AR's 'Big Rethink', letter to Editor, Feb 2012 - Full text

Dear Madam,

The AR's 'Big Rethink' is a welcome change from the coffee table nature of many of it's past building studies. However, Peter Buchanan's article has come too late to have any meaningful effect, and even after the same points have been raised by contributors to other periodicals. This is due more to the timing of the AR's new direction than any fault on Buchanan's part.

Where the Buchanan article has perhaps trumped other similar offerings, is in the severity and urgency of it's tone and in the direct -albeit qualified- criticism of named practices; a dubious honour, but Buchanan has probably only written what has already been said at dinner parties, cafes and lecture theatres across the UK at least, over the past few years.

The targets of Buchanan's ire are notable by their almost complete absence from contemporary architectural theoretical discourse; they are the architectural equivalent of the Football world's 'Galacticos'; great names of the past who have become victims of their own successes and who are not likely now, to suffer significantly from negative criticism. There are many other architects who are just as guilty of the 'sins of the starchitect', or at least would be , given the choice between growing their practice off the back of a large prestigious job and turning such a job down for ethical reasons. There is a reason why Peter Zumthor is unique.



David Beckham, Figo, Ronaldo & Zidane were well past it by the time they joined the 'even more past it' Raul to form the 'Galacticos' at Real Madrid FC. Football's equivalent of the 'Justic League'.

No, I fear that there is more to the malaise which presently afflicts architecture than the simple cult of the starchitect. Ultimately we must as architects and theorists admit our powerlessness in the face of larger forces. Modernism was the child of the Industrial Revolution, leading to an unprecedented break in the continuing evolution of craft techniques that had always underpinned architecture, but which had never been properly acknowledged.

This meant that the technical and cultural failures of many of the products of Modernism were probably inevitable.

But what happened subsequently was certainly not inevitable. The fact that architects and theorists never learned from those initial mistakes and continued to assert in their lectures, publications and commentaries- with ever more delusional vehemence - the autonomy of the heroic artiste-architect, led to the repetition of the same cultural and technical failures as before.

In fact it has only been in the last 10 -15 years that the architectural profession, at least in the UK, has begun to see building production in a more interdisciplinary light. This has only occurred because the profession's delusions regarding it's independence have led other actors - contractors, QS's and clients - to lose patience with it and to develop ways of procuring buildings that rely ever less on architects. They will not tolerate another repeat of the failures of Modernism.

If architects and theorists had learned the initial lessons and had developed a Postmodernism that was more responsive to societal needs -such as Peter Buchanan has enunciated - and less self-indulgent, then we may well not have been where we are now as a profession.

Personally I'm interested in how and why this happened. How did the soothe-sayers and the kings (theorists /critics and the architects they taught) get it so wrong? Buchanan talks of Eisenman having gotten away with it for all these years but, like Rogers and Bernie Madoff (to draw parallels with another more immediately significant crisis for a moment) he is an easy target and is not alone in his guilt.

However, it must also be acknowledged that there are some people who, like Nouriel Roubini, can feel satisfied that they at least, have been doing justice to their vocations as opposed to milking them.

In the mid-nineties, when I started training, and when the building boom that has just ended was about to get into full swing, Kenneth Frampton was way ahead of the game with his 'Studies in Tectonic Culture'.

In Switzerland, Sergison Bates architects have just completed yet another 'cheap plain building with quiet unobtrusive dignity', the type which Buchanan has rightly identified as being tragically beyond the reach of most architects, but which Sergison Bates seem to have mastered. It says much about the current state of affairs in this country that practices like theirs seem more welcome on the continent than in the UK.

In the 1970's (when I was born) the unfashionable Robert & Brenda Vale carried out their autonomous house project and concluded that the continuing growth of cities (and the economic growth that underpins it) is not compatible with sustainable development. Increasingly, it's looking as if they were right but few in the profession have really taken them seriously.

Alas for the AR, Buchanan and others like them, because the horse bolted a long long time ago.

Sincerely

Michael Badu

Michael Badu Architecture, London