AULA PFC JUAN HERREROS

PROFESORES: JUAN HERREROS / NGEL BORREGO / JACOBO GARCA-GERMN / LINA TORO / DAVID ARCHILLA ASISTENTE: ESTEBAN SALCEDO

CAPTURAS
A BLACK BOX: THE SECRET PROFESSION OF ARCHITECTURE
Reyner Banham. 1990

05
but it is not

The difference between Wren and Hawksmoor, I have finally not. This judgment may seem foolhardy,

decided, is that Hawksmoor was an architect and Wren was deliberately perverse. It has been forced on me by some gave me a chance to revisit St Paul's and sundry City churches I had not seen since student days. And it struck

months of visiting the Lloyd's building chantier, which

me that even when Wren was being as clever as he was in

widening the central bay in each arcade at St Mary-le-Bow, or as inventive as he was in the upper parts of St Stephen Walbrook, Hawksmoor had done to make great architecture out of as humdrum a concept as the interior of St Mary Woolnoth. The temperaments distinction or levels I am making of creative is not genius, between but he still was not doingwhatever it was that

different

between 1

fundamental modes of designing. Nor are the consequences of the architectural mode necessarily beautiful. Some pretty ugly stuff happens in the lantern of the mausoleum of the in no doubt that Sir John Soane was an absolute architect. Dulwich Art Gallery, for instance, yet the result leaves us

Whatever this mode, attitude or presence may be, one can recognise it - in the bottom of Phillip Johnson's AT&T building, for example, but not in its middle or its top,

nor in most other works of programmatic postmodernism. Its absence from Charles Jenck's own house in London, in spite of all its erudition about architecture, seems to confirm

what the recent work of Robert Stern (but not, I think, of Robert Venturi) had been strongly suggesting. That reliance on relation erudition to architecture alone leaves as postmodernism female impersonation in the same to

femininity. It is not architecture, but building in drag.

I propose to treat the architectural mode or presence as a classic unknown in its contents. It is not to be mistaken for "good design", since architecture is often conspicuously present are pretty dumb designs from other points of view. - in the work of Lutyens for instance in buildings that To "black box", recognised by its output though

separate architecture from good design in this way may architecture has operated for some six centuries now, but it does not imply that the two are incompatible; simply that one can have either without the other.

unsettle those who do not question the mythologies by which

The situation has been much muddled by the tendency of the modern gather movement, up all decent since the buildings time of into William the Morris, rubric of to

"architecture". This was a warm, friendly and egalitarian 2

thing to do, but it must now seem as historically crude and as perniciously confusing as Nikolaus Pevsner's proposition that Lincoln Cathedral is architecture and a bicycle shed Cathedral had aesthetic pretensions and bike sheds don't. is not. The distinction was made on the basis that Lincoln

This was not only a piece of academic snobbery that can only offend a committed cyclist like myself, but

also

revolves a supposition about sheds that is so sweeping as

to be almost racist. How can he know that any particular bicycle shed, or even the whole typology of "bicycle shed" in general, was conceived without aesthetic intention? What Pevsner may even have meant), is that cathedrals (including ugly ones) are generally designed modo architectorum, and bicycle sheds (even handsome ones) are more commonly done in one of the numerous other modes of designing buildings available. one can know by practised observation, however (and what

Such is the cultural prestige of the purely architectural mode, civilisation", however, that within most the of protected us get area brainwashed of

"western

into

believing that it is synonymous with "good design" or even "the design of buildings". The modern movement has done itself little good in promoting this muddle, because it thereby undermines one of its own most useful polemical devices. For, in spite of this inclusivist approach, there has been a long tradition - from before Adolf Loos to after architectural electronics, objects, from peasant bad crafts to advanced

Cedric Price - of using comparisons with certifiably nonto reveal how regular architectural

designing had become. Quite a lot of these paragons were indeed buildings, and good ones at that, but once they, in their turn, had become incorporated into the architectural 3

canon, they lost their critical power and left the body of architecture confused rather than reformed.

Let us then re-divorce what should never have been joined together in this opportunistic

Throw out all the Zulu kraals, grain-elevators, hogans, lunar excursion modules, cruck-houses, Farman biplanes and so forth, and look again at "this thing called

marriage-of-convenience.

architecture" in its own right, as one of a number of to occupy a position of cultural privilege in relation to the construction industry.

thinkable modes of design which, for some reason, has come

What then would distinguish the products of this black box from environmental performance? Beauty of form or deftness of space? Truth to materials or structural efficiency? These are all qualities for which the architectural profession habitually congratulates itself, but a Buckminister Fuller dome or an Eskimo igloo can usually beat architecture on air liners, inflatables and animal lairs. So why do we not those of other thinkable modes? Functional or

all six counts, and so can a lot of other buildings, ships, admit that what distinguishes architecture is not what is wife can apparently do it better - but how it is done.

done - since, on their good days, all the world and his

We can distinguish that "how" in two crucial ways in the actual allotted tasks as building designers. The first is that architects almost uniquely among modern behaviour of architects as they perform

their

professionals - propose to assume responsibility for all of legally answerable to the client for their proper delivery. Other 4 professions (such as electrical and mechanical

design

those six aspects of good building set out above, and to be

engineering)

responsibilities, preferring to remain at one remove from minor war criminals, "were only carrying out orders". Or, too prone to say, for instance, ''You design your concert acoustics," rather than "That's a stupid shape for

notoriously

avoid

such

overall

the wrath of clients as "consultants"; hired guns who, like to be less offensive to engineers, a body of men who are hall any old shape you like, and I'll try and sort out the concert hall, this will work a lot better." However, this willingness to assume responsibility is only makes them architects, as Lethaby seems to have perceived beginning of the century. What makes them architects, and in his arguments against professionalisation at the

what makes architects a noble profession. It is not what

recognisable as such, is usually easiest to demonstrate anecdotally, beginning with that oft-repeated story of the architect who, when asked for a pencil that could be used to death in the street, carefully enquired "Will a 2B do?" The point of such stories is that they unconsciously reveal not only the fundamental valuesystem on which architects operate, unspoken - or unspeakable - assumptions on which it rests. The more revealing of these stones tend to originate from that crucial attitude-forming situation, the design crit in the architectural school studio. but the narrowness of that system, and the to tighten the tourniquet on the limb of a person bleeding

In a telling example from my own experience, I once found myself defending point by point a student design for a penthouse apartment that had been failed by my academic colleagues. I secured their agreement that it fulfilled all the requirements of the programme, was convenient in its

spatial

roofstructure in question and that all this could be seen in the drawing pinned up for judgment.

dispositions,

well

lit,

buildable

on

the

But the drawing was scratchily done in ball-point on one sheet of what appeared to be institutional toilet paper; an "insult to architecture", the year master announced, thus making it clear that, for him, the effective design of buildings "architecture". was apparently something other

than

One could easily multiply such instances where, it seems, some secret value system applies, often at variance with the verbal expressions used in explanation. Everyone around architecture (rightly, in about one case in five) that they have been schools knows students who are convinced

failed "because I don't draw in the right style", in spite of faculty assurances to the contrary. And most of us can remember crits that finished with the pronouncement,

"Sorry It's very clever/beautiful/sensitive, but it isn't architecture, you know!"

These instances are no less weighty for being "only about

school". That is where architects are socialised into the it) and they acquire attitudes, work-habits and values that will stay with them for life. Their persistence is neatly shown in the current modes of "engineering" profession (as the great Jane Abercrombie used to phrase

buildings: the types of visible structures preferred by architects and the ways in which they detail them, neither of which would ever occur to engineers left to their own devices as "problem solvers". Admittedly, there

high-tech

structural engineers like Peter Rice and Tony Hunt, who seem to glory in their complicity in architects' scheming; 6

are

and the doyen of the profession in Britain at the moment, to "indulge in this kind of structural exhibitionism, then I can help them!" structural The key phrase there is this kind. Engineers also enjoy

Frank Newby, did say to me recently that if architects want

version, both in the choice and organisation of the larger forms and - even more intensely - in the marshalling and profiling of the smaller ones. The Lloyd's building, to pick an obvious instance - but Norman Foster's Renault Centre or Hopkins's Schlumberger labs at Cambridge would serve equally well - exhibits preferences and scruples, not to say obsessions, that one does not commonly find in

exhibitionism,

but

architects

have

their

own

regular engineering design. Compare forms and details of the structure of the Pompidou Centre with what it is so often jokingly compared with - an oil refinery - and you

of a joke. There is, above all, a kind of pickiness over

will see that there is no comparison, except at the level

details that shows up in regular engineering only when a total stranger wanders in from another field, as did Henry Royce automobile. For the or Ettore Bugatti in the early days of the

behaviour, one need look no further than the place where architects studio. Anthropologists are socialised have into been their known profession, to compare the the

sources

of

these

differences

of

professional

teaching studio to a tribal long-house; the place and the

rituals pursued there are almost unique in the annals of western education. One of the things that sustains this uniqueness is the frequency with which students are

discouraged from pursuing modes of design that come from outside the studio. Usually, the discouragement need be no more than veiled or oblique, but when schools were under 7

radical pressure in the early seventies, many students will the blunt directive: "Don't bother with all

have Heard something which I personally heard at that time, environmental stuff, just get on with the architecture!"

that

How does one "get on with the architecture", forsaking all uniquely do? The answer, alas, is that they do

other modes? What is it, in other words, that architects "architecture", and we are thus back at the black box with

which we began. But we have recently been vouchsafed an accidental view of what the contents of that black box might be, because of an 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 of its apparent failures to his biographer, Stephen Grabow: Bootleg copies of the pattern language were floating up and down the west coast, and people would come and show me the projects they had done, and I began to be more and more amazed that, although it worked, all these projects looked like any other buildings of our time Still belonged perfectly within the canons of mid-century architecture. Now, if one hoped that the pattern language would be a

architecture comparable with the Copernican revolution in cosmology, then clearly the project had failed and further failure of the pattern language to change the nature of architectural triumph: an unwitting not design could firstapproximation with what be seen as something research was indeed needed. But, in another light, the of a

revolutionary way of designing buildings, a new paradigm in

certainly 8

what architects actually do when they do architecture. It does tally architects

description

of

normally

claim that they do (explicit and implicit procedures are at variance in many professions), but it may still provide at least subliminally acquire in the studio long-house. The heart can of Alexander's matter a is the as an analogy with the mental sets that students

"pattern", which is a sort of package of ideas and forms which be subsumed under label commonplace as "comfortable window-seat" or "threshold" or "light on two

concept

of

sides of a room", or as abstract as "intimacy gradient". Such a labelled pattern contains not only the knowledge of the form and how to make it, but "there is an imperative aspect stable to the pattern it is desirable other pattern [The

architect] must create this pattern in order to maintain a pattern will have moral force, will be the only right way of doing that particular piece of designing - at least in the eyes of those who have been correctly socialised into Rogers claiming long ago: "There is no such thing as bad and healthy world." In words, each such

the profession. I seem to hear an echo here of Ernesto architecture; only good architecture and non-architecture." And in general, as an outsider who was never socialised in the patterns tribal are longhouse, very like it the seems kind to of me packages that Alexander's in

architects can often be seen to be doing their thinking, particularly at the sort of second sketch stage when they version. are re-using some of what was sketched out in the first

which

their imperatives seem to be shared by all architects, an d

Such patterns - perhaps even a finite set of patterns

-and

are, in some sense, what we recognise in Hawksmoor and do

not find in Wren. This is not to say that Alexander's accidental revelation exhausts the topic. Far from it; for 9

a start, it is still much too crude to explain anything really subtle. Being cast in a prescriptive, rather than descriptive, format, it avoids such questions as how such of anthropological investigation that has revealed the

patterns are formed, and where, and cannot support the kind workings of other secret cultures to us in the past. It the contents.

cannot yet open the black box, but it can give hints about

While we await their eventual revelation, what are we to make of architecture? No longer seen as the mother of the arts, or the dominant mode of rational design, it appears as the exercise of an arcane and privileged aesthetic code. We trivial or quadrivial, since its traditions are of the same antiquity and classicist derivation as the others (it even has a part share in a muse, Melpomene). We could stop could, perhaps, treat it as one of the humanities,

pretending that it is "a blend of art and science", but is a discipline in its own right that happens to overlap some of the territory of painting, sculpture, statics, acoustics and imperialism that leads the writers of general histories of architecture to co-opt absolutely everything built upon the earth's crust into their subject matter. so on. And we could halt the vulgar cultural

To do so is to try to cram the world's wonderful variety of building arts into the procrustean mould of a set of rules of thumb derived from, and entirely proper to, the building discipline, design, is simply disegno, a style arts of the Mediterranean basin alone, and whose masterdraughtsmanship once practised only in central Italy. I am increasingly doubtful that the timber buildings of northern Europe, construction, 10 for instance, really belong or the under triumphs the rubric of Gothic of of

architecture cathedrals

even, because they were not made of the pure geometrical and imperial Rome. Current

were

at

"not

all.

very

Le

Corbusier

beautiful",

felt

not

that

architecture

Gothic

forms that he found in the buildings of classical Greece

structures and services, seem to derive from a similar held classicist sentiment: that architecture is from masonry, together Recognising by gravity, the very and straitened its volumes boundaries effectively of

misgivings

about

high-tech,

with

its

exposed

closed.

architecture as an academically teachable subject, we might deceive and confuse ourselves less if we stopped trying to cram the whole globe into its intellectual portfolio. We could recognise that the history of architecture is no more, believe but it emphatically was: the progression no less, than of those what we styles used and

to

monuments of the European mainstream, from Stonehenge to the Staatsgalerie, that define the modest building art that is ours alone. We might then have a better view of the true value and splendours of the building arts and design methods of other Charles Eames, for instance, sugar-coated the design arts cultures, avoiding the kind of sentimentality with which of the Orient. We might also be moresecurely placed to study the mysteries of our own building art, beginning with pattern that subsumes all other patterns and shelters them from rational scrutiny. Even before architectural drawings achieved the kind of commercial value they can claim the persistence of drawing - disegno - as a kind of meta-

nowadays, they had such crucial value for architects that

being unable to think without drawing became the true mark

11

of

architecture. Recall the

one

fully

socialised

into

the

profession

of

Michael Keyte's claim in the early sixties that, with the CLASP system, one could design buildings without making drawings at all, just a typewritten schedule of components programme, let us acknowledge that Keyte was and procedures. If that sounds suspiciously like a computer anticipating the probably fatal blow that computer-aided architecture too. Not by mechanising the act of drawing itself, indeed make drawings, copy them, and turn them in and out but by rendering it unnecessary. Computers only

alarm,

disguised

as

contempt,

that

greeted

design may have dealt the mystique of drawing, and thus to can

can remember drawings. But they do not remember them in imagery that the eye can read.

of perspective or isometric, and - most crucially - they

Rather, they remember them in the usual bytes of bits of binary computer memories. And that kind of information can be punched in and out of the memory by means of an ordinary alphanumeric keyboard, without any draughtsmanship at all. the making of drawings, then to persist in the act of act of cultural defiance "resistance" in the information that is the common content of all

And if draughtsmanship thus becomes unnecessary even for drawing and in setting store by that act, becomes either an righteous cant of New York academe represented by Kenneth of a secret society. self-

Frampton - or a conscious submission to the unspoken codes

To a certain kind of old-timer, this could be good news: confirmation that they were right all along and that we should 12 have stuck to the orders and the theory of

composition

stuff. To other interests, however, such as those of the rest of a world increasingly desperate for better buildings unadmitted acceptance of this parochial rule book can only humanity. and a more habitable environment, architecture's proud but seem a crippling limitation on building's power to serve

and

ignored

all

that

technology

and

modern

If architecture could "to its own self be true", accepting that it is not the whole art of building everywhere, but just the making of drawings for buildings in the manner practised in Europe since the Renaissance, it could be recognised as something that belongs as valuably at the heart Christian liturgy, Magna Carta or - precisely - the Masonic mysteries of Die Zauberflte. And it could then get out of some of its more egregious perceptual and intellectual of western culture as do the Latin language,

muddles, like those over Christopher Wren and Mies van der Rohe.

Wren could be seen as a master-builder of talent bordering

on genius who tried to teach himself architecture out of books, like a postmodernist, but never gained entry to the inner sancta of its art or mystery. The west front of St Paul's remains the finest piece of urban scenography that a rational mind could have placed at the top of narrow old Ludgate Hill, but please don't call it architecture. Mies, on the other hand, could be recognised as a true has been largely that obscured by the rhetoric of pure

insider of the arcana of architecture, whose achievement rationality has come from his followers and

explainers. Indeed, he is a very good case in counterpoint to Wren, an absolute architect whose building was so open

13

to

explanations

rational

explanation had

architecture - until various good grey men had to try to into the proposed Mansion House Square development.

almost

that

nothing

few

to

noticed

say

that

about

these

his

explain his architecture in public at the planning inquiry

The egg left on the face of the modernist establishment by that enquiry does not mean that it is necessarily impossible to find language to discuss what is currently subculture possible of architecture basis in general. Not only have the

ineffable, but valuable, in the work of Mies and in the Christopher bafflement Alexander's the confused for gropings in suggested face but of one

conceptual of

behaviour of architects might provoke some psychologist or

general

public

deeper

enquiry, the

the

anthropologist to try to break through the glass wall of inscrutability that surrounds the topic. Anthropologists have workings of societies far more remote than the tribe of architecture. But the tribe would almost certainly have to resist the intrusion integrity as a social grouping. It might well decide to if it were the ark of its covenant. What else on its privacy if it were to preserve its already gone a long way in penetrating the inner

defend the contents of the black box at whatever cost, as architects deliver endless do? The or threat to of ultimate revelation, the would

could of

demystification

architecture series of

even

confronted it since the first quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns.

crossroads

yet

deconstruction, another of of

decision

that

seemingly have

surely

14

It

understandings of the profane and the vulgar, at the risk

could

permit

itself

to

be

opened

up

to

the

of destroying itself as an art in the process. Or it could close ranks and continue as a conspiracy of secrecy, immune from scrutiny, but perpetually open to the suspicion, among the general public, that there may be nothing at all inside the black box except a mystery for its own sake.

11

15

Reyner Banham, the critic champion of Megastructures and the design rationale of the Machine Age, and the relentless promoter of the more technological strand of Modern Movement in the ostwar period (and arguably, then, the purer one) tries to get to terms with Architecture, a discipline he had pretended to define, or rather, redefine, for the best part of his life. Banham had studied engineering and art history in some of the most prestigious institutions of the time, but all through his life he had thought of himself as a quasi-architect, an architect that worked through theory. This explains his early description of what makes up an architect: <<can you think of any better minimum definition of the architectural frame of mind tan imaginative technologist?>> R. Banham in: Space, Fiction and Architecture. In: Architects Journal, no. 127, 1958 He was friends with the young architects and artists from the London of the 50s and 60s that gathered around the Institute of Contemporary Arts, the Independent Group, etc. and had an interest in a certain type of architecture being produced, an architecture that resonated exactly with his description of the imagination of technology. This article is a final attempt by Banham at solving the puzzle, the riddle that Architecture is, acknowledging that he had been nave with his previous descriptions of it, that he had missed a crucial part of what makes up an architect: that unique academic environment that constitutes the studio (to understand ourselves, this is none other than clase de proyectos), and a hope for the future of architecture and how it relates to society at large.

Paper 22-25.

published in New Statesman and Society, 12 Oct. 1990, pp.

from

Critic

Writes.

pp.

292-299.

Originally

16