'The Destruction of Architecture' a criticism

Before starting my PhD I thought it might be a good idea to revisit my Masters dissertation (full text here, PDF format), the piece of writing which made concrete desire to take on a doctorate.

I now see I really missed the point! I spent the majority of the writing combining the thoughts of three diverse thinkers into an alternative view of society and then resorted to an irritatingly architectural language in the closing sections which is still based on the reliance on an objective reality, something which I thought I had discarded in the preceding chapters. Perhaps I only realise this now as I've had time to overthink these concepts.

Ian McGilchrist's 'The Master and His Emissary' allowed me to view and expand on the Heideggerian model which my original text relied on. McGilchrist explains that there are two main modes of thinking, illustrated by the 'left brain-right brain' cliché (this is only used to illustrate his ideas; while some brain functions are localised to the brain's hemispheres they are not a prescribed as this now debunked archaic paradigm). These modes of thinking can be described as 'abstraction' and 'metaphor.' Abstraction breaks our world down into discrete chunks we can understand, wresting theses 'bits' from their context, perceiving them in isolation. The alternative mode does the opposite. It looks at the entire picture and sees the connection between things. It manifests through metaphor and creativity.

The revelation of this text was that abstraction, despite it's apparent domination of modern life, is subservient to metaphor, illustrated by the beguiling notion that music preceded spoken language as a method of communication amount humans. understanding depends on metaphor.

These ideas became reinforced by a chance encounter with the work of physicist and consciousness philosopher, Dr Tom Campbell. I had encountered the famous 'Double Slit,' experiment before I started listening to Dr Campbell's lectures online, but I had never heard it described so elegantly, nor had its startling implications ever been spelt out so fully to me.

The themes of this experiment are too large to discuss in this already bloated post, but essentially Campbell's theory (which he playfully names 'My Big TOE,' TOE being Theory Of Everything) suggests that our concept of objective reality is false and is actually a probabalistic infomration field. This field seeks to lower it's level of entropy (uncertainty, chaos) and does so in an evolutionary fashion (this links up neatly with Richard Dawkins' description of Darwinian evolution as described in 'The Selfish Gene,' particularly when Dawkins begins to describe it as a concept which reaches beyond the idea of genes). As the system evolves and it's level of entropy decreases, the system becomes more and more stable and rules are 'imposed' (these become the basics of Newtonian physics). These give the illusion of an objective reality.

These two notions, 'abstraction as servant to metaphor' and 'reality as a field of probabilities,' hold the potential for a powerful tool for examining society. The pieces don't quite fit in my mind however...yet...

To return to my master's thesis, I suppose the aim of this initial piece of writing was simply to straighten out several key concepts and ensure I had an understanding of them. If I were to define an objective now it would be trying to understand how architecture's purpose could be re-understood considering this new model of subjective reality.

A bit lofty at the moment, I know. I hope there's nothing wrong with starting off this big!

As an aside, the two theories outlined in this post, that of Ian McGilchrist and Tom Campbell, have been severly squashed to fit into this post and I have probably done them a massive disservice! They involve major paradigm shifts and dramatically challenge the 'common sense' notions of reality and the self. If you are interested please seek out their books and particularly Tom campbell's numerous lectures, available free on youtube. This is a good place to start.

The will to a system...

'The will to system is a lack of integrity' 1

For some reason the above Nietzsche quote has always stuck in my mind. Perhaps it captured my attention given my field of interest; the practice of architecture could be described as 'the will to a system,' an attempt to rationalise a way of life by allowing it to 'congeal' into the physical realm. The subjective objectified.

However, as the world becomes smaller and the tower of babel slowly spirals skyward, architects feels increasingly redundant; knocked off their neo-classical pedestals by the errors and decadence of the modernist experiment, a 'lack of integrity' conspicuously exposed. The concept of an all encompassing, life defining method-of-execution seems increasingly absurd. There cannot be a 'correct' answer concerning how to live.

I reached these conclusions concerning my mild fixation with this Nietszchean snippet after reading 'Citizens of No Place - an architectural graphic novel.' Set in a hypothetical future where the earth is uninhabitable and mankind finds itself adrift in 'Noah's Ark In Space,' this book starkly illustrates the absurdity of the architect's reliance on the diagram to the degree where the individual is lost amidst the statistics. While the situations described in the book seem far fetched, the attitudes and approaches to design feel frighteningly familiar.

Life translated into a diagram in order to realise a design never seems to get retranslated back into life. Worse still, architectural diagrams often pose as the reason for a piece of architecture rather than simply the whims of the egotistical designer.

These thoughts were punctuated by the viewing of the film 'The Lives of Others.' Set in authoritarian East Berlin in the early 80s, the folly of the attempt to reduce life down to a system is made explicit. Here we see a Stasi observer compelled to intervene in the lives of the observed rather than simply to document, becoming tangled in the emotions and vibrancy of the lives he watched rather than seeing it as the raw data he is expected to produce. It becomes impossible to passively observe as the observer's subjectivity defines his relationship with the observed. A dull stack of files becomes loaded with meaning for the observed, just as an abstract book dedication is for the observer. A system only makes sense when it is contextualised against the passion of human relationships.

A system must serve the users; users must not serve a system.

I suppose the other side of the coin is to consider architecture as an enabler, a facilitator and enhancer of existing ways of life. Most systems seem to start like this; inevitably the system seems to overtake the way of life which defined it and the roles are reversed.

So where does this leave architecture? The short answer is 'Fucked if I know...' - I'll try to get back to you with a long answer.

1 'Twilight of The Idols' Friedrich Nietzsche
2 'Citizens of No Place'
3 'The Lives of Others'