Architects and theorists gathered in Paris to discuss the current state of architecture. Globalisation in the form of cyber-culture was the main topic of conversation, writes Michael Nurok
If a bomb had gone off in the Palais de Chaillot last week, architecture’s past, present and future would have ceased to exist. Rarely have the doyens of any one discipline gathered in such mass as during the ninth and penultimate of the annual Any conferences: Anymore.
The conferences were established to bring together a hybrid of contemporary theorists and practitioners to discuss the current state of architecture. And a contemporary moment it was, featuring the who’s who of the discipline: architects included Peter Eisenman, Greg Lynn, Bernard Tschumi, Arata Isozaki, Anthony Vidler, Rem Koolhaas and Mark Goulthorpe, and among the theorists were Elizabeth Grosz, Rosalind Krauss, Saskia Sassen, and Mark Taylor, to name only a few.
One couldn’t think of a better place to contemplate this century than at the Palais facing the Eiffel Tower and its electronic signboard counting down the days to the millennium. Paris, the city of the 19th century, poised in a reflexive gesture to the future.
The three days were divided into sessions where invited speakers addressed issues of Anymore. Anymore theory? Anymore context? Anymore architecture? Anymore technology? Anymore mores? Perhaps the biggest question was how to make sense of such a spectacular array of not-always related ideas.
To understand the conference one needs to return to Paris and the symbolic moment of May 1968. At the time, political discontent with a conservative government was the motivation for a popular “revolution” where all forms of authority were challenged, thereby bringing Paris to a halt. Ripple effects were felt around the world, and with this spirit was exported “French theory” which had served as a critical and oppositional foundation for the revolt.
This theory was taken up by an architectural avant garde who interrogated the role of authority in architecture and used these critical ideas to inspire their work. At that time, such “postmodern” architects and their ideas were marginalised within the academy. But, Mark Taylor insisted, these same figures have now become central. The problem is that the political, economic and social power landscape of thirty years ago – where the “French theory” found clear adversaries – has radically changed.
The feeling at the conference was that our moment is characterised by globalisation – virtual reality as a cultural condition. Opposition was easier to understand at a time when nation-states were all powerful. But as the recent intervention in Kosovo demonstrates, issues like individual rights now subsume the autonomy of the nation- state. Economic power is now invested in trans-national flows. As Saskia Sassen said, “We are facing a much more sophisticated mode of empire.”
All good and well except that we have very little theory to understand just what globalisation is, and even fewer sociological tools to give meaning to such a complex system. Rosalind Krauss looked at ways that artists have tried to resist the principal vehicle of globalisation – cyber culture, a state in which everything is packaged as entertainment.
In doing so she lauded South Africa’s William Kentridge and his efforts to use line drawings and animation, thereby embracing the lowest possible end of the technical spectrum and resisting technophonic euphoria.
Peter Eisenman seemed to agree with Krauss in his bid to avoid making buildings that amount to “theme parks”.” But Eisenman insisted, “No client will hire an architect to produce a critical project. Clients aren’t interested in any form of ideology except perhaps their own.” He cited one of his projects which gives the appearance of enclosing a central space, but which actually exists as a series of layers – no enclosure. The experience being effectively divided from the appearance. Eisenman claimed that if the client had known what his building was “about” they would have never accepted it.
But looking at his building and other curvy “organic” architecture like it one questions to what degree these architects are really breaking from cyber-culture.
Virtually all of the work presented was computer-inspired. Eisenman himself quoted Fredric Jameson as arguing that computation in its complexity creates new forms of nature which save “the natural” from the domination of the machine.
It doesn’t seem a long stretch from here to the view that globalisation and capitalism are in fact liberating in that they give individuals the freedom to make choices from a wider variety of products. An idea of consumption as oppositional that Krauss characterised as “interesting for about a minute-and-a-half”.
But not all agreed with her. Greg Lynn echoed Eisenman in questioning whether through cyber-culture, media and commerce are not becoming more artistic than art? An idea which seemed to sit comfortably among the younger generation of architects, who were – according to Any director Cynthia Davidson – setting a “generational debate”.
Calling it a debate was excessive. It felt more like a murmur of discontent. Privately, young architects expressed frustration with the old guard who effectively control the current architecture scene. And to a degree this was evidenced. At times it felt like the more illustrious architects were arguing using the authority of their position without backing up their claims in ways they expected of their less established colleagues.
But overemphasising this divide would be extreme and work like Lynn’s or Mark Goulthorpe’s, which critically engage modern technology, was universally applauded. Lynn noted that 45% of single- family United States houses are built by non-architects using computers – a fact that “architects don’t want to digest”. He added, “Much of this discussion is academic in the worst sense in that it has already been decided for us.”
So yes, computers are inextricable from architecture – but whether their sexy electronic generated images are buildable is an entirely different question, to which the answer is all too often: no. An exception is Goulthorpe’s work which turns digital images directly into constructional specifications using a hybrid method created by a team of mathematicians, engineers, and theorists.
Goulthorpe will be discussing his work in Cape Town later this month.
The closing session degenerated into a conversation on ethics in architecture. Some, like Anthony Vidler, were reluctant to engage ethics, claiming that they are indistinguishable from political and social questions which we don’t have adequate conceptual tools to address in our current state. To highlight just this, Lynn noted that the contemporary aesthetics of ethics is minimalism – less costs more.
But these contradictions did not stop French organiser Jean-Louis Cohen from relating ethics in architecture to state practices like housing.
One couldn’t help but think of South Africa when Elizabeth Grosz responded that all cultural production comes from energy above and beyond “subsistence” and therefore issues such as housing are critical to architecture.
She went on to add that only when subsistence is addressed can we revel in the “superfluous” – the word Franco Purini used to characterise architecture, and Grosz to name cultural production.
So where are we with respect to architecture at the millennium? Any founder Davidson concluded that we are experiencing a crisis of renaming. We badly need ways of defining and understanding our current condition. Perhaps this lack of specificity is why Mies van der Rohe was continually invoked. Is more, less? Is less, more? Or is it simply that less is not any more?