4 minute read
on site review 43: time
a fragmentary introduction
stephanie white
This issue started by thinking about architecture through the Annales School lens of history: the longue durée, cultural history factored by land, geology and climate (where structural questions arise about architecture’s longevity – is it all temporary?); histoire événementielle, a series of events (in architecture particular buildings have long been the subject of most critique – how long does this famous building actually live for?); and the formation, development and demise of social movements – a middle ground between spectacular events and millennial histories: the long era of modernism, for example.
This last one I am most interested in terms of the instant recognisability of late colonial architecture. I was reading about E R Braithwaite and his 1959 autobiographical novel To Sir, with Love, and found he had attended Queen’s College in Georgetown, Guyana, then still a British colony. And there was the building: a white, brise-soleiled, low horizontal stamp of indubitable tropical colonialism.
Most empires start to have qualms at a certain point; their end beckons, and there are various remedial attempts to re-frame the colonial enterprise. The high point of British Empire was achieved towards the end of the reign of Queen Victoria, but it had started four hundred years earlier with Queen Elizabeth I, covering civil war, the industrial revolution and the rise of global capitalism. WWI, The Great War, dealt imperial hubris a death blow. By the end of the Second World War the process of literal decolonisation had begun, resulting in bloody wars of resistance: resistance to colonial status in the colonies, and resistance to this resistance on the part of Great Britain, eventually re-naming its empire The Commonwealth, and tying negotiations for independence to the Queen and to resource extraction, the main reason for having colonies in the first place.
What exactly is modernity in the context of de-colonisation? It became an imperative in Africa and the Caribbean for public housing, schools, administration buildings – a sort of cheap, egalitarian architecture for institutions; a casting-off of hierarchies, whether colonial or social or ancient. Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry were the exemplars of this kind of postwar architecture: rather than the bludgeoning architecture of empire, they turned to the environment: weather, climate, materials. The AA had a department of Tropical Studies within it, revisited at the 2023 Venice Biennale. Kenneth Frampton’s critical regionalism of the 1980s continued this direction. Admittedly influenced by the Frankfurt School and its critique of capitalism and globalisation, he proposed an architecture of place, culture, climate: more direct responses to locale than theoretical approaches to society, politics and capital economic contingency. An architecture of place, culture and climate sits in the Annales sense of a longue durée, where architecture concerns itself with material fundamentals that transcend both events and social movements, no matter how new or old they might be.
Now, forty years since critical regionalism was floated, it seems to divert architecture’s possible response to division and strife. We cannot ignore the state of the world in 2023. We can no longer rely on climate as a touchstone. The neo-colonialism of trade pacts and treaties work much as did the old colonialism. Any idea of a social contract is near extinction.
What is the architecture for this?
At this point, just as my fingertips were touching what I thought was critically momentous, all the critically momentous essays for this issue of On Site review came in and I got totally distracted as I read, edited and conducted much, no doubt annoying, correspondence with the contributors. Now that the layout is done, I return to my introduction to this issue.
Time, being a concept deep and fathomless, has in this issue become largely a discussion of the temporary: whether it is achieved or resisted, whether it is a valid direction for architecture or simply cheap. Is time an eternal background factor to all we do, or is it a series of events we can control? There is something for every position here. Is architecture itself a series of events over a long history of civilisation? or is architecture a rather monotonous background to other more vital forms of civility and incivility? or, is architecture the face of social and political movements and revolutions: an evolutionary flag?
These are not rhetorical questions, rather they are topics addressed in this issue. Each contributor has sent us a very specific discussion, either of specific buildings or building systems. Collectively they speak about architecture’s place in a series of endings, from climate to political systems, from cultural hegemonies to a misplaced trust in globalisation.
Stephanie White is the editor of On Site review.
