Dependency Culture

Here, for anyone who missed it in Icon, is my review of Jeremy Till's book Architecture Depends.

Jeremy Till has a neat spatial metaphor for the aloofness of architects from society. The School of Architecture at Sheffield University (where Till was until recently Dean) is located in the Arts Tower, a twenty-storey block that sits on a hill overlooking the city. The tower uses a paternoster lift where open compartments move up and down in a continuous non-stop loop. Jeremy Till suggests that architecture is like the occupants of this building: removed from the life of the city in an ivory tower, constantly moving but going nowhere.

I read this section of Architecture Depends whilst on a train to Sheffield to give a lecture in the Arts Tower. This is the kind of bizarre coincidental relationship between theory and the everyday that I imagine Jeremy Till would enjoy. His book contains a number of similar anecdotal stories that run like a parallel narrative alongside the main more academic text. These stories - frequently amusing and often self-deprecating - highlight the discrepancy between architecture conceived as a perfect, timeless object by architects, and architecture as part of the messy reality of our lives as experienced by everyone else.

This is Till's central thesis: that architecture constantly resists its own dependency on the outside world. Buildings have lives beyond their designer’s control. Not only are they formed out of a mess of compromises (despite the supposedly clarity of the RIBA Plan of Work) but they are also subject to constant change once built.

They get lived in, added to, refurbished, neglected and sometimes demolished. Their official function - office, house, museum - is disturbed by an infinite number of smaller unofficial ones. People write on them, fall in love in them, break up outside them and ignore them. Till contends that architectural theory actively resists these contingencies, preferring to believe in various versions of the autonomy of architecture and the architect instead.

My only criticism of this well written and entertaining book is that in order to discredit the figure of the autonomous architect, Jeremy Till has to make us believe in him in the first place. Much of the book is taken up with the construction of this straw man. Fragments of architectural theory from figures as diverse as Vitruvius, Le Corbusier, Ruskin and Sigfried Gideon are lifted out of history and corralled into this enterprise.

Yet I suspect these architectural myths are considerably less stable than Till allows. In a sense he is (over) stating a truism. The Barcelona Pavilion may have been conceived as having little to do with the everyday but that doesn't stop it from being rained on. Buildings simply ARE part of the everyday whether architects like it or not. The question then becomes how different are they when this fact is foregrounded in the design process?

The one concrete (well, straw) example Till offers here is ironically enough his own house. The self commissioned private house is one where the architect has the greatest control and autonomy. The radical qualities of his own design - the straw bale construction and 'messy' planning for instance - depend on exactly the kind of precise formal control that he admonishes architects for craving. If this is the everyday, then it is a highly refined version. If this is mess then it is artful dishevelment.

A meta theory of the everyday is an inherently risky business. In some ways it attempts to wrestle control back from all that contingency. So whilst this book hits most of its targets and successfully satirises the self-image of the architect, Architecture Depends depends itself on a model of architecture that is to a large extent wishful thinking.

Rough Poetry

Yesterday I had the opportunity to make a quick visit to Park Hill in Sheffield. Much has been written about this building lately and it was the subject of a recent BBC documentary following the story of its rebuilding by Urban Splash. I've been to Sheffield a few times and gazed up at its impressive bulk from the town below but I've never, somewhat shamefully, been up to look at it closely before.

Several things struck me when I did go and see it. The first is just how impressive a building it is. The concrete frame is indeed a beautiful thing - whether squinting or not - and its rhythm of single and double height openings has a tectonic vivaciousness which puts it way ahead of most comparable buildings of its period. Or any other period come to that.

Secondly, its extraordinary formal ruthlessness in maintaining a single roof datum while stepping down a steep hill throws up all sorts of vertiginously exciting spatial moments. I particularly like the way that its gargantuan scale at the bottom becomes almost intimate and traditional at the top of the hill. The concrete frame - a thing of stark abstract beauty when seen from afar - becomes a richly textured and endearingly rugged object close up.



One can see clearly how the twisting and turning plan form was intended to create partly enclosed public gardens between the blocks although these have an inevitably somewhat desolate quality today. The gaps between these areas, crossed by high level walkways, have an undeniable spatial thrill as the spaces tumble down the hill and the frame marches relentlessly on. Musically this building has been compared to the stark futurism of Sheffield's electronic pop, from Human League to warp, although looking at it now it seems to have more in common with the Krautrock of Can. Its relentless metronomic repetition and thumping low end register reveal subtle modulations the more you look at it, like staring into a very deep river.

Given all that the state of the place at the moment is deeply ambiguous. The decision to rip out not only the internal flats but the external brick and window infill panels might be justifiable on any number of less well realised housing schemes but seems particularly odd here. The different shades of stock brick give the block its distinctive Brutalist/Late Corbusien quality. Like Corbusier's Unite, the building offers an intruiging collision of machine like precision and cultivated rusticity.



Most odd of all though is the half-built half-demolished aspect of the building at present. With a bunch of earth movers - possibly pointlessly - moving muck around and the tallest section of concrete frame standing gaunt and exposed, it's possible to imagine that Park Hill is in the process of being built rather than re-built. In this state it has a bittersweet quality, both brave new world and failed vision of the future at one and the same time.

Not that this failure is necessarily a fault of the building iself. It seems, in principle, an eminently liveable place, a machine for living in the best possible sense. It's often said that buildings look best when still under construction. Certainly that's true when you see the exposed shuttered concrete bones of contemporary office buildings soon to be clad in jaunty, bar code facades. But Park Hill is heading the opposite way. Not for ever for sure, and hopefully not for that much longer, but its concrete frame whilst undeniably striking and strange with the sun shining through it ultimately looks a lot better with people living there.

Suburban Frontyards International

Not the title of my forthcoming album - although if I had one it probably would be - but a fabulous flickr set. I'm particularly taken with the deadpan joys of this one.

In the absence of original post material here are some other links:

Zone Styx Travelcaard, an excellent new (mainly) music blog that I initially thought might be this man, although I've now been reliably informed is not. Good recent posts on old faves Swans and a kind of continuing conversation with Kpunk on nostalgia. I'm planning a future post (sic) that takes some of the same themes but in an architectural direction...nothing to do with grainy jpegs on blogs and everything to do with the wholly pejorative use of the term within architectural debate. It's always worth trying to pick apart something so regularly deployed as an insult.

Mammoth, a blog devoted to BIG urban, infrastructure and architectural issues.

The pithily titled Cosmopolitan Scum is shaping up well, even though he has a fairly caustic pop at the generally excellent Bad British Architecture.

Finally a sad fairwell to one of my favourites blogs. Emmy Hennings/Anwyn Crawford has not only stopped writing Aloof From Inspiration but expelled it out of the air shift and into deep space. Deleted the entire thing in other words, hence no link, as it ain't there no more. I shall miss it.