Echoes in Perspective-Essays on Architecture

mentor

Preface

Perspectives on the Architectural

The essays presented here represent close to twelve years of thinking on the margins of architecture after an initial undergraduate education in the discipline. The essays that follow were born out of a two-fold consideration: the first to further an intellectual engagement with the act of architecture from the bowels of my own interests in the discipline, whilst the second was a means to demonstrate an ongoing commitment to architecture by way of honestly thinking through the architectural.

Architects are too often trained in the métier of architecture as a commercial outcome, which is evident in many schools of architecture. In doing so, much creativity and joy of discovery and speculation are lost, which consequently comes to bear on the quality, nature and type of architecture that is subsequently produced. As Adam Ferguson in the eighteenth century stated, The commercial and lucrative arts may continue to prosper, but they gain an ascendant at the expense of other pursuits. The desire of profit stifles the love of perfection. Interest cools the imagination, and hardens the heart¹ – such is the fate of much architectural production and architectural pursuits in our own time as well, without a wholehearted interest in the speculative and possibility of the creative.

So often, architecture as a discipline and later professional pursuit is confined to the commercial dictates of profit in servitude to lucrative outcomes, in contra-distinction to the possibility of dreaming-up new worlds. The ability to speculate, interrogate, question and thus dream-up new worlds and possibilities is arguably at the heart of what architecture as a discipline should encompass. It was on an Occupy Wall Street banner in 2011 where I read the inspiring words, Occupy your Heart / Another World is Possible / Make Ready your Dreams; it is in such vein that I attempted a pursuit of architecture, of which the following essays are the result.

One could read the collection of essays herein as a political voice to architecture and the architecture profession, constantly gnawing away at the disciplinary, only to find favor in the imaginative, intellectually interesting and the creative. Beyond embodying a collection of thought on architecture and its discipline, the present collection of essays also serves as a not-so-veiled political program for the possibility of architecture, with the aim of re-establishing a desire for architecture as such. If only it were architects doing such thinking, as opposed to writers such as myself, which I have become, the professional class of the discipline might realize something about architecture that goes beyond a mere servitude to the King of profit and its dictates.

Some of the essays presented in this volume may seem to address the topic of architecture and architectural making from left-of-field. However, I see this as justified, as there can be no stricture on an approach to thinking the architectural if it is truly to be called architecture.

The collection begins with a musing on the archaic origins of architecture, which arguably are found in the requirement for shelter and envelopment in response to the dictates and needs of sleep. Following is an essay on the discipline and on the architectural process, the concerns of which are interlinked, in the making of architecture. An essay follows on the question of the repetition of the form-function urtypology derivative of the practice of Parkour and how it destabilizes such architectural repetition. After this essay three pieces follow on architecture and politics, the first from the perspective of the meaning of politics for the ancient Greeks, the second on architecture as a possibility for political activism, the third on the politics of digital architecture, or what it should be. The collection continues with seven further essays variably on the possibility of infolding philosophy and the practice of architecture in the pursuit of Peter Eisenman’s collaboration with Jacques Derrida, a philosophical musing on the essence of making place, an essay critique of the redevelopment efforts of Ground Zero, the role and possibility of architecture theory, a discussion of the question concerning poiesis in architecture, the significance of corners, and a rumination on the meaning of ruins and with it the fate of all architecture.

The title of this volume was chosen as Echoes in Perspective, which was taken from one of the late-John Hejduk’s poems titled La Roche published in his poem anthology Such Places as Memory. John Hejduk himself, as an architectural educator and long-standing academic at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of the Arts, was one of those few people in the profession of architecture who championed the creative over the profitable, the imaginative over the intellectually moribund. It is apt, therefore, to take a line from one of his poems that seems to sum-up the act of writing in this collection, as well as that of writing in general in relation to architecture: firstly that the concern of the architectural is found within the meaning and accomplishment of the term perspective, whilst the writing that confronts it and addresses it might be seen as the sounding of echoes forming off such perspectival walls, only to return thinking on the discipline to the profession as a ghost. Such echoes require a voicing as well as perspectival matter off which to refract; therefore the written word is as applicable as anything else in pursuing architectural thinking in the course of pursuing and realizing its perspectives, with indeed the two going hand-in-hand.

Some in the profession are of the position that architects should build, make, design and accomplish function, while the speculative and the interrogative should be left to academics and writers or, more precisely, theorists on architecture. I believe conversely, that architecture can’t truly be realized without the speculative and the interrogative, and that both facets require to be folded into one another in order for architecture to truly be pursued. Hence the art of thinking the architectural through in an honest, interesting and important way is as much a part and should be as much a part of disciplinary competence as anything else.

The thus presented essays in this volume are aimed to serve as echoes of thought off the inanimate and the concrete, hoping to infuse making with reflection and inspiration for a possibility of otherness, and to stimulate its readers in the possibility of dreaming-up other worlds. In the least, I hope the current collection of essays will serve as an interesting footnote to the thinking through and consequent making of architecture and its joys, which should include an affordance for speculation and interrogation with rigor. I hope this present collection of essays does justice to both the object of its gaze, which is the architectural, as well as the inspiration to that gaze, the speculative and the intellectual in relation to it.

Daniel Pavlovits

London, March 2014

On the Archaic Origins of Architecture

Watching late-night television one evening starring Tom Hanks in the epic movie Cast Away, the story of an ill-fated courier pilot being washed-up on a deserted South Pacific island after his airplane crashed into the ocean and his attempts at survival on the island and escape from it back to civilization, a striking thing was portrayed about the elemental nature of the human condition vis-à-vis envelopment and shelter. This led me to begin to think about the archaic conditions governing the psychological and anthropological genesis of what has become known as architecture in human history, and its fundamental relation to the biological condition.

In the movie Cast Away, after being washed-up on this fictional desert island, the protagonist attempts an ill-fated escape back to civilization by attempting to float through the breakers a rubber dingy salvaged from the plane crash. The scene ends in disaster when the rubber dingy is washed back by the waves onto coral, puncturing its fabric. No longer of any use as a floatation device for the purposes of survival at sea, or indeed escape from the desert island, the fabric-hull of the thus ruined rubber dingy is trans-morphed in the scene following into an ad-hoc canopy of shelter for our protagonist in his moment of ordeal.

What struck me in this sequence of scenes, is that despite the constantly balmy and tropical climate in which this desert island is fictionally located, and despite the ample tree-covering of the ground for use as shade from the sun and protection from rain, the protagonist nonetheless found an urge, need and desire that cannot but be construed as archaic, to seek-out and erect a device for shelter, which in any logical analysis, was of no apparent need. What struck me from the portrayal of this scene, is that this act of creating shelter seemed as some sort of archaic and deepseated psychological and anthropological – even evolutionary – connection of biological specimens to the need for envelopment.

As we well know, many species, let alone humans, construct for themselves and their offspring, various forms of shelter serving the purpose of envelopment, be it burrows in the ground, nests in trees, nests in streams or rocky outcrops or, as humans did originally, find settlement in caves or other naturally occurring places of shelter. What is unique about this practice is not only the obvious reason to provide shelter from predators and/or elements of nature for the purposes of survival, but it seems as though it might be appropriate to speculate that there exists an archaic, possibly genetic need and desire based within our biology, for a form and type of envelopment – even in apparently idyllic climates such as a tropical desert island.

Thinking about this speculation and reflecting on biology and species of varying intelligence evolved from it, it cannot but raise the question of whether this archaic condition latent within our evolutionary past and psychology leading to anthropology is as such the archaic origins of architecture, for it is arguably within this archaic origin that we find the genesis of what we now practice and understand as architecture.

Of course, the practice of what we consider and recognize as architecture is a development beyond the basic seeking of shelter, specifically marked by the emergence of building and construction of artifices in an artful way – something that is denoted by the Greek term tékhnē; its origins might nonetheless arguably be rooted in an archaic psychological and anthropological need and desire for envelopment, something that is present in varied biological species, both animal and plant life beyond the human being. This is to say, that the metaphysics of architecture might be found within a psychological and anthropological distant past rooted in evolution, of which architecture as we know it, with the application of art, artifice and the concept of tékhnē to the act of building, is merely an extension.

It would be interesting to study, look into more deeply, and theorize this archaic origin of architecture. No doubt, evolutionary science relating to plant and animal life, anthropological research into indigenous forms of the prehistoric practice of shelter, and not least psycho-analytical sources, including Freud’s many case studies, would need to be researched in order to do so. It would also be interesting to speculate and research the effects of an absence of envelopment on psychological wellbeing. In doing so, it might be possible to assert that architecture as we understand it from our civilized human history is none other than a biological condition rooted within evolutionary history, imprinting itself on our psychological past and present. I would give this theoretical study a preliminary title of The Archaic Origins of Architecture, a study and consequential theorization of the need and desire for envelopment as a fundamental trait of the biological condition and, as an extension, the human condition.

Perhaps it is from within this archaic origin for the need of envelopment that we can argue the development in humankind of building practices in their most rudimentary form – just like our cast-away’s practice in the late-night television movie – in addition to beginning to theorize the development of sedentary settlement that arises from it, even the emergence and development of archaic urban forms in early human civilization. Of course anthropology asserts to already possess a theory as to why settlement occurred in early human history, and the reason behind the rise of proto-typical villages and community. However, none of them to my knowledge begin with an evolutionary, biological and psychological reasoning and argument come theory. To do so would be to go beyond the physical archaeological and anthropological study of the practice of prehistoric life, in order to delve into the philosophical, metaphysical and theoretical origins of architecture, of which it might be asserted, that a central component is the archaic desire, urge and need for envelopment as a phenomena and practice, possibly arising from the most basic of biological conditions, the need for sheltered sleep.

Turning our gaze to recent modern practice of architecture and planning, perhaps the reason behind the failure of Modern, twentieth century urban planning might just be able to be explained from such a philosophical study. The fact that Modern architecture and urban planning treated material structure and construction as an object placed within a carte-blanche field similar to and extending from Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin project for Paris from 1925, explains why such vision for our urban environment has arguably resulted in failure. The reason arguably being, that it fails to provide and resolve the archaic biological, evolutionary, anthropological and psychological need for an experience and sense of envelopment (beyond the need for shelter) that might do justice to the human condition, instead treating architecture as a series of objects placed within a blank field.

Of course this practice of Modernism in urban planning evolved from a utopian resolution to the disease and decay fostered by historical urbanism; however, a study as such proposed above, might be able to argue its failure from a unique philosophical angle, as opposed to the merely subjective and technologically aesthetic.

There seems something fundamental in the need and desire for envelopment, to which architecture is but a calling. If architecture and urbanism would be understood as a response to an archaic evolutionary, anthropological and psychological need rooted within the biological and psychological human condition, our understanding and indeed development of architectural thinking would alter. This is to say that our subjectivity by which we perceive the utility of architecture would morph from an exercise perhaps in pure development and expenditure of capital for the purposes of return, or even a simplistic practice of aesthetic taste, toward beginning to seek out and address the psychological and evolutionary need in us, and reflecting it and the most basic trait of the human condition back to the world through what might be conceived architecturally.

Some architects indeed already practice this thinking and observation in their own built projects. For instance architecture that seeks to mimic and extend the condition of the traditional macro built environment on a micro-scale is but one example, treating the configuration of an individual building along the lines of a miniature city, creating room and openings for rest and reflection, contrasted with adjacent spaces leading to a prescribed end of uniqueness or destination, possibly connected through a vista of sorts either visual or audible, in the same manner that nineteenth century urban planning envisioned the layout of the city in places such as Paris (but of course for other reasons), or to a lesser extent some parts of London. This, of course, is not to make an argument for the return of such nineteenth century form in the present day, but rather to comprehend something about the principle of envelopment as central to the concern and psychological wellbeing of human beings and their experience of an environment, albeit practiced and achieved in a contemporary, critical, and even radical way. Criticality always emerges from theory, from a deep understanding of an issue, and what such a study and theory of envelopment might offer as the one being ruminated on here, is insight into new ways toward contemporary criticality in practice.

Herein lies the possibility of