Photo by Marshall Astor
So Ingerid calls asking for a text. Did I attend the Culture of Risk seminar? Had I heard Cecil Balmond speak about his work, about how he had suggested that we had reached the end of universality in architecture? Would I care to comment on this? If we’ve reached the end of universality, then what’s left? How can we speak with authority about architecture if what is left if all is detail and particularity?
I see the problem. Architecture, and especially in its public discourse, has long been founded on the idea that any building has the potential to rise above the particularities of its condition and to partake more generally of some kind of universality. As a public art, architecture has nurtured the perception that it is the practice of big ideas rather than small, and the awesome responsibility for the architect working within the public sphere has been mitigated by the tacit acceptance that whatever the gritty realities of the built work, the work will appeal to the human spirit in as great a portion as it does the private gain.
All the same, the notion that architecture has moved past general ideas at all is relatively common these days. Architects are more apt to be heard talking about LEGO and shipping containers than ideal forms or truth in construction. Indeed, recent architectural thought is passionately un-universal, fixed instead upon the particulars of its willfully idiosyncratic design processes. In an environment in which unique selling points are a necessary component of the marketing of architecture, difference and individuality are more highly prized than the search for commonality. As the practice of architecture continues its long drift into the market-driven rather than the social realm, it has become more dependent on the individuality of brand than on any sense of a shared sense of purpose. Let the citizen beware.
Really, though, this is hardly new. My first thought on hearing a statement about the end of universality was approximately: Really? Still over? As a student in the eighties, I was challenged by the likes of Peter Eisenman who insisted that we reject any ‘totalicizing’ discourse and investigate the potential of terms such as the ‘aleatory’ and ‘secondarity’. Bernard Tschumi suggested we design a space that would enable murder of, for example, a tedious wife. John Hejduk was patiently drafting, sharpening his lead after each stroke, a house for ‘an inhabitant who refused to participate’. The modernist notion that architecture could somehow bring mankind into a universal consonance with the world was emphatically derided. Dead as a doornail. Embarrassingsly so.
Why should this have been? Why would this have happened? It was part and parcel of the postmodernist approach: that the desire to work through architecture towards universal ideas was at best a politics of repression intended to strip the individual of its real struggle to find itself, and at worst a power trip on the part of the architects who sought to impose it. Speaking of the universal in architecture was tantamount to social control, and the real job of architects should be to discover and promote not top-down programs of sameness but rather the disruptive and specific ideas of difference and uniqueness.
Later, though, I discovered, almost as a nostalgic reverie, the powerful poetry of modernist universality. As it appeared in the work and writing of Le Corbusier, the pursuit of universality attained a complex and often tragic face. In his view, the development of modern society was dangerously derailed, propelled by an unimaginable technical process, but blindly following a outdated and ill-suited conception of architecture. A true understanding of technology (and therefore architecture), he argued, could not only right the wrongs of technical progress but in fact lift mankind to another, higher level, in which we might see that all of our artifice was really an extension of the natural world, and that its proper application could show us all the more vividly our place in the universe and the existential meaning that we might there discover. He believed, and he practiced, that science would raise the clumsy solipsism of a stylistic architecture to the realm of natural creation and beyond, and bring humanity back into communion with both itself and its environment.
Scoff if you will. But a quest such as this for something universal was less an appeal to the politics of power than it was the embrace of the power of human artifice to expand and ameliorate the world rather than to simply consume and destroy it. Yes, you can live you life without any ideals at all. But would you want to? Whatever the potential of approaching universals in architecture, part of the problem has been the perception that raising the question of universality is somehow a straightjacket on creative thought, or an empty lip service to hollow thought. When people speak deridingly of ‘universals in architecture’, there is the implication that this means the necessity of representing universal values in the built work. Obviously, gravitation is still a universal phenomenon in architecture (for those who would dispute this, I would second Alan Sokal's jab that I have a balcony from which you can jump). But it is mostly true that architect’s are not particularly interested in expressing this condition in architecture. Sometimes it seems that being ‘honest’ with natural materials is what is meant. At this level, yes, universals are hardly cutting edge.
But I can think of any number of conditions in architecture today whose power and pervasiveness will qualify them, if not for the category of universal, then at least the status of very big particulars. What about money, and the challenge that architects have to speak truth to power? How about our increasing dependence on communication technologies and the resultant hollowing out of public space? And what of the ability of architecture to impart to our lives a sense of meaning that transcends seven or eight decades of killing time, with a little shopping thrown in to keep us from thinking too much about it?
And there is one pressing issue that redefines what the ‘universal’ means, and gives it a striking immediacy. There is probably no other idea in currency today whose power and pervasiveness can match the so-called Green Agenda. In the space of ten or so years, the focus on the environmental impact of cities and buildings has been transformed from a hippie hang up to a hip fixation. Plainly, the wisdom of rethinking architecture in order to reduce its waste of energy is undeniable; but how should we account for it becoming so fashionable as well? The hard work of mutual responsibility seems an unlikely candidate for fashionista. But it is nonetheless a fact that the styling of energy efficiency in architecture is a positive development, bringing a sorely needed corrective to an industry resistant to change. In this sense, becoming fashionable can be equated with meeting widespread adoption. All the same oddness of a fashionable green agenda should alert us to the fact that it has become an aesthetic. The phenomenon of “greenwashing”— or simply announcing a green agenda without following through on it— has become very common. Here, the appearance of environmental soundness is little more than a ploy to distract attention from the real ‘green’ project: making money.
Everybody is talking about it (which might qualify it at least for this year’s universal), but it seems that the architectural response is as much greenwashing as it is good ideas. But what about the real agenda? In some estimates, buildings account for half of the carbon emissions that fuel climate change. Obviously, the importance of understanding the way in which architecture relates to its context is essential. But the scope of that context has changed. Whereas the notion of contextuality in architecture has traditionally been concerned with the middle scale of its landscape, whether urban or otherwise, it is becoming clear that this context has been enlarged to the global level. Whereas the early 20th century saw in internationalism an open and nearly limitless domain, we are beginning to understand the planet as a closed system of equilibrium. And the ultimate consequence of this change for architects is not only that they develop a better command of energy efficiency but that they can develop a meaningful symbolic language within it.
The Nobel prize winning chemist Paul Crutzen, noting that the influence of human behavior on the planet as a whole has reached a tipping point wherein humanity has changed from being an inhabitant of the natural world to becoming a powerful agent in its operation, suggests that we have entered a new geological era (along the lines of the Jurassic) called the Anthropocene (from the Greek anthropos: human). The Anthropocene is characterized by the increasing prevalence of the artificially composed world within the natural global system that is our evolutionary heritage. Suddenly, we can see the degree to which we as humans have transformed the system in which we live.
It is significant that it is in times of perceived crisis that the search for powerful universals emerges. As Le Corbusier struggled with the cultural impact of mechanization so are we beginning to see the contours of a disturbance in our environment. Still, though, architecture seems to be casted about at piecemeal strategies for limiting our influence, but remaining essentially silent about the greater issues that this realization might produce. Clearly, we need to address the broad cultural consequences of globalism— whether at the level of climate change or in the political configuration of identities and personal freedoms— and to advance a body of architectural thought that not only addresses the particulars of the problem but also challenges itself to provide conceptual models for the significance of architecture in a global system, now as much artificial as it is natural. The globe is becoming a piece of architecture.
These can be times of change, rich with promise for innovation in architectural thought. But if we are to fulfill this promise, it seems to me that we would be better off reigniting a debate on universals, rather than confidently dismissing them as ‘constructions’. Indeed, constructions they are: and so is architecture. And the end of universality? Well, it looks more like the endgame to me. And if you’ve ever played chess, you know that this is where it all really starts to get interesting.
(2008-05-15)