Lovely, but how practical?
In a recent article, the futurist David Lindell explored the idea of the auto industry becoming more like the airline industry -- two global corporations producing essentially identical transportation solutions (can you tell if you're traveling in a Boeing or an Airbus?) designed for efficiency and convenience, and not personal expression.
Goodbye Nobe GT100, you sexy, impractical, unique, unstandard, car! Hello to a world divided by the Honda Accord or the Toyota Camri (and can you tell now if you're traveling in one or the other without looking at the steering wheel logo?).
It's a curious idea. How much do we really care what kind of Uber we get into, as long as it's clean, comfortable, and gets us there as cheaply as possible, just like an airplane? Is the eco-fun-style cachet of owning a Nobe on the wane? Only the wealthiest strive for airplane ownership, and even then the choices are practical--range, comfort, size, and cost, not exterior aesthetics. We common air travelers chose our tickets on the same basis. I would be amazed to meet an economy-class flyer complaining about how the boring the 320 looked on the outside. It gets the job done well, and cheaply.
How about a similar solution for architecture? Only two global corporations producing homes, offices, factories, all to one most-efficient, most-comfortable, and most economic designs? Keeps you warm, out of the rain, places to sleep, eat, socialize, wash and shit. Aren't these the same needs as travelers? If met, would we really complain that our houses are boring?
You could say that Internationalism and other movements were a flirtation with this idea, but that practically speaking, such global uniformity would be inappropriate for the built environment. There are simply too many different local considerations. And we like the local differences.
But there is a curious contrast between architecture and aircraft or car design. Passenger comfort is a major design concern for both cars and airplanes, while aesthetics are the issue that are dispoable. In architectural design, the aesthetics are everything, while occupant use or comfort are a relatively unimportant secondary consideration.
And how much time do we spend in an airplane or in cars compared to our homes, offices or workplaces?
I've just finished william j. r. curtis's definitive, excellent, erudite and comprehensive 736-page long study titled modern architecture (yes, the all-lowercase is a thing). I learned that modern architecture is, apparently, "the unique spark of individual artistic personality," as each great architect is "obsessed with the problem of defining an architectural language appropriate to industrialized society." In summary, the greats -- Le Corbusier, Mies van Der Rohe, Walter Gropius, had great architectural-artistic-lingustic answers to these burning questions. The rest, to lesser degrees.
Buildings are aesthetic statements. Fine. But.
What we don't find are goals such as "addressing the evolving practical needs of common humanity in an industrialized society." Apparently, this--improving the quality of indoor human life--would not be a notable achievement.
Buildngs are not places where we eat, sleep, rest, talk, wash, work, think, argue, store things, etc. etc. That's not part of their design brief.
Next up in American Airlines Business Class: resolved integration of Post-modernist tropes in the overhead bins.
Perhaps such lesser practical goals are considered implicit within the achievement of the higher artistic goals. Some known architects such as Adolf Loos did strive to make his buildings livable. Perhaps many more unknown architects and developers and contractors did and do, quietly, while aiming for status in the public arena on the terms of artistic statement.
The trouble is the evidence speaks otherwise, as the vast majority of modern buildings consist of architectural style, economy, and profit for the builder, rarely the best use of the dwellers.
Just consider the glass door. You know, the one you can't find the handle on. Or that you try to open out, when it only swings in. Or that you walk into not seeing it because you're distracted. Or that you don't want to touch because the greasy finger prints all over it. Or that the birds smack into and kill themselves. Or are so heavy you need a linebacker to help open it.
But the zoomy space-age aesthetic of that glass door! We really can't do better?
Making a building "work" in all its fine details and requirements remains a relatively mean goal with little underlying incentive. It doesn't produce fame. It probably costs money. Times will change anyway. I don't hear much complaining except from fringe cranks like me. This could be a side effect of our capitalist culture, that profit comes before other considerations in the company-client relationship. And yet Socialist or Statist political system lead to no better architectural results, and often worse, as economy, efficiency and the power of bureaucracy seem to deaden design even more.
So we come to expect glass doors in office buildings, and laugh at the idea of a press release about prettier overhead bins on aircraft.
Modern architecture prompts our pretensions, ennobling them, forgetting our bodies, or core needs at the base of Maslow's pyramid, and in the process of adulating architecture that doesn't care about insulation, normalizes it.
“How could you find that which my brightest and bravest could not?” asked the King.
“I don’t know. I only knew that you were thirsty,” the fool replied.
I envision the design of the built environment by holy fools, who know only to respond to human need, both big and small, and simple and contradictory. There can be no one building design for we do so much more in our environments than get from here to there. But there can be an admission of this complexity and that the primary role of the architect is to address those myriad needs, not discard them as secondary to his or her own aesthetic statement.
My aesthetic statement may well be that cute little electric Nobe GT100 for my wife, for her needs are to get to and from work as efficiently as possible, while experiencing the great joy of turning heads and creating smiles on every mile.
But then we'll look inside and find no place for a cell phone or coffee cup.... hmmm. That might be a deal breaker.... let's not be miserable to look good, as in architecture.
Comments