed, analysed and ultimately controlled.
Why is this important? Why bring such a sense of melodrama to our well-tended gardens?
Simply because the Faustian bargain we chose as architects to make also entailed that we agreed to forever think of the language of architecture, simply the language of line, as no more important than a line that traces in a graph the Gross National Product of the latest Five Year Plan. Yes, line was recoded as if a tool, as an ideationally transparent medium, that is well suited to the job in hand, but is certainly not worthy of attention in and of itself.
Such willed blindness towards the very medium that makes architecture possible has also entailed that architects still hold to an essentially 19th century bourgeois idea of the subject in relation to language i.e. I have an idea in my head and I use line to express it. This way of understanding the world of the linear, employs line as mere utility as opposed to thinking how lineature structures the space of the imagination, yes, how it creates the sense of the possible.
The language of architecture has on the whole therefore throughout the 20th century consciously set itself apart from the radical theories of language as developed within the disciplines of Linguistics, Semiotics, Anthropology and Post Structuralism, so leaving us, at the beginning of the 21st century, a rotting infantile corpse of a discipline that is only now, recognizing its intellectual paucity.
What is the alternative? How are we to reestablish what is particular to our profession? How are we to radically rethink line? Through the eyes of another discipline? Or can we, as the masters of line, think what it is to have wedded ourselves to lineature, in a mode of address, a new lexicon, that is a result of the analysis of drawing practice and not from a desire to gain the respectability rightly due to others, by crudely appropriating their language. Yes we need to found new readings of lineature, a new plurality, with its own terms of reference, ways of speaking and sense of permanent revolution.
It is with these thoughts in mind that each student researcher starts the year by experimenting with a style of drawing developed by another artist, for example the work of Albrecht Dürer, Hanne Darboven, Francisca Goya, Peter Roehr, Jorinde Voigt, Robert Oppenheim and Georges Seurat, so as defamiliarise their relationship to the very act of expression itself.
Initial graphic studies are then applied to a series of architectural propositions that seek to test the limits of each student’s experimental language, framed within this year’s research theme:
Popular memory and the deep structures of lineature.
Gordon Shrigley, 2013
To enter the world of drawing is to give up an element of grounding, in what we understand to be day to day reality.
The authorial activity that is able to translate simple marks upon the picture plane into coded relational lines within the picture plane, is a process whereby the author moves slowly into the simultaneous reality of the space of the drawing, a space which paradoxically knows no hard and fast borders or a sense of its own mortality. This is not a representation, this is simply the true condition of architectural drawing.
To draw then is to both dream through line and to use line as a simple mimetic code. One involves a partial surrender, so as to let line follow its own path and the other holds onto the physical world, attempting to translate complex phenomenon into a universal language that is readable across time and space.
Yet these two ways of working with line appear as a contradiction. How is it possible to let line dictate both how the composition develops and also to consciously use as if a tool? The answer lies I think in a certain intimacy with the codes, which allow one to employ line without having to constantly ask, how should I use this line to show this or that detail? This may suggest that by working with an abstract language over time, similarly to written language, one develops an ease with its cold structures and internal expectations, to the extent they become deeply ingrained within ones consciousness. The same process therefore which allows me to write these words without having to constantly check my grammar, spelling or if the words are working for me and expressing what I want to say, is the same process whereby I can draw lines which have a direct relation to the material world of objects, without having to constantly check whether the lines are running away with themselves and are describing characteristics to objects which they are not capable of.
The greater the intimacy with the codes of architectural representation therefore, the more one is able to let go of first order intentionality, so as to feel the strength of line seducing you to explore it discrete world, distinct from its character as an instrumental tool. Simply the more one draws, the more ones work is inevitably situated within the realm of desire, of jouissance. For the sooner one leaves simple ideology behind and gives up the attempt to use line to express an external idea, the sooner one realises that to draw is to enter into a tense negotiation between the infantile ordinances of line and the authors particular neurosis. The author may choose to use line as a simple tool, but I think that author will never discover the surprising play of line and will be forever limited in their conceptions. It is our contention therefore that by giving up a certain amount of intentionality, that one is able to start to investigate how line pushes and pulls the architectural imagination. This not a contradiction, but a tension which allows one to fall into the world of line, yet always with one foot placed firmly within the simple mimetic tradition of architectural representation. To choose to explore one path to the exclusion of the other is to step into the field of other related disciplines and so is to give up the hard won title of an architect.
This quality to architectural practice is perhaps unique in that it collapses two seeming opposites, the transcendent and the relational and I think therefore, we should build on this opportunity and try not to deny it by convincing ourselves that it is possible to practice either pure aestheticism or blind instrumentality. For just perhaps, this is one key to a future that can work outside of the easy oppositions, which we are constantly plagued by.
Gordon Shrigley, June, 2011
Gordon Shrigley, 2006
To start to answer these questions we have invited artists and writers to discuss through words and images how line effects the practice and thinking of their subjects. Depending on who is doing the talking of course, line may be made to signify any number of different material and conceptual processes. Accordingly Spatula has been designed to provide the reader with an extensive range of examples of talking through line, from the deadpan world of science to the carefree irreverence of the cartoon.
Spatula includes work by the following authors:
Monika Aichele, Barry Dainton, Annette Geiger, Dominique Lämmli, Ulrike Noack, Christophe Marchand-Kiss, Gordon Shrigley, Sarah Treadwell, Daniel Welton, Judith Zaugg and Slavoj Zizek.
See: www.drawingmatter.org
The first iteration of the sketch score took the form of representing the string and note architecture of a Steinway B piano.
Ultimately as a starting point for a composition, this route proved too complicated and we reverted to an amended form of traditional music notation for the final version of Three Five–Part Inventions.
A graphic score for two hands and one piano. Gordon Shrigley and John Snijders, 2017.
I was first introduced to the idea of experimental graphic scores during my stay at Academy Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart in 1998, where I first met the composers Marc Sabat, Chiyoko Slavnics and Krystyna Bobrowski, whilst working on an artists’ book on the nature of the graphic line.
During my stay, Christian Wolff also held an open performance workshop and invited artists and musicians to work with him to realise his graphic score ‘Burdocks’. I volunteered as a percussionist, and although I make no claim to any performing expertise, this experience allowed me valuable time to think about the nature of the graphic score that Wolff had invented to realise his work.
Sometime after this, I began to wonder what would it mean for an artist and not a composer to create a score from linear relationships alone, inspired only by the dynamic equilibrium of the drawing, without any thought to the resulting soundscape?
Importantly though, so as to be more than a pretty picture for a performer to react to, such a experiment would also need to mediate between its very ‘pictureness’, and its role as ‘instruction’, so as to inhabit the space somewhere between an aesthetic graphic artefact that is explored in and of itself, and a distinct set of visual codes that could be read by any performer.
It was with such questions in mind that the collaboration between the pianist John Snijders and I began in 2015, which finally resulted, after two year’s work, in the composition ‘Three Five-Part Inventions’.
Design Studio 14, 2013, MArch. University of Westminster, School of Architecture, London Lecturers: Gordon Shrigley and Christian Ducker. Visiting lecturer: Thomas Reinke, architect, Berlin
Lecture handout to a presentation on PoMo for MA interior design students at Westminster University in 2014 made by Gordon Shrigley and Mark Jackson.
How can architecture therefore, further to its role as a container, also engender patient reminiscence?
• Are dementia patients to be offered the full rights of citizens? Or does the fact that the final responsibility lies with the carer, reduce the patient to a child?
• What is the best way to proceed with the various forms of Reality Orienting?
i.e. Patient A thinks the nurse is his wife. Do you continually remind the patient that his wife died some years ago and so repeatedly confuse and perhaps upset the patient or do you alternatively agree with the patient, so as to keep the patient relaxed? If the later, consider the possibilities for memory construction [see Blade Runner].
• The current paradigm within medical architecture, is to prefer soft edges to hard.
i.e. The buildings architecture has to be mindful that patients may slip and hurt themselves and so all surfaces have to be designed to respond to this fact. Nevertheless within everyday life it is clear that we all regularly slip and hurt ourselves and not all buildings are designed with continually curved surfaces. Therefore what singles out patients for this type of approach? What is the underlying ideology at work here? Again, are patients children?
Therefore, although a thorough understanding of the material, technological, environmental, ethical and heritage aspects related to each proposal is vital, we place our principle mode of enquiry upon and within the discrete lines that make architecture in the first instance, possible. Believing therefore, that a passionate engagement with the language of linear representation is the first step each of us must take if we are to move from employing the art of architectural representation as a mere tool, to meet a particular historically contingent need, to exploring Architecture, as a discrete unique graphic language, in and of itself.
Twenty years ago the democratically controlled countries around the world basked under the belief, that with the fall of Communism, the West had effectively won the Cold War and hence the various forms of Capitalism, ranging from the German, Scandinavian to the Anglo Saxon models as practiced by the United Kingdom and the United States of America, could have free reign.
Under the spell of this moment of exuberance, the various regulatory controls of Capitalism, accrued over the 20th century; the Bretton Woods Agreement, the Glass–Steagal Act etc. were consigned to the dustbin of history by the principle world economies. As the consensus was at the time, that Capitalism had won and so no longer needed to be constrained by the various regulations designed to regulate the financial market.
Since the time of the big bang, Capitalist economies around the world increased their Gross National Product to a degree largely unknown before (global wealth doubled between 2000-2006 from $36 trillion to $70 trillion) and the golden boy of all economies, the financial sector, increased in size exponentially, as the new freedoms allowed, under what was described as the time as ‘light touch regulation’, vast profits to be made.
In 2008 however, we all watched in amazement at how this edifice of unassailable wealth and prosperity appeared almost overnight to start to crumble into what most economist tend now to agree, has been the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930’s.
This is not the place to attempt to explain either why this state of affairs came about or even to suggest ways forward. But I think it safe to say that nevertheless, these events have created within the established and new Capitalist democracies (mainly drawn from former East European states), a deep sense of unease as to why the various forms of democratic accountability, that had won the ideological war with Communism, were nevertheless unable to control and regulate the economy so as to avert such a financial disaster?
Perhaps then the West had not won after all, but had only managed to outlast the various forms of autocratic rule by chance or by simply muddling through? If we accept that this may indeed be the case, we may have to review how we see ourselves, and our future under a new light. Should we carry on as before? If not what are the alternatives? And how are we to judge ourselves without the mirror of Communism?
Such questions are perhaps best put to one side, for in the end we are but Architects who neither have the economic or ideological expertise to intervene in such discussions. Nevertheless, our task in this instance is to design an archive building to house the various Parliamentary Acts and discussion papers that enshrine our democracy in stone.
For it is clear I would suggest, that if we had been asked to fulfill this task immediately after the fall of Communism a certain flag waving would have been in order and so forgiven, as any Architect I believe would have sought to express the exuberance of this moment through the various forms and materials at their disposal. Can we though today act in such a manner? Is it still clear to us that the democratic tradition is without fault? Is flag waving still appropriate?
To answer this question, each of you will have to decide, by weighing up the various facts that are available to you, the state of the democratic consensus. Is the tradition of democratic control in crisis? If not in crisis, does it need recalibrating? Or changing? Or do we essentially carry on, simply muddling through? As before you can design an archive to house the sacred texts of democracy, you will need to answer one of these questions, so as to establish beforehand how and if, you want your building to contribute to this debate.
In light of the above, it appears to be an apposite time to ask the question: What is an archive? And further, how can we as Architects express the foundational texts of democracy through architecture?
The following pages therefore describe three possible narratives to answer the question of ‘what is an archive?’ based on former, current and potential organisational structures that could be described as Skin, Network and, looking to the future, as Goo.
In June 2011, the Secretary of State for Business Innovation and Skills, The Rt. Hon Dr Vince Cable MP and the Minister for Universities and Science, The Rt. Hon David Willets MP presented to Parliament a White Paper entitled: Higher Education, Students at the Heart of the System. This document forms the basis for the financial reorganisation of the UK Higher Education system and whose aim it is to reform the university sector from one being primarily funded from central government to one whereby students, through a commercial loan system, will provide the core funding for all university courses and activities.
The general consensus at the time of writing is that this move will bring forth the potential marketisation of the culture and experience of university life and therefore represents a paradigm shift of the character of the universities in the UK [for further information please consult the enclosed PDF copy of the above White Paper].
Therefore in light of the above it appears to be an apposite time to ask the question:
What is a University?