writing about architecture: book

Jacques Ellul – The Meaning of the City

What is a city? What does a city mean for you? How do you define the city-ness of a city? By what scale do you measure urbanity? Where does it begin and what is its essence? What thin, red, necessary and sufficient conditions delineate the metropole? And then, what of the city's allure? If the city qua city is centralised dwelling, what magnetises that node? What central suction, what centripetal affection drew you hence? Why are you here on the Holloway Road? A job? For what? To hide? From whom? As a means? To an end? Are you here under duress? On pilgrimage? By accident? For asylum? To profit? Or plunder? The city promises much for these, while it is yet a mystery. What is a city? How do you consider it? All of you who love to hate to love London, how do you construe its sprawl as the subject of such affection? Can you speak of the city's totality except by deference to myth and metaphor? For surely the city as an independent and unified entity exists only as an abstraction, as a mirage, as power play, as a spirit? The infinity of London's diversity resists reduction and in this way I have never met a complete 'Londoner' and accordingly there is no such simple thing as London. And yet we ally ourselves to her, we march under her banner, we trade in her name, we defend and are defended by the brand of an unknowable London. Why is this and what is a city? Dear urban creatures, do not be ignorant of your own reasons for being and being here, do not avoid to question the meaning with which you invest this city.

The city has a particular meaning for Jacques Ellul. He writes of these feelings quite plainly, damningly, but plainly and these meditations form the thrust of his book The Meaning of the City. The book is hugely problematic, but it is precisely in the problematic nature of this work that it rewards rereading and earnest discussion. There are three major points which he helpfully makes plain: the personal nature of the urban phenomenon, an apocalyptic reading of the urban end game, and, relatedly, an explicit disjunction between human and divine roles in redeeming the city.

Ellul argues that the city is no mere impersonal product of inert extension and technique multiplied to accommodate a density of human bodies on a centralised network for the advancement of economic efficiency. The city is not primarily a technical phenomenon, it will not be fixed by tinkering, the eager queue of architects, planners, hygienists and economists will modify the device in vain and certainly the psychogeographers and social scientists' efforts to reinterpret the city are inadequate. That happy city we all want cannot be re-engineered because it has already failed at the level of its motive force: the metropolis was fashioned for a purpose, conceived as a machine for hiding in, born as an organism bent on self-defence. In expressing this, Ellul helpfully invigorates inquiry into the human desires and supposed needs which founded the city; and by speaking of these desires he establishes that this urban mode of dwelling is not inevitable. The city is a personal force, a moral phenomenon open to criticism, open to being other than London is.

By such a critique he would rattle the negligent and speak urgently needed restraint to those holding a faith that urbanisation is an unequivocal good in the project of progress. However, for the antiurbanist Ellul, the desires which motivate the city are only and always depraved, and so the city is only and always bound for apocalypse. In prejudicially bringing an apocalyptic reading to his source texts Ellul promotes a fatalism which is ruinous to any effort to motivate action towards the improvement of the city. If the discussion of a meaning to the city was opened up by qualifying the urban phenomenon as moral and personal, it is firmly closed by this disempowering fatalism.

In 2012 we live in a crescendo of apocalyptic enthralment, conspicuously in the language of some among the environmental movement, and by extension in the massively popular brand of disaster cinema. The apocalypse is attractive because it excuses responsibility to care for the city now. Into this mêlée, The Meaning of the City is useful for the lengths to which it pushes the logic of a philosophy which is behind the appeal of these visions. If at first he establishes the city as morally personal, and second he advances the city as subject to judgement apocalyptically, the third point of his theology which I believe to be instructive to our own time is his resolution to the urban problem: the New Jerusalem. Ellul fans the flames of learnt helplessness in his conclusion by forging a disjunction between the human project and divine action. This is not Christianity, neither is this sustainable, but it is a widely held hope amongst those who suffer the city. If environmentalism was going to declare heresies it would do well to address apocalyptic antiurbanism.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Meaning-City-Jacques-Ellul/dp/0802815553

writing about architecture: biography

A. Beresford Pite (1861-1934)

“El Dorado, Yo hé trovado” was the caption that a twenty year-old Beresford Pite gave to his Soane Medallion winning design for a fantastical medieval club house in 1882. In this claim to have found the Golden City is the boldly civic while ambitiously playful approach which marked all of his ensuing career. This Edwardian eccentric resists easy categories and is misfiled amongst revivalists of the late 19th century. His passion for an intelligent synthesis of constructional reasonableness and imaginative, even rebellious, creativity is asserted in his RIBA obituary which claimed Pite to be a “modern amongst the modernists”.

“If architecture ceased to reflect the age in which it lived, and the public thought by which it was surrounded, it ceased to be a living art, and it would become a mere museum exhibit.” (Pite, 1923) In developing his decorated modern, Pite owed a theoretical debt to Ruskin’s Gothic and Lethaby’s Greek, finding in both a description of a ‘primary style’, which was unlike the derivative confectionery of uncritical revivalisms. In this way Pite’s mix of mannerism, social concern and practical industrial requirements corresponded to the contemporary Arts and Crafts movement, but with an altogether more urban sensibility. The result is a lively primary architecture which bears the marks of a symbiosis of teaching and making in his practice. Teaching and making being two pillars which I would argue are the foundations which distinguish the work of this architect, who taught emphatically, by some accounts zealously, that architects must master or be mastered by the building process.

“When sculpture stands forward to illustrate a subject.. architecture should give it assistance and unobtrusive support, treating the whole as a jewel whose beauty is to be enhanced by an appropriate setting.” (Pite, 1888) Pite’s vision for the process of making, particularly sculpture, was inspired in large part by Michaelangelo, an affection for whom he demonstrated at the Institute for Chartered Accountants (1888-93)with Belcher and perhaps more freely at 82 Mortimer Street (1896). Figures sculpted in these designs assert Pite’s understanding of architecture as the mother of the arts, a concept terminally under threat over the course of his life. The use of sculpture was a vehicle for the personal or spiritual both in the building as a representation and in the building as a production, that is, as well as displaying the image of a human, sculpture demands the singular giftedness of a crafting individual human – a notion which Pite believed to be indispensable to art. We see his conviction in the idea of genius manifested equally in the flamboyance of his draughtsmanship, which may have owed something to William Burges and Albrecht Dürer, but ultimately expressed a single-minded freedom unobliged to any fashion or Zeitgeist.

“[The arrangement of teaching at the RCA] is a corrective to the tendency in talented students to accept their training and success in schools of applied art as a stepping-stone in an artistic career of unrelated idyllic art, either in painting or sculpture, of little ultimate benefit to the nation or profit to the artist.” From 1900 Pite taught as professor at both the Royal College of Art and the Brixton School of Building, and attempted with enthusiasm and some success to realise the pedagogical and professional ideal of interdependent art and architecture. If it can be said he influenced the cause of a diverse and adventurous architecture through teaching, he was also influenced significantly himself by the very process of teaching. A parallel has been drawn with Ruskin, for whom the experience of tutoring art to artisans at Frederick Denison Maurice’s Working Men’s College was the basis on which he was confident to believe Gothic to be practicable and so to commence work on the Oxford museum. For Pite, his work on the Euston Road (1906-8) in a piece of daring and persuasive classicism, came only after six years of doubts were assuaged by what he found in teaching.

Teaching defined much of Pite’s life. Driven by a religious devotion he considered the world of architecture to be a mission field, and he developed a reputation for provocatively thoughtful contributions in RIBA debates, exercising a passion for persuasion further tested on a platform at Speaker’s Corner. This dialogical evangelism demanded from Pite a sensitivity to listen to the questions of a context and required the strength to persuade by the expression his personal convictions in a language that could be understood. Both the process and reward of this missional way of being in the world find their parallel in his teaching of architecture and the two come together in his missionary commissions in Palestine and Uganda. Pite’s engagement to design a hospital in Jerusalem for the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews in 1892 began a series of buildings in that country, which were followed much later in his career by his cathedral for Kampala in 1918 and a training college in Mukuno 1924 for the Church Missionary Society. These were buildings which asked with an earnest and experimental curiosity, “In what style should missions build?” In reaction to the imperial imposition of much colonial architecture, the temptation for missions was to manufacture an indigenous pastiche. Pite, however, is noted for the sensitivity of his synthesis, he brought with him all the versatility that he had gained in years of dynamic dialogue over style put to the cause of a message, and he returned from these exercises with many lessons which he applied in the structure and message of occidentally inspired projects like Christchurch Brixton Road.

The notion of architects as messengers, had been gained from Burges, whose Cardiff Castle was the architectural work which best embodied the architect-as-anchorite understanding which Pite imported. This anchorite is one imprisoned to the compromise of being caught between heaven and earth, between utopia and commercialism, but a prisoner with a mission to act as an agent for the good of the city. Hence Pite’s was no pietistic faith, and from 1900 the socially diverse commissions which Pite chose, soup-kitchens and Harley Street practices, are notable as archetypal elements of a diffuse ideal city realised in the earthly city of London. The civic skill and creative art of so making the city were at odds with the professionalising trajectory of the RIBA, against which he rallied but never abandoned. He passionately argued that the Institution existed “not for the protection of the private interests of architects from unrestrained competition, but for the advancement of an art which creates a city out of the aggregate work of its members.” (1905)

The message Pite desired to convey in his work could be distilled to an urban optimism, defined against the “settled pessimism among architects, as well as among public men interested in art, on the subject of the general aspect of our cities” (Pite, 1905) but more specifically Pite’s was a call to us that we would join him as he “looked for the city, which had the foundations whose builder and maker is God.” (Obituary) This was his Golden City.

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Based largely on the essays contained in this excellent collection:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-golden-city-architecture-imagination/dp/1898465029/
Other worthy web appearances of ABP here:
http://www.abpite.silent-cities.com/page3.html
http://www.artandarchitecture.org.uk/images/conway/506591b0.html
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kielbryant/371337050/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/a2d/2502125722/sizes/l/in/photostream/

writing about architecture: poem

Form over function, this writing a sonnet business.
With apologies.

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We sought a house, we thought it through. They taught:
“You want a house to buy to sell to let.”
We made a plan, we took advice, we bought,
A money spinning spinner to forget.
“Now market it, target the shop spoilt brat.
Resell in cynical clinical games.
Reglaze, refurb and wreak all cad fad tat.
Install cleanable, demeanable, frames.”
“We'd rather not, we'd rather have, or be
A house that is what it is what it loves
That looks like it feels and sounds like it sees
Unanxious to dwell twixt earth and above.”
“Foolish, first-time sentimental buyers,
Dabbling too deep against higher powers.”

writing about architecture: place

Hello. This is open plan writing that has lost its fourth wall, don't write like this, it lets the rain in. I discover that six hundred words is a length that requires more structure to a narrative, some foreshadowed bait to sustain the youtubed reader's fleeting attention span to the very end. Thank you for your time, I can offer no collateral for the promise that the soaring comic arch of this narrative will touch down in the promised land of punch lines, character transformation and the affirmation of all you've ever hoped for. But promise I must. I promise there is another London, an impossible London, a London concealed in plain sight, a pregnant London, a London that is within us, but so much more than a state of mind.

The problem of writing-about-a-place is neatly the opposite problem of dwelling-in-a-place thus: try writing in the past-tense. Dutifully for the workshop's advice, I self-consciously shall. But consider the difficulty a moment: rather as we live in a tension between the now and the not-yet, we write in the tension between the now and the past-tense. Hence, in writing we take authorial power to confect a universe to live inside, albeit one naïvely constructed of present-tense unschooled writing. Whereas, in life we take a similar power to sell political dreams in the future tense, or to feign omniscient retrospective expertise in the past tense; but to live life in the now, now there is a fearful place, of holy moments, where you tread the invisibly thin line between what was and what is to come. Anything could happen. The kingdom of heaven is such a happening, it is a participle in the present-continuous-tense.

Today, however, it happened that I left the house at 10.15, it was that time, that is the time that it was, this is history. I walked down the steps from my last writing exercise, into the haptic, tactile, tic-tac-toe world outside of myself, beyond my cocoon. I adopted a gaiety of step that the magnolia gave license to. Fentiman Avenue appeared determined to carry on with spring despite the weather, and I was happy to cooperate. It was a familiar route, not over-familiar mind, this was no 'when one walks down..', it happened in that moment that I walked down, it was the gift of an unrepeatable instant, under a cotton scudded sky in a painterly spectrum of whites that will never happen quite the same again. It was the gift of those furry fuzzed emergent magnolia buds split apart at precisely that stage of exultant new-born blossom. Hello you.

I was not permitted to linger on metaphors to furnish writing exercises with for very long, a busy Saturday summoned. I crossed the Wandsworth Road, over a threshold between an altogether more cuddly urban grain and the bloated Nine Elms environs. I had discovered, at some pluperfect point last year, a shortcut through the wholesale flower market, a happy harbour in the eye of the urban planning storm of greater Vauxhall. Undisappointed again, today I was greeted at my haven by a three dimensional quantity of abandoned cut daffodils crying for want of a collective noun. A disaster of daffodils? I scooped up an arm of the second-hand seconds, they will have a second chance.

I considered that my future tense flourish at the end of that paragraph offered an excellent point to conclude my sojourn, but, having not yet arrived at six hundred words, I continued, confident that London promised more. Determined, I survived the length of Battersea Park Road's endlessly banal tirade of advertising, and, turning in past another-Tescos I climbed with a sonorous home-coming the steel stairs to the Doddington Garden. Welcome. At once, the ordinariness of the supernatural was busy all around me. The happy beds of soil we had cleared and furrowed were ready for planting, and so was I. Dear London, please believe.

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writing about architecture: building

Unprecedently I have now been present at one address for more than 12 unbroken months. From our upstairs bathroom window I have seen the Shard creep up above the horizon of the opposite terrace, from its Mace mushroom beginnings to its Christmas tree glittery grandeur, topped by that strange awkward angular angel craning in tinsel and candy canes. I get to see such festivities come a second time, and am being awakened to the wealth of wisdom's comparative adjectives, to speak of place and the turning of seasons. And by the gradient of these, to learn to sense the trajectory of change in the spirit of a place. None of this here. I must write 300 words on a building. Go.

It was God who found me a room to lodge within this sleeping giant of a terraced house, a handsome handbuilt home, and there is an architecture to this, overlooked as vernacular, overlooked as speculator Georgian, commodified as mere property, parcelled out and auctioned off. It bears a revisiting.

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Turning right out of Oval tube we sally through Lambeth's plastic patchwork of sporadically updated public furniture, along the rarely tree-lined artery of the Clapham Road down which a feud of lorries and cyclists impatiently flee from not-London to London-proper: we are their no-man's-land. Right again into the gentler Richborne Terrace. Scarcely registering the invisibly mundane revival huddle, sawn off at the knee by building regulations, one is lead on to the prouder, dishevelled huddle of brick, render, and soilstacks. A noble family of houses who still muster a remembrance of the sublime, whose war-weathered gentlemen, unashamed of their neglect and stoic against their occupants' efforts to modernise, are visible through unkempt magnolia, as a troop, in unsteady syncopation, brandishing their ordinary adornment, wearing the unpolished medals of cracked stucco and striving clematis on their shoulders. And, selectively, by addressees more self-conscious, the unevenly cleaned, occasionally repointed yellow bricks permit a melancholic honey ochre in the dusklight of a sunset's fall calculated to cut in half this symmetrical urbanism.

Half way up, or down the street, we arrive with a click and whine through a fifties gate, treading upon this elder statesman's broken toenails of seventies fractured tiled steps to a nineties catalogue imported door handle, I am living in all of history at once. My body's memory leans its weight unconsciously into the door swing and we are in the hallway. Peace and Sebaldian dust hang in the air above my head, in the 4 feet before the ceiling, 4 feet where my soul has room to roam, and the dreaming spirits of many occupants-past have been dignified by these few additional inches of air.

Climbing to the kitchen, even in the warming ecobulb gloom, careless chips into the painted banister reveal a rainbow history of long loved colours, pregnant, every surface with a diversity of domesticites and the unselfconscious idiosyncrasies of this happy bricolage. Arrived, we settle in folding chairs while skip-saved lilies preside over my favourite room in the world, a room whose yawning huge windows drink in the sky and all of the backstage of this terrace, like a newborn baby's eyes feasting gazes from her father's shoulder, amazed at everything on the pew behind her in church.

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