SPEAKING RUINS

BLOG 02: THE FUTURE PAST: Architecture in Ruin (A HIDDEN MANIFESTO)

Architecture is civilisation:

It establishes a shifting conversation throughout the deep past, the present and an imagined future. Its forms of language, reference and discovery, enlighten and provoke. Excavating resonances, knowledge, ideas and meanings; universal and ambiguous.

Architecture is infrastructure, defining territories and political organisation. Its faculties of monumentality and power have sustained civilisation for centuries. However over the past century the era of global capital has radically overpowered architecture’s fundamental characteristics. Manhattan, Koolhaas’s laboratory is a territory consumed in its own shallow decadence, the empire state the stand-out souvenir of the twenty first century pilgrim. The late twentieth century city could be argued to be the subliminal assent for paradise after floors and floors of purgatory. Manhattan the twentieth century sublime stands as a collectors table of various versions of the mythical tower of Babal, the Shinar plane cataloged very specifically into a grid, so that each tower could compete with its neighbour, (the grid being the divine perfection of pragmatic capitalist ideologies). Contemporary architecture in this setting was the ability to materialise economic supremacy. Not of the state but linked specifically to private enterprise. To consume its potential, architecture in this era had to profit from the market tool of seduction. Leading to an architecture pre-occupied with itself. With the centre of gravity of architectural production shifting to the envelope and surface. Buildings were predominantly the same cathedrals of modern work as each other through were wrapped in increasingly ostentatious skins. This fashion coincided with the epidemic expansion of market forces, the free spending, free living individual and the global media. Architecture and architects throughout the period were heroically portrayed. In January of 1979, the cover of TIME magazine depicted Phillip Johnson wielding his model for the sony building, ready to inflict it upon the city.

Over the past decade, the market crash in 2008 and continued global security fears have challenged the sustainability of this approach to the future capitalist city. Now in a time of sustained economic recession modern analysts believe we have reached a terminal point in global capital.¹

While architecture has stalled in this period, new technologies of social media have evolved the age and its inhabitants approach to the multi-dimensional living. While historically buildings would communicate ideas; political or cultural, today in the main communication is through technology.² The role of architecture seemingly redundant.

The past decades of architecture, while expanding and popularising the field, has coincided with a time where the influence of architecture has a seemingly political and cultural powerlessness.

How does architecture re-imagine itself and the city?

Excluding the incessant unfocused discussion of aesthetics style and taste, architecture and architects faces a series of paradox, challenges and opportunities:

• To be made to sustain civilisation though in a way that it is able to adapt to the speed of change of political, social, cultural and technological forces

• To create civilisation in a world increasingly privatised and restricted by state policy and compliance.

• To make buildings that are a catalyst 
  
• To not be afraid, to re-imagine the past to generate a future

Architecture in Ruin

My interest in the ruin has little to do with what some may term nostalgia. Rather it is the potential of the ruin as an architectural construct for the 21^st century.

The ruin has the ability to expand time and space, to dissolve and expand its constraints and measures. In the work of the Otolith group, as Nina Power suggests in her 2008 article, “Waiting for the Future,” “The future, the past and the present interweave with a delicate sense of proportion.” Otolith 01 proposes a spectre of a multi-fragmented future, formed by the juxtaposition of history, a lived present and an imagined future. The result is a spatial experience constructed in ruin that provokes a dynamic, multitude of readings and resonances that blur the thresholds of past, present and future. The Facebook timeline is an example of how technology has already begun to seamlessly collage these once absolute boundaries, of here and now and then and ago.

In Grayson Perry’s recent exhibition “the Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman” at the British Museum, works from the past are juxtaposed with his own work, with each lending gravitas to the other and obscuring the edges of time. It is revolutionary in the fact that it rightfully suggests that human discovery is not linear, its excavation is more fluid, going against the grain of the institutional desire of the museum to catalogue work chronologically. The classical order of time and space no longer exists. Perry demonstrates that in these liberal, secular times the individual is free to construct their own mythical perennial existence, establishing traditions and creating connections, conversations and resonances far beyond the inevitable fragility of a short life (the artist).

Siguard Lewerentz’s St Peter’s church in Klippan, Sweden explores how we navigate the boundaries of a deep primitive past and a high-tech future. The building is a dichotomy of scale, volume and use veiled by darkness and unknown from one fixed point. We gather our understanding of the space through a fluid collation of excavated images. This slow acquisition of space causes our senses to behave more acutely, forcing us to engage with the space in an increasingly profound manner. Only in this frame of seeing are we able to understand the symbolic religious references inferred by the architect.

The Ruin as Infrastructure

The Sagrada Familia, in Barcelona is a living ruin.  In Gaudi’s cathedral we see the close alignment of ruin and construction. Having been in construction/ruin for over a century the time passed has allowed a re-imagination of the Gaudi’s original image with the technological, engineering advancements of the past decades accelerating the implementation of the project. Throughout its construction the ruin is constantly in a state of becoming, forever made and re-imagined. Due to be completed in 2026, it is somehow disappointing to imagine it finished.

In the 18^th century Piranesi etchings of Rome depicted the ancient ruin as the infrastructure of the future city. While his contemporaries intended to restore Rome to a pastiche of its ancient grandeur, Piranesi saw the political and aesthetic power of the ruin as the generator of a city not yet realised. Terry Kirk states “His images encourage an idiosyncratic, creative process of hybridisation and a liberated response to historical heritage in all its palimpsestic richness.” Piranesi was able “to restore the latent vocation of the city,”¹ as the dynamic re-imagining and re-invention of itself. The “Ichnographia” is a map of existing and imagined ruins that define the territory of the Campus Martius with the everyday city fabric existing as a background to this political organisation. Piranesi’s imagined future depicts a blurring of public and private thresholds, volumes and uses, a hierarchy of civic and domestic scales and spaces that establish a political organisation. It is common that in the composition of his perspective views of Rome that the ruin or monument is placed in the middle distance, often overlooking a civic square or open landscape that recedes into multiple axises to the city beyond. The ruin or monument in this context exhibits a control, defining a territory and assuming a power or governance over a space. Furthermore it establishes a centre or a sense of home in a chaotic world and play on the faculties of power and monumentality to establish order. A city composed through the juxtaposition of the set pieces is reflected further in Piranesi’s aesthetic interest in the architectural fragment. Often Piranesi depicts ruined foundations, composed of colossal masses of stacked stone, put together dry, held only by gravity.

Living in the city of Fragments 

Aldo Rossi’s “Architecture of the City” published in 1984, was a theoretical basis for the city formed in the context of the past and its future resonances. His architectural works were diagrams in the political organisation of the city. His cemetery in Modena is a fictional city for the dead, composed of a collection of spaces and forms that explore ideas of meaning and memory.  The “Gallaratese Housing,” project in Milan establishes an elevated village above an open public colonnade.  It is in these composed gaps and public spaces that buildings order and sustain civilisation.  

John Hejduk’s work in Berlin the theoretical “Victims” project published in 1986 and Kreuzberg Tower social housing project in 1988 both explored the notion of a city as a collection of fragments.  In the Victims project, the different architectures seem to gather and converge in a dynamic conversation each with its own poetry, personality and expression. Imagine then moving around Hejduk’s assembled city, moving between the juxtaposition of emotive powers that exude, each one calling on our innate curiosity and imagination.  Hejduk manages to allude to a world of myth and mystery, in a secular and increasingly prosaic, utilitarian world.

Such approaches are counter to the trends of contemporary urbanism.³

The Hybrid

In 1965 Cedric Price proposed the “Potteries Thinkbelt,” a hybrid building of research and industry. Price’s vision of a new type of university was to integrate industry and academia in order to exploit developments in research and share resources.

The end of the end