The work of architecture in the age of reproduction.

The degree to which reconstructions of buildings is seen as either sentimental kitsch or authentic rebuilding depends largely on the perceived value of the original structure.

Last week I heard Jamie Foubert make an interesting presentation (at this event) regarding resurrected buildings. I was reminded of it in connection with the current, rather odd, campaign to reconstruct the Festival of Britain Skylon.

Resurrections of buildings can take a number of different forms. Sometimes they are the realisation of something that was never actually completed to start with, like Charles Rennie Macintosh’s House for an Art Lover, built some 90 years after he designed it.

Sometimes they are actually the original article but displaced from its original context, such as the reconstruction of London Bridge in Lake Havasu City, Arizona.

Sometimes they are precise reconstructions of a building that was demolished such as Mies van der Rohe’s German Pavilion in Barcelona.

All these re-buildings raise interesting questions about authenticity. Are they all, to some extent, fakes? In art authenticity historically lies within the mark made by the author. Can a building, which is never the product of a single author and can take years, even decades, to construct ever be simply a fake?

For Modernism reconstruction is always a problematic act. Architecture, it assumes, should be an immutable product of its time. It derives its authenticity through its very newness. In his talk Foubert attempted to re-categorise his examples into authentic and in-authentic examples of reconstruction based on familiar modernist tropes: honesty of construction, appropriateness to function, proximity to original site etc.

So, the architects of the Barcelona Pavilion reconstruction would no doubt claim authenticity of detail and location to justify their recreation although, technically, Arizona’s London Bridge could make an equally legitimate claim. In this instance, dislocation in space is assumed to be more inauthentic than dislocation in time.

This dislocation in time has another effect, which is to enshrine the buildings perceived meaning within that of a particular era. The Skylon, for instance, is still synonymous with the Festival of Britain and the post war Labour government that sponsored it. Reconstructing the Skylon, it is suggested here, is inappropriate because its absence is a more eloquent testament to the reasons it was removed. It's political meaning would be effaced through reconstruction.

Reconstructions are also interesting then because it is in their absence, rather than their presence, that buildings seem to gain a purity of meaning. Jonathon Hill has argued that the Barcelona Pavilion achieved its iconic status precisely because it was dismantled. This is not simply because it became more poignant but because it could only be experienced through the rarified medium of photographs and architectural history. It was never sullied through (mis)use. To connect back to the bastardised Walter Benjamin title of this post, it retained its aura. Buildings that disappear are like rock stars that die young: they leave a beautiful corpse. They never grow fat or old or lose their edge.

Free from contamination by the present, the Skylon still represents the possibilities of British Modernism and post war socialism. Whether you want to recreate it - re-released and digitally re-mastered – or celebrate its absence, Skylon’s meaning seems clearer than if it were still here today.

Talking Mies

Russel Fernandez very kindly sent me this. It's a collection of conversations with Mies van der Rohe dating from the late '50's to the mid '60's - i.e. his well established American years. Mies (as I feel obliged to call him) is in predictably opaque form on the whole. His answers have a stately, elegant emptiness and a refusal to be drawn on straightforward issues. There is a gathering cloud over some of his comments as he seems to detect the decline of his influence and the coming of more extravagant and expressionist buildings, but mostly he takes a fairly lofty disinterest in issues such as legacy or influence.

I was surprised by one of his answers though. This suggested that Mies' architectural approach was formed somewhat abstractly, through theory and through reading. "My architectural philosophy came out of reading philosophical books" he states at one point, contradicting much of what I thought I knew about Mies, which is that he learned architecture as a primarily practical art from his father, who was a stonemason (or so the myth goes) and that he had little time for theory.

Perhaps I was wrong - or at least a little ignorant - but Mies' architecture has aways seemed to shun words, bringing out a kind of awed silence in critics and onlookers, encouraged by Mies himself who also said: "I don't want to be interesting. I want to be good". Goodness, or quality perhaps, is assumed here to be something that eludes verbal description. Interest is equated with novelty and the superficial interest of the eye-catching rather than the deep structure of the profound. To silence one's critics is normally to trump their mere words with innefable art. But Mies admits that words proceeded, even defined, his structures.

Mies' interest in theory proceeding design seems extremely unfashionable today when architecture has put its faith in flamboyant self expression and personal signature. Mies allows that actually building buildings might have tested his theories, maybe extended them, but certainly not disproved them. It also contradicts his own teaching methods which focused rigorously on technique and technical skill and very little, if at all, on theory.

When I studied architecture in the early 1990's Mies was still - just about - held in speechless awe. Now, no one seems to talk about him at all. His work once spawned a thousand imitators but now seems impossible to replicate and the emphatic clarity of his towers has become literally unfashionable. A home grown piece of Mies on London's Pentonville Road has recently been re-clad by architects AHMM (you can see it literally being covered over here). It was always one of my favourites because it was such a perfect homage, so contentedly unoriginal. AHMM's scheme is like a cover version but with the same backing track, replacing Mies' grave voice with an altogether jollier one. Perhaps the distant rumble of theory still echoes from the structure though.

Crisis? What crisis?

The latest, sixth, volume of architecture ‘boogazine’ Verb begins with a familiar kind of declaration: “Faced with unprecedented political, social, economic, cultural and environmental challenges Verb Crisis recognises that architecture cannot carry on as usual.”

It’s easy to affect a jaded cynicism when faced with this kind of rhetoric. After all, haven’t we always been faced with unprecedented challenges? When did anyone ever say: “Don’t worry, the world’s fine as it is, lets all go back to bed.” But Verb backs its claim up, eschewing the usual suspects and focusing instead on some genuinely thoughtful and provocative work.

The book is divided into three fairly self-explanatory sections: Places, Positions and Projects. It focuses on a few key cities: Dubai, Madrid, Detroit and Tijuana. Detroit in particular is fascinating and represents the diametrically opposite problem to that of Dubai. Instead of relentlessly spiralling levels of development there is depopulation and an emptying out of the city. New York based architects Interboro Partner’s contribution not only documents this process but finds, hidden below the surface, a new kind of development occurring there.

They describe the process of what they call ‘blots’, newly vacant plots of land where the houses have been knocked down. These blots have then been absorbed (mostly through legitimate purchases) into neighbouring properties, becoming home to garden overspill, additional parking, recreation areas and, in some cases, complex architectural extensions. As the city empties little bits of ad-hoc DIY urbanism grow back between the cracks. As Interboro say, this is important “however unspectacular”. Theirs is not strictly a proposal, more a process of observing and, to borrow a phrase, learning from what is going on.

This combination of empirical research and actually looking at the city to see what it is like - as opposed to wishing it was something else – is a strong theme in all the work included. There is a valuable sense here of architects actually engaging with the processes by which cities develop, and with the needs of their inhabitants. A healthy criticism of some of the more banal thinking within the profession comes across in most of the contributions.

Geographer and architect John May describes the Staten Island landfill site of Fresh Kills, recently the subject of a high profile architectural competition to turn it’s vast and festering piles of trash into a new park. May raises pertinent and uncomfortable questions about architecture’s complicity in such boosterism, and its role in supplying the glossy images to go along such venal developments. He also exposes the hollow posturing of the profession, the endless posing as ‘radical’ or ‘cutting edge’ by an architectural avant-garde long since removed from any sense of social purpose.

The most impressive project included is perhaps also the most modest. Elemental Architecture’s social housing scheme in Chile allows residents to expand and adapt their homes over time. This approach allows more homes to be included simply by building less of each one and letting the residents fill in the gaps when they can afford to do so. The photographs of this project show the spaces filling up with lean to’s, diy bay windows and bolted on extensions. It reminded me of Le Corbusier’s housing scheme at Pessac after the residents had added window boxes and pitched roofs, except here the adaptations are a deliberate and positive part of the story.

Verb Crisis is deliberately un-glossy. It comes in a brown plastic wipe clean cover, like a welding manual. It is simply and straightforwardly laid out. But, if you ever wondered whether there were any architects left with any sense of critical or social engagement, or an interest in the wider political and economic realities of their practice then Verb is worth a look.