ON MODERNIST ETHOS IN CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURE / Reiner de Graaf
New Book → vivid, uncompromising narratives contextualised with shrewd essays about architecture’s lost ideals, its false pretentions, and utter dependence on forces far more powerful than design.
“In essence, I don’t think humour is ever depressing. It can, of course, be a sign to conceal a tragic reality.”
Russia → where there was a desire to progress and an inherent inability to do so. It is deeply tragic, but also almost admirable to see how skilful they were in crafting that tragedy. I’m wondering to what extent that is symptomatic of our profession as a whole. In its current form, architecture is an elaborate ritual to avoid the inevitable, namely if history continues the way it does, our ongoing and increased marginalisation in the future.
“The book is a wake-up call, which I felt could only be written with a light touch and with funny stuff in it. The alternative would have been a highly moralistic book. There are highly moralistic issues that I address, but I haven’t been raised to preach, and I don’t think preachers make very good writers.”
Notion that thought production by the architectural profession has come to a standstill...
Your book is an engaging intellectual product, but I’m left wondering what your intention is because it refrains from setting an agenda → I think the architecture profession is in such a state of denial that providing a quick fix solution would almost be like letting them off the hook, and allowing them to collectively run towards that answer. I thought it was more productive to analyse the state of affairs without sugar-coating things. Ultimately the solution to every problem begins with the frank acknowledgement that there is a problem. I don’t think our type of people are anywhere near ready to acknowledge the extent of the problem or even that there is a problem...
Professional daily reality is also tainted by very banal setbacks, by very mundane, and sometimes quite deflating behaviour on the part of clients or the world at large.
Notion that the circumstances in which you work seem incredibly mundane, but all the while world history is a kind of tumultuous spoilsport of ongoing affairs. My recommendation is that architects become more aware of the context in which they work and take more time to look around at the world that asks them to do what they do so that they can for instance recognise the motives behind it.
The essay about Thomas Piketty deals with something else to consider, namely that modern architecture was once based on efficient, rational, fast industrial production to give as many people as possible a decent home. It made buildings cheap, so they were available to many people.
→ That same ethos is still very present in modern architecture, but it makes buildings – cheap not to be sold cheap or to be rented cheaply – it makes buildings cheap so that they generate the highest possible return on investment! → That same aesthetical ethos of saving, of an economic minimalism, now serves an entirely different purpose. It serves not the happy many, but the happy few.
In other words it’s the same architecture in the context of a different system. I don’t think anybody who practices modern architecture is even vaguely aware of this. They were all educated with Le Corbusier and Gropius, and they consider themselves the heirs of those heroes when they actually operate in a system where they are complicit in things completely at odds with the ideals of that movement and those heroes!
All that is left of modernism are the stylistic principles? → the stylistic and organisational principles help very different interests at the moment. So it’s not just that the original modernists once were a positive force and the current ones are simply a neutral force. By continuing that legacy under current circumstances, today’s modern architects are contributors to negative forces...
“An architect is not supposed to be nostalgic but forward-looking. But I’m nostalgic for a time when mankind was a lot more forward-looking than it is today; for a gradual optimism about the future. That’s the paradox.”
Notion that from a sociological perspective, 2100 might look dangerously like 1900...
Look at the social housing estates from the 1950s and 1960s: they are either vilified and demolished, and social housing is eradicated, or they are preserved as historic monuments and converted into luxury apartments that are unaffordable for ordinary people. So even if the buildings stay, the social housing is no longer there.
“We need very different politics. I think it is essential that the left reinvents itself so that it acquires a new mass appeal. I’m quite jealous of the appeal that populist right-wing movements manage to have with big groups of people. If the established left-wing parties would only have ten percent of that same appeal, they would be in a lot less trouble.”
“I deliberately wrote the book in a type of language that is understandable. A lot of writing about architecture is pretty dense, and that is a friendly description. But I also wrote like that because I wanted the book to be accessible to more people than just architects.”
Architects don’t generally like the idea of having too many people meddling with their labour, and I understand this instinct.
Essentially, a reconnection with users, even if those users are not the ones financing the buildings per se. Buildings are now speculative tools for users we don’t know. Since we don’t know them, there’s also no dialogue with them and that’s where I think the crux is. We should try to break the almost unbeatable cycle of architecture merely being real estate, being a tool of capital.
“After making a convincing case of being for the masses in the twentieth century, architecture will have to be with the masses in the twenty-first.” → idea of participation is less about asking people what kind of window frames they would like and more about.. It’s about mobilising the people as a political force. They can say what window frames they want, but ultimately, the architecture is a detail.
Any realised project is inevitably only a percentage of what you intend, and whether the percentage is above or below 50% determines the project’s success...
interesting to see what kind of role architects can play in the trench warfare, the shadow boxing, between public interests and private greed. You are almost forced into the role of a manipulative mediator, to make sure that greed, at least to some extent, works for the public good. But that’s a far cry from the role of the heroic building master who triumphs over his uncompromised vision.
our wake-up call. It makes you realise that architects have very little power. And what you have power over, you can wonder how much it matters in the end.
Was it worth it, becoming an architect? → I would not advise my children to go into the profession. There are more interesting topics to pursue in this day and age, and architecture is ultimately an old-fashioned discipline. There is nothing wrong with that, there is a need for an arriere-garde.
I get very tired of an architecture that desperately tries to stay up-to-date with computer forms → The essence of the digital is that it is the digital. It is a revolution in another domain, and not per se in building materials. When there is a revolution in building materials, there will be a revolution in architecture again. → Until that moment, we ought to be happy being the enablers of other intellectual and technological revolutions. The most forward-thinking thing to do about architecture today is a kind of reflection on what it actually means.
Parallel to Rem Koolhaas noteing in the context of preservation that abstinence, doing nothing, is hardly ever considered. How do you think about that regarding the production of space? → I agree with that. It would probably not be bad to take a time-out as a profession, to stop the mad and meaningless race that we are caught up in, and simply introduce a pause where you look around and assess situations.
That’s probably a different kind of abstinence than the one Koolhaas is talking about, but I do think that the unintended by-product of abstinence could be a bigger realisation of context.
Notion that “Freedom has been sacrificed in the name of freedom.”
“The market is a mundane pursuit of the radical, but I’m interested in projects which revert that relationship; a radical pursuit of the mundane.”