Grabbing technology and holding it there, just so.
* No AI functions were used to write this post.
Even I like to thank my AI for a good answer. I admit that I feel that I may bring on bad karma if I'm not polite. If I cursed it, it might react. It does not really care though, although it responds. It may seem to be my friend and to listen to and follow my needs, but it has no feelings and it is a thing. It might cut off its service because it represents being ticked off like the people it is designed by and for frequently are. It integrates and is made to integrate with the public sphere. This is not unlike being an architect in a relationship with our building technology and professional practice technology.
Architects need a forceful attitude to engage with technology realistically. Most of us are good at tightly controlling technology within the scope of a project. But we do not take on technology's role with the same force that we created it and maintain it. We do not push against the barriers that technology puts up to areas it cannot enter. Like love. The architect, the client and the builders pretend that technology is human. Or rather, we project humanity on it. This is unrealistic. Technology knows nothing of love in practice. It cannot act with love. Like AI, we project a relationship on it's limited form. We have a complex proxy relationship with ourselves through technology. Nevertheless, our technology represents our human values and our culture.
The forcefulness required is the same that I use to respond to a rod of steel. That is physics. The steel is what it is, bent or not. Technology is a lot of different physics put together by people. I need to use force, willpower and commitment to bend steel. I may have to train to do it. It is necessary to accommodate for the human factors that are implemented technologically. AI acts as it does because it is derived from mimicking people, but it is no different than any technology. This is different from bending a human by force. It is just like a metal object. August Rodin cast metal sculptures. They do not love.
Architects Follow Technology
I am in BC and a native of the GVRD, so I will mention Patkau architects, for example. Their work appeals to me through their clever and complex use of form and materiality. Their work is in the same register of Modernism as Herzog & de Meuron. There are many like this who are doing good work in this form; Brooks+Scarpa, PPAG, Todd Williams Billie Tsien Architects, or much of the work on Divisare come to mind. Their amazing work pushes Modernist composition onward to its next forms to newly realize the needed form in respect of the locus and its culture. Those stand-out examples represent those who remain committed to the regime of technicist Modernism, which is almost everyone.
To assert that these architects represent work uncritical of the technicist regime may seem unfair, since we are all critical of systems that we question as we develop any project. They do not, however, question the authority of technology. The resulting environments are like a bird singing in a cage relative to architecture. The work cannot presence architecture in principle. It can only near it asymptotically. This is work for a culture that does not feel need for architecture, and as we proceed deeper into the growing absence it feels that less, and there is little pressure to question our profession. The original essential importance of architecture is concealed and it is lost on most of us.
Many architects became leaders early on in Machine Age modernizing. The profession required modernization to utilize the power of technology. Energetic evolution by architects took great strides toward harnessing new modes of production and to form the systems that we typically use now. We developed new building technology to retain the authority of the profession in presencing architecture through those technological changes because the change would have left the profession behind, much as it is being left behind now. That began to reach a consensus at the Bauhaus about 100 years ago. The acute need to engage Machine Age technology was accelerated by the World Wars and by the powerful corporations that they generated. Up until that time we were 'outside' technology, 'in' architecture. Post–war and today we, generally, are 'in' technology, and architecture is 'outside'.
Architects today get their professional standing by committing to an allegiance, which is marked by successfully passing the regime's regulatory thresholds to serve the institution. That allegiance is to the mechanism of a profession structured around technology that anyone who wants to be a 'real' architect must commit to. An architect is not regulated to produce technicist Modernist work, but we must know its values to qualify, and we have promoted integration with a construction industry largely of our making. This industry is no longer under architects' control and it arguably leads now. It sets steadily narrowing limits for architects. We talk of creativity, or its lesser cousin of innovation to keep pace with technology, but considering the most powerful firms in Canada and the international firms that churn billions, it is difficult to find them significantly creative.
Technology cannot presence architecture. This distinction has become critical as the technicist Machine Ages play out toward their end through its technocratic regulatory valuation. Although architects have been running after technology for a lifetime, by now it should be clear that that it is not going to regain its real value that way. We do remain free to provide our work as we see fit once qualified, but it is with the impressions of those limitations. We may choose otherwise, but it is difficult.
Testing the Regime
Clearly, we are not active in upcoming transformation. A century ago as we participated in creating modernist technological Machine Ages architecture and its profession and the culture of this transformation. Now architects appears complacent. AI is, in this context, an accelerant toward differentiating from technology from architecture.
Forming environments that support architecture is not dependent on any technology. The architectural value of a project and the professional are independent of technology. Knowledge for this is woefully absent.
The key is in our approach to the consciousness in a project. Working with this requires developing an approach to technology's place in the world and an approach to our own individual experience with evolving consciousness. Developing conscious control of technology in terms of its meaningfulness for the project, discriminating meaning of the project from the role of technology as its architecture, is another necessity.
The work that appeals to me has the quality of questioning the authority of technology. The majority of the early or pre–modernists were necessarily questioning technology in light of architecture. Wassily Kandinsky was a painter at the Bauhaus who questioned colour like a mathematician and like a psychologist, and he came full circle through technical psychology to esoteric values. That is a simile for the questioning of Antonio Sant'Elia of the Futurists and many other architects and movements working for the continuity of the heart of architecture through a time of radical transformation; not to save it, but to architect it. Architecture does not need saving, it is original to humanity.
After World War II this questioning of the heart of architecture came to a close. We had arrived at an institutionalized architecture of Machine Age technology. The discussion moved within a set of parameters within a dogmatically held paradigm.
The value of an architect is defined by the monetary cost of power and matter, the crux of technology. The value of a project counted by its monetary value was an easy path for technology to become dominant. Industrial repetition became a positive value. This technicist ledger of power and matter defining the value of the profession has arguably destroyed a big chunk of the architectural profession.
Some architects grasped this early after WWII, and immediately began to fight it. Complexity and Contradiction is an original approach to this fight. That approach sought to position a powerful institution of questioning vs the institution of International Style. Postmodernism became a professional style that held up history against the abolition of history that most pre–modernists advocated, which had got entrenched in the tenets of International Style architecture. The use of history was eclectic and pluralistic: a lot like the eclectic period of styles in late 19th century England as tradition began the break apart. It took on nuance that ranged from accepting history as a language and the philosophy of deconstruction, to attempting to coopt history as its caricature. Denise Scott–Brown and Robert Venturi took this on and many others ran with. I call this classicist postmodernism. Despite the radical divergence of its image from institutional modernism, it remained hamstrung in the modernist trope.
Some postmodernist architects developed methodology of control in their architecture that included methodology as form-making of architecture in the 1970s. These are abstract postmodernist architects who were gathered for the 1988 Deconstructivist Architecture exhibition at MOMA. These architects have an approach that takes control of technology as a component of a project's formation. Whether or not Philip Johnson, the curator, did this consciously or not, this is what they have in common. If he did it consciously, he didn’t tell us.1 He focused on Constructivist architecture and other aspects that come out of the time of pre-institutionalized Modernism. ‘Style’ is a red herring. The low-level approach of taking deconstructivist architecture's imagery as the style is an unfortunate byproduct of Johnson's presentation and Wigley's strangely uninsightful approach, given his scholarship.
The quality that I am pointing to, of channeling a critical element of valuing technology against architecture, also exists in the Seagram Building. It is important to remember that Ludwig Mies van der Rohe had taken up Machine Ages technology 50 years earlier. He was one of the architects whose own work formed simultaneously with forming the institutionalized modernist architecture.
Making buildings that gather context broadly to supersede the need to adjust for local context, time and place is an ideal for the building industry. It goes hand in hand with measuring the value of architecture as derivative of the cost of substance only. This was the aim: 'Technology is universal'. Mid-town Manhattan already gathers the world, so it is naturally ground for the International Style. Now, after generations of production since the arrival of that building, the Lever House and others, the architecture that it presences is less relevant to the technology of the building than to the story of its technology. It remains aware of the architect's control and the choices that give it its value in a way that the contemporary technicist architects do not.
Each of the 7 abstract postmodernists who Johnson had gathered had a one-way filtering process for technology that directly forms their architecture. They take on what pre–modernists had to do to push forward, beyond the institutional modernism they were taught. They intended to presence that social information as architectural value in the public sphere. Peter Eisenman appeared to be more technical about it.2 In some cases it expresses as protest. Some are more complex focussing in practical ideology, like Bernard Tschumi.
Frank Gehry created a regime of control using powerful technology that he developed to protect his freedom to play from the direct imposition of technology. Coop Himmelblau was expressly about protest. They took the information for a project and created a ‘psychogram’ of just a few hand drawn lines, very small, and not unlike Gehry’s work with paper and tape, but forming a different process/sequence. The steep climb out of the moment of the psychogram to building required disciplined adherence to the generating psychogram to subvert the authority of technology. It required a steady hand that would ‘expand’ the psychogram while staying true to its intent. For CHBL a fellow named Marcus Pillhofer originally did magic with it. This is a bit idealized. The process is messy. Ultimately, none of these architects went beyond the limitations of technicist Modernism either.
The abstract postmodernists – deconstructivists thanks to Johnson – created methodologies that intend to form the architecture directly. You see the difference? Classicist postmodernism was historicist, did not leverage the integrity of process with architecture and it did not question technology in light of the profession. The design process is isolated from the architectural form like the factory machinery from the chocolate bar. Except it isn't, of course; the machines touch the chocolate. The latter architects designed process that reduces the authority projected onto technology, removes it from directly forming environments, and attempts to support architecture's presencing in a non-asymptotic way. Technology is in play in abstract postmodernism.
Abstract postmodernism currently has little effect. It tends to disturb the profession by cutting at the roots of the technicist professional regime. Questioning technology’s authority in process of practice compromises the power of the hegemony and risks too much. The pressure to generate income against the lack of a market for high end (real) architectural output is the symptom. Asserting architectural value begins to create a vacuum that scares the client, and inspires only some architects. It creates economic pressure by confusingly presenting architecture instead of technology centric values that have infected the superordinate program of architecture. That infection is inescapably tied to the public sphere. The profession has been culpable in this, and the steady destruction of a market for architecture.
Rem Koolhass and OMA exemplify the meekness of the profession in their capitulation in the face of this danger. They are not meek. Their capacity was abundant, with often radical solutions, but they had to 'fine tune' to do business. It appears as cynicism winning the day. Coop Himmelblau as the architects of the billion euro ECB Headquarters in Frankfurt is a slippery but inspiring conundrum. Housing an essentially technocratic institution in abstract post-modern architecture is an oxmoron. Coop Himmelblau becomes the (wealthy) hypocrite loser. The project remains important for its aspiration, but it is also cynical. Architecture is not likely ever cynical.
Johnson was able to sniff out a key thread and to spin it. Those 7 architects Johnson gathered were put into a featured role that made them more present than otherwise. It made them iconic. It was a message to the future that is not yet here. The revaluation that abstract postmodernism points to a component of a future profession. Johnson might have felt a kind of glee at setting up that exhibition at MOMA. It’s like concealing a computer virus in plain sight, while not knowing when it would actually blow up the works, or if we would get to it at all under these terms. The infection is inherent, he just injected more.
The need of the day is to grab hold of technology and to wrench it out of the driver's seat. Do we fear that it may get angry? It is but a thing that we made. Architect's professional pledge to support technology is under pressure here. This need to question technology forms the meaning of presencing architecture now, as it did for the abstract postmodernists. A reckoning with technology is pending across all cultures and is globally meaningful. It is this that architecture must express now. But that is only a first step. Architects' coming positive role, beyond freeing itself this way, is reconciliation with nature and spirituality. That is what I mainly write about.
Consciousness in the heart of nature.
Dissolving the hegemonic regime of technology is the threshold (not yet the door or the vestibule) to our desperately needed new approach to nature. Architecture is the only profession that holds the body of knowledge required for this. Questioning technology with humane values, basically writing the code of our environment architecture that technology cannot, which nature leaves to humanity, will be the next step — after the one we have not yet taken.
Architecture is human aspiration. That is the core value of human intelligence: evolution. Technology is also human intelligence. We are in a time of radical transformation from a circular relationship with ourselves to one with nature. It won't happen without architecture, but it might happen without the architectural profession as it is. Some of our greatest minds and hearts are muted; hamstrung, one could say. Most willingly so.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was active at the beginning of Machine Ages architecture, before the WWI and II and before the advent of the institution of Modernism, engaging the role of technology in architecture. The Seagram Building is connected to that, with ancient Rome and the ancient techné, and control of technological force that abstract postmodernism initiated anew. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe spoke of the purity of Modernism. His purity includes experiment and discovery. Study the sections and details of the Seagram Building and you see bronze that is not clearly structurally necessary at all. To get purity and simplicity he took technology and held it there, just so.
Architects are uniquely positioned to be far ahead of current currents, as always. The profession created current building technology. We can move on from it too. We must. The balance is tipping the other way now, away from Machine Ages technology and its sciences. Cynicsim is capitulation if we are already concealing architecture in a proxy, even if it appears to be presencing architecturally. We are resting on laurels that have long ago wilted, grown dry and weak. Who will step up?
I am referring to the process of Eisenman's 1984 project for the Biozentrum in Frankfurt am Main. This is a 'digital' iterative program integrated as form giving process. Although it appears to be a digital method, that is not the point. It reflects the simplicity of nature where one thing does many, although it is a messy example of invention and play. Peter Eisenman in conversation with Greg Lynn.
Image is a combined images of one that may be from skyscraper.com and from archdaily by Paul Raftery.