Literary Dose #42

"Architects have more to offer their clients and society than they realize. Integrating design morphology, material science, and environmental sustainability will undoubtedly inform everyone what is possible or achievable in the built environment, in a manner not previously seen. A focus on architectural science (distinct from building science) must equal our overwhelming obsession with form. It must become the foundation by which to certify a new architectural expertise -- comparable in breadth and scope to medical research. The National Science Foundation should be the logical choice to fund such research but -- incredibly -- it does not recognize architecture as a science! We must demand that our representative organizations, such as the AIA, lobby to change this.

Today's broad societal concerns -- global warming, greenhouse gases, resource depletion -- will focus greater public attention than ever before toward architects for answers and innovative solutions. Should they fail, such attention will quickly be redirected elsewhere. The US Green Building Council, Architecture 2030, and Architecture for Humanity all raised broad public awareness on these issues well before any of the professional organizations did. This is not a coincidence but a wake-up call. Talking about green design can only go so far. Metrics derived from controlled testing -- automobile fuel mileage or appliance energy ratings, for example -- enable those with ideas to speak above the fray. Those who now seek government-funded building programs but fail to address the opportunity for digital design process change will have missed the point."

- "The Digital Design Ecosystem: Towards a Pre-Rational Architecture" by Paul Selestsky (senior manager of digital design in SOM's New York office) in Provisional: Emerging Modes of Architectural Practice USA, edited by Elite Kedan, F. Jonathan Dreyfous, Craig Mutter (Princeton Architectural Press, 2009, pp. 44-45)

Literary Dose #41

"Consumption and affluence have increased in many parts of the world, and although they seem to form a baseline of contemporary society, some counter-movements are also visible within consumer society. Not a wholesale refusal but some level of consumer savvy, such as re-use, purchasing sustainable, 'ethically produced' or local goods. Here, the market finds a way to respond. When viewed cynically, that indicates that there is no 'moral' component to the market, but that profit is the only concern. While this may be true, if the public enforces a conscience upon producers by choosing to purchase some goods over other (and price being one of numerous factors in that choice), the results are not necessarily bad. The TV-program Extreme Home Makeover encompasses a number of different features of this debate. On the one hand, it presumes the desirability of an identity expressed in architectural terms (although primarily on the surface more than in the space). Bedrooms are turned into drive-in movie theaters, incorporate pick-up truck beds, have music-themed wall decorations, grass-covered floors -- anything is possible, as long as it is based on a particular hobby or interest of the room's occupant. It also offers a 'quick', and sometimes superficial fix: although wrecking balls and sledgehammers are used extensively, the fundamental structure of the space is not typically transformed. The houses remain recognizable suburban family dwellings. It offers a spectacle: extensive demolition and construction crews are working against the clock with the design team, and the pressure builds as the deadline nears. And it offers the satisfaction of the family returning, who will forget the troubles in their life as they walk through their beautiful new home. We could say: this form of sugar-coated home makeover is no more than a temporary placebo for their problems. Or we could also say: if there is a role for architecture to play in the everyday life of suburban families, this offers a caricature of what architects could be doing -- making the home back into a castle."

- Lara Schrijver from Radical Games: Popping the Bubble of 1960s' Architecture (NAi Publishers, 2009, p. 20)

Literary Dose #40

"'[Ric Scofidio] and I typically argue a lot,' [Liz Diller] says.
'Yes,' he says.
'We kind of beat each other up. He has his ideas, I have my ideas, and I think my ideas are better than his.'
[...]
'Early in our relationship, we really pushed it many times to be on [sic] the breaking point,' he remembers. 'I mean really be on [sic] the breaking point, and then 20 minutes later we're back together and everything was fine. And I think that that has enabled us to be totally brutal and honest with each other.'"

- "Portrait of a Working Marriage" in FLYP Issue 35, which features a couple videos with DS+R and an audio interview with FHL co-founder Robert Hammond.

Literary Dose #39

"My entry into the profession in 1972 coincided with a number of important architectural events, most dramatically, perhaps, the first energy crisis of the decade, which began with the oil embargo in October, the beginning of a long-term and severe increase in the cost of energy. Its immediate architectural effects were formally dramatic if somewhat short-lived -- the incorporation of solar panels, earth berms, Trombe walls, and a variety of other gadgets to create passive energy sources. Its long-term effects were more subtle bu more permanent -- a dramatic increase in the importance of the wall as a thermal barrier, resulting in not only a lot more insulation but also the decline or even disappearance of single glazing, uninsulated spandrels, exposed columns and beams, and thermal bridges. Whole architectural vocabularies -- the exposed steel frames of the Case Study Houses, the exposed concrete frames and mullionless glazing of the brutalist era -- declined or disappeared, and the structural frame retreated behind the building envelope. The wall, at least in large-scale buildings, had long ago lost most of its structural importance, and once the wall became primarily an environmental membrane, everything changed. The solid wall devoid of insulation was replaced by the multilayered multifunctional wall. It is no accident that the advent of postmodernism and the decline, if not the disappearance, of any interest in structural expression followed soon after, for it is difficult to express a structure you cannot expose."

- Edward R. Ford from Five Houses, Ten Details (Princeton Architectural Press, 2009, pp. 113-114)

Literary Dose #38

"For Pierre Restany it was the society founded on the eternal that was obsessed with the values of permanence and materiality; today, instead, we share the understanding, matured from the 1960s onwards, that what is real is not eternal. ... The danger of contemporary culture is not the freshness of the image, its here and now, but rather its freezing, mummifying it in a form that remains immutable over time. The obstinate hope for perrenial monuments in the end testifies to a headstrong obtuseness that we have dragged behind us since the time of the Egyptians, and which consists of wanting, at all costs, to exorcise death and refuse the deeper meaning of life, which is precisely that of mutability."

- Luigi Prestinenza Puglisi from New Directions in Contemporary Architecture: Evolutions and Revolutions in Building Design Since 1988 (Wiley, 2008, pp. 111)

(Luigi Prestinenza Puglisi's book contains a bibliography of "50 books, 10 of which are must-haves." I don't have all of the must-haves, but I do have 10 of the 50, pictured above.)

Literary Dose #37

Hans Ulbrich Obrist: You wrote in the Observer in 1997 a piece on airports and London where you said that, “By comparison with London Airport, London itself seems hopelessly antiquated. London may well be the only world capital—with the possible exception of Moscow—that has gone from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first without experiencing all the possibilities and excitements of the twentieth in any meaningful way.” And you carry on mentioning your admiration for the Hilton Hotel in Heathrow. Can you tell me why that building, and what relationship or dialogue you have in general with architecture or architects?

J.G. Ballard: The Heathrow Hilton designed by Michael Manser is my favourite building in London. It’s part space-age hangar and part high-tech medical centre. It’s clearly a machine, and the spirit of Le Corbusier lives on in its minimal functionalism. It’s a white cathedral, almost a place of worship, the closest to a religious building that you can find in an airport. Inside, it’s a highly theatrical space, dominated by its immense atrium. The building, in effect, is an atrium with a few rooms attached. Most hotels are residential structures, but rightly, the Heathrow Hilton plays down this role, accepting the total transience that is its essence, and instead turns itself into a huge departure lounge, as befits an airport annex. Sitting in its atrium one becomes, briefly, a more advanced kind of human being. Within this remarkable building, one feels no emotions and could never fall in love, or need to. The National Gallery or the Louvre are the complete opposite, and people there are always falling in love.

[Heathrow Hilton by Michael Manser, 1992 | image source]

Hans Ulbrich Obrist: And what is your favourite museum and why? What do you think of the evolutions undertaken by museums in the last few decades? In your view, what role do museums play today? And ideally what do you think their role should be?

J.G. Ballard: I like traditional museums, the less frequented the better. All the changes in the past fifty years have been for the worst. I remember the Louvre in 1949 when it was completely deserted, whereas today it is a theme park where you can enjoy “the Mona Lisa experience.” This isn’t only a matter of funding. Museum directors enjoy being impresarios, guru-figures manipulating the imaginations of the public. Museums shouldn’t be too popular. The experience within the Louvre or the National Gallery should be challenging and unsettling, and take years to absorb. The Italians had the right idea. Most of their paintings were in dimly lit churches, un-clean and difficult to see. As a result, the renaissance endured for centuries.

- An interview with J.G. Ballard and Hans Ulbrich Obrist from Hans Ulbrich Obrist Interviews, Volume 1 (Charta, 2003, pp. 58-68)

The above interview in its entirety is available at Abitare (via Archinect), though volume one of Obrist's interviews -- a nearly 1,000 page tome with 66 interviews with architects, artists, curators, filmmakers, musicians, philosophers, social theorists, and urbanists -- is worthwhile for those interested in this form of inquiry.

See Ballardian for obituaries and tributes on the author who has influenced architects (among others) with his unique form of science-fiction.