Architectural manifesto – personal proclamation
A Narrow Road to the South*
INTUITION
SOCIETY
SITE
A Narrow Road to the South* Architectural manifesto – personal proclamation *The title is a play on Matsuo Bashō’s ‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North’ and my own name which means ‘Son of the South’ in the original Hebrew Benjamin Forster 626842 ABPL90117_2014_SM2 21st Century Architecture tutor: Robert Ventresca University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
“Architects don’t invent anything, they transform reality.” Álvaro Siza
Architecture starts with a blank page; but no project’s canvas is without texture. That texture is ‘program’ (purpose) and site, client and circumstance, society and surrounds. The architect is alchemist mixing magically the ingredients they have to hand in an effort to transmute gold. My ingredients include keyframe, silhouette, timing, gesture, overlap & weight (KEYFRAME - a key pose or moment, SILHOUETTE - the ability to read the outline of a gesture against a background, TIMING - the spacing of keyframes in time so that an object has the illusion of weight, GESTURE - the attitude of a keyframe so that we intuitively know what
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it represents, OVERLAP - the running of one keyframe into another piecemeal so that not everything arrives at once, WEIGHT - the illusion of mass and volume). Skills learnt from a decade of animating; acting by keyframe. The veracity of which relies both on the technical and aesthetic. And so my architecture unfolds as narrative, sometimes disjointed sometimes sequential. This is my starting position in the profession but says nothing about where I’m going. That will depend on the teachers I encounter, the circumstances I’m surrounded by, and whatever power I can muster to project myself into the profession.
THIS IS THE ARCHITECTURE OF MY EXPERIENCE. 4
“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.� Albert Einstein
My architectural journey is mysterious. Both Einstein and Newton acknowledged the power of dreams in their processes. Freud and Jung walked into the land of the unconscious at the turn of the 20th century; a land that for millennia the shamans and mystics of the world have been mapping, and began curing the incurable. But we live in an age of the conscious mind; explication, analysis, diagram, justification are all demanded of us. Were architects ever islands of silence in the cacophony of the rational world? Perhaps not, but their art is mute. A building makes no noise
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and yet is inhabited by all the noises and smells of the world. It’s meanings are poetic, unspoken. Not all answers are found in the reductive land of the computer equation, or in the contemporary parlance of architecture; the generative algorithm. Mutability is not something that springs to mind when considering architectural outcomes. There is an implicit expectation that the built will last forever. However experience and collective memory teach us that change is wrought both in sudden and unexpected circumstance and through the inexorably erosive powers of time. We believe we have history, personal and cultural, and future. We feel we live in a
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measurable slip-stream of time and space. But at any instant we only know what surrounds us in that moment. Fihi ma fihi - it is what it is. A notion our thinking mind struggles with - so we oscillate mentally between a sense of time and the now. Architecture exists in both space and time and becomes a locus for this ambiguity. Some buildings reflect an historic past, some a radical future and some the present. Ambiguity is something we must accept. The architectural alchemist must intuitively grasp the threads of this ambiguity and from them create form.
I CALL THIS THE ARCHITECTURE OF SPACE & TIME. 7
Architecture steps into a complex current of memory and place materialising built form. It is an incredibly precious, delicate, beautiful art, the practice of which is littered with the dead skeletons of failure and promiscuities of success. People are precious about the places they inhabit for reasons that are entirely explicable. Home is where the heart is i.e. home leads the heart, not the intellect. And yet, as architects we willingly tangle ourselves in intellectual knots: arguing syntax, obfuscating continuously, inventing esoteric terminology, rejoicing in new technologies, all too often in a language that alienates. If we spend the little time we have barking up trees in the forest, we will lose sight of what really matters. People remember 8
good architecture as they remember a good book. It changes the way they look at the world. Good books are enjoyable and give pleasure to the reader in many ways; stimulating ideas, moral introspection, dramatic events. A good book sits on the shelf forever to be revisited. Good architecture should be as simple as a good book.
I CALL THIS OCCAM’S ARCHITECTURE.
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“Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together. There it begins.� Mies Van Der Rohe
The perfection of the simple can ennoble it above and beyond the ordinary. But it is no easy task to do something simply and extremely well. To work in this way one must understand the tools and materials to hand with total confidence. This takes both time, patience and an excellent teachers. Maturity is not just taught, it is experienced. When something has the ring of truth, all recognise it; an exact joint between timber rafter and beam, a brass handle turned just so, the rise and run of a staircase perfectly calculated, a lintel just deep enough to hold a vase. A thousand details await perfecting.
I CALL THIS THE ARCHITECTURE OF 10,000 HOURS 10
The wheels of change return us repeatedly to ideas that have been explored by past thinkers. We don’t need to break new ground, only better understand the territory that surrounds us. Contemporary society would have architects present themselves as avant garde in an effort to distinguish themselves and gain traction in the commercial marketplace. Film critics make poor filmmakers but are an intrinsic part of the machine that promotes Hollywood’s films in an effort to maximise their profits. Theirs is a secondary industry upon which the primary now relies for promotion and profit. The architecture industry is little different: beware the leeches. Architects must step outside the mainstream of self promotion, woolly criticism and 11
hyperinflation. Rampant commercialism has led to a deadness in contemporary society that we see reflected in every so called ‘architecturally-designed’ development. These are not ‘developments’ we see littering our landscapes but cash crops built by snake oil salesmen. Every architect has the possibility of pursuing something sincere. Peace of mind is found in the pursuit of the meaningful.
I CALL THIS THE ARCHITECTURE OF HAPPINESS.
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“The city was castle-like, compact, dense, multilayered, like the edifices of Piranesi. Red brick predominated — it signified civilization — and, on the other side of the river, wilderness began. He marched quickly; his companions, a he and a she, could hardly keep up. And suddenly he realised how abstraction changes into reality: the spicy scents from stores, an enticing vapor from passed-by kitchens, huge flitches of hams, taverns full of wine drinkers, oh, to be thus restored to the senses, only that and nothing else.” Czesław Miłosz
Without people there would be no architecture. Architecture is at the service of people. What best serves the one does not serve the whole. Commercial interests, philosophic interests, environmental interests do not appear ready partners in the 21st century. In every newspaper and their online equivalents we witness conflicting ideologies. As architects we cannot blinker ourselves to the political, social and environmental issues that surround us. We must actively engage and sympathise with what confronts our society and the people in it, making individual contributions as we can. Architecture cannot be aloof to the world, it is of the world and of the people; individuals one and all as they are, not as we imagine them to be.
I CALL THIS ARCHITECTURE FOR PEOPLE.
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REAL PEOPLE. 14
It is not enough for architecture to shelter, not enough for architecture to pass residential code, not enough for architecture to come in on budget, not enough for architecture to meet a green star rating, not enough for architecture to give credence to a building’s aesthetic. Architecture must navigate these prescribed territories and emerge with its own agenda. Architecture must be meaningful to people. It must be a place of ‘potential’ thought and action. An architect can plan neither explicitly. There is no equation that explains leading the heart. We must unlock our intuitions and brave the unknown in order to achieve architecture. Architects cannot escape their own subconscious, its existence must be acknowledged. Architecture is the art of storytelling in the built environment and stories are the currency of the world.
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Architect’s stories are told in the spaces they design. My intuition tells me that light, volume, proportion, colour, texture, materiality, the tangible qualities of an environment, are critical. They must be acknowledged, studied and imbibed. BIM, pre-visualisation, rationalisation, presentation, et cetera are nothing but servants to these greater forces. Saul Bellow’s barking canine in The Dean’s December is overheard by Corde who imagines the barking as a plea: “For God’s sake, open the universe a little more!” We must push against the frontiers to increase the sum of what is possible. Not reduce it.
I CALL THIS THE ARCHITECTURE OF INNER FRONTIERS. 16
All illustrations and photography in this manifesto are my own. Š Benjamin Forster 2014