utobiography constitutes quite a different literary genre in itself. It points out towards something different than the work of an author, but it still manifests the work of this author, his life. There must be a turning point in the mind of a writer when he commits himself to the edition of his autobiography. It is as though he understands that his life is coming to an end, the time for producing has ceased and in front of him is the last venture, making graphic the heritage of an entire life. The publication in 2001 of The Charged Void: Architecture marked the beginning of a series of theoretical autobiographies of two of the most important figures in postwar architecture, Alison and Peter Smithson.1 A publication that, at the same time, supposed the conclusion of a Pharaonic literary enterprise, initiated by the couple more than twenty-five years before. The culmination of a life dedicated to the discipline. In its pages we find the testament of two of the most polemical personalities of modern architecture. However, the book was not conceived as an endpoint, but rather as a just one more contribution within a long tradition of books by architects. It was not a break-through, but an assertion, the reaffirmation of a particular understanding of Architecture. A proposal to see the discipline in a different way, not just as a field dealing with ‘buildings’, but as a much more complex idea in which,—as the Smithsons state—using a “military analogy, the realised buildings are objectives we have taken; they are not the intention of the war.”2 A work in which the written word is considered at the same level as the designed project because both are “conceived in the Mind, and contrived by an ingenious Artist”3 as Alberti declared in the first of his Ten Books. The books by architects provide another look at the discipline from a wider form of praxis. Architecture constructed, not in the space we all share, but in the inner room of the mind of the architect-writer that gently opens its doors for the reader to inhabit.
However, the contemporary reader runs the risk of considering a book by an architect as simply one among similar publications (on par with a magazine, a critic, a booklet, a catalogue...). The stream of works being produced nowadays triggers in the reader a kind of anxiety for consuming as many texts as possible and, possibly, a literary indigestion. We live in a time when more review printings are done than ever. ‘Critical’ is the adjective that predominates in this industry, even to the point of becoming part of the orthodoxy of book titling. For every work, a hundred reviews. However, this is a time in which we take most of ideas for granted. The desire for ingestion is preventing us from reflection. But the books by architects demand a different kind of pace. They require calm “consumption”, and not voracity. The Charged Void: Architecture is a book to read with a pipe more than with a cigarette. The book slows things down, and this process generates in the unruffled reader a more sensitive understanding, a different attitude to knowledge. Even the title page —that part that we all skip quickly, looking for the index—can shed more light than what we expected; “The Charged Void: Architecture”, we were looking for a monograph and had ended up in a definition, almost an dictionary entry: ar•chi•tec•ture |`ärki,tek ch r|: n 1. The Charged Void. e
A
If we manage to ease our impulsiveness, then the books by architects grant us more than we asked for. In a slow exercise of disentangling the pages and the tools of its edition, in the space traveling from one page to another, the reader can discover the core of the book, even the author himself.
utobiography constitutes quite a different literary genre in itself. It points out towards something different than the work of an author, but it still manifests the work of this author, his life. There must be a turning point in the mind of a writer when he commits himself to the edition of his autobiography. It is as though he understands that his life is coming to an end, the time for producing has ceased and in front of him is the last venture, making graphic the heritage of an entire life. The publication in 2001 of The Charged Void: Architecture marked the beginning of a series of theoretical autobiographies of two of the most important figures in postwar architecture, Alison and Peter Smithson.1 A publication that, at the same time, supposed the conclusion of a Pharaonic literary enterprise, initiated by the couple more than twenty-five years before. The culmination of a life dedicated to the discipline. In its pages we find the testament of two of the most polemical personalities of modern architecture. However, the book was not conceived as an endpoint, but rather as a just one more contribution within a long tradition of books by architects. It was not a break-through, but an assertion, the reaffirmation of a particular understanding of Architecture. A proposal to see the discipline in a different way, not just as a field dealing with ‘buildings’, but as a much more complex idea in which,—as the Smithsons state—using a “military analogy, the realised buildings are objectives we have taken; they are not the intention of the war.”2 A work in which the written word is considered at the same level as the designed project because both are “conceived in the Mind, and contrived by an ingenious Artist”3 as Alberti declared in the first of his Ten Books. The books by architects provide another look at the discipline from a wider form of praxis. Architecture constructed, not in the space we all share, but in the inner room of the mind of the architect-writer that gently opens its doors for the reader to inhabit.
However, the contemporary reader runs the risk of considering a book by an architect as simply one among similar publications (on par with a magazine, a critic, a booklet, a catalogue...). The stream of works being produced nowadays triggers in the reader a kind of anxiety for consuming as many texts as possible and, possibly, a literary indigestion. We live in a time when more review printings are done than ever. ‘Critical’ is the adjective that predominates in this industry, even to the point of becoming part of the orthodoxy of book titling. For every work, a hundred reviews. However, this is a time in which we take most of ideas for granted. The desire for ingestion is preventing us from reflection. But the books by architects demand a different kind of pace. They require calm “consumption”, and not voracity. The Charged Void: Architecture is a book to read with a pipe more than with a cigarette. The book slows things down, and this process generates in the unruffled reader a more sensitive understanding, a different attitude to knowledge. Even the title page —that part that we all skip quickly, looking for the index—can shed more light than what we expected; “The Charged Void: Architecture”, we were looking for a monograph and had ended up in a definition, almost an dictionary entry: ar•chi•tec•ture |`ärki,tek ch r|: n 1. The Charged Void. e
A
If we manage to ease our impulsiveness, then the books by architects grant us more than we asked for. In a slow exercise of disentangling the pages and the tools of its edition, in the space traveling from one page to another, the reader can discover the core of the book, even the author himself.
Fig. 1. Engineer´s Contact Diagram (postEuston Arch). AS, 1968.
Fig. 1. Engineer´s Contact Diagram (postEuston Arch). AS, 1968.
The book as project. Linking
‘For us a book is a small building’ AS
The Charged Void brings with it the kind of fascination that comes with the really old whisky. The long process of ageing the golden drink is something striking in a society of fast trade, and maybe because of that, the allure is even greater. Alison started to work on the first manuscript of The Charged Void in 1974 and kept working on it until her death in 1993, when Peter took it over until its publication in 2001, adding only a few minor details. Almost thirty years of work are a witness to the importance that Alison and Peter gave to this item. Six hundred pages that could be considered as the outcome of an architectural project. As Mark Wigley considers, The Charged Void “is itself an architectural project whose polemical contribution needs to be respected and evaluated with care.”4 And in that sense, he claims that, in this project, the “agenda from the beginning” was clear: “to enter the endless collaborative debate sustained by successive generations of polemical architects operating in the dynamic space between buildings and books.”5
Following the process of the project, after setting the agenda, it would be interesting to look at the tools they used for its production. Their purpose of establishing a place in the history of the discipline is seen by the Smithsons as “entering in the debate”. In other words, to add their voice to the discussion. For that reason, their statements are not a monologue, a voice in the desert, but a dialogue with other speeches that produces an advancement in the discipline. For the Smithsons, the individual thoughts of an architect are interesting, but only as long as they are able to reply to previous voices, or be the inception of future responses. They put forward a vision of the discipline where the agent that emits the statement is important, but even more important is the act of transmission; because in that action is implicit, not only the isolation of the transmitter, but the space of the discipline. A space that is supported by the net of relations between speaker and audience. The speech of an architect makes no sense if there is not a forum of other architects that receive it. With the Smithsons, the focus is not as much in the voice as in the links that make possible the dialogue. In architecture, the designer establishes connections with previous statements and opens the door for associations to come in the future. No project emerges out of the blue.
However, in that sense of linking one´s own thoughts with the history of the discipline, The Charged Void did not suppose a new way of projecting a text, because they used this tool in earlier written works. In other essays6, the Smithsons traced relationships between their thoughts and the statements of several architects along the time. It is characteristically revealing the production of Three Generations, published in Italian Thoughts, based on a 1976 lecture by Peter in Harvard. In the text, the Smithsons establish connections between the designers of three generations of the Renaissance and three generations of the XXth century. They resemble the trajectories of buildings in both periods, connecting designs and characters along the history. The whole text is based on the idea of flow of the discussion in the discipline, observing that attitudes of one generation are also present in different periods. The fundamental question are, again, the links. Le Corbusier is viewed as an Alberti, or Francesco di Giorgio is matched with Candilis, Josic and Woods. And in the midst of this net of relations, the Smithson claim their presence as an active part of the debate, displaying some of their buildings, as interventions in the conversation. And not only the buildings are responses in the dialogue, even the famous photograph of Walter Gropius having breakfast with Ise Gropius in 1937 at their house in Lincoln, Massachussets, is displayed by the side of a portrait of Alison at breakfast in the Upper Lawn Pavillion. Every document is useful for generating the essay, connecting different personalities and varied ideas. What they called the strategy of ‘family trees’ is the main tool for the design of this text. But these family trees are no more than a variation of the idea that links are the trigger of the design.
And this approach is not only present in the design of written words, but also in the conception of buildings. The Smithson´s project for Sheffield University is an illustrative manifestation of that way of undertaking a project. Its formalization is not guided by Wittkower´s vision of Architecture. As the Smithsons claim in the report of the project “Connection is the generator of Sheffield.”7 In the site, a series of volumes are linked by decks that pulse with the transit of people. Within these corridors, the affluence of students produces an identity full of casual encounters. As Reyner Banham poses in his The New Brutalism article for The Architectural Review (December 1955), the location of the volumes compose an “apparently casual layout”, but clearly this is not a product of “unconceptual” design. Its composition is not based in the “elementary Platonic geometry”, but it is mastered by an “intuitive sense of topology”. And that concept of topology became essential for designing along the career of the Smithsons. The term makes emphasis in the relationships of entities and its structures, purposing a tour de force from the euclidean geometry in the composition of a project. For Banham, Sheffield represents “the most consistent and extreme point reached” in the “search for Une Architecture Autre”8. This idea of Topological composition was more accurately conceptualized by Alison Smithson in the Spring of 1984 with the term “Conglomerate Ordering”9. An idea that guided the work of the couple since the Sheffield project, and informed the approach to the edition of The Charged Void: Architecture.
So, the idea of linking is twofold in The Charged Void: Architecture. In the one hand, it is a tool used in the composition of the book, displaying projects whose value is not confined to themselves, but which establish connections with the discussions going on at that time. Every building is a statement. This way, The Charged Void is a monograph of the Smithsons that implies a history. As such, the book is a summary of the period. In the other hand, the concept that underlies its pages is a manifestation of the way the Smithsons designed, producing in the reader a double interpretation of the same tool both in the projects displayed and in the way they are composed. In the design of The Charged Void it is tacit a new way of operating in architecture, the linking.
The book as project. Linking
‘For us a book is a small building’ AS
The Charged Void brings with it the kind of fascination that comes with the really old whisky. The long process of ageing the golden drink is something striking in a society of fast trade, and maybe because of that, the allure is even greater. Alison started to work on the first manuscript of The Charged Void in 1974 and kept working on it until her death in 1993, when Peter took it over until its publication in 2001, adding only a few minor details. Almost thirty years of work are a witness to the importance that Alison and Peter gave to this item. Six hundred pages that could be considered as the outcome of an architectural project. As Mark Wigley considers, The Charged Void “is itself an architectural project whose polemical contribution needs to be respected and evaluated with care.”4 And in that sense, he claims that, in this project, the “agenda from the beginning” was clear: “to enter the endless collaborative debate sustained by successive generations of polemical architects operating in the dynamic space between buildings and books.”5
Following the process of the project, after setting the agenda, it would be interesting to look at the tools they used for its production. Their purpose of establishing a place in the history of the discipline is seen by the Smithsons as “entering in the debate”. In other words, to add their voice to the discussion. For that reason, their statements are not a monologue, a voice in the desert, but a dialogue with other speeches that produces an advancement in the discipline. For the Smithsons, the individual thoughts of an architect are interesting, but only as long as they are able to reply to previous voices, or be the inception of future responses. They put forward a vision of the discipline where the agent that emits the statement is important, but even more important is the act of transmission; because in that action is implicit, not only the isolation of the transmitter, but the space of the discipline. A space that is supported by the net of relations between speaker and audience. The speech of an architect makes no sense if there is not a forum of other architects that receive it. With the Smithsons, the focus is not as much in the voice as in the links that make possible the dialogue. In architecture, the designer establishes connections with previous statements and opens the door for associations to come in the future. No project emerges out of the blue.
However, in that sense of linking one´s own thoughts with the history of the discipline, The Charged Void did not suppose a new way of projecting a text, because they used this tool in earlier written works. In other essays6, the Smithsons traced relationships between their thoughts and the statements of several architects along the time. It is characteristically revealing the production of Three Generations, published in Italian Thoughts, based on a 1976 lecture by Peter in Harvard. In the text, the Smithsons establish connections between the designers of three generations of the Renaissance and three generations of the XXth century. They resemble the trajectories of buildings in both periods, connecting designs and characters along the history. The whole text is based on the idea of flow of the discussion in the discipline, observing that attitudes of one generation are also present in different periods. The fundamental question are, again, the links. Le Corbusier is viewed as an Alberti, or Francesco di Giorgio is matched with Candilis, Josic and Woods. And in the midst of this net of relations, the Smithson claim their presence as an active part of the debate, displaying some of their buildings, as interventions in the conversation. And not only the buildings are responses in the dialogue, even the famous photograph of Walter Gropius having breakfast with Ise Gropius in 1937 at their house in Lincoln, Massachussets, is displayed by the side of a portrait of Alison at breakfast in the Upper Lawn Pavillion. Every document is useful for generating the essay, connecting different personalities and varied ideas. What they called the strategy of ‘family trees’ is the main tool for the design of this text. But these family trees are no more than a variation of the idea that links are the trigger of the design.
And this approach is not only present in the design of written words, but also in the conception of buildings. The Smithson´s project for Sheffield University is an illustrative manifestation of that way of undertaking a project. Its formalization is not guided by Wittkower´s vision of Architecture. As the Smithsons claim in the report of the project “Connection is the generator of Sheffield.”7 In the site, a series of volumes are linked by decks that pulse with the transit of people. Within these corridors, the affluence of students produces an identity full of casual encounters. As Reyner Banham poses in his The New Brutalism article for The Architectural Review (December 1955), the location of the volumes compose an “apparently casual layout”, but clearly this is not a product of “unconceptual” design. Its composition is not based in the “elementary Platonic geometry”, but it is mastered by an “intuitive sense of topology”. And that concept of topology became essential for designing along the career of the Smithsons. The term makes emphasis in the relationships of entities and its structures, purposing a tour de force from the euclidean geometry in the composition of a project. For Banham, Sheffield represents “the most consistent and extreme point reached” in the “search for Une Architecture Autre”8. This idea of Topological composition was more accurately conceptualized by Alison Smithson in the Spring of 1984 with the term “Conglomerate Ordering”9. An idea that guided the work of the couple since the Sheffield project, and informed the approach to the edition of The Charged Void: Architecture.
So, the idea of linking is twofold in The Charged Void: Architecture. In the one hand, it is a tool used in the composition of the book, displaying projects whose value is not confined to themselves, but which establish connections with the discussions going on at that time. Every building is a statement. This way, The Charged Void is a monograph of the Smithsons that implies a history. As such, the book is a summary of the period. In the other hand, the concept that underlies its pages is a manifestation of the way the Smithsons designed, producing in the reader a double interpretation of the same tool both in the projects displayed and in the way they are composed. In the design of The Charged Void it is tacit a new way of operating in architecture, the linking.
Fig. 2. Fragment of ‘Dismembered typewriter’ from Paralells of Life and Art. ICA, London. 1953
Fig. 2. Fragment of ‘Dismembered typewriter’ from Paralells of Life and Art. ICA, London. 1953
The book “as found”. Fragments
‘The Diary is in this way an aspect of our belief that everything is important as indicators and/or as “fodder”; everything can be picked up and examined, turned over and thought freshly about to see if it will inform us directly of something we previously did not realise...or, simply, as in a Greek shard picked up on a classical site, enable the touch that the Greek or Sicilian slave potter put into the clay to become a fragment of tangible connection in the palm of one´s hand.’ AS in DS.
This suggestive declaration of intent in the introduction of AS in DS10 manifests the importance of the object “as found” in the architecture of the Smithsons. The couple found fascination in all the items that configure a space. For them, the stuff found in a site generates its identity. Every fragment draws the character of the place. And as such, everything is susceptible of being analysed, modified and rethought, in order to trigger a new creation. It is interesting to see The Charged Void as one more “as found” object. Sometimes we forget that the books by architects could be this tangible connections with the writer in our hands. An object that hides much more than what it shows. The Charged Void could be approached like this, as a confidential talk with the Smithsons, an intimate conversation in which they put in our hands an entire life of work.
Seeing the existing as an inspiration for design has been present in many of their projects—building and text— since the mid-1950´s. In the photographs that Nigel Henderson took of the street life in the post-war Bethnal Green11 , the Smithson discovered a source of creativity based on remainders of the Second World War, a vitality lived with minimum means. Since that time, the Smithsons approached architecture engaging the existing in order to generate the new. Since around that time, they became voracious collectors of items. Something similar to the hobby of Charles and Ray Eames— in fact, they were never shy to “publicize their affection”12 for the Californian couple— but for them, there was a subtle but important difference in their attitude. Instead of ‘collecting for collection’, the Smithson position is a ‘collecting for transformation’. The attitude ‘as found’ is directly related with the processes of creation. In AS in DS, Alison traces the experience of a trip from their London office to the Upper Lawn Pavilion in Wiltshire driving the fabled Citroën. Travelling is collecting the landscape, experiencing it in the voyageur. In that book, the description of the countryside is fractured through the use of three dots between sentences. This generates a kind of ellipsis that dissolves the continuity, an illustration of the character of this new experience. Every piece of text is a flash. The sensation is powered by a special use of the text and images in the book. Short paragraphs and Alison´s sketches—drawn during the trip— are mixed over a background of road maps that overlay the page, which is cut as the silhouette of the car. The quick graphic annotations that Alison drew in her notebook during the journey ratify the description in the broken paragraphs. Two lines that narrate the same experience. In the structure of the book, both text and graphic documents have the same value, fostering the elaboration of this “Sensibility Primer”13. Text and drawings are confused in the experience because they are all fragments of the trip. Alison was trying to reproduce a new way of experiencing, characteristic of “moving view of landscape”14. In this new sensibility, the re-composition of the fragments in the mind of the beholder is fundamental.
In that sense, the editing of The Charged Void was guided by this way of experiencing through fragments. Through its pages, the projects are narrated by means of images and text. Some projects, like the Hunstanton Secondary Modern School or the Arts Barn Building in the University of Barth15, include plenteous documentation, ranging from the first sketches to the erected building going through pictures of the construction process. However, others are just defined with a sketch, like the project for the Paolozzi Studio House in Kent or the Married Graduate Flats and Squash Courts, Queen´s College in Oxford.16 Sketches, diagrams, photos, text and details are all of the same importance; they are all fragments that make up the complete statement. And this way, the tool of ‘as found’ is incorporated in the fabric of the book. The process of selection of the documents would not be very different to that one of Benjamin´s flânerie17. But this time, the collector does not rescue the fragment from the metropolis but from the Smithsons´ Archives. Like in the German writer, once selected, the fragment is displayed with many other segments of similar nature configuring a new artefact, this time The Charged Void. Therefore, the book is composed as a collection of fragments. They applied the idea of “as found” to their own work, ‘picking it up and examining, turning it over and thinking freshly’ about it, informing a new nature. As Claude Lichtenstein and Thomas Schregenberger claim in the introduction to their book As Found, The Discovery of the Ordinary, the ‘as found’ “is an approach to design” that finds its justification on “the experience that this path (...) leads to new insights and ‘forms’.”18 The ‘as found’ is a productive attitude. It does not remain on the fascination with the ordinary as such, but it fosters the generation of the new. And as a tool, they used the ‘as found’ for designing the book.
The Charged Void can be read as a collection of fragments, placed one by the side of the other configuring small chapters, as clusters, that relate one another as parts of the new object. Looking at this fragments, one could easily evoke this classic site that Alison mentions in the introduction of AS in DS, and so, see the projects arrayed as archeological discoveries. The book is at the same time the archeological site that contains the fragments, but also, a fragment itself, an object ‘as found’, and as so, capable of generate new connections. In the hands of the reader, every project, tells him about the life of the craftsman that produced it. Every fragment narrates the history of the Smithsons. But this history is only a fragment of a larger tale, the History of Architecture, susceptible of being “picked up and examined, turned over and thought freshly about to see if it will inform us directly of something we previously did not realise...”
The book “as found”. Fragments
‘The Diary is in this way an aspect of our belief that everything is important as indicators and/or as “fodder”; everything can be picked up and examined, turned over and thought freshly about to see if it will inform us directly of something we previously did not realise...or, simply, as in a Greek shard picked up on a classical site, enable the touch that the Greek or Sicilian slave potter put into the clay to become a fragment of tangible connection in the palm of one´s hand.’ AS in DS.
This suggestive declaration of intent in the introduction of AS in DS10 manifests the importance of the object “as found” in the architecture of the Smithsons. The couple found fascination in all the items that configure a space. For them, the stuff found in a site generates its identity. Every fragment draws the character of the place. And as such, everything is susceptible of being analysed, modified and rethought, in order to trigger a new creation. It is interesting to see The Charged Void as one more “as found” object. Sometimes we forget that the books by architects could be this tangible connections with the writer in our hands. An object that hides much more than what it shows. The Charged Void could be approached like this, as a confidential talk with the Smithsons, an intimate conversation in which they put in our hands an entire life of work.
Seeing the existing as an inspiration for design has been present in many of their projects—building and text— since the mid-1950´s. In the photographs that Nigel Henderson took of the street life in the post-war Bethnal Green11 , the Smithson discovered a source of creativity based on remainders of the Second World War, a vitality lived with minimum means. Since that time, the Smithsons approached architecture engaging the existing in order to generate the new. Since around that time, they became voracious collectors of items. Something similar to the hobby of Charles and Ray Eames— in fact, they were never shy to “publicize their affection”12 for the Californian couple— but for them, there was a subtle but important difference in their attitude. Instead of ‘collecting for collection’, the Smithson position is a ‘collecting for transformation’. The attitude ‘as found’ is directly related with the processes of creation. In AS in DS, Alison traces the experience of a trip from their London office to the Upper Lawn Pavilion in Wiltshire driving the fabled Citroën. Travelling is collecting the landscape, experiencing it in the voyageur. In that book, the description of the countryside is fractured through the use of three dots between sentences. This generates a kind of ellipsis that dissolves the continuity, an illustration of the character of this new experience. Every piece of text is a flash. The sensation is powered by a special use of the text and images in the book. Short paragraphs and Alison´s sketches—drawn during the trip— are mixed over a background of road maps that overlay the page, which is cut as the silhouette of the car. The quick graphic annotations that Alison drew in her notebook during the journey ratify the description in the broken paragraphs. Two lines that narrate the same experience. In the structure of the book, both text and graphic documents have the same value, fostering the elaboration of this “Sensibility Primer”13. Text and drawings are confused in the experience because they are all fragments of the trip. Alison was trying to reproduce a new way of experiencing, characteristic of “moving view of landscape”14. In this new sensibility, the re-composition of the fragments in the mind of the beholder is fundamental.
In that sense, the editing of The Charged Void was guided by this way of experiencing through fragments. Through its pages, the projects are narrated by means of images and text. Some projects, like the Hunstanton Secondary Modern School or the Arts Barn Building in the University of Barth15, include plenteous documentation, ranging from the first sketches to the erected building going through pictures of the construction process. However, others are just defined with a sketch, like the project for the Paolozzi Studio House in Kent or the Married Graduate Flats and Squash Courts, Queen´s College in Oxford.16 Sketches, diagrams, photos, text and details are all of the same importance; they are all fragments that make up the complete statement. And this way, the tool of ‘as found’ is incorporated in the fabric of the book. The process of selection of the documents would not be very different to that one of Benjamin´s flânerie17. But this time, the collector does not rescue the fragment from the metropolis but from the Smithsons´ Archives. Like in the German writer, once selected, the fragment is displayed with many other segments of similar nature configuring a new artefact, this time The Charged Void. Therefore, the book is composed as a collection of fragments. They applied the idea of “as found” to their own work, ‘picking it up and examining, turning it over and thinking freshly’ about it, informing a new nature. As Claude Lichtenstein and Thomas Schregenberger claim in the introduction to their book As Found, The Discovery of the Ordinary, the ‘as found’ “is an approach to design” that finds its justification on “the experience that this path (...) leads to new insights and ‘forms’.”18 The ‘as found’ is a productive attitude. It does not remain on the fascination with the ordinary as such, but it fosters the generation of the new. And as a tool, they used the ‘as found’ for designing the book.
The Charged Void can be read as a collection of fragments, placed one by the side of the other configuring small chapters, as clusters, that relate one another as parts of the new object. Looking at this fragments, one could easily evoke this classic site that Alison mentions in the introduction of AS in DS, and so, see the projects arrayed as archeological discoveries. The book is at the same time the archeological site that contains the fragments, but also, a fragment itself, an object ‘as found’, and as so, capable of generate new connections. In the hands of the reader, every project, tells him about the life of the craftsman that produced it. Every fragment narrates the history of the Smithsons. But this history is only a fragment of a larger tale, the History of Architecture, susceptible of being “picked up and examined, turned over and thought freshly about to see if it will inform us directly of something we previously did not realise...”
Fig. 3. Cluster City, 1952-53
Fig. 3. Cluster City, 1952-53
The book and the reader. Conclusion
As with an old familiar album, when opening the book, the reader finds a compendium of a life of work, the compilation of projects that illustrate the history of an office. Every old photograph, every project, illustrates a statement. An album that, when perceived as a whole, makes present the atmosphere of a past. A book which is an index of ideas that framed the discussion of a time. A re•present•ation of a past of the discipline.
But these conclusions would miss the core of the argument. The tools used by Alison Smithson in the design of the book do not foster the composition of a simple monograph, nor even a historical narrative. The resource of fragments and linking try to pose a different question. The book is not about their works... The book is not about their statements... The book is not about the Smithsons; ...it is not, even, about the debates of a time. It is more about Time, about the History of Architecture, and the discipline itself. At the beginning of the book, Alison outlines a set of brief ideas called “Evolution” where she presents a kind of prelude to the future. Foreseeing what would happen with the book, she prophesies that “after the architect is dead, one receives another sort of ‘catalogue’, with every scrap of paper interpreted by historians.” This way, she turns aside their interest, not focusing on the people that see the discipline from outside—criticizing the role that, sometimes, the historian plays as observer of the discussion from without. And specifying their real target audience, she continues: “we write(...)to help architects who intend to build”; stating that “building architects ask of the detritus of a working, thinking life completely different kinds of questions that wish to receive totally different kinds of answers.”19 They write for building architects who are expected to bring new questions, not a set of tools for criticizing the text. The book presents in its pages, not buildings, but the detritus of these projects. The whole book is fragmented, because every fragment has the capacity to establish new links in the mind of the reader. These two designing tools, the link and the fragment, are aimed at helping the building architects in future generations to produce new answers to the questions they carry inside. None of the projects shown in the book is a concluded statement. There is always a door open to the possibility of posing new questions, establishing new connections.
Their agenda to enter in the history of the discipline is not an attempt to enter as a link of a chain, but as the weld that joins up each one of the links. The vision of links and fragments is essential in their conception of History of Architecture itself, because, for them, the “evolution in form-giving proceeds from an incomplete thought.”20 This incomplete thought is what constitutes the development of the discipline. As Peter described in Italian Thoughts, the incomplete thought is “the single image half understood; the thought half heard; the detail seen in passing on a site or drawing board; the detail seen in a magazine studied and reflected upon.”21 They are not talking about a logical approach—like a conscious process—, but about intuitive knowledge. The same approach to design is also present in their conception of History, the attitude “as found” covers in a similar way both the fragments of the site where they work and the fragments of their thinking. And they use the book format as a vehicle to transmit this attitude because, as they consider in Italian Thoughts, published text “...when printed become an artefact, and as a ‘wrapped gift’, remain to be discovered, unwrapped in wonder, treasured and interpreted again and again by later generations.”22 The pages are only waiting for architects with new questions; and within them, the careful reader can find “Idea-energies”23—as AS call them— that are a trigger to the creative process capable of providing an answer to these questions. The book could be seen as a grandfather to whom we go in search of advice for our lives, but who, in its knowledge, tells us a story without any apparent connexion, but one which, after being reflected upon, arises in us the impulse that solves the problem. Architecture is the production of these answers, statements accumulated along more than twenty generations; a discussion which is fed with new questions that, sometimes, find the seed of an answer in an incomplete though, in a fragment charged with energy. The resolution of the Smithsons to constitute their heritage to the history-debate of the discipline is not materialized in simply a new answer to the discussion, but in the very nature of Architecture:
‘In calling our collected works The Charged Void: Architecture, we are thinking of architecture´s capacity to charge the space around it with an energy which can join up with other energies, influence the nature of things that might come... a capacity we can feel and act upon, but cannot necessarily describe or record.’ (The Charged Void: Architecture, “Intention”)
...the very nature of the statements, the nature of the debate. A void energized with past answers, open to new questions.
The book and the reader. Conclusion
As with an old familiar album, when opening the book, the reader finds a compendium of a life of work, the compilation of projects that illustrate the history of an office. Every old photograph, every project, illustrates a statement. An album that, when perceived as a whole, makes present the atmosphere of a past. A book which is an index of ideas that framed the discussion of a time. A re•present•ation of a past of the discipline.
But these conclusions would miss the core of the argument. The tools used by Alison Smithson in the design of the book do not foster the composition of a simple monograph, nor even a historical narrative. The resource of fragments and linking try to pose a different question. The book is not about their works... The book is not about their statements... The book is not about the Smithsons; ...it is not, even, about the debates of a time. It is more about Time, about the History of Architecture, and the discipline itself. At the beginning of the book, Alison outlines a set of brief ideas called “Evolution” where she presents a kind of prelude to the future. Foreseeing what would happen with the book, she prophesies that “after the architect is dead, one receives another sort of ‘catalogue’, with every scrap of paper interpreted by historians.” This way, she turns aside their interest, not focusing on the people that see the discipline from outside—criticizing the role that, sometimes, the historian plays as observer of the discussion from without. And specifying their real target audience, she continues: “we write(...)to help architects who intend to build”; stating that “building architects ask of the detritus of a working, thinking life completely different kinds of questions that wish to receive totally different kinds of answers.”19 They write for building architects who are expected to bring new questions, not a set of tools for criticizing the text. The book presents in its pages, not buildings, but the detritus of these projects. The whole book is fragmented, because every fragment has the capacity to establish new links in the mind of the reader. These two designing tools, the link and the fragment, are aimed at helping the building architects in future generations to produce new answers to the questions they carry inside. None of the projects shown in the book is a concluded statement. There is always a door open to the possibility of posing new questions, establishing new connections.
Their agenda to enter in the history of the discipline is not an attempt to enter as a link of a chain, but as the weld that joins up each one of the links. The vision of links and fragments is essential in their conception of History of Architecture itself, because, for them, the “evolution in form-giving proceeds from an incomplete thought.”20 This incomplete thought is what constitutes the development of the discipline. As Peter described in Italian Thoughts, the incomplete thought is “the single image half understood; the thought half heard; the detail seen in passing on a site or drawing board; the detail seen in a magazine studied and reflected upon.”21 They are not talking about a logical approach—like a conscious process—, but about intuitive knowledge. The same approach to design is also present in their conception of History, the attitude “as found” covers in a similar way both the fragments of the site where they work and the fragments of their thinking. And they use the book format as a vehicle to transmit this attitude because, as they consider in Italian Thoughts, published text “...when printed become an artefact, and as a ‘wrapped gift’, remain to be discovered, unwrapped in wonder, treasured and interpreted again and again by later generations.”22 The pages are only waiting for architects with new questions; and within them, the careful reader can find “Idea-energies”23—as AS call them— that are a trigger to the creative process capable of providing an answer to these questions. The book could be seen as a grandfather to whom we go in search of advice for our lives, but who, in its knowledge, tells us a story without any apparent connexion, but one which, after being reflected upon, arises in us the impulse that solves the problem. Architecture is the production of these answers, statements accumulated along more than twenty generations; a discussion which is fed with new questions that, sometimes, find the seed of an answer in an incomplete though, in a fragment charged with energy. The resolution of the Smithsons to constitute their heritage to the history-debate of the discipline is not materialized in simply a new answer to the discussion, but in the very nature of Architecture:
‘In calling our collected works The Charged Void: Architecture, we are thinking of architecture´s capacity to charge the space around it with an energy which can join up with other energies, influence the nature of things that might come... a capacity we can feel and act upon, but cannot necessarily describe or record.’ (The Charged Void: Architecture, “Intention”)
...the very nature of the statements, the nature of the debate. A void energized with past answers, open to new questions.
1. The published books were The Charged Void: Architecture (The Monacelli Press. 2001. USA) and The Charged Void: Urbanism (The Monacelli Press. 2005. USA). 2. Smithson, A&P. The Charged Void: Architecture. The Monacelli Press. 2001. USA. p. 11. 3. Alberti, Leon Battista. The Architecture of Leon Battista Alberti Ten Books. Ed.Edward Owen. 1755. London. p 27. 4. Wigley, Mark. Alison and Peter Smithson—The Architects of The Void. In Risselada, Max(Ed.) Alison & Peter Smithson. A Critical Anthology. Ediciones Polígrafa. Barcelona. 2011. p. 414. 5. Ibid. 6. See Team 10 Primer (Architectural Design,1962), The Heroic Period of Modern Architecture (Architectural Design, Dec. 1965), Three Generations (published in Italian Thoughts, pp. 9-15. 1993. Sweden.), Changing the Art of Inhabitation (Artemis, London. 1994). 7. Smithson, A&P. The Charged Void: Architecture. The Monacelli Press. 2001. USA. p. 108. 8. The term Une Architecture Autre was first used by Banham in this article for Architectural Review. He used it in this text as analogous to Michel Tapié´s art autre, a postwar attitude anti-art and anti-classic that synthetizes authors like Pollock, Dubuffet and the Surrealist. Banham saw in the term a rejection of abstract and formally derived concepts ‘in favor of human presence, signs of life and symbols of living in the ‘mass production society’ that was the Second Machine Age.”(See Chapter 2, in Whiteley, Nigel. Banham, Historian of the Inmediate Future. The MIT Press. 2002. Cambridge.) 9. Smithson, A&P. Set of Mind, in Italian Thoughts. 1993. Sweden. p. 103.
10. Smithson, A. AS in DS. an Eye on the Road. Delft University Press, Delft, Netherlands. 1983. 11. See Walsh, Victoria. Nigel Henderson: parallel of life and art. Thames and Hudson, London. 2001. 12. To see the relationship between both pairs of architects read Colomina, Beatriz. Couplings. In Risselada, Max(Ed.) Alison & Peter Smithson. A Critical Anthology. Ediciones Polígrafa. Barcelona. 2011. p. 354-367. 13. Smithson, A. AS in DS. An Eye on the Road. Delft University Press, Delft, Netherlands. 1983, p.1. 14. Ibid., p.47. 15. Smithson, A&P. The Charged Void:Architecture. The Monacelli Press. 2001. USA. pp.40-67 and 476-483. 16. Ibid., pp.216-217 and 367. 17. See Lathouri, Marina. Frame and Fragments: Visions for the Modern City, in AA Files, No. 51. p.64. 18. Lichtenstein, Claude and Schregenberger, Thomas. As Found. The Descovery of the Ordinary. Lars Müller Publishers. Switzerland. 2001. 19. Smithson, A&P. The Charged Void: Architecture. The Monacelli Press. 2001. USA., p. 13. 20. Ibid., p. 37. 21. Smithson, A&P. Three Generations, in Italian Thoughts. 1993. Sweden., p.13. 22. Ibid., p.14. 23. Smithson, A&P. The Charged Void: Architecture. The Monacelli Press. 2001. USA., p. 37.
1. The published books were The Charged Void: Architecture (The Monacelli Press. 2001. USA) and The Charged Void: Urbanism (The Monacelli Press. 2005. USA). 2. Smithson, A&P. The Charged Void: Architecture. The Monacelli Press. 2001. USA. p. 11. 3. Alberti, Leon Battista. The Architecture of Leon Battista Alberti Ten Books. Ed.Edward Owen. 1755. London. p 27. 4. Wigley, Mark. Alison and Peter Smithson—The Architects of The Void. In Risselada, Max(Ed.) Alison & Peter Smithson. A Critical Anthology. Ediciones Polígrafa. Barcelona. 2011. p. 414. 5. Ibid. 6. See Team 10 Primer (Architectural Design,1962), The Heroic Period of Modern Architecture (Architectural Design, Dec. 1965), Three Generations (published in Italian Thoughts, pp. 9-15. 1993. Sweden.), Changing the Art of Inhabitation (Artemis, London. 1994). 7. Smithson, A&P. The Charged Void: Architecture. The Monacelli Press. 2001. USA. p. 108. 8. The term Une Architecture Autre was first used by Banham in this article for Architectural Review. He used it in this text as analogous to Michel Tapié´s art autre, a postwar attitude anti-art and anti-classic that synthetizes authors like Pollock, Dubuffet and the Surrealist. Banham saw in the term a rejection of abstract and formally derived concepts ‘in favor of human presence, signs of life and symbols of living in the ‘mass production society’ that was the Second Machine Age.”(See Chapter 2, in Whiteley, Nigel. Banham, Historian of the Inmediate Future. The MIT Press. 2002. Cambridge.) 9. Smithson, A&P. Set of Mind, in Italian Thoughts. 1993. Sweden. p. 103.
10. Smithson, A. AS in DS. an Eye on the Road. Delft University Press, Delft, Netherlands. 1983. 11. See Walsh, Victoria. Nigel Henderson: parallel of life and art. Thames and Hudson, London. 2001. 12. To see the relationship between both pairs of architects read Colomina, Beatriz. Couplings. In Risselada, Max(Ed.) Alison & Peter Smithson. A Critical Anthology. Ediciones Polígrafa. Barcelona. 2011. p. 354-367. 13. Smithson, A. AS in DS. An Eye on the Road. Delft University Press, Delft, Netherlands. 1983, p.1. 14. Ibid., p.47. 15. Smithson, A&P. The Charged Void:Architecture. The Monacelli Press. 2001. USA. pp.40-67 and 476-483. 16. Ibid., pp.216-217 and 367. 17. See Lathouri, Marina. Frame and Fragments: Visions for the Modern City, in AA Files, No. 51. p.64. 18. Lichtenstein, Claude and Schregenberger, Thomas. As Found. The Descovery of the Ordinary. Lars Müller Publishers. Switzerland. 2001. 19. Smithson, A&P. The Charged Void: Architecture. The Monacelli Press. 2001. USA., p. 13. 20. Ibid., p. 37. 21. Smithson, A&P. Three Generations, in Italian Thoughts. 1993. Sweden., p.13. 22. Ibid., p.14. 23. Smithson, A&P. The Charged Void: Architecture. The Monacelli Press. 2001. USA., p. 37.