The value that makes concealing architecture impossible.
P-01.2 Going beyond meaningfulness to presencing architecture in practice. Part 2.
The goal of this series is to make tangible the value that makes concealing architecture impossible. In the previous post I used the term 'bad-architecture architecture', but feedback says it is not the right wording. I am referring to the lack of architectural value. It is not about poor quality or styles that might offend or be inappropriate. The assertion of 'bad' is for environments where we support the negation of human value as people in that environment presence that negation as their awareness. It's complex.
Architecture is something that people can provide for routinely as part of their work. The lack of architecture is often portrayed as a matter of time and resources. But it is not. If it is an intention and if the knowledge is there, it costs no more to provide for architecture. It is seen as an 'extra' by most people because it is not core to the profession in a way that makes it essential to the environment. Obviously, the least amount of work possible, with no care for anything but base utility, will be faster. But that is not the discussion here. I want to avoid the impression that I am arguing against bad work, untalented providers or bad actors. I am discussing transcending the status quo that does not include architecture well in principle. It can also be considered to be a matter of who is making decisions and that we are not putting the right people into that position, but it is deeper than that. How do we name this when we are committed to calling so much that is not architecture architecture?
We always express our values when we make our environment. Architecture is in people's awareness, associated with their consciousness and the aspiration we all feel. This links directly to our values. Each of us create architecture, presencing it within. We can question if architecture can happen inadvertently. Even if it does, we are culpable for our values in practice and how we manage our lives in practice. If we consider that we expect and aspire architecture as part of human consciousness, the pressure and negativity of environments that are not supportive of architecture may start to become clear. Consciousness must form itself in a responsive interaction to the spaces we form part of, anywhere we are. This is not optional and it has very real consequences. We live the consequences of environments unsupportive of nature, spirituality and humanity everywhere. This is 'concealing architecture’, because the force of architecture is always present and conceals in environments that do not support it.
There is no need to be radical even as the proposed value does undermine a lot of commonly held assumptions upon which most careers in architecture are built. It is not radical because, just like when we tell children how to be good, we then also tell them that the world badly contradicts that in how it operates, that 'successful' people very often do very bad things but are still treated as if they are good due to their acquired wealth and power. There are people now who no longer conceal their immoral nature as a sign of their value.
The large firms tend to conflate managerial responsibility with űber-design control. Business management and the soul of a design are generally at odds, and I am not even writing the word 'architecture'. Design is another technical component, but that is where we are; design is typically conflated with and appearing instead of the word 'architecture'.
Universities are ducking and weaving in an apparent conflict with what 'industry' needs education to provide. The real issue is that the education of architects is based in an outdated pre-Machine Ages compromise, while the industry's intent is to be in architecture to do business rather than to do business to create architecture. Medicine is an interesting and expressive example. It is understood as essential to human life and life quality. But government medical systems tend to fund their systems minimally, even as it is clear that such saving costs the economy far more than is saved, and the most egregious insurance situations deny care for profit. We are starving children, scrimping on education, and poorly housing them as a market function even in the wealthy communities (although Canada does currently have housing poverty). Housing is denied routinely, conflating a person's life and human value with their capital holdings and income.
Architecture is considered a business and a choice, so it is vulnerable to the same technological commodification in our current society that does not consider essential needs exempt from the market. But we do not typically associate architecture with wellbeing – the attributes that we generally call architecture are infrastructure, technical services and building. Architects create need based value by asserting technical requirements such as sanitation, heat, light and other physical attributes. Buildings are basic needs, and architects serve those as a responsible competence to be effective and efficient for the client. We do not see it as a gross conflict and abrogation of duty when architects do not provide architecture, in part because we call it architecture anyway. We name everything architects do as architecture. This is a blessing for our future.
The red herring argument between education and the business of architects is better taken as about a professional mandate that is anachronistic, which was already true when the Modernist profession formed, and the business and socio-cultural space of making our environment that is formed by the profession after a generation of prioritizing seamless and effective construction process. This has brought the business of construction, finance and profit motive with it, infiltrating the profession. We have been driving technology forward. This recreates the importance of architects on those terms, but erodes the valuable character of architecture in our life.
Perhaps this was an inadvertent side-effect. After the many years that I have watched this, I characterize it as a very positive intention that brings with it the excitement and revolutionary zeal of the Modern Machine Ages. Up to the 1960s technological change was automatically a 'good'. That started to change, marked by Silent Spring, through which the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was brought into being in the USA, and other food and drug related agencies everywhere. The weak mandate that the profession has to provide architecture is, however, outed in the capitulation to technological value of the architectural profession. It is a couple of generations of devolution of architectural knowledge for the sake of technological value. What we are facing is the out of balance use of technology.
Humanity has got powerful, and now we have to control it. As an example we can take the concepts for geo-engineering to mitigate the effects of climate change. These are items like depositing immense amounts of chemicals or elements into the upper atmosphere or the oceans, or building umbrellas in orbit. The justification is that we are geo-engineering already. Are we actually geo-engineering now if we cause a landslide into a stream to make a bridge? The new geo-engineering is then to build a dam upstream to keep the houses by the stream from flooding because the landslide bridge is useful to some people.
We speak of geo-engineering the ocean, saving wildlife, fishing, over-fishing, saving livelihoods, acidification of the ocean, adding chemicals to enhance algae growth, while natural algae growth is vilified, the unknown undiscovered wonders of the deep ocean and mining the pristine deep ocean floor with hellish machines, all at the same time. Carbon sequestration by mechanical means never seems to die even as it is repeatedly proven that it cannot be scaled to the level needed because money for studies and prototypes is sound business. The architectural profession has CO2 and energy mitigation programmes that reassert the importance of technology, maintaining confusion of what is actually architecture through these relevant and responsible activities.
The defining issue is who of us is able to make those value judgements for cause and effect, and how are we to deal with the profit motive (i.e. greed) that seems to drive solutions as we proceed.
Making the value in question tangible starts here. Architecture existed before technology, has not become technology, and will exist after our concept of matter and energy transcends technology. If architecture is not technology, if it is not the building or any physical material form, and it is within the people who are there at a place affecting and affected by it, then the architect is foremost a person who understands humanity.
The architect knows about things that are not materialized, yet they also know what is there that will be supported by what is not yet there. The architect has a value for human awareness in the public sphere, and in feeling that value they have compassion. They have evolved their connectivity with humanity more broadly. This is a channel of aspiration in conscious awareness we can call the public sphere.
The value that will make concealing architecture impossible, as powerful as it might be, would have to be widespread to create the impossibility for concealing architecture. Perhaps that seems a major caveat that undermines it, since we might think that it’s a singular blast that would eradicate what we don’t want. But it is not the eradication of what we don’t want, it is the addition of something that makes the poverty of architecture’s absence and what that absence allows to manifest impossible. Poverty is impossible when the need is filled.
In this case, it is the inclusion of something that is already our capacity. Any work of art or the intuition that science needs touches it. This is material recognition of the humane, a level above the merely animal in us, beyond the fact of our living bodies and beyond the merely personal. This question already defines the answer: What is the value equivalent to being humane in the practice of providing for architecture in making environments? I will take that up next time.