I read somewhere that architects build nothing, instead that they create drawings and models towards selling a dream.
Once sold, that dream becomes the problem of tradesmen. They in turn interpret and transform those dreams into something practical, and thereby something the architect cannot understand.
Architecture sits in the window of marketing and looks out at the trade of making. Imagining a room is nothing like standing in it, or anything like building it.
I think it's time the core of the profession got out from behind that window. It needs a better starting point than dreams, or even in the hands that build. It needs to begin with an understanding of what it's like to stand in the room that's built.
Mies van der Rohe's career epitomizes this issue. He began his career as a tradesman--a stone mason--and never studied architecture in a university. Drafting for another architect, then on his own, his early work is traditional and conventional. Then Mies's designs became highly conceptual. Some of them were not buildable -- towers of glass and steel that the engineers of the day shook their head at. Others that were built were not entirely livable. His Tugendhat house was "a showpiece, not a home" said one critic. (Two details: the curved walls in the main space didn't allow its owners to hang any pictures, and the dining table was secured to the floor, and not moveable). He sited the famous Farnsworth house on a river's flood plane, apparently suggesting that when it did flood, Farnsworth could get to her house by canoe.
These are precisely Miesean dreams turned real, with all the problems that ensue when fantasy encounters reality.
Both the Tugendhat and Farnsworth houses are held up as "modernist masterpieces" -- successes by the standards of the the industry, the critics, and even the people with money who pay for such things.
I love art. But I don't want to live in it. A surreal Dali landscape is fascinating. But please don't let me fall into that universe. Art is for visiting, and craft for living.
Mies understood how to build with his hands, and thereby had some idea of the importance of function in tools, in what tools produce, and the fundamental role of tools in human life. But he apparently had little to no sympathy with the people who bought or used his tools. What did he feel when he stood in the rooms he designed? I don't believe he ever lived in one. He was a visitor to them. Like Stanley Kubrick late in his career, was Mies playing an fundamental joke on the world -- creating spaces for the human body and mind that denied the human body and celebrated only the mind?
Like star-bellied Sneeches, we are told the Farnsworth house is a modenist masterpiece, and so we enjoy it. We are happy to have the privilege of working in a skyscraper with glass doors, no matter how many times we smack our noses on them. We gladly bathe in bathrooms full of glass, glorious light, and the neighbors' eyes, and feel provincial in our desire for curtains. Modernist masterpiece aesthetics feel right, but they don't feel good.
In what buildings, then, are we allowed to feel good?
Architects should begin not in aesthetics, but in sociology and psychology. They should dream of environments that are true tools for living, in the way human beings live in their bodies and minds, and not just in their dreams.
They should sit and watch people live and work. They should see what people can't see themselves about their habits, their preferences, their annoyances. And they should then design to make life a bit easier, a bit more beautiful.
I have yet to come across any particular praise for a building or home that is exceptional for its intuitiveness, usefulness, and beauty. I'm sure this underground exists, and I'll find it eventually. But the profession as a whole won't strive towards these goals until they are rewarded and applauded over and above artistic, personal aesthetic expression, and intellectual exploration in the mainstream.
Can the architect of empathy sell the dream of beauty and usefulness over the heads of the academic taste makers? Can they hand dreams to tradesmen towards buildings that are truly enjoyable to live in?
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