Architecture that Destroys
"Christie Malry's Own Double Entry" is the story of a renegade clerk, written by the English avant guard novelist B.S. Johnson. His character, Malry, takes double entry bookkeeping and uses it to define his relationship with the world. Morality, hurt, injustice, unfairness are logged as debts - just as a business might log financial debits. Malry begins to collect his own form of credit. To begin with, these are minor incidents: "Oct 1 : Unpleasantness of Bank General Manager : 1.00" or "Oct - Apr: Small kindnesses from Joan: 0.28". Through the story, Malrys perception of debt increases. His demands for recompense rise accordingly. Chistie Malrys hypersensitivity of 'debts' owed to him by society warp his view of the world. One such example is logged as: "May 1: Restriction of Movement due to Edwardian Office Block - 0.05" This entry refers to an incident which occurred crossing Hammersmith Bridge, and confronted by a building blocking his desired route. "Who made me walk this way? Who decided I should not be walking seven feet father that side, or three points west of nor-nor-east, to use the marine abbreviation? Anyone? No one? Someone must have decided. It was a conscious decision, as well. That is, they said (he said, she said), I will build here. But I think whoever it was did not also add, 'So Christy Malry shall not walk here, but shall walk there.'" His umbrage at those responsible 'for standing this building in my way, too, limiting my freedom of movement, dictating to me where I may or may not walk in this street' is set out in his account ledger: "May 1: Scratch on Facade of Edwardian office block: 0.05" Johnson's novel is a grand confusion of capitalism and morality, the personal and the public. It explores these issues through a logical system taken to an illogical extreme. It makes accountancy into something dark, surreal and dangerous - which I suspect is actually a more accurate picture than its usual dull image. Christy Malry might be paranoid, but he's also right: Buildings destroy as much as they create. They restrict the infinite possibilities of a Greenfield site through the iteration of a single proposal. Architecture turns a field into a planning authority regulated, building code limited, singular thing. Maybe architects were right when they said 'less in more'. They usually mean it when referring to buildings made out of glass and steel with minimalist detailing. However, they don't actually say what they mean by 'less' or 'more'. If they had meant 'Less architecture means more possibility' then they could have been on to something. Architecture turns landscape into concept. And that concept is embedded in the culture and society that create it. Like most things, architecture reveals its true nature in extremes: When it's angry, aggressive, or defensive. At one extreme, a prison shows architecture that is motivated by denial. Its walls are barriers, isolating the interior from the exterior. The architectural intent is crystal clear. Architecture is performing a task of enclosure - on behalf of society, at the behest of the state. In the case of a prison, the walls enclose to isolate a piece of land. An island, not made from arrangements of land and water, but of ideologies. The difference between the inside and outside is exaggerated. Which turns the architecture into a strange interface. One that's explored, probed, and questioned by prisoners escape attempts. Tunnels dug with spoons, hacksaws contained inside cakes, keys cast in soapbar moulds are architectural interventions, attempting to undermine the ideology of the building. This was perhaps most dramatically played out at Colditz Castle - the Second World War German prisoner of war camp. It was used to contain prisoners who had attempted escapes from other camps. On the one hand, the stone walls of the castle, the barbed wire perimeters. On the other it was riddled with all kinds of ingenious schemes to breach the architecture of captivity. Prisons are specific and specialised. Sometimes, the scope, scale and ambition of architecture as ideology becomes vast. When ideology, identity and geography collide, it's usually on a map. At the lines drawn between one thing and another, or one place and another, or one state and another. There is an overlaying of an idea - an abstract concept - over the geological reality. Politics, power and economics define territories. They distort landscape. We have remade the world into ideas, abstracted it into words and images - representations that have come to change the very surface of the planet. Winston Churchill remarked that 'we shape our buildings, and our buildings shape us' - but in reality, we shape maps, and the maps bash us into new shapes. The walls of your house create a division between the city and your private domestic world, between warm and cold, wet and dry. The same fundamental construction can make barriers between other kinds of things, at other kinds of scale. The Berlin Wall erupted between two ideologies - Pushed up like a mountain range between tectonic plates made out of ideas. The Berlin Wall may have divided a city, but it also divided the planet. Its scale was huge to begin with: Imagine a wall that divided a city. Consider the territory it partitioned : to Moscow in the East and Washington in the West. It's a wall that functioned both locally and globally. It's perhaps the most all-encompassing piece of architecture ever built. A perversion of a medieval walled city with the Warsaw ghetto. These are failures of global politics, of societies, of religions that are played out in the form of urban design. In such extreme situation, it reveals qualities about a wall that are usually just latent. The difference between one surface and the other, the mass, height, material whose qualities prevent the passage of particular items: people or sticks or bombs. The 'Peace Line' in Belfast is a six-meter-high steel, concrete and chain-link series of walls - flung up over decades to protect "interface communities" - flash points of sectarian violence. It separates areas such as the Catholic Falls Road from the Protestant Shankhill Road. The fences were originally intended as temporary measures when construction began in 1969. Over the years it's become taller and longer and proliferated. Though not continuous, the barriers are collectively known as a single entity. There are currently around 40 sections, with a total length of 13 miles. The bottom section of the wall is made of concrete blocks that have been painted white. On top of this is metal sheeting painted green. In parts, a metal grill attempts to prevent missiles from being thrown over the wall. At low level, scrawls of graffiti by tourists unable to comprehend divisions deep enough to result in the Peace Line. In 2003, Israel began construction of a security wall. Following the "second intifada" in 2000, Israel faced a dramatic increase in attacks and suicide bombings. Its response was to construct a wall along the West Bank border. The barrier is still under construction. It is architecture reduced to a basic element, and made impossibly large. It's a gesture of colossal scale, demonstrating Israel's singular intent. A symbol of power. It is architecture as pre-emptive strike. If it is completed, the final barrier will run for approximately 400 miles. If all this modern history seems depressing, lets zoom back in time to a picturesque moment in history, to the edge of the Roman Empire in AD 122, where Hadrian ordered the construction of a wall between Roman England and the Scottish tribes. Like the wall at the end of the garden, it marked the end of a domain. Except this garden was an Empire which stretched all the way back to Rome. Like the other examples, this wall was permeable: gates allowed passage through. The significance of the wall is to attempt to exert control.
When we think of architecture, we should remember that it is a set of decisions stacked up. Each of those decisions has consequences, effects both positive and negative. It's important to ask, who benefits? Asking this question is a way of revealing the ideological and political dimension of buildings. Buildings possess the strange facility of making these dimensions almost total invisible, hidden. The behaviour it encourages or discourages, the symbolism it promotes or demotes. Thankfully, most environments are not as extreme as the examples we've looked at here. Though the politics might be less extreme, it also becomes more complex. The polarisation that conflict creates obscures the more complex, faceted, graduated reality of everyday life. The way in which walls, windows, thresholds, staircases and other architectural elements reflect, embody, or indeed create these complexities. Every building is a fuzz of encoded morality, control, and social expectation. These implications are often invisible to the designer, client of a building. What Cristy Malry saw when he crossed Hammersmith Bridge was the everyday reality that at its core, architecture is the imposition of intent upon the landscape.
Posted by anothersam at October 12, 2005 7:45 PM.
Contents:
More Scenes In Cartoon Deserta
Generic Powerpoint Template: Delivering Bad News
The Best New Building In London
Book Review: The Infrastructural City
The Michael Jackson Monument Design Competition
Now Showing: John Baldessari Sings Sol LeWitt
Obscure Design Typologies: Life Guard Chairs
Osama bin Laden Cigarette Lighter: Novelty Products as Congealed Culture
Absurd Car Crashes: A Eulogy for J.G. Ballard
Now Showing: Dan Grahams 'Rock My Religion'
This Concrete 'O': On Serotonin, the M25, and the Motorik Picturesque
Church of the Literal Narrative
Philadelphias Floating Architecture
Now Viewing: Married To The Eiffel Tower
Le Corbusiers Image Hoard: Poeme Electronique
Giant American Signs: Original Learning from Las Vegas Footage
Giant Soviet Signs Cut Into Forests
Bricks Melted Into Icicles: Napalm Decorative
C-Labs 'Unfriendly Skies' & 'Bootleg' Volume
2 The Lighthouse: Self Storage & Architectural Hallucinations
Ceci N'Est Pas Une Pipe: Infrastructure as Architectural Subconcious.
Viva Sectional Cinematography!
Now Showing: The Installation of an Irreversible Axis on a Dynamic Timeline
Sim Seasons Greetings! The Rise of Neo-Winter
Geography in Bad, Festive Drag.
Simulations of Industry: High Tech Architecture and Thatcherism
From The Factory to the Allotment: Tony Wilson, Urbanist
Koolhaas HouseLife / Gan Eden: The Revenge of Architectural Media
Ruburb-ric: The Ecologies of the Farnsworth House
Telly Savalas Looks At Birmingham Redux
Acts of Un-Building: Timelapse Demolitions
Yard Filth: Next Years Hot Look
Stonehenge: A Black Hole At The Heart Of British Architecture
The Popemobile: Mechanised Robes & Motorised Architecture
The Secret Language of Surface
Information Fields: Agriculture as Media
My Bloody Valentine: Sound as Substance
A Cubist Copse: Gehrys Serpentine Pavilion
Spouting Off: Some Thoughts On The Fountainhead
Form Follows Dysfunction: Bad Construction & The Morality of Detail
Vintage Tradeshow Surrealism: International Grune Woche
Moving Houses: Buildings In Motion
Desktop Study: The Strange World of Sports Studio Design
Married to the Eiffel Tower: More Objectum Sexuals
60 Years of The Crazy Horse Memorial
Married to the Berlin Wall: "The Best and Sexiest Wall Ever Existed!"
Inflatable Icebergs: Sublimated Guilt Has Never Been So Fun
The Cinderella Effect: Phantom Architectures of Illumination
Two Deaths and a Retirement: The Strange Shape of British Architecture
If London Were Like New York: Antique Schizo-Manhattanism
If London Were Like Venice: Antique Geo-Poetic Speculations and Hydro-Fantasy
41 Hours in an Elevator: The Movie
NASA: Mapping the Moon with Sport
Lemon Squeezy: Design Tendencies after the Juicy Salif
The Nihilistic Beauty of Weapons Arranged in Patterns
Dogs: Britains Greatest Design Obsession
Detroit Sucks: The Motor Shows Last Gasp
Authentic Replicas: Football and the Franchising of Place
Folk Football: Landscape, Space and Abstraction
A Wishing Well with a Fat Up Pipe
The Camoufluers and the Day-Glo Battleship
Pseudoccino: Instant Coffee Foam
Blown Up: More Inflatable Military Stuff
On Christmas Trees, Folk Forests and Staples Office Supplies
Hampton Courts Shrouded Sculptures
Named Fabric: 20 Sponsored Pieces of Architecture at the New Museum
Form Follows Felony: The Secret Home of the Un-Dead Canoeist.
Architectural Magazines: Paranoid Beliefs, Public Autotheraphy - More on Clip/Stamp/Fold
James Bond Lives Next Door: Suburban Imagery as Industry
The Ghost of Christmas Futurism
Chapters for an Imaginary Book About Architecture
Shrouded Plinth - Urban Striptease
In the Night Garden - Surreal Landscape of Nostalgia
Kim Jong II, The Great Architect
Place Faking: Instant Heritage for the Thames Gateway
The Marc Bolan Memorial Crash Barrier.
Enjoy The Silence: Bose Noise Cancelling Headphones
Telly Savalas Looks At Birmingham
In Search of Britains Vehicular History
Scary Suburbanism: Why Horror is at Home in the Suburbs
I Like Your Manifesto, Lets Put it to the Test-o
How to Become a Famous Architect
Northampton - Sci-fi Pop Planning Promotion
Advertising Central Milton Keynes
The Velvet Underground at the Glass House
Duplikate: Kate Moss on the Production Line of Individuality
Hollow Inside: Starbucks Foam and the Rise of Ambiguous Materials
Revisions to the Architecture of Hell
Crufts: Dogs, Design and Aesthetic Genetics
Eos Airlines: Executive Bubbles over the Atlantic
Google Earths Vertiginous Mapping
Church of the Ascension and Descension
Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles
Reading Lines: Skateboarding and Public Space
Chris Cornish: Prototyping History
The Most Visited Location in the UK
Anything to Feel Weightless Again: The Cargo Lifter and the Tropical Island Resort
'Its beauty will know no season'
2000 Years of Non Stop Nostalgia. Or How Half Timbering Made Me Whole Again.
Backpeddling into the Future: The Historical-Futurism of British Architecture
Miss Selfridges' Feeling for Fake Snow. The Oxford St. Lights and Why We Need Artificial Winter
New Tory Logo: A Hazy Shade of Politics
Jeff Koons, Rem Koolhaas, Hans Ulrich Obrist at the Serpentine
Celebrity Scents: The Bittersweet Smell of Success
Imperfect Pitch - Football, Space and Landscape
Product Placement: Making the Impossible Possible
Suburban Growth: Matthew Moores Field of Dreams
Perfect Sound Forever: The Secret Function of High End Stereos
A Little Light Product Placement
Some Advice To A Young Designer
Useless Proclamations for a Beautiful City
Topsy Turvy VSBA: Inverted Heros of an Upside Down Avant Guard
Everything Flows: ideological cartography
How Geostationary Was My Valley?
The Psychotic Utopia of the Suburbs and the Suburbanisation of War.
In a Lonely Place - Under Construction
Mach 3 Nitro Gel - Design that's foaming at the mouth.
Marchitecture. Architectural things to do in London this March
What happens when you cross a pen with a car?
Football Pitch: Best of British
The First Cut is the Cheapest - Blenheim Palace: pop architecture that goes for the jugular
Holiday Snap II : Giant Glowing French Balls
Holiday Snap: Canadian War Memorial, Vimy, France
Anatomy of an Architectural News Story
Its All About the Big Benjamins
Poundbury, unexpectedly, in the rain
The Exploding Concrete Inevitable. Lou Reed and the Casa da Musica
Untitled (Plastic Sack and Timber)
Berlin 1945 - The Obscene Picturesque
Interview: Jeremy Deller & Alan Kane
An Incredible Smell of Roasting Coffee
Langlands & Bell - The House of Osama Bin Laden
Architectural Criticism gets Sharp
Venturi, Scott Brown and my love that dare not speak its name.
Douglas Coupland: Design and Fiction
Christopher Dresser at the V&A
Fugitives and Refugees' - Chuck Palahniuk
Just What is it That Makes Yesterdays Homes So Different, So Appealing?
Everything Counts - The Sound of Geography Collapsing.
Other:
|
Links:
IconEye
Leave a comment