being ornamental

[I would, as ever, earnestly love to have your feedback, thoughts and counter-theologies]

[Apologies:
- This is a completely unbloggable piece of writing, if you would prefer it as a pdf do email me and I can offer it in a more intuitive format.
- The sketchbook cuttings with which I break up this gargantuan column of text are unrelated to adjacent bits of writing.
- I coin phrases, frequently without justification or explanation. This is the most frequent criticism I recieve, along with long sentences, failed syllogisms and generally erratic clauses.. So to try to preempt that coining complaints: Religiose and religione are pejorative to describe the attitude and faith of the self-righteous, 'religion' would also cover the damage done that I wish to convey, but it comes with too much baggage. Nuditism, differs from nudism as scientism differs from science, it is explicitly a belief in the saving power of the thing. Aedicule is not my coinage, but a real word applied to architecture by Summerson to speak of the phenomenon of the miniature. Angelological, also a real word, describing the study of angels.]





Being Ornamental: On the motive forces of an ornamental world view and why we disornament

“Lack of Ornament is sign of spiritual strength” (Loos, p21)

Prompted by the enduring criminalisation of ornament, this essay would like to explore ornament's presuppositions in the hope of arriving at such an alternative as might render ornament possible, meaningful and delightful. It intends to speak of the noumenal/phenomenal dualism, which ultimately precludes ornament, as a dualism begetting and begotten by a solipsistic, disembodied and religiose mode of being towards reality: a mode emerging subtly in the work of Ruskin, to a clarity in Semper and triumphalistically in Loos. Analogically, in this dualism, ornament is the optimistic veil of clothing over the naked body of a meaningless reality. Because these three writers employ clothing metaphors, we will speak a little regarding clothes and disrobement's implications for ornament. Finally, drawing on Summerson and Heidegger from this semester's reading, the essay hopes to offer for ornament an antidotal mode of being which is intersubjective, embodied and hedonistic, seen in the play of a dolls house as a ready-to-hand aedicule.

Concerning the Truth problem of ornament, if the answer to Pilate's question “What is truth?”(John 18:38 ESV) is “to say of what is that it is”(Aristotle (Metaphysics 1011b25)), we are left then to ask, what is? And to what 'is' should architecture be true? The problem we make for ourselves is illustrated in the castigation of Ruskin's 'supposed honesty' (Davies, p85) on the basis that Gothic's carved leaves are 'not real leaves'.(Davies, p85) This highlights something of the problem in the modern conception of that 'real' regarding which we are obliged to be honest. For the 'reality' which the modernist defends is here assaulted by no mere foliated dishonesty but an affront to the foundational truth upon which he bases his hope: 'truth to materials' is all when the material is the only ground for truth following the divinisation of a unified system of natural causes. I would contrast this with the real of an allusive universe, wherein reality is found to be a 'this' which is really about 'that'. In such an existence it would be entirely legitimate, and indeed true, to ornament in speaking of what is: that is, the parabolic God, who is there. I am speaking simplistically, but I hope I can draw us out first to the changed 'real' which has occluded our ornamenting, and second drawing us on whither our stone leaves.

I intend to write as academically as I can find the footnotes for, but equally personally, there is something in ornament's person-ality which forgives and requires an appeal to discover, in architecture, those elements which are, in Alexander's terms “alive in themselves...connected to us...personal” (Alexander, p308). Further, by way of apology, arguing through allegory especially in an area so potentially fraught, subjective and emotive as nudity and shame is a risk, but one which seemed a gauntlet run consistent to meet Loos' polemic with polemic by.

If a battle(Taylor, p108) for ornament was being fought at the turn of the twentieth century, the war, I believe, had already been lost. The landscape of available vocabulary and the evidence of any validating demonstration that might have been brought to ornament's defence had already been eroded.

Francis Schaeffer has fashioned some conceptual constructions to make sense of the shift which I will borrow and I will presume on his argumentation somewhat. It interests me less the case he makes for Modernism's origins in the Enlightenment's origins in the Renaissance, which is made by many, but rather the mechanism for its evolution. Schaeffer observes the birth of autonomous man through the expression of a reality read in the dichotomy Nature-and-Grace, where the Grace of heavenly things is the 'Upper Storey' and Nature is those bodily, earthly things in the 'Lower Storey'.(Schaeffer, p16 ) This is a familiar neo-Platonic dualism, but rendered helpfully in a language that is less static than a body/spirit duality. His storeys allow for a progression of concepts to pass into and out of the sacred over time.

The act of divorcing these two, Nature and Grace, is an act of authorship, of writing reality as if from outside, usurping the happy authorial relationship Grace had had with Nature which sustained their meaningful integration. Further, the autonomy to elect what exactly to put in these storeys is inherently unstable, with Cartesian doubt and logical positivism among the few tools in autonomy's epistemological toolbox (Tinker & Tinker, p202). Accordingly the Lower Storey degenerates, mechanistically, to an utter determinism. Taylor speaks of an 'intensification, almost exacerbation,' (Taylor, p3) of entrenching mechanisms of Modernism's critical competences and logic. Concurrently, the Upper Storey of ideals and meaning-making mutates to 'Freedom' following the death of God. Even then it struggles against a rising tide of united machinery which is absorbing everything once considered sacred. The unity desired downstairs is exclusive by definition and totalising in its ambition: the particulars of mechanics insatiably consume the fleeting Grace above them.

This does not happen all at once, there is a generational and geographical migration of this dualism and its effects, but, more importantly for this study, there is a migration across disciplines working its way outwards to the slower moving disciplines, in a manner alluded to by Evans, who proposes that “it is not unlikely that harmonic theory passed into architecture as an evacuee rather than as a coloniser.”(Evans, p265) Harmonic theory had pretended authority to define beauty in music by inalienable laws, ratios and mystique, and this indivisibly singular assurance was the composer's confidence. When harmony was exposed as both more complex and less mysterious, we observe the migration of whole-number legitimating mechanisms: we see failed ideals in a flight from a rationality which is ironing out the superstitious glitches of music's upper storey into architecture's, for a time.

Schaeffer identifies the 19th century realisation of the vanity of the project to unify knowledge in this manner:(Schaeffer, p46) this Lower Storey with all of its might of mechanised industry and scientism had not arrived at an ideal, but rather a unified and total pessimism. The chasm to the upper storey had only grown. It now manifested a 'Line of Despair'. The answer here, in both Christian and Secular Existentialism, is a 'Leap of Faith', whereby one resigns one's rationality in order to retain rationalism. A non-rational upper storey is manufactured, untouchably aloof from the demands of the machine below. We do so irrationally, and without thought to consequence because “man as man is dead.”(Schaeffer, p47) Into this non-rational Upper Storey we can store all the faith and fragile fineries that were under threat, for a time.

In using 'upper storey', 'leap of faith' and 'line of despair', I am deferring to this construction, which, for the tidy topology of its diagrammatic reduction of philosophical evolution, appeals for an application in the question of ornament, stowed, safely as it is, in the Upper Storey. Ornament flees hence because, within modernity, it will not fit our systems of knowing. It is dead weight in the machine for living in that we have constructed, and so we must move it to the upper storey to fill the vacuum up there.

The makeshift and unstable resolution to the dichotomy of nature and grace has far-reaching effects. Of chief interest to us is the notion that the instability of this dichotomy precipitates various defence and coping mechanisms which manifest themselves in the detail and debate of ornament. Firstly, in order to legitimise the dichotomy, art and/or ornament within the upper storey becomes sacred in and of itself, so to spiritualise the dispirited man. Secondly, in order to defend itself from the lower storey, art/ornament becomes spectacle, so by sensation to affect the desensitised man. And thirdly, in order to appease both warring factions, ornament is wilfully compromised through an explanatory language of clothing.

Ornament as Sacred: this is Art for Art's sake in the domain of ornament. It is a faith in pure ideal against that age of mechanical reproduction going on full steam downstairs. As Benjamin observes: “art reacted with the doctrine of l'art pour l'art, that is, with a theology of art...'pure' art, which ... denied any social function of art.”(Benjamin, p218) Ornament, in this way, becomes the object of our hope, a mysterious cultic trinket rendered in a sentimental style, which we hope, inexplicably, will save us, and will give, to our building, meaning.

Ornament as Spectacle: an imposed illusion on an epic scale, a decadent and dictatorial substitute for a former ornament. Rather as war, in Benjamin's terms, “supplies artistic gratification of sense perception,” (Benjamin, p235) so ornament is mere affect: a complicity in a Babel project, writ large and defended frankly. Spectacular ornament is the estimation of sensation above any slow, subtle speaking of love, which is surprisingly defended by Moussavi who notes that “ornamental mass movements in a stadium “bestow form to a given matter,' these buildings produce affects that seem to grow directly from matter itself. ... overcom[ing] the need to 'communicate' through a common language.”(Moussavi, p7) Ornament, for her,“is the figure that emerges from the material substrate, the expression of embedded forces”(Moussavi, p8) The use of a passive 'emerge' is indicative of a faith in impersonal, or apparently impersonal, forces, and the ambition to overcome 'communication' is reminiscent of exactly the destruction of language(Debord, Thesis 192) which Debord damns in his Society of Spectacle.

If the sacred and the spectacular are the modes of ornament after the upper storey leap, how is this reconciled to the lower storey? By what unifying picture can one explain the need of these things? Through what allegory can we make this known? I would argue that the metaphor of clothing employed by Ruskin, Semper and Loos, displays the depth and breadth of widespread acceptance of this radically dualised world emerging at their moment in history. Clothes serve as a picture of the freely chosen personal which adorns a given body; they are the demountable image of a thing. Clothing as a metaphor is not self-evidently legitimate and it carries with it assumptions of a dis-integrated world.

Ruskin's considerable opus presents us with a certain contradiction regarding ornament-as-integral or ornament-as-applied. This is illuminated in Chatterjee's reading of Ruskin, particularly with reference to his prescriptions regarding restoration. My hypothesis would venture that a younger Ruskin speaks critically of the ornament-as-detached-from-social-core, any alternative to which he is later at a loss to provide philosophical means to enable and so endorses a totally compromised restoration-as-veneer. In doing so, he exposes his deeper conviction as to the centre of architectural meaning, in what constitutes a long crisis of faith for him, a crisis which, I will argue, corresponds to Schaeffer's line of despair and the death of man.

For the notion of Ruskin as no mere revivalist in his concept of the value of Gothic I am indebted to Hardman who establishes two categories in Ruskin's architectural vision, that of 'Primary' and 'Secondary' architecture, where, "Secondary architecture … is imported and propagandistic … superimposed by imperial requirements … pseudo-transcendentalist rather than truly mythical or realist… it is a merely imaginary aesthesis … that exists in vacuo … its hypothesised population, undifferentiated or stereotyped..."(Hardman, p192) and, "Primary architecture … is rooted in landscape and vernacular traditions. It exists in perpetuity … it is reconciled to the accidents of its own material, not offering to ‘defy’ the fallen nature of the world and its inhabitants."(Hardman, p193) The Primary is the architecture Ruskin would like to believe in, one which romantically, and against his deeper assumptions, he seeks to promote.

Chatterjee expounds the contradiction in Ruskin, first by establishing the manner in which Ruskin conceives a building as a person, “endowed with spirit”(Swenarton via Chatterjee, p3) and “expressing personality”(Swenarton, via Chatterjee, p10), where ornament is its “bodily expression of thought”(Ruskin via Chatterjee p3), and crucially that can “die”(Ruskin via Chatterjee, p3) and it is “impossible ... to raise that dead.”(Ruskin via Chatterjee, p3) In this little handful of slightly strained and contextless quotations we can derive, firstly, Ruskin's abandonment of a resurrection faith, which is a resignation to Schaeffer's death of man, but much more importantly, we see the sentiment that buildings 'live' and, Chatterjee expands, that their life consists in those externalities of ornament and façade and so dies architecture in the decay and disruption of surface rather than by any structural failure: “The whole finish of the work was in the half inch that is gone.”(Ruskin via Chatterjee, p4) The prominence of façade in a Ruskinian view of architecture, or at the very least, among the Ruskinianisms that he, even unwittingly, inspired, is corroborated by the much attested power of his illustrations to inspire, which far outweighed the substance of his social argument in the minds of much of his readership.

However, it is in Ruskin's friendship and intellectual exchange with Carlyle's Transcendentalism, that we find, perhaps, the firmest grounds to speak both of Ruskin's shifting spiritual convictions and of the theoretical framework which explicitly informed his theory of ornament. Hardman summarises the Ruskin's shift thus:“urgently seeking a viable alternative to ... medieval Christian humanism, ... in Dante's response to Aristotle ... he knew this would be inadequate for the harsher world of Darwinism and aggressive imperialism”(Hardman, p191) Darwinism was, for Ruskin, an imperialism laying siege to, and scaling the walls of, his upper storey.

In their letters, Carlyle speaks of casting off his former faith as “Hebrew old clothes” and within this frame Ruskin speaks of his faith as “fluttering in weak rags,”(Ruskin, Works 36 p115) under the torment of those “Geologists' ... dreadful hammers”. Surveying their correspondence, Cate, sees at last a Ruskin emerging, “closer to the Carlylean mould and farther removed from the faith of his fathers"(Cate, p14) Furthermore, that in Ruskin, "the gulf between his rational and his emotional approaches to the world widened, rather than narrowed, in the course of his life.."(Cate, p58)

Carlyle's intriguing book Sartor Resartus, is suggested by Chatterjee to have been formative in Ruskin's adoption of a clothing frame of ornament. We see in this book a theory, an ontology, considered through clothes. Carlyle claims:“Clothes have made Men of us” (Carlyle, Sartor Resartus) where otherwise we would merely be, “To the eye of vulgar Logic ... a Soul, a Spirit, and divine Apparition.”(Carlyle) and cements the dichotomy thus: “his Body and the Cloth are the site and materials whereon and whereby his beautified edifice, of a Person, is to be built.”(Carlyle) And so then, within this construction, “The first purpose of Clothes, as our Professor imagines, was not warmth or decency, but ornament.”(Carlyle)

Within this framework, Ruskin's understanding of ornament as the location of both the soul and the person of a building in the manner of clothing, is made clear. In attempting this mystical division Ruskin uses categories of labelling which fit snugly into Schaeffer's storeys, he goes so far as to label “higher” the elements of ornamentation over against the technical and construction “lower” elements which it masked.(Chatterjee, p5)

Semper, one among a number of 19th Century theoreticians seeking a legitimising origin to the practice of architecture, a seeking which I would posit is for them a search for a cosmological argument for the new God upstairs. Alluding to the source of ornament, Semper's identifies a 'Hearth' at the centre of ancient architectures, however, notably, he proceeds to marginalise this theoretical centre as he progresses into his analogy of ornament as dressing; going so far as to claim that cultural evolution necessarily entails such a separation of hearth from decoration. From the outset Semper presumes that decoration impersonally evolves through uncritical adoption of dead forms inherited without communicated meaning. This is the justification made for his particular anthropological method: “Hellenic culture could only have arisen on the humus of many past traditions long since dead and decayed and from alien motives brought over from without and no longer intelligible in their original meaning.”(Semper, p101) This theory of Hellenic evolution foreshadows the widespread default to spectacle following a disbelief in language's capacity to carry meaning. His method of navigating history is one that relies on the inspired autonomous individual, in this case Semper, to be our guide and interpreter of these mysteries, the high priest who makes plain and makes relevant the decoration in which his audience and client are to be bedecked.

Using this method, he argues that architecture begins with the hearth,“Throughout all phases of society the hearth formed that sacred focus around which the whole took order and shape. ... It is the first and most important, the moral element of architecture.”(Semper, p102) This hearth is not simply a form of fire at the geometric centre of a construction, but rather the sacred non-negotiable which defines a culture: “[architecture should] also make the form and character of its creations dependent on the ideas embodied in them...”(Semper, p102) it argues that craft follows concept, and that the way we world-build is derived from the unifying world-view that we have. But here ends any examination into that relationship, indeed, in speaking of Ruskin's hopes (Mallgrave, p188-9) for such authenticity, Semper protests:“How unfair it is to reproach our architects for lack of invention, when there is nowhere a new concept of universal historical importance being pursued with force and vigour. First provide some new ideas; then we architects shall find architectural expression for them. Until then, we have to be content with the old.”(Semper, p284)

What follows in Semper's writing on architecture is a substantial emphasis on 'dressing the body's nakedness'(Semper, p254), its analogies and applications. Explicitly praising the Greek thus: “Among these old traditional, formal elements of Hellenic art, none is so profoundly important as the principle of dressing and incrustation. It dominated all of pre-Hellenic art and by no means diminished or languished in the Greek style, but survived highly spiritualised, serving beauty and form alone, more in a structural-symbolic than in a structural-technical sense.”(Semper, p248) This spiritualisation of the ornamental process aims thus: “the material disappears behind the radiant polychrome dressing and becomes pure form.”(Mallgrave, p39)

The interaction a young Loos made with Semper in his 1898 article The Principle of Dressing(Loos via Risselada, p122), where by referencing Semper's argument for the derivation and legitimation of ornament from ancient wall-hangings, Loos reveals his roots and true affections. It becomes clear that where he fails in practice to embody the polemic of Ornament and Crime, it is where he has not fully realised the opposition of the faith he has in an evolution of culture towards the mechanically hygienically determined and the hope and memory he still holds that architecture should yet be delightedly evocative. From his practice it could be argued that the interiorising of ornament in work of Loos' practice reflects the privatisation of faith which is embarrassed at its irrational affection for ornament. The embarrassment stems from a flaw in Loos dichotomy: that is too absolute to attain. This is shown in the contrast he makes between two contemporary attitudes towards ornament.

Firstly: “The aristocrat...knows that the hours in which they work are their holy hours. The revolutionary would go to them and say 'It is all nonsense.' Just as he would pull down the little old woman from the wayside crucifix and tell her: 'There is no God.' The atheist among the aristocrats, on the other hand, raises his hat when he passes a church.” which is an excellent preaching against hypocrisy even if it assumes no 'holy time' and only power play. However, he does not escape religione as this critique leaves a religiose gap to fill.

Secondly, to fill the void left by the revolutionary, Loos establishes his own notion of the Upper story, assuming that this dualism is the mode by which primitive people engaged ornament, and that we in our current condition merely exchange in the content of the non-rational upper storey, Loos substitutes Art for art's sake as the opiate joy“I tolerate ornaments on my own body, when they constitute the joy of my fellow men. Then they are my joy too... for they all have no other way of attaining the high points of their existence. We have art, which has taken the place of ornament.”(Loos, p24)

I have attempted to parallel Ruskin, Semper and Loos' dichotomous language regarding ornament to illustrate how the comparison of architectural ornament with clothing assumes and exacerbates the divided self. I will now argue, within their clothing language, that this dualism is always power-play trading in shame, in a way much similar to Scheler's discussion of shame and the dualised man: “the essential characteristic of shame [is] conflict between man's spiritual powers and his servitude to his body. [Scheler] speaks of a bridge or passage between these two orders of being that is essential for man in order for him to be human. This is shame rooted in the nature of man.”(Lynd, p262 Note:22d)

To the extent that this dualism is pursued it observably leads to a nudistic mode of being and building, that is, by shame, to the morally, emotionally, or politically motivated abandonment of ornament and clothes. And this is no mere strip tease, but a moral crusade driven by the religiose zeal that lies at the heart of modernism: the division of the personhood of a person from the parts of their being is a reductive exercise of power, observable across imperial political powers responsible for the absurdity and depravity of much 20th Century social architecture.

“...modern man uses his clothes as a mask. So immensely strong is his individuality that it can no longer be expressed in articles of clothing. Freedom from ornament is a sign of spiritual strength.”(Loos, p24)

Emphatically what I am arguing for is not new clothes but a change of metaphor. However, I will indulge the sentiment as far as it helps explain the whither of our stone leaves. Clothing in this case is that expression of freedom and personhood which has been put into the upper storey for safekeeping from the rationalistic determinism of our body beneath.

In exploring the disornamenting disrobement parallel, it seems right to cite first, the early 20th Century German Free Body culture, particularly Pudor, an exact contemporary of Loos and author of Nacktkultur and then the slightly later Suren of Man and Sunshine. Clothes for Pudor are a weapon by which“the aristocracy of the "upper 10,000" held the nation down”(Pudor, p122 via Williams, p26 ) paralleling Loos' political advocacy for “...those trades that groan under the tyranny of the ornamentalist...”(Loos, p23) For both Loos and Pudor man is primarily a spirit, they share a gnostic vision of future hope and a platonic contempt for the material, sensual and embodied. Consistent with Corbusier, these advocates of Modernism, “sensuality and sensible experience are inferior to rationality” (Taylor, p108) and even, for Suren, that, “the body itself was a completely asexual object: yet another machine for living in.”(Worpole, p44-45)

Each of these nuditisms aggressively attempts to celebrate a crucially atrophied notion of what it means to be human. Each shaming, with a frequently racist contempt, the supposed unevolved primitivism of the dressed and embodied. This because the total person is fragmented and accordingly the parts war against one another, body against clothes, function against delight. This idealistic iconoclasm is an over-realised, future-focused construction latent still, I would venture, in the joyless minimalism of heaven-is-elsewhere warehouse churches.

Secondly, and a little later, but notably related, I would raise the nudity as Kundera presents it in his Unbearable Lightness of Being. Indulge me in an extended quotation:“Marching naked in formation with a group of naked women was for Tereza the quintessential image of horror. When she lived at home, her mother forbade her to lock the bathroom door. What she meant by her injunction was: your body is just like all other bodies; you have no right to shame; you have no reason to hide something that exists in millions of identical copies. ... Since childhood, Tereza had seen nudity as a sign of concentration camp uniformity, a sign of humiliation. There was yet another horror at the very beginning of the dream: all the women had to sing! Not only were their bodies identical, identically worthless, not only were their bodies mere resounding soulless mechanisms – the women rejoiced over it! Theirs was a joyful solidarity of the soulless. The women were pleased at having thrown off the ballast of the soul – that laughable conceit, that illusion of uniqueness – to become one like the next.”(Kundera, p54)

This imposed division of body from individuality is not the idealism of the former, Nacktkultur, rather, is the fallout from that. The consequences of that past idea, visited on the third and fourth generations. If the former was proactive, this is the reactive inheritance of learnt soullessness, which trades in shame as compensation. Visible, architecturally, I would argue, in second generation, disornamented, monolithic, social housing, in which the shame of the depersonalised is imposed, with a policed joyfulness, on their children: who no longer have any right to shame.

Thirdly, and briefly, in this little naked triptych, I will invoke Wink's non-violent reading of the Sermon on the Mount: “And if anyone would sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well.”(Matthew 5:40 ESV) Wink, writing in Engaging the Powers, contextualises this action as one of naked resistance:“Only the poorest of the poor would have nothing but a garment to give as collateral for a loan”(Wink, p169) And in this action. “The creditor is revealed to be not a legitimate moneylender but a party to the reduction of an entire social class to landlessness, destitution and abasement.”(Wink, p179)

If Loos' is proactive idealism and Tereza's mother's is reactive brokeness, then this is a subversive use of disrobement, which still uses confrontational shaming (because in Judaism the shame was the beholder's rather than the naked's(Wink, p179)), which still employs a division of body and person, but in this case it is a critique of the dualism. It states that by taking away my ornament the empire is doing violence to the integrity of my whole person. The aim of such a protest, in Wink's excellent words, is to “depotentiate” the Powers that Be “by deft lampooning... burlesquing its pretensions to justice”(Wink, p179)

Architecturally and immediately we could look at OccupyLondon, rendered in an architecture of bare essentials and set against systemic injustice, they are actively engaging the present, and vulnerably. Vulnerability is the key, I believe, because Loos similarly hopes to critique, by sardonic lampooning, the aristocratic powers who have so debased building by the unjust employment of a subjugated workforce towards a Secondary architecture, but Loos critiques unvulnerably, he was not stripped naked, he bore no cross.

The clothing metaphor, with the epistemological arrogance that it entails in authoring a division of reality between 'function' and the 'frivolous', is advanced by a metaphor-maker who necessarily defines himself against a childlike submission to any world bigger than he, and with that definition loses his wonder and commits himself to an ever deepening entrenchment in the knower's supposed sufficiency under the banner of the project of progress. I would argue that this sentiment, the hope in the saving power of man's intellectual evolution, is there in the three writers we have considered:

“Pompeii [belonged] to the decline of art that had again become childish,” (Semper, p250)
“mere toys” (Ruskin, Seven Lamps p46)
“We have outgrown ornament” (Loos, p20)

Loos states the ambition most clearly, speaking frankly about cultural evolution, impeded by what he calls “stragglers”(Loos, p21). Even conceding that Loos is employing hyperbolic polemic, nevertheless, this is hugely problematic, the cost he proposes to stake for progress will be the child sacrifice of eugenics. If we make 'progress' absolute, if we make it a moral measure, we will appreciate neither the sacred value of the straggler nor the sustaining importance of child's play.

I will conclude this essay with a consideration of vulnerability, of play, of what it means to come to an ornamental kingdom like a child, and the crucial ways this redresses our dualism. I will argue that play is functional, and unselfconsciously so, in the best and broadest definition of humanness. Play is a pointing toward and a delighting in the reason man is. It says of what is that it is and, what is more, is shows why it is.

To this end, Summerson introduces the device of the aedicule, which is, at the same time, a metaphor and a methodology. Establishing from the outset that the aedicule is a creative work which finds its origins in “infantile phantasy”(Jung, p83, via Summerson, p1) or, in his illustration, by play, as with a dolls house: “There is a kind of play common to nearly every child; It is symbolism – of a fundamental kind, expressed in terms of play. This kind of play has much to do with the aesthetics of architecture.” (Summerson, p1) What is more, this mode of being, so obvious in children, of fascination and intensified sensation constitute a love which, he hopes, “none of us ever entirely grows out of”(Summerson, p2) Play, in this aedicular framework is a place-making, it is an act of creative choosing, naming, valuing and making personal. It stands as a 'small house' against the 'big house' of top-down institutions and impositions on the personhood of people.

What makes this particularly relevant is the contrast he draws between an aedicular mode of architecture and the playless mis-readings of Gothic which he highlights in a critique of Viollet-Le-Duc who missed the point of Gothic qua Gothic by giving primacy to technical premises, and so inevitably arriving at “the 19th-century fallacy that architecture is a matter of structure plus adornment.” By contrast, the aedicular methodology is an integration, it is a playful rescaling, a fractal reproducing, which delights by extension and allegory, it sees man caught up in a cosmic excitement, “in the infinity of the great, but also in the infinity of the small ...a world of bewildering activity and infinity”(Worringer via Summerson, p26) The claim of the aedicule is that we do not live in a depthless universe, flattened to a human, rational scale, prescribed by theoreticians, disembodied and aloof. Rather, we live in a world re-enchanted, enlivened, one angelological that longs that we be caught up in worlds within worlds. These are the hopes that are at play in play, they are, a little bit, magic.

In my introduction I asserted that ornament died a death at the hands of solipsistic, disembodied, religiose men who dualised the world at the eventual cost of the exclusion and illegitimation of ornament. And Play is our antidote? It will embody the disembodied, hedonise the religiose and integrate the solipsistic? There is the hope.

What then is Play? Play is the excellent both-and of engaging specificity:“a pleasure in the relationship between [child] and the setting”(Summerson, p2); and totality: “[play] should awaken...the great thought of the inner constant living unity of all things and phenomena in nature”(Jacobus, p17); through the fantastical“the heightened consciousness [arising from the] all-involving spell of make-believe”(Huizinga via Jacobus p8 ) or “constructed analogy”(Summerson, p1); and mundane: 'playing is doing...[playing] is a basic form of living.”(Winnicott, via Jacobus, p9)

Very essentially, play is a free act freely engaged, echoed throughout the literature:“a definition of pure play: the activity is free, undertaken voluntarily...” (Huizinga, via Jacobus, p8) “I would understand play as that activity which is freely and spontaneously entered into..” (Johnston, p34) Freedom is the prerequisite for childish abandon is the prerequisite for the ornament that Alexander praises in Kairouan tiling which display: “a spirit of childish abandon...created whenever a person is truly free, and doing only whatever is essential, whereas the artificial, excessively formal, careful, calculated quality in a thing always comes about when the person is not sufficiently abandoned, and not free.”(Alexander, p212) This is a freedom-for, by contrast, Loos' is a freedom-from,“we have fought our way through to freedom from ornament”(Loos, p20) which is, at best, a second best freedom, a mere breaking of a bounded set is a liberation unto agoraphobia, a sailing adrift on Crossan's lighthouseless sea.(Crossan, p44)

A freedom-for, by contrast, is centred on and submitted to a play-Thing that is material and ready-to-hand. In this way play is embodied, it rewards presence and it carries the tacit know-how of craft. A happy point illuminated by Heidegger and Polanyi both playing with hammers. Heidegger for whom the hammer is used without theorising to such an extent that in fact by theorising we would more likely make a mistake. And Polanyi points us to knowledge of and delight in materials, tools and processes accessible only through that bond with the thing, developed in a dual awareness and desire "When we use a hammer...I have a subsidiary awareness of the feeling in the palm of my hand which is merged into my focal awareness of my driving in the nail."(Polanyi, p55 via Jha, p57) So must play be, and cannot be so if we are theorising ornament at any distance from the craftsman's bench.

Barthes extends this, combining an argument for play's embodiment with a politically motivated notion of freedom, to speak of a specific virtue of wood in play's materiality contrasting with the “embourgeoisement” of Barbie and her plastic which “destroys all the pleasure, the sweetness, the humanity of touch..”(Barthes, via Warner, p15) instead rather, “...when the child handles [wood] and knocks it, it neither vibrates nor grates... it is a familiar and poetic substance, which does not sever the child from close contact with the tree”

It is by the desire inherent Polanyi's tool-guiding that I would carry us to the hedonism of ornament which I believe to be antidotal to the religiose mis-constructions of ornament. Ornament, has been filed in our upper storey, the constructed panic room, in which the non-rational arts are safe from the aggressive hegemony of determinism below. From this vantage art and ornament-as-art luxuriate in their redundance which is their privilege as sacred objet in the cult of Art for Art's sake. This, by all accounts, is a corruption of ornament, and in Freud's discussing toys and totems, it has been said that “there can be no doubt that art did not begin as art for art's sake.”(Freud, via Jacobus, p20 ) And in Rookmaaker's defence of the creative gift“it also does not follow that art is to be for art's sake. Just as a tree, being more than the totality of its functions, nevertheless has functions,” (Rookmaaker, p112) In elevating ornament to religione it is divorced from the very currency of hedonism on which basis it would function, and that basis is an intersubjective gift exchange of love by needs and desires met and affections reciprocated.

This exchange is a meeting of subjects and the end of solipsism, thereby establishing ornament as both a means and an end for relationship, relationship with the other and the ordinary. The ornamental relationship is perhaps more legible in the practice of play. In play, I believe, we meet Rookmaaker's tree in the manner Buber celebrates, to quote part of his beautiful encounter with a tree:“It can, however, also come about, if I have both will and grace, that in considering the tree I become bound up in relation to it. The tree is now no longer It. I have been seized by the power of exclusiveness....Rather is everything, picture and movement, species and type, law and number, indivisibly united in this event.”(Buber, p14) Playing is meeting thus and “the player is called into play by a potential co-player or play object, and while at play, treats other players and/or "playthings" as personal, creating with them a community that can be characterized by "I-Thou" rather than "I-It" relationships.”(Johnston, p34) “[Play] weaves the fabric of subjectivity, fastening the ties between self and other,”(Warner, p9) In this way play is a shameless relating with the real, here returning to Scheler's notion of shame that originates in dichotomising body and spirit: “the essential characteristic of shame [is] conflict between man's spiritual powers and his servitude to his body. [Scheler] speaks of a bridge or passage between these two orders of being that is essential for man in order for him to be human.”(Lynd, p262 Note:22d) What we can offer is less a bridge than a causeway of play.

To conclude and return to the beginning, we play for Truth. To interrogate Winnicott's transitional object theory of play, in which, through play, the child that we were and are transfers from subjective omnipotence into an objective reality: What is that objective reality and when do we cease transitioning? I would propose, always, to read our happy stone leaves as such, as eternal transitional objects serving a constant transitioning unto the biggest dimensions of a depthless objective reality of perpetual wonder.

I have attempted to parallel Ruskin, Semper and Loos' dichotomous language regarding ornament and its comparison to clothing as a way that leads to a divided self and so to shame. I have then hoped to contrast these with the parallels found in Summerson and others who allude to an (assumed by some to be unachievable) alternative of shameless undivided wholeness that finds itself in most basic play. There is a worldview uncomplicatedly presented in the Bible that declares that we are children in our Father's arms(Luke 15:20 ESV). I would argue that this in-our-Father's-arms-ness is the prerequisite for play and so the prerequisite for ornament. Am I allowed to say that in an academic essay? If it is a true truth, then it is the truth to which architecture must be true, it is the how and why of ornament. If true.

-----

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alexander, Christopher – Nature of Order, Book 1 Phenomenon of Life (Berkeley, 2002)

Aristotle – Metaphysics 1011b25

Benjamin, Walter – Illuminations: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (trans. Harry Zorn) (Pimlico, London 1999)

Buber, Martin – I and Thou (trans Smith, Ronald Gregor) (Continuum, London, 2004)

Carlyle, Thomas – Sartor Resartus Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1051/1051-h/1051-h.htm

Cate, George Allan – The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin (1982, Stanford)

Chatterjee, Anuradha – Birth, Death, and Rebirth: Reconstruction of Architecture in Ruskin’s Writings (Interstices Under Construction Symposium, Tasmania, 2011) http://unsw.academia.edu/AnuradhaChatterjee/Papers/1182394/Paper_Birth_Death_and_Rebirth_Reconstruction_of_Architecture_in_Ruskins_Writings

\\Swenarton, Mark – 'Ruskin and “the Nature of Gothic”' in Artisans and Architects: The Ruskinian Tradition in Architectural Thought (Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1989)

\\Ruskin, John – Works 36 - Letters of John Ruskin 1

\\Ruskin, John – Works 8

Crossan, Dominic – The Dark Interval: Towards a Theology of Story (Niles, Argues, 1975)

Davies, Colin – Thinking About Architecture (Laurence King, London, 2011)

Debord, Guy – Thesis 192 http://www.bopsecrets.org/images/sos.pdf

Evans, Robin – The Projective Cast:Architecture and its three Geometries (MIT Press, 1995)

Hardman, Malcolm – Intellectual lens and Moral Retina: A Reappraisal of Ruskin’s Architectural Vision, Ruskin & Architecture (Spire Books, 2003)

Jacobus, Mary & Warner, Marina – Only Make Believe: Ways of Playing (Compton Verney, 2005)

\\Barthes, Roland – 'Toys' in Mythologies, selected and translated by Annette Lavers (New York, 1972)

\\Freud, Sigmund – 'Totem and Taboo' (1913)

\\Huizinga, Johan – Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture, trans. R.F.C.Hull (London,1949)

\\Winnicott, D.W – Playing and Reality (1971) (Hove:Brunner-Routledge, 2001)

Jha, Stefania Ruzsits – Reconsidering Michael Polanyi's Philosophy (Pittsburgh, 2002)

\\Polanyi, Michael – Personal Knowledge

Johnston, Robert K – The Christian at Play (Wipf & Stock, 1997)

Kundera, Milan – The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)

Loos, Adolf – Ornament and Crime (1908)

Risselada, Max – (Principles of Cladding) Raumplan Versus Plan Libre: Adolf Loos Le Corbusier (010 Publishers, Rotterdam, 2008)

\\Loos, Adolf – Principles of Cladding

Lynd, Helen Merrell – On Shame and the Search for Identity (1958) (Harcourt, Brace&World Inc, New York)

Mallgrave, Harry Francis – Gottfriend Semper:19thCentury Architect (1996)

Mallgrave, Harry Francis & Hermann, Wolfgang – The Four Elements of Architecture (CUP, Cambridge, 2010)

Moussavi, Farshid – Function of Ornament (Actar, Harvard, 2006)

OED Online Oxford University Press. http://oed.com/

Rookmaaker, Hans – The Creative Gift (IVP, Leicester, 1981)

Ruskin, John – The Seven Lamps of Architecture: Lamp of Truth: XV (Dover, New York, 1989)

Schaeffer, Francis – Escape from Reason (IVP, Downers Grove, 1968)

Semper, Gottfried – The Four Elements of Architecture (Trans Mallgrave,Harry Francis and Hermann, Wolfgang)(CUP, Cambridge, 2010)

Summerson, John – Heavenly Mansions: An Interpretation of Gothic (Norton, 1998)

\\Jung, C – Psychological Traits (Trans. H G Barnes)

\\Worringer – Form in Gothic, trans. H. Read (1927)

Taylor, Mark C – Disfiguring: Art Architecture Religion (Chicago, 1992)

Tinker & Tinker – Fifty Years on - the Legacy of Francis Schaeffer - Churchman, Vol.119 Issue 3 (Autumn 2005)

Williams, John Alexander – Turning to nature in Germany: hiking, nudism, and conservation, 1900-1940

\\Heinrich Pudor – Nacktheit und Kultur (Stuttgart, c.1907)

Wink, Walter – Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination (Fortress Augsberg, 1992)

Worpole, Ken – Here Comes the Sun: Architecture and Public Space in Twentieth-Century European Culture (Reakton, 2000)

saving architecture

This is a piece I wrote a draft of in the form of a letter in 2008, it is the culmination of various hopes and investigations from my time at L'Abri, and it was prompted particularly by conversations with JV, to whom the letter was written. It remains a work in progress, tidied but largely unchanged since I first put it together. In due course I will attempt an exploration of the same questions, hopefully being more historically and architecturally specific. Posting it online was prompted by two things:

http://www.londonmet.ac.uk/architecture/courses/postgraduate/ma-architectural-history.cfm
http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/kevindeyoung/2011/10/04/church-architecture-book/


1.0 - BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION -
After discussing with A a convoluted paper I had written in January, a tentative foray of a paper into the possibilities of critiquing sustainable architecture in world-view terms, we began one of those conversations, of the type that A clearly relishes, about the causes and antidotes to the environmental pickle we find ourselves in. To sum it up crudely, he posits the blame in a corrupted Protestantism, now indistinguishable from capitalism, and puts the responsibility for its resolution in the church’s hands also, by means of a critique from without rather than the popular but inevitably subvertable critique from within. Predictably this meant a protestant neo-monasticism. I take A with a pinch of salt, as I feel he does himself, it was the conversation I have found most fulfilling out all in my time here, it was not as perhaps it appears above, about them and us, nor did it contain a hint of the guns blazing monasticism with a capital M approach favoured by every other self-conscious emergent seeking to brand their intentional community into a publishing deal. (Too strong?) And this take on the affair lends a certain urgency and purposive direction t o a solution to our conversation-cut-short relating to how one might take the best of L’Abri home with you. If we were to make imperatives of those little pleasures that we are at liberty to take joy in here, the flower arranging, the high tea and sweat in the garden, and more than that, the placedness, the history and the pilgrimage, would we arrive at an environmental solution by accident?

Which I suppose leads me at a jump to thoughts of defining an archi-theology, how do I mean that I see everything though the lens of architecture? Certainly not in the limiting sense of everything being reducible to the built ego-theories of the last three hundred years, nor that my lens filters out all that is not a Cartesian architectural element representable in blue prints to some pleasing graphic effect.

“You talk of seeing the world as architecture. Would it make sense to you if I said I saw it through literature, as art. That is I'm exploring the relationship between literature and life and bonding them to be inseparable.”

This was how you phrased it in your letter and it has, without exaggeration, been on my mind daily since. I think if human life is story, then architecture is all at the same time the pages on which it is written, the stage upon which it plays out, and all the wardrobe, props and programmes that define and describe the action of it, of life.

So I am describing and prescribing a present and possible world and using 'architecture' as a lens and a language, claiming this method has the potential to make the world more beautiful. I stand at a difficult turn, obliged to go forward, to define, 'goodness' and 'architecture-ness', if only as working definitions, as a thing must be definable, as “more like this than this” or “not this” until eventually “this” for the blink of an eye, in the span of history, a definition stands and falls like those monastic ruins, a tribute to a former understanding.

Those who say we cannot define have surely never built anything, a brick on top of a brick absolutely is so, separating in from out. A definition may or may not last the breath out, but that is not to say that the task is fruitless or that people will not look at the carvings on a cathedral and ache for its beauty, knowing the beauty before them speaks of a time when people lived within a world sufficiently defined to build by. As your purchased Parisian letter proclaims that once there lived, moved, breathed and had their being, such p eople as took the time to celebrate the everyday. The question of 'right building' will be answered when we have established a realistic place for architecture within the attention of every soul, and this by setting out what exactly this thing, architecture, is. And so I should unpack this. I will come at this in two ways:
~2.0 – Architecture as a descriptive language for products.
~3.0 – Architecture as a prescriptive language for process.


2.0 – WHAT DOES 'ARCHITECTURE' DESCRIBE:
Architecture as a descriptive language for products: Architecture can be a language for describing things as they happen and come to be. And in this case, by extension or analogy, everything is a building: a meditated construction on a greater or lesser scale, everything is a building, every coffee table, every book, every marriage, every intentional action, every proverbial tower in life before which we should first count the cost.

2.1 - BUILDINGS AS TECHNOLOGY –
Form as inevitable given techno-economic force. Archite cture as engineering. Humans as machines. So ask: What wealth or power wrought this form?
We can view architecture as simply techno-economic phenomenon. This is an architecture of economics, it is trends and abstractions, a volumetric a rchitecture of developable areas extruded by profiteers, capped by planners, arranged by engineers, decorated by marketeers, purchased by statistics. This is a construction of reality and the reality of construction for many, but in this, popular and tragically fatalistic view we divinise the market and reduce architecture simply to impersonal grand expenditure. In this trajectory we get economistic architecture which looks, in form, increasingly like the diagrams and graphs, flowcharts and spreadsheets out of which it was birthed.

2.2 - BUILDINGS AS BURROWS –
Form as a conch shell. Architecture as biological determinism. Humans as red in tooth and claw. So ask: What wind or weather wrought this form?
We can read architecture as a personal shell or frame describing the lives and lifestyles of individuals and societies: as one might understand a cr ab by its crabshell or a tree by its timber. The home is the residue of habit, the calcifications of personal and family life, the glorious conch reflecting the health of that organism, that body that had its being singularly and particularly on that patch of earth. In this way we can view whole environments in their complexity and judge if they were conducive to life. A healthy animal leaves a beautiful shell, a healthy tree spreads its branches and all varieties of bird make their nests there, a termite colony living in harmony with its environment will construct a balanced and beautiful mound. Here we are talking of broad sustainability but in this we are essentially viewing the humans who live build and design building s as mere animals subject to the forces of nature, living by nature within a naturalistic universe.

But to move towards an architecture that more truly reflects reality we must consider the total human, who cannot be reduced to an animal or machine.

2.3 - BUILDINGS AS WORLDVIEW-FORMED AND WORLDVIEW-FORMING –
Form as poetry. Architecture as belief. Humans as believers. So ask: What will or wonder wrought this form?
In this way architecture is like any other art, you can read the philosophy of the artist and the spirit of the times in the substance, style and symbols of the work. However, architecture, for being more immediately practical offers to reveal literally the view of the world a people held and how they projected themselves onto the given natur e.

So, one has a certain fundamental understanding of reality, of life after death, value in life, confidence in the goodness of man and nature or not: a metanarrative, a myth structure, a story which makes sense of the absurdity of daily experience. Further, and born of this understanding, one then holds certain values, certain priorities towards which one applies the weight of one's energies: into a pursuit of wealth, of personal security, longevity, knowledge, justice, mercy, peace, enlightenment. And so then towards the achieving of those hopes, one lives in a certain way, orders one's relationships, orders one's lifestyle. And so th en one builds in a certain way. This is elementary, obvious even, you desire privacy you will build accordingly etc; however many of the motives are subconscious or made on your behalf by a collective consciousness, the city council, the ruling party; or the motive forces lie in ignorance. So you wish to deny God's existence you will build accordingly; a n ation wishes to clear its western consumer conscience through extravagantly displayed environmental concern, it will build accordingly; or you grew up nev er knowing the joy of placedness you will then build accordingly. So in all these ways architecture incarnates a worldview, but so much further, architecture speaks, creates the conditions for, even imposes a worldview on the people that follow. That is to say a worldview begets architecture begets worldview.

So, to live in this house with these views, on this plot, with this decoration, we are submitted to all the previous generations and all they built in their striving, all that they esteemed, protected or destroyed, then limits us, at any one time their total manpower exceeds ours. So in obvious practical ways we do not inherit a tabula rasa, but further, our imagination and subconscious are informed, coloured, limited by all the frivolous and practical concerns, superstitions, and politics of our fathers, these make up the palette of visual, practical, conceptual elements which constitute our present language, life and values. These are the sins or virtues of our fathers being visited on us unto the third and fourth generations, this accounts for the long sounding echoes of Christendom in many ways through its literal and metaphorical architecture.

It is a similar conversation to that which asks of violence in film whether it merely reflects a violent culture or if indeed it instigates violence beyond the cinema. And clearly the answer is both, but in the case of architecture, its message and coercion is inescapable, it is not merely on every street corner, it is the street corner.

Buildings moderate and govern human behaviour and relationship, effecting division or unity. They are instruments for liberation or incarceration, they are potentially fall-mitigating structures, like spiritual disciplines in bricks and mortar. Or otherwise they are a crippling weight to bear, vast and anti-human sprawls sapping freedom, dividing family, demanding burnt offerings of oil and commuter hours to sustain even a meagre existence. These anti-places, bear fruit of cynical wounded people, with impoverished imagin ations and seared consciences. We have in places built for ourselves a living hell, any number of science-fiction films, 2001, the Matrix etc, resonate with their viewers because we feel in some way that this machine we have created is killing us, drawing the life from us, as if once we knew a real world, the keys to which we have handed over.

This picture I have painted thus far of buildings might equally, if to a lesser degree, apply to all culture, all art and enterprise. I view all things in terms of their order and potential through one lens, I call this lens 'architecture', it perhaps needs to be broader, a 'meta-architecture'. But I will for now continue to call it architecture as I make my meaning understood most easily in these terms, and to zoom out would be concede a place for private architecture as a subset in this system and it would be to run away from the redefining of architecture's place that needs to be done. It is not to privilege buildings over other arts, but rather there is still a need for 'architecture' as perhaps it might once have been, as a bridging language for all crafts.


3.0 – HOW DOES 'ARCHITECTURE' DESIGN -
Architecture as a prescriptive language for process: In this way Architecture is not merely a way of seeing the world, but a way of being and a way of doing life. If we substitute 'architecture' with 'the good life'? How do we make 'architecture' happen, who is allowed to participate and where? By what process do we hope to build our future? The definition of the practice good 'architecture' hangs on the hope placed on democracy, despotism or delegation, if you will. Thus:

3.1 - 'ARCHITECTURE' AS TOTAL -
On the one hand, everyone is an architect and architecture everything, it is a second skin, an extension of the self, an expression of how we wish and will the world to be; as a word it is interchangeable with 'technology'; it is all exercises of dominion; it is a means of describing the reconfiguring of natural resource and all the ways of bending nature to serve our individual will, our need, our comfort and survival. The hope expressed in this totalising movement is valid, it is motivated by frustration at former arbitrary definitions, however, it goes awry when it makes architecture of anything and everything I decide to call 'architecture'. Leaving a thin soup for culture, an unfenced playground, no rules to play by, nothing less architectural about a toothfilling than about a towerblock. Presumably this school of thought has a name. Positively and initially, it opens up routes to a more flexible and cross-pollinating artistry, and ideally impresses on people their responsibility as part of the whole, for the whole; negatively this is incarnated as a militant relativism motivated blindly against the abuses by those formerly in a position to define architecture, wounded and angry young architects would rather have architecture be everything and nothing than concede their own mortality, specificity and limits. Any obligation to history is sacrificed on the altar of possibility, in a world without fathers or story or judgement.

3.1.1 - A PROBLEM IN THIS MAXIMALISING DEFINITION -
There is a striking parallel in this totalising re-jig of definitions towards a hope of painting a more cohesive, integrated view of the world in the debates defining 'Spirituality' in these last terms at the Manor. A damaging side-effect of the 'Comprehensive Spirituality' campaign by JP and EP is that having worked so hard to define 'spiritual' as 'that which is truly real', they confuse and disable people from discussing things which are spirit by nature, which is an impoverishment of language and muddies the water they hoped to clear. So too as I try to re-indigenise, popularise and make-human our built environment and relationship to it, if I go about it by defining all actions in space as 'architectural' then we strip language of a word to conjure the depth of that specific family of crafts related to shelter fabrication and leave a definition of limply thin vacuity.. Oh I don't know..

3.2 - 'ARCHITECTURE' AS BY AND FOR THE ELITE -
The other end of this pendulum swing places architecture in the exclusive hands of those great high priests, architects. There is a sense in which architects have seized a monopoly power to call their work 'architecture'. Marketing their skill as a mysterious, complex task quite beyond the scope of the ordinary home-dweller, and even if the plebian masses were competent to form safe and stylish abodes by themselves, it would be, they can argue, inefficient that way. 'Architecture' here quickly becomes a dark art, a philosophy, the work of a closed club of brutally initiated genius form-givers, an intellectual exercise in a coded language impenetrable to all but those well-schooled in post-modern literary criticism (and even then... to steal the metaphor, the experience of many in architecture school is of that dark room in which blind men are looking for a black cat that's not there). Architecture is dropped out of space as a joke at the expense of the pedestrian; architecture is violent spectacle assaulting the ground it stands on; architecture is illusion, the new clothes of the emperor, the art of selling facile glamour to the insecure, shallow prestige to a short term government, an air of ironic sophistication to the knowing middle classes. It could be argued this conceit emerges when architecture is argued for as a self-consciously distinct discipline, which it has a long history of doing, of elevating itself above the humble crafts of which it eventually consists, to a cerebral discipline, and this is the Greek and Romantics' heritage. In this way conventionally labelled 'architecture' is in many ways unhelpfully so delimited, as such a separation divisively severs such things which should be ordinary from the ordinary people who will daily use and inhabit this environment, it is a power game by an intellectual elite who eschew ritually unclean manual work.

3.3 - A THIRD WAY: 'ARCHITECTURE' AS AN INTEGRATED ARTISTIC LIFE? -
I am not looking for some inoffensive middle ground that satisfies both the totalisers and the cerebralists, there must be a third way. A way by which architecture is not an abstract solution imposed by an isolated genius, but neither is architecture as a word and concept stretched so thin as to denote every and any accident and void in the spatial realm. We can redeem the word, the process and the fruit of 'architecture'.

Here I am looking across displines for writing defending craft, human touch, artistic expression and poetry. Seerveld in Bearing Fresh Olive Leaves extends his proposal for the normality of the artist and their role in a community some way in this direction. If his thoughts were applied, the need for a bridging language and its fluent servant enabling the integrity and coherence of the whole would be more apparent. If we all spoke a language which had signifiers ascribing value and importance to place, story and unity within a wider total vision of the human life, we could more directly speak of our loss.

In all this I hope there is the potential for an architecture born of the seamless integration of the artist and ordinary life, for buildings as the logical and beautiful by-product of life lived relationally, for 'architecture' as the life-skill and for an infinite personal architecture, truly sacred space.

3.3.1 – URGENCY -
This misfortune, this inconvenience of less than picturesque architecture is not a grand and lofty luxury we have fallen short of. Architecture such as this, personal, allusive, human and relevant, is as necessary as poetry, and conceivably more tangibly. The absence of poetry is the lack of something life-giving and sustaining, without which we would bleed to death for lack of joy and lack of understanding, here however we are dealing with the rash sprawling of its antithesis, the weapon drawing that blood. We presently face a vacuum of language defending the value of place and beauty in our experience of space. The loss of present, relevant local art is not a victimless loss.


4.0 - THE ARCHITECTURAL PROBLEM -
Given those two previous sections discussing extensively and by analogy the 'Architecture' that could be, let us talk now about the architecture that is: Buildings and life as we know it. Let us expand where architecture is broken, and veer all over a landscape of apocalyptic language and hyperbole...

4.1 – DISCONNECTS -
So far I have tried to limit myself to definitional problems within our conception architecture, which of themselves make of architects men less than fully human, and bear the fruit of buildings, alien and aloof. So there is this, and then a breadth of wider societal problems and disconnects whose causality is to and fro with an impoverished architecture: as we view buildings today, there are notable disconnects, of architecture/art from daily life to a professional sphere of its own; the loss of responsibility for the physical environment at all by its inhabitants; a loss of story, of meaningful interaction with the narrative of built history in which our chapter falls. So, this is to say that architecture and the various individuals and forces that bring it into being are disconnected from the people it belongs to, the ground it stands on and the time it is occurs in. Christians are apt to be those most acutely complicit in these disconnects, if they hold a glibly fatalistic theology of the fall, that somehow these disconnects are to be assumed, to be expected, to be tolerated and coping mechanisms devised for surviving within them, and coping mechanisms largely drawn from the individualistic self-help philosophies that constitute the atmosphere of counsel they breathe from a secular culture.. And this rather than going for the jugular.

4.1.1 - Aloof professionalisation: This and the academicisation of architecture. This is architecture by a self-proclaimed elite, where architects, for reasons known to themselves elected to elevate their role above the sweat of brick laying, and create an intermediary role, uniquely schooled in the mysterious language of architecture. They make for themselves an insecurity in the nature of their role as divine form giver and they suffocate themselves with the bureaucracy of this tertiary craft. This pattern is set in school, the building crafts, seldom taught within the syllabus, are considered as the inconvenience to be overcome in the realisation of a paper dream.

4.1.2 - Complexity of the building industry: This has reached a point such that architects are by necessity reduced to project managers and image-mongers. No one architect can sufficiently master all the specialisations, so even prominent elements within a design, windows, landscape etc, are sub-sub-contracted. Quite aside from a resulting lack of coherence visually, artistically or otherwise, this super-specialisation makes buildings completely unrepairable, it is systemic planned obsolescence. Further, the more complex and high-tech a building is, the more anonymous manufacturing steps between the human crafting and the human inhabiting there are, the more alienated the inhabitant will feel.

4.1.3 - Consumer Culture and 4.1.4 – Placelessness: Placelessness is consumer culture applied to space, as space becomes only a consumable commodity, it loses its placeness, to coin the phrase. The culture of consumption has roots philosophically and sociologically, it was made possible in its present incarnation by the industrial revolution, its was made probable, even appealing by the corrupted work ethic and individualism of the reformation/renaissance. It has been suggested that this culture is a form of empire, its is not the only and logical outworking of technological advance, oil-driven possibilities are pursued and marketed by the vested corporate interests of a select few, advantaging them at the expense of the weak and voiceless, the poor and the environment. Consumerism, becomes an ism at the point we define ourselves first by what we have, when this shift in identity is made a house is reduced to an image of a house, and so the upwardly mobile, geographically promiscuous migrate north from postcode to postcode to postcode to postcode as each annual city bonus allows them. It is not a great leap to see how this will effect shallow places, anonymous neighbours, unrelated neighbourhoods, further nuclearisation of the home, higher walls and less patience, an faddish disposable architecture of speed, spectacle and expediency.

4.1.5 - The infatuation with and intoxication by the virtual: The unreality in which we can be sovereign: that virtual universe, that 'life' online, is a place where we can be omnipresent and omniscient, we can be the identity we wish to be with power to bring into being anything out of nothing, our finitude touches infinite possibility. These are the same hopes that drugs and religion are made of, and you can sense well the addictive power of it. The effect on architecture and place is manifold, chiefly 1. people expend their energy, time and resource within an unphysical, impermanent, essentially unreal dimension at the expense the real, this is Narcissus wasting by the pool, these are slums with satellite dishes, the blue-white cathode flicker on the living-room ceiling of every ugly house in suburbia. And 2. they are disappointed by the real and physical, just as pornography will torpedo a marriage. This is ultimately a glory exchanged for an image, this escape from the physical and contempt for manual work have philosophical roots, gnostic ideas of man as spirit etc.

4.1.6 - A denial of beauty: This is done in subtle ways, where the question is marginalised on the grounds of it being arbitrary or uneconomical, although I have had more heated confrontations in school with tutors who feel more strongly against the power structures implied in the word. There is a degree of legalism around ornament, tradition and story. It is spilt perfume all over again. And I struggle to explain except by a flight from God, beauty points to something, has its origin in something, commands gratitude to someone. Beauty in a random universe is not beauty at all.

4.1.7 - The collapse of community: And so now we study abroad, commute to work, fly on holiday; we have abandoned the church, the local grocer and the village hall; we are bowling alone, living in single-person dwellings, unmarried, divorced, and childless statistically. If we consider this only pragmatically, we are living technologically enabled but vastly inefficient lives, or to term it less economically, we are living ineffective lives. The precious 24 hours we are gifted each day are frittered away in the car, infront of the microwave, paying off our personal mortgage and trying to bring up a family on your own. To live on one's own costs more to heat, costs more to light, cost more to feed, costs more period. And you simply haven't the time to decorate, embellish and enjoy more than to throw a handful of Ikea candles about the apartment in the image of homeliness.

More serious than this, is the loss of community, in particular intergenerational community. Only if we live with children are we reminded daily and personally of who the future we are affecting is, only if we live with the elderly are we truly aware of our own frailty and mortality, in them is a wisdom which cannot be penned, in them is a life's experience communicated tacitly. If we lose this breadth of community we lose our place in the story, we need go back to the beginning and start over each generation. And this affects architecture in a number of ways: we lose a timeless way of building and replace it with spectacle, we lose the foundations for visual consensus and we lose craft and an entire consciousness which values it because we lose the embodied knowledge in which consisted. And I think we lose confidence in our place on earth, contemporary architecture swings between timid parodies of former domestic style and violently bold cries for attention.

4.2 - DISCONNECTS: FRUITS -
The measures of this lost architecture are read in the losses within ecology, as something or someone has to pick up the bill for this profligate existence. The trees felled, green fields sprawled over, oil drunk and carbon exhaled. It can be read in the loss of the human, both in the resulting extra-human scale of urban environments, super-human machine polished finishes and in the sub-human work done by an underclass reduced to a form of slavery, mindless joyless work simply to put bread on the table. And further in the loss of story, loss of ornament, increasing hardness..

I would argue that bad architecture is killing people, through unsafe space, depressing and hopeless space, divisive, exhausting and unnatural space but here, if I have not already I am sailing into spurious conjecture.


5.0 - A THEOLOGY OF THE ARCHITECTURAL PROBLEM -
In this discussion so far I have dabbled in threads and narratives, I wish to venture a meta-narrative, I believe the architectural problem is better understood and the way forward more clearly navigated in the light of the God who is there and who is not silent. Theology threatens to be but another layer of terminology and disagreement to derail us, and yet, and yet, the beauty of the person of Christ, the coherence of his alternative and the witness of history's happy houses draw me onwards.

5.0.1 - A CHRISTIAN ANSWER?: A WARNING FROM HISTORY -
I recently discovered the writing of Quinlan Terry, who has written and practised in the area of architecture and theology, he comes out in favour of a pseudo-classicism which I have not yet reconciled, but provocatively he begins what I suppose is his main treatise on the subject thus: “My subject is architecture and theology, or rather Art and Faith, the place where architecture and religion meet. The two great authorities on this subject from the last century were Pugin, who designed the Houses of Parliament, and Ruskin, the celebrated artist and writer. Both started their lives as devout Christians, and ended their days in a mental asylum...” And so timidly I tread..

5.1 - THE FALL -
So, roughly the theology is th is, a perfect world fell, along with all its subsequent architecture, but they can be redeemed. The fall, a chip in the windscreen slowly growing to completely fracture the pane, where the integrity of the pane had consisted in those crucial relationships of us to ultimate reality, us between ourselves and that between us and created order. Fallen-ness is the inherited orientation of every human being towards the self. Psychology finds a common belief by people that once we were at peace with our environment but that we have lost that connection irretrievably, the largest part of other religions address this selfishness and the guilt of it.

If broken, one should then ask how a knowledge of this helps us. A theology of the fall should allow us to say that things are not as they should be, that human nature defaults to selfishness and self-destruction and that people are not perfectible. This can be taken too far, often by evangelicals, to crushingly low expectations of human possibility, but done well it saves us from modernism's naïve hope that human nature is intrinsically good, which expressed itself in equally naïve utopian architecture for perfect people. Further, such a theology of the fall makes plain the impossibility of our saving ourselves, and relieves architects of the burden of saving humanity as they are apt to aspire to.

If people could be saved from this fallen state they ought to be observably liberated to form better architecture. But if true, I would argue this myth provides a coherent structure which connects the moral flaws with the poor architectural fruit they bear. Thus bad architecture is fearful architecture, selfish architecture, deceitful architecture. Having spent the largest part of my time at university attending a tin warehouse church, I am conscious this jump is not self-evident.

5.2 - WHAT IS THE GOSPEL? -
In the light of this fall, Christianity claims God became a man in history, died and rose again. Demonstrating life is a story not an accident, language has grounds for meaning beyond itself, beauty has a source, death is not the end. So there is nothing to fear in life, you can be confident in death, you can be confident in poverty, you can be confident in suffering and fearless in everything you do make say and build. So to the disconnects:

5.2.1 Aloof professionalisation gives way to an acknowledged creatureliness, servant architects, sacrificial and anonymous building.

5.2.2 Complexity and the machine are no longer means to salvation, human personhood has grounds in the transcendent. Technology – which is never inevitable or neutral – is put towards the end of realistically sized community. Physical work is no longer unclean, expediency gives way to patience.

5.2.3 and 5.2.4 Consumer culture no longer pretends a monopoly on joy, a market economy give way to a gift economy, identity is grounded beyond your stuff. Place is of specific value ordained by an author god.

5.2.5 The virtual loses its addictive appeal, there is a god so we don't have to be, and there is nothing to fear and nothing to escape from in the physical world.

5.2.6 Beauty, truth and goodness are grounded in a transcendental signifier.

5.2.7 The gospel and its ending of fear makes community possible, it makes a unique oneness possible. The gospel demonstrates, requires and makes possible an integrated life. The gospel is the beginning of the gift economy which begets community. Further, a common centre makes community possible. A purpose to our differences makes community possible. I believe that the gospel correctly understood, enacted through intentional community, will bring truly good and redemptive architecture.

5.3 - QUESTIONS OF A 'GOOD' ARCHITECTURE -
Means of judging the goodness of architecture:
- Is it good work? - was the piece and its constituent parts brought into being by individuals working in such a way that they would do it regardless, if they were unpaid? ~ as in CSL's 'Good Work'
- Is it alive? - does it operate to contribute and cooperate within its local ecosystem? Does its bring dignity to the humans building and inhabiting? Does it sustain a certain relational ecology – this rather than cancerously massive cells within an organism society. Who is glorified?
- What does it say? - does it speak a message of hope or cynicism, is it afraid, fearful architecture or is it joyful? Does it take a Sabbath, is there leisure painted on it, is it one seventh frivolous? What is its attitude to the ordinary? How does it relate to its elders?

5.4 - TOWARDS A 'GOOD' ARCHITECTURE: HOW SHOULD WE THEN BUILD? -
What is argued for here is a paradigm shift, not merely at the level of the beliefs of those at the top who presently effect architecture, but a shift is the nature of the 'top' all together, like a mustard seed or a virus, a grass-roots movement (there is a tired phrase) from the ground up (and the clichés sparkle on the water) compelling other people by the joy of such a community, by the very presence of God among them demonstrated by their unity, to leave their consuming addictions (and puns as well, this letter must nearly be over).

The social critique must go deep enough, deeper than Ruskin's, deeper than Quinlan Terry's. There must be urgency, abandon and action not talk. There must be a clarity in our understanding of our physicality and of heaven and of 'need'. There needs to be a reassessment of place through family. There must be a commitment to the long haul in a specific place. We must effect an integrated life, food, building, education, and this by the spiritual disciplines. We will live by Unity Humility and Prayer.


6.0 - END -
I'm just throwing bullet points around now. If you are still reading and have anecdotes, refutations, illustrations, to put flesh on these bones, fire away.. I have tried to present the lens I see through, the problems of art in the world that motivate me towards a new way of seeing, and a new language for discussing goodness and necessity in buildings and life, I have called it 'architecture', as it were a qualitative term, one equally might use 'poetry' to name this language and form.

So concluding, in this letter and at lunch tables we are writing about writing, talking about talking, speculatively communing in discussion of communal possibilities as if the talk were an end in and of itself. It is as if this whole period at L'Abri as been an introduction, the preface to biography, the hypothesis of an experiment. And there is a certain irony in arguing on paper against paper architecture, in criticising criticism culture, and in asking using the medium of theory to propose a move away from theory. Irony, nay arrogance; here like every other brave opponent to modernity, I will be subverted by its empire unless I go beyond its city gates, this should read untriumphant as a suicide note, here in concluding should be offered the quickest directions to the known horizon of present possibility, that is the only humility.