Brickchat

Books, Articles, Talks on the diminishing role of the Architect abound. Better to close the lid than to keep searching, re-organising and cramming. The box is full. Better to leave this function to those willing to continue with it, waiting for it to fulfil a function it cannot.

Reiner Banham wrote about the ‘Black Box of Architecture’. His metaphor is not to be confused with in-flight recording devices, instead Banham criticised the self-serving establishment figures of his own generation and society’s indifference to them, putting Architecture in a black box.

A more recent contribution to the subject, Thomas Heatherwick’s Humanise, has at last satisfied me that this is no longer a problem worth my time. Put the Profession in its box. Take what skills you need and try to do some good work with them.

Reading the Heatherwick book I vividly recalled my own tense discussions with my dissertation tutor, having been advised against [forbidden from] writing a piece on the work of Colin St John Wilson. Instead I was forced into a comparison of the works of Hans Scharoun and Le Corbusier. With the benefit of hindsight a task so dull that I now understand the lethargy I felt.

That piece of work would be as tough to read now as it was to write then. I did not, and do not, believe the hype that surrounds the Modern movement. To say that they were visionary moral arbiters of society at large is akin to saying that tech bosses are best-placed to show us the way to the future of the web.

Or that the masons and clerics responsible for the great cathedrals of Europe really had the human interest at heart as the domes of Christendom soared ever higher, as workers toiled in the hot Tuscan Sun or fell to their deaths. Anyone who has visited the mosque in the Spanish city of Cordoba knows how wrong this statement is and how misled those people were in their convictions.

Heatherwick’s book lays out his anger at the cult-like tendencies of an architecture profession more concerned with how it looks in the mirror than how it serves humanity. Indeed I loved his lambasting of the convoluted language spouted by academics and their eager understudies.

That being said, the tone of the book is odd from someone who themselves has risen to such heights, and whose work has resonated at such a broad scale. At first I thought, great. For a practitioner of Heatherwick’s standing to be cross, it must be okay for me to be angry about this too. But he never joined the profession, he is a successful outsider whose marketing strategy is defined by his opposition to the orthodoxy.

One only need walk a quarter of a mile from Coal Drops Yard to be swallowed by the 10, 20, and 30 storey blocks of the wider masterplan. The latter very much funding the former. Is there an argument to say that without the orthodoxy of the boring, there would be nothing to bounce off?

With land values as they are in developed economies, what can be done to ‘humanise’ a city, a building, a street? The steps offered by Heatherwick on a building-by-building basis are pragmatic and help us all to think more clearly about the challenges.

How these mechanisms are utilised for social housing, schools, or hospitals is less clear. Do not misunderstand me, I am grateful to Heatherwick for the lampooning of a fusty profession, and also for the fun that has been brought back into buildings. I only hope to emphasise the challenge of bringing excitement to the margin-squeezed middle.