After the Machine

The original Modernists claimed beauty in the efficient and practical design of the machine (eg, the automobile or the airplane or the ocean liner). This was 100 years ago or so when the movement took off so the machines that inspired Modernism might be primitive (or at least ‘antique’) by todays eye - but early modernism’s departure from ornamentation and monolithic construction in brick and stone set us on a path that we’re still following today, albeit without the philosophical vigor of the 20th century.

Modernism the philosophy called for a total embrace of machine ‘functionalism’, but modernism in practice quietly celebrated architectural expression as long as it was done in steel, glass, concrete and non-load bearing partition walls.

Modernism the philosophy celebrated economic efficiency and standardized building materials, while Modernism in practice especially among the icons we still study and preserve today, usually came in well over budget.

Contradictions can be picked out of the work of Corbu or Mies or their contemporaries, but they can probably be excused as young designers straddling a couple of world wars, hungry for work. It’s a fine line between the philosophical basis of Modernism and the marketing angle of the whole thing.

To build anything new, you need someone to pay for it. The Modernists made a deal at a crossroads - they would fetishize and glamorize industrial production, and the industrialists would commission them to build monuments to the machine age.

Le Corbusier is held up as the greatest icon of the Modernists, but the founder of the Bauhaus, whose work is relatively minimally known, probably had more influence. Walter Gropius trained early European cohorts in machine-age architecture before being chased out of Nazi Germany all the way to Harvard. He called for a union of craft and design - an architecture rooted in a deep understanding and mastery of the machines of the day. This is the branch of Modernism I’m most intrigued by. Most innovations in building throughout history have come from a deep knowledge of the tools and materials of the time and place - Modernism, in theory, just has access to new materials and new technologies for comfort, travel and domesticity. Thus, new building forms are inevitable.

The buzz of machine age modernism wore off a while ago, at least in the mainstream, but we’re left with some of it’s guiding principles - perhaps just the worst ones.

We’ve developed a building culture deeply that talks a lot about affordability and economy, while building some of the most expensive and complicated structures in history. And usually ones that are dreadfully bland and have a functional life span of maybe a few decades. The baseline and reference point for pretty much all residential construction is a layered, light wood frame structure with masonry or concrete foundation and selections from the same catalogue of embellishments, materials and equipment. We’ve also built up standards and codes and widespread processes around this specific type of construction, propelled by the argument that it is the most economical and/or rational way to build. So this idea of economical construction based on standardized building materials has seemingly given us both high construction costs and mediocre construction with un-resilient materials. It wouldn’t be too hard to poke holes in the ‘rationality’ and inevitability of the way we build if anyone bothered to give it some serious objective thought.

The other big innovation - the ‘open plan’; the separation of structure from facade - has also stuck around. The average house with lap siding or stucco and asphalt shingles and far too many rooflines doesn’t look much like Villa Savoye, but it benefits from the same sort of aesthetic freedom. It consists of a mostly concealed structure with relatively large spans that can be clad and sculpted in about any reasonable configuration. The open plan did generate the freedom that the modernists were after, but I don’t think they had in mind the ability to interchange a ‘contemporary’ house for a ‘colonial’ with a few shifted rooflines and a different selection of claddings and trims. Yet, here we are - building has been reduced to stylistic labels one can pick out from a home builders catalogue, while zoning codes and HOAs codify this way of building through so-called ‘design standards’.

It might be a good time now to think about what pressures our newest technologies will contribute to our culture of building and design, especially given the trajectory we’ve been on for some time.

100 years ago, artificial intelligence only existed in a little bit of obscure science fiction. In the age of AI - a machine which releases the ‘designer’ of most, if not all, of their agency in the design process leads to an outcome which, at best, can only be partially wrangled and directed. I don’t know of many examples of ‘smarter’ tools generating better designed structures, spaces, products or experiences. Rather, the structures that have endured the longest, that we value the most, were borne out of a deep understanding of the materials of their construction and their purpose (often spiritual rather than solely functional) in a community.

The technology of the 20th century machine age - glass and steel and concrete, air conditioning and the automobile - created a lot of opportunity for design innovation and experimentation. The ‘movement’ of the International Style and all of the various -isms that popped up in the post-war industrial era offered some direction - some intellectual underpinning to art, architecture and culture. That kind of framework is hard to find today. And I can’t say I’m excited about the prospect of an AI-era architecture, if one were to take shape.

With the pressures and persuasion of the digital machine continuing to build at faster rates, we may no longer have to worry about the gap between craft and design - because both of those responsibilities can be fully wrenched from human control while humanity and the things that we have valued throughout history - whether art, architecture, music or culture - will be chopped up, regurgitated and force fed to us by the machine.

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“When the scientific investigation of matter embarked on its recent zoom, its effectiveness was so startling that a rejoicing world took it up as the primary cause. People, as I have said, made the farcical assumption that because their machines were efficient and honest, they, too, partook of those qualities.”

- Generation of Vipers, Philip Wylie

A Monoculture of Construction

‘Current suggestions for further improvement still tend to fall automatically into a purely mechanical mold… on the glib theory that uniform conditions are the “ideal” ones…

Formless urbanization, which is both dynamic and destructive, has become almost universal. Though it utilizes one kind of structure in metropolitan renewal projects and a slightly different kind in suburbia, the two types have basically the same defect. They have been built by people who lack historical or sociological insight into the nature of the city, considered as anything but the largest number of consumers that can be brought together in the most accessible manufacturing and marketing area.’

- The Design of the City, Lewis Mumford

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One, potentially useful, dualism in the categorizing of built structures is between an image-driven and a craft-driven architecture. The spirit of each of these strains of practice, though, is being abandoned at a fast rate except to the extent that they can serve the economic aspirations of the funders and benefactors of development. These overseers of what gets built and where, unfortunately but not surprisingly, have generally no taste, no vision and no care for the human experience of what gets built, even when they occupy these spaces themselves.

The image-driven architecture is the design and embellishment of the spectacle. The creation of the image-based architecture usually starts and ends with the conception of the diagram or symbol which the building should speak to — usually witnessed from specific pre-determined viewpoints, like the streetscape, the highway, the skyline, or possibly, if the symbolism is carried also into the building, from a grand atrium or circulation path or point of pause within the structure. In contemporary practice, the work of ‘starchitects’ like Bjarke Ingels exemplify this approach of design by diagram and the building as a symbol.

This type of architecture usually relies on compulsory technical detailing and administrative maneuvering, sometimes quite impressive in its own right, to realize the monument — each necessary detail of construction is at the service of the symbol. Don’t inspect too closely the architecture of the image, or the whole thing might fall apart.

On the other hand, a craft-driven architecture allows the form of the building to follow the materials of its construction and the efforts of those who construct and assemble it to lead. The detail is the genesis rather than a technical sleight of hand meant to evoke the symbol. This type of building is closer to the traditional means of building which, out of necessity, relied on regional resources — both material and human — to realize everything from humble homes to enduring monuments. The work of Peter Zumthor, whose buildings lack the conceptual clarity of the star architect’s monument, relies on the materials and methods of construction, usually with regionally appropriate materials, to invoke an ‘atmosphere’ rather an image.

The craft-driven architecture may be firmly rooted in a place — for instance, the Japanese have long built impressive structures out of wood, and have gone to great lengths to preserve the knowledge of their craft (eg, the rebuilding of the Ise Shrine every 20 years for well over a millenium). Technology has certainly supplemented craft traditions, as can be seen in the work of say, Kengo Kuma or Shigeru Ban — but it has not displaced tradition for the sake of ‘efficiency’, which of course, leads to a uniformization of everything, despite the resistance and creative efforts of even the best designers.

Image and craft are not mutually exclusive. The architectural image as well as careful craft can be found in historical monuments, say the repetition and proportions of the Greek temple, just as easily as the Modernist canon — take the Farnsworth House by Mies van der Rohe as one of the purest expressions of the the International Style in glass and steel. However, since the abandonment of regional building methods beginning in the industrial age, the split between craft and image has widened, with the image-based architecture taking precedence. The inertia of technology tends to displace regional ways of thinking and building, which in turn, replaces traditional craft and craftspeople with universal systems of building using standard materials that can sourced and assembled just about anywhere in the globe. The spectacle is easier to sell and quicker to produce, even when it has been reduced to a flat and uninspiring monolith of dull materials.

Contemporary building in the 21st century has mostly abandoned the spirit of both approaches in the sole pursuit of “efficiency” — the structure as first, and maybe solely, commodity. So the image must only be that which sells, not that which inspires or excites. This is just as true of the personal home as it is in the speculative commercial building or the community gathering space — resale value and return on investment are all that remains sacred.

A monoculture of building has taken a firm grip, modeled on a ‘scientific’ and ‘rational’ approach — not unlike the monoculture of agricultural production that made the family farm mostly obsolete. In the same way, a global, formless architecture has stamped out any place in the industry for bespoke craft except to serve a small minority of exclusive elite. This is convenient for politicians, investors, city planners and stakeholders who measure building and it’s associated uses (housing, tenant space, manufacturing and production, etc) by economic metrics.

The monoculture relies on proprietary inputs from an ever-evolving and consolidating pool of corporate distributors. Each product in the kit of parts to choose from is solving a specific problem, usually one that it created in the first place — structural, environmental or aesthetic — making up a layered and convoluted construction without a unifying logic. When new problems arise, as of course they do in such a ‘rational’ approach, the system is repeated to add a new layer to address the latest symptom — and on and on. Novel products and industry niches are popping up regularly to solve very specific issues that never existed in the first place when construction was rooted in place-based knowledge and ways of building.

Those architects and builders who can achieve a conceptual clarity of a firm intellectual footing while navigating the growing administrative and technical challenges of creation are praised, rightfully so, given the monumentality of this task. Meanwhile, less and less of our societal creative energy is directed toward envisioning a better built environment because that effort is needed for the gymnastics of obtaining planning and zoning approvals, capitulating to HOAs, modeling energy usage, satisfying building inspectors, padding pro formas and otherwise selling the commodity of space in our built environment.

Craft, and the specialized regional ways of building that had developed for generations using repeatable and adaptable materials and methods of a locale, have little place in this ‘rational’ way of designing and constructing the built environment. Those who still operate with some level of traditional means — perhaps building with earth or timber or stone — are dismissed or ignored as irresponsible idealogues. To be modern, after all, is to wipe the slate clean of the shackles of tradition and fully embrace consumption, commodification, scale and global uniformity.

The architecture industry hasn’t yet seemed to draw a connection between the transition to a purely technical and administrative role and the further erosion of the architect’s standing, influence and, of course, fees. The creative, intellectual and visionary responsibilities have been abandoned within the walls of academia, while disillusioned young designers who have not yet been fully crushed of the vitality and vision needed to realize a different way of building are being churned through and burned out of the industry at an increasing rate, leaving those who embrace the religion of ‘efficiency’ left to guide us and to rebuild the world in their image.

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‘I have never met that sculptor who could design a Venus “in the mind’s eye” with the expectation that a collaborator would free her from the marble block; and he would be a strange architect who could expect contractors and workmen to capture his thought in steel and stone except under his own strict supervision. Among the architects-of-cities there should be only two categories: master and apprentice, both of whom should be mindful of the truth, so often demonstrated in the arts, that imagining and making are, in practice, parts of a single process’

- Architecture and the Spirit of Man, Joseph Hudnut

The Disciplines of Building

The trajectory of building and creating over history has been one of ongoing compartmentalization of the various roles of design, manufacturing, and administration - especially since the unleashing of the machine in the industrial age. More than ever, independent interests vie for leverage in the administration of what gets built. The result is an overwhelming mess of mediocrity.

The proliferation of legislation, litigation, codes, regulations, permits, inspections and other oversight has hamstrung creativity and innovation in the built environment - but despite these suffocating constraints, we can’t let designers and architects off the hook. The ‘professionalization’ of the design and building trades is a kind of exclusive quasi-intellectual pursuit that seems to value self-preservation over ethical and cultural responsibilities. This only contributes to the predictable decay of the design professions and further entrenches the various ‘disciplines’ of building.

There seems to be an unspoken agreement between the academy and the profession to discard and scoff at anything that might be considered folk, ‘unprofessional’, ‘undisciplined’, etc - which is then reflected into the growing administrative burdens of building anything.

The irony is that the institutions of design offer little in terms of an intelligible value system that might guide and innovate how we build. Any kind of leading ethos to give direction to the industry is absent, at least in mainstream work, in the post-industrial age. In other words, rather than prove it’s value through praxis, the industry has resorted to defensive and litigious means to ‘protect’ it’s place in society. The design-by-committee parcels out responsibility and oversight, giving up ground on any meaningful ability to build better than, or at least as well as, we have before. Craft, and therefore culture, have given way to the commodification of everything, including the design and building professions themselves.

Nevertheless, trained designers are quick to fetishize the so-called ‘vernacular’, the last hold-outs of regional craft. But the modern designer is driven by the eye and generally limited to grasping at cheap symbols supposedly representative of folk craft and traditional building. To understand any kind of ‘vernacular’ building, you have to know the people who create them.

And what is the vernacular? It is architecture without architects. It is the anonymous act of creation borne out of the hyper-specific necessity of structure - whether it be functional, cultural or mythological. It is a complete undermining of the whole, flimsy contemporary underpinnings of the profession. It is the very thing that the professional guard has been out to destroy.

By fetishizing the vernacular, we admit that folk building has something to offer that ‘professional’ architecture (that is, architecture by architects) does not. A common defense against this self-inflicted undermining of the architect’s own authority is the Critical Regionalist’s line of thinking that suggests that the architect should acquire contextual symbols representative of a place’s building tradition and reassemble them within the rigor of contemporary intellectual frameworks. Because of course, folk building methods and forms in themselves are not worthy of serious consideration until they are inflected with the ‘professionalism’ of the architect.

This isn’t a complete or fair summary of Critical Regionalism. I admit to finding the Critical Regionalist theory intriguing and even useful, but it’s seemingly done little to combat the most common, well deserved and most difficult to refute critique of the contemporary architecture practice - the overwhelming ubiquity of bland and soulless spaces, structures and cities, disconnected from culture, geography, climate and the human experience. A truly regionalist approach, one that might help slow the spread of mediocrity in our built environment, would require deep knowledge of the history, resources and people of the place.

Perhaps, despite the continued doubling down on the narrowing and specialization of the various building and design trades, there is still something great to learn from those who have done what we, the profession, do without the extensive training and ever-increasing administrative limitations. I don’t expect much of an admission from the academy or professional institutions on the merits of folk craft and building - but without a true acknowledgement and course correction, the legitimacy of the professions can only continue to erode.

We seem to have fully bought into the myth that with more effort, more technology, and more commercial products in our arsenal, that we may again achieve the kind of enduring and inspiring construction of the historical structures that we study and preserve today. The alternative is to believe that this pursuit is just not worthwhile and to accept the bland uniformity and placelessness of our built environments as inevitable, or even desirable. If we have not entirely given up on our architecture and our cities, it’s perhaps time to find inspiration in what has worked before, rather than to march on blindly toward Progress trusting that more technology will solve our issues for us.

More than 100 years ago, Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus crowd sought a re-union of craft and art - of design and construction. They witnessed what was on the horizon - the consequences of the machine age. The ‘robotization’ of the individual when craft is reduced to commodity, and building is left entirely to the constraints of the machine, without the creative direction and intellectual purpose of the designer with agency and mastery over their tools. They likely underestimated the power of the machine - which they worked to reign in through a new form of machine-age craft. In the age of AI, the pace and scope of this displacement has only increased - but the consequences are the same. Artificial intelligence will never replace human craft - but without the intentional and persistent resistance to the ‘progress’ of machine development, the agency of the designer and the communities and clients who they represent, will continue to be sacrificed.