An Architectural Discourse based on Love

After our first seminar, I left wondering what exactly this course was about. What made it more than something that you could just pick up from being down the pub? Maybe I was scared that it didn't use the sort of language that I'd come to expect from being in an 'academic environment', or maybe it was just the directness of a certain bearded wonder's anecdotal 'look at meeeeee' stories about how living the dream constitutes sleeping with as many Las Vegas hookers as you could want to. To be frank, I found the whole 'deciding how you live your life by how it reads on your blog posts' to be irritatingly arteficial, ironically unspontaneous and dishonest.

I think something clicked though when Paul was talking about one of the texts that we'd read the previous week, David Hickey's 'Air Guitar', which contains not a single reference to any other work about the nature of criticism (nor any book at all for that matter). It was that the lack of rigour and autonymity (just let me use the crutch of academic bullshit language for a bit longer) was the beauty of it. It's about conviction and love for a subject that people can actually care about- not some esoteric epistemological twaddle that can be understood by only 5 people in the world who despise it anyway because they didn't come up with it.

"Theory that says nothing but references a lot" is, I'd argue, ultimately and ironically anti-ego as instead of heroically putting your thoughts out there in the most direct way possible you obfuscate them through justification: If they're any good and accessible then people will 'get it' and judge you as a genius, or whatever you want, instead of just assuming you're a disciple of some dead old white guys. If Vegas is Hickey's heart's destination, his writing gives us the map that he used to get there and beautifully ignores all the conventional tricks used to create the illusion of academia.

If you can look through the rather juvenile angst it uses to conclude about freedom, etc, Hickey's essay "A Home the Neon" offers so much to learn about behaving as a critic, and a citizen. I'm a bit embarrassed to say that the 'urban condition' subject matter of the Hickey article and that which we had to compare it to, Mike Davis' Sand, Fear and Money in Dubai are really not that interesting to me. For your information however, and maybe to prove that I have actually read both texts, Hickey's essay is about reintroducing the quotidian individual into the discourse of high art and how America's most perverse (read sinful) urban condition is ironically the purest arena for translating the American dream of social mobility into something you experience when awake as asleep. Davis' writes about how the world's most perverse urban condition, in this case because of its feudal Islamic foundation that allows sins to pass under a table veneered with futurism, uses a lack of social mobility to fuel its growth.

If in Vegas the two rules are "post the odds" and "treat everybody the same" then in the Emirates surely they become "No sex on the beach: keep it under the table if you have to do it at all or you'll be deported" and "We'll send your brown ass back to Pakistan if you want a fair wage for building our city". Syriana offers a good illustration of the clusterfuck of complexities that arise through the rapid development of a place who's backwards social models are ripe for international exploitation. Basically, both Vegas and Dubai are corrupt but Vegas is stronger socially because it's unashamed about it- granted, it has its own problems with a disenfranchised social underclass but life for the city's tunnel dwellers is actually pretty normal.

Whilst I could easily carry on regurgitating my memories of some of the 'great' points we came up with during our comparison of both essays' respective angles on urban freedoms in the seminar, the whole exercise reminds me of comparing poetry as part of a timed essay in my A Level English Literature classes: Who cares how the two pieces go about saying what they do, it's much more interesting to think about why they chose the language that they did and why they wanted to say it in the first place. Why does Mike kick us off with a travel brochure style introduction? Why does Dave start by writing about himself? Why is Mike's article so bloody long, with graphs and charts in it? Why does Paul Davies tell his students about how great it is to be able to sleep with many, many hookers? Why are Paul and Dave more pedagogically worthy than Mike?

Because Paul fucking believes in what he does, despite how crude and abrasive some people may find it; he's proud of his lifestyle and its all encompassing extension into his 'academia'. It's really refreshing, and it takes balls to put something without a single reference out there. I'm even more embarrassed to say that what clicked for me in our last session is that it can be alright to think that the weakest theories exclude the evidence of the everyday. As I'd like to think of myself as someone who's clever because he's mastered architectural rhetoric to the point of being able to blag my way through anything by saying nothing, its so obvious.

Perhaps it's the fetish for over-intellectualised theory (even when it's not needed) in the architecture schools that I've been to where students have to provide something for the 5 people in the world who can understand your theories to hate, which makes non-architects become pretty dumb, 'clever' architectural writers and thinkers. I'm sure that if you go to a school of architecture in the Emirates, or any other place where there's actually a need for buildings and architects, you aren't marked on how much good you are at justifying your work, and how strong a hate it conjures up from embittered academics, but rather on how good your work is and how much people love it.

Zaha's anti-rhetoric, left wing economic soothsaying and my thoughts

I recently attended a seminar discussing two articles that I had read recently: "Johnathan Meades' on Zaha Hadid" and Alain Badiou's essay "This crisis is the spectacle: Where is the real?".

Architecture: The Real and the Represented


The architect's deliverable is the drawing, the banker's is the money. Both are only representations, abstractions of an idea of space and capital. In reading both articles, I was struck by how the narrative of each article was constructed: Whilst Badiou proselytises a pretty clear damning message about his take on capitalist financialism and its self-fulfilling destruction, Meades is more candid in his observations of Zaha. Sometimes pandering to her ego and sometimes critising her in a manner that borders on ridicule, the strength of his writing was how it left me to judge her for myself. Whilst Badiou is admirable for the clarity of his stance and its tendered solutions, Meades and Zaha offer neither. How very Miesian that his strength is his weakness. I'd like to be able to do the same in this post, but fear it turning into something of an unreferenced rant. Here goes...

Banking / Architecture: Mysticism & Myth

What struck me initially was the common esoteric mysticism and mythology that both the world's financial operators and creatives invent in order to market themselves and ensure their 'worth' to society is unquestionable. They differ in their approaches to these however: Financiers openly proclaiming a system of trading that they are only too happy to try to explain despite their blatent collapse into jargon-laden esotericism and consequential betrayal of the fact that they have very little control (let alone understanding of the game that they are playing). Conversely, architects deliberately abdicating any explanation lest it 'reveal the secrets' behind the magic that they conjure: If you thought that the Zaha of Meades' article was bad for not talking about her ideas, at least she has a website to view her work on: Think of how those torchbearers for architects around the world Herzog & de Meuron and the architect's architect Peter Zumthor eschew a website or contact information. The exclusivity of their cult is perhaps best indicated by the weight that their respective email addresses hold amongst prospective employees and clients alike, a quite deliberate manipulation of the world's perception. I mean, if someone seems like hard work to get in touch with, it must mean that they're worth it!

Making my way around Part 1 shindigs here since I returned to London last, I was regaled with a story of Zaha enforcing a single designer branded plain black dress shirt landed on every one of her employees' desks on the very morning that some big shot was to coming tour the office. Whether you believe the rumour that she then deducted the three-figure cost of each shirt from each person's pay cheques at the end of the month, so too I read in that bastion of boring tripe that is the AJ that Peter Zumthor is currently designing grey uniforms for his staff nestled in the picturesque swiss mountains to wear. Contrary to what they want you to believe, image and mythology is clearly everything for these guys if you even start to scratch beneath the surface of their reticence.

Local and Global Wars

I think the difference between apparent openness of the banks and the reticence of the architect stems from one concerning individual and collective. Architects are unique amongst all other professions in as much as there is no unifying code of approach to our creative discipline (as the free objectivist in me would like to believe there shouldn't), and as such practitioners of architecture revert back to mysticism as, frankly, architects believe that they exist in competition with one another and jargon seems a good way of setting oneself as different. The collective of bankers whom we pin our current economic mess on close ranks and don't even pointing their fingers at each other, claiming to be but symptoms of a society for whom money is an primarily an ends and not a mean, an approach founded in objectivism but against progress.

However, both the suit-clad drivers of the City of London's economic cogs and those heroic byronic architects share a common inherent social responsibility. The City of London contributes 22% of Britain's annual GDP and architects at least partially shape the spaces where we live. However, as architects we operate at a local scale and under the dictation of so many concerns beyond our locus of control that we have got away with an sustainably competitive existence and will continue to operate as such. The significant capitalist mechanisms in which we invest more than just money shouldn't have this tolerance: If we were to view each of the worlds' countries' economic microclimates as at war with one another, as architects fundamentally are, then we would lose the free trade principles that the financial markets are built upon. The individual's greed stemming from an hostility born from mutual and paranoid distrust of perceived competitors that bankers and architects share is what I'm thinking that the entire financial crisis between the real and the represented boils down to: Maybe a departure from Badiou's thought?