Architectural Meanings are Nothing but Fictions

The recent unveiling of Stephen Holl's design for University College Dublin's campus has generated a bit of a furore. People have been getting rather upset about the American architect's claim that the building's angular forms are "inspired" by the extraordinary geometries of the island of Ireland's most famous natural landmark, the Giant's Causeway.

In a manner that recalls the US president's antics on the golf courses of Scotland – and his approach to international relations in general – it appears as if Holl, clad in plaid shirt and high-waisted trousers, has metaphorically marauded across the landscapes of the emerald isle and, in doing so, failed to spot a couple of not unimportant details. Firstly, the geographical inconvenience that the Giant's Causeway is not, in fact, anywhere near Dublin, and secondly, the unfortunate faux pas of neglecting to notice that the world-famous landmark is not actually situated within the borders of the country of which Dublin is the capital.

But by crudely appropriating the geological wonder, Holl might actually have done us a favour. In reducing it to a crass form of commodification that gives his architecture no more value than that of an image printed on a souvenir tea towel, he has prompted us to ask: why do so many architects feel the need to engage with this kind of unedifying and clumsy projection of "meaning" in their projects?

Maybe it has something to do with the way late capitalism has emptied all sense of purpose out of contemporary life. Perhaps it is the reality that is ruthlessly presented to us by modern science – a science that has robbed us of our delusions about the meaning of life and its supposed higher purpose. Or is it just a loss of confidence in architecture to speak for itself?

Whatever the reason, it seems the search for "meaning", "narrative" and "metaphor" is the disease of our time. It affects all aspects of contemporary life, as demonstrated by the success of the self-help publishing industry, which itself packages up meaning into neat little consumable parcels.

For architects, the condition manifests in our apparent need to resort to crass metaphors, in a pathetic attempt to bolt some sort of superfluous, immediate and fully formed signification onto things we clearly fear would otherwise have none.

I think architects would do well to take note of the philosopher Ray Brassier, in his call for fellow thinkers to embrace a "mind independent reality" that is "oblivious to the ‘values' and 'meanings' which we would drape over it in order to make it more hospitable".

This is because architectural meanings are themselves nothing but consolatory fictions, often used for nefarious ends.

Take, for instance, the allusion to noble antiquity expressed in the grand Georgian estates that grace numerous British cities, which casts a less-than-noble veil over their connections to the ill-gotten gains of slavery and colonialism.

Or the celebration of English Christianity in the Neo-Gothic architecture of the Victorian period, which disguises the somewhat unchristian ethics that prevailed in the murderous exploitation of the factory system, whose proceeds financed it.

As theorist Roland Barthes established in the 1950s, all meaning is entirely arbitrary. Classical architecture, for example, has enjoyed a colourful historical journey from its origins in the material world of sacrificial ritual to its later manifestations as idealistic expressions of scholarly antiquity, colonial power and modern conservatism, amongst many other things.

Modernism attempted, not entirely successfully, to do away with all of this sort of thing. And I think that, in our increasingly cringe-worthy clinging to the comfort blanket of metaphor, we have come full circle. It is perhaps time to question the necessity for meaning in architecture once again.

An interesting aspect of Holl's UCD building is that its chosen metaphor suggests that it should be treated as a sculpture to be contemplated, rather than as a building to be inhabited. In this sense, it exemplifies the distinction drawn by Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi between a "duck", a building that takes on a three-dimensional representational form in its entirety, and a "decorated shed", a building whose form is a generic and unpretentious product of everyday life, but to which representational decoration might be applied.

Venturi and Scott Brown were perhaps over-zealous in dismissing all buildings with strong sculptural characteristics as ducks. Their targets included the brutalist buildings of the 1960s and 70s, which have recently enjoyed a resurgence in popularity. These buildings were not entirely free of metaphorical allusion but, rather than aiming at a bogus commodification of context, the metaphors tended to be directed at more generic idealisms embedded within the architecture itself, such as the expression of materiality or a faith in technological progress.

I think it is fair to say that the design of buildings such as these was not driven by an overriding desire to manufacture spurious meaning. Indeed, one of the criticisms levelled at brutalism when it fell out of fashion in the 1970s was precisely its apparent lack of meaning.

Part of the reason why these buildings have become popular again is because they have now acquired meanings that have nothing to do with either signification, metaphor or narrative, nor with the design intentions of their architects.

The meanings associated with these buildings today reflect a material history or, more precisely, a lack of it. For these buildings are products of a time when, in contrast to the present, architectural endeavour was directed towards improving material life in the form of houses, schools and hospitals. They stand as monuments to a period when good quality affordable housing, in aspiration if not always in achievement, was considered a citizen's right.

If these buildings can be considered to carry meanings, then the latter are embodied not in some cheap contextual metaphor, but in an aspiration for material progress.

The buildings of the brutalist period also manifest an optimism about the future that, in the current political climate, seems absent. But one chink of light is that at some point soon, governments are going to have to build houses, schools and hospitals again. Perhaps they might do in a way that provides us all with material progress, so that architects can be spared the obligation to add pseudo-poetic overlays of commodified meaning. As Le Corbusier might have put it, we have a choice: architecture or revolution.

As architects, we might begin to prepare for this eventuality, not by fomenting a brutalist revival, but by developing an architecture that manifests once again the politics, technologies and material culture of the present. We can begin by dropping the obsession with imposing fake meanings and turn our attention to what really matters: the material conditions of our current reality.

Sean Griffiths, Dezeen , August 24, 2018.

A Colossal Compendium of Brutalist Architecture Argues for Saving ‘Concrete Monsters’. Allison Meier on  the book ‘SOS Brutalism A Global Survey, Park Books,  Hyperallergic, February 22, 2018

The colossal book, available in English and German versions with over 700 pages of richly illustrated material, is published in conjunction with SOS BRUTALISM – Save the Concrete Monsters!, on view at Deutschen Architekturmuseum (DAM) in Frankfurt. After the exhibition closes at DAM on April 2, it will travel to Architekturzentrum Wien, opening on May 3. Both the book and the exhibition represent the first global survey of Brutalist architecture from the 1950s to ’70s. They were developed from the online #SOSBrutalism campaign, a collaboration between DAM, Wüstenrot Foundation, and Uncube, that crowdsourced a database of over 1,000 projects across the world.

“In strong opposition to the modernism of the International Style, Brutalism was transformed locally as a bottom-up movement, in close relation to local culture and craftsmanship,” Oliver Elser, curator at DAM and one of the editors of SOS Brutalism, told Hyperallergic. “In many countries it was the architecture of independence and/or cultural and economical progress. This connection with politics is only visible through our global perspective.”

For instance, the 1975 Kolašin Memorial Center in Kolašin, Montenegro, was constructed as a Yugoslavian civic facility; following the country’s collapse, the spiky concrete building lost both its social role and maintenance funding. In the Ivory Coast’s Abidjan, the 1973 La Pyramide was designed by Rinaldo Olivieri as a modern African market in the city center. Yet its optimistic city investment was a failure, and its huge pyramid-shaped space is gutted and inaccessible.

As Anette Busse of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology explains in an SOS Brutalism essay, “Brutalism arose from strands of development in the fine arts and art theory, adopting from these the idea of appreciating that which is available, or an honest material. The search for natural forms was taken from science, and the new sculptural and constructive possibilities from structural engineering.”.

SOS Brutalism demonstrates the richness and diversity of the style. Exposed concrete has its own unique preservation challenges, and Brutalist buildings are often difficult to reuse if their original purpose becomes obsolete. Still, they collectively represent a post-World War II moment of experimentation with form and new materials, something that is worth protecting.

See also :  In Defense Of Brutalism: One Architect On The Meaning Behind All That Concrete. By By Jack Mitchell  and Jeremy Hobson.  Wbur, August 6, 2018. 

In the space of just a few days, bad news has struck two buildings constructed by the studio Venturi & Scott Brown, the Abrams House in Pittsburgh built in 1979 (the same year as La condition postmoderne) and the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, which was completed in 1996. In the first case, the owner of another adjacent villa, the Giovannitti House designed by Richard Meier at the beginning of the 1980s, purchased the building in order to expand his property, beginning refurbishment works on the quiet, including the removal of a fresco by Roy Lichtenstein from the living room; in the second case, there is a project for minimalist expansion works which threatens to demolish the wing added by V&SB to the museum, which is constructed around an original building from 1915 by Irving Gill, the pioneer of modern architecture in South California. All of this is taking place after a project in 2007 by Brad Cloepfil deformed and inexorably altered expansion works by the duo from Philadelphia carried out on the Seattle Art Museum, and after the 1969 Lieb House was saved at the last second thanks only to a collector who purchased it and moved it on a barge from New Jersey to a new property in Long Island.

This all begs the question that if the work of famous architects from the post-modern period is under threat, perhaps all that production is in danger, be it due to building speculation, or to a refusal to acknowledge that aesthetic interlude in the name of an undefined form of “neomodernism”, as defined during a telephone conversation by Denise Scott Brown. “PoMo has the defect of being out of fashion while not being old enough to be re-evaluated, while a new generation of architects who grew up during the period of re-evaluation of these reference points is now emerging. Luckily, the extension of the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery in London has been listed for protection”.

The fact is that many postmodern buildings are at risk of demolition at the very moment that a mass of young scholars and critics  throughout Europe and the USA are carrying forward the legacy of the postmodern figurative canon, which only in architecture managed to find a collocation that despite not being perfectly defined, is at least accepted. Having burst forth after the Biennial by Paolo Portoghesi in 1980 (but in reality already present beneath the ashes of radical architecture, and the more polished style of “Oppositions”), the “end of citationist, historicist and anti-functionalist prohibition” had very strong echoes in design, from Memphis by Ettore Sottsass & Co., and in fashion, particularly in the global domination of Swatch watches under the artistic direction of Alessandro Mendini. Following years of the SuperDutch and those of the rappel à l’ordre, Postmodernism re-emerged with the millennial generation, also due to videos, from Katy Perry to Thegiornalisti. The latest example which is representative of a general trend is the recent theatre by Matteo Ghidono at the Milan Triennale, a mishmash of allusions to Aldo Rossi (the ephemeral wooden theatre), Sottsass (the self-definition of “pagan temple”, the gaudy colours on the backdrop) and Rem Koolhaas (the balloon).

Going back to Venturi and Scott Brown, now very elderly and unable to defend themselves properly, much could be done to raise awareness by the upcoming documentary film Learning from Bob & Denise by their son Jim Venturi, who previously made Saving Lieb House in 2009 (with John Halpern). It is difficult to resolve the question here, but what remains valid however is the opinion of a great critic, Alfonso Berardinelli: “Postmodernism is not the sinful and frivolous invention of a few, it is not a form of poetry which cancelled the anguished seriousness of the Modernists and substituted it with the playful use of ephemeral shapes. As is the case with Modernism, Postmodernism also has at least two sides. On the one hand, it could be seen as the rhetorical response to a form of extremism which was too programmatic even for famous past avant-garde movements. On the other, Postmodernism was, over the course of half a century, from 1945 onwards, a historical situation which involved contrasting cultural trends: neorealism, nouvelle critique, nouveau roman, neomarxism. Novels such as House of liars, Lolita, The Leopard, films such as The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and Barry Lyndon, poets such as Ponge and Auden, or Pier Paolo Pasolini, Magnus Enzensberger, Álvaro Mutis and Derek Walcott are aware that there was no more energy or space for modernist progressivism and the formal search for the boundless new in the mid-1900s. There were no more traditions or rules to break, but rather forms to return to and vary for other uses, contaminating genres rather than cancelling them “. This needs to be taken into account, before demolishing buildings which are currently “out of fashion”.

Should we demolish the Postmodern simply because “out of fashion”? asks Manuel Orazi, Domus , August 6, 2018.