Category: ARCHITECTURE
Source URL: http://www.ar.utexas.edu/center/benedikt_articles/less.html

Less for Less Yet:
On Architecture's Value(s) in the Marketplace

by

Michael L. Benedikt
Center for American Architecture and Design
The University of Texas at Austin

Appeared in the Winter/Spring 1999 issue of Harvard Design Magazine,
http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/hdm/

Why ask about architecture's values or the value of architecture? Are architects in any doubt about either? Certainly, architectural monthlies and the major newspapers find no shortage of sharp new buildings to show. Lectures and exhibitions and professional meetings abound. We give and get design awards. Recondite history and theory books continue to be published, enough to satisfy a generation of assistant professors (and then some), and all of them serve to substantiate our essentially positive opinion of architecture's heritage and importance. And for the more retiring among us there is always Architectural Digest (covertly examined), travel to the villas and gardens of Europe, and new books with reassuring titles like The Architectural Photograph.

Indeed, it is possible for architects to live entirely inside this World of Architecture, which is a state of mind, without ever leaving it. It is possible for architects to drive right through the overturned garbage can that is the greater part of the American built environment, tisk tisking about the averageness of other architects and the rapacity of developers, without ever thinking that the condition of the modern world is at least partially due to what the "best" and most prominent architects have done, have allowed, and have come earnestly to believe in, over the past fifty years. This is why we should ask about architectural values.

And what do we, or they--the "best" architects--believe? I shall keep the list short and deliberately conventional: that architecture is for people; that integrity and honesty of expression is a virtue; that form follows function; that simplicity is beautiful; that cheap doesn't necessarily mean bad or ugly; that creativity is the architect's chief gift to society; that indoors and outdoors should be melded; that shaping or manipulating space is the essence of what architects do; that the grid is rational; that the world is "speeding up" and architecture should/must follow (corollary: that advances in technology offer possibilities for architecture that should not be passed up); that together with our consultants we understand completely what a building is and does. Every one of these essentially Modernist beliefs, held as a value, is problematic to architecture's value. Every one of them (except, perhaps, the first, which is somewhat vacuous) has caused more harm than good to the environment and to our profession.

Consider the idea that creativity is our chief gift to society.¹

The first thing to challenge, even if one accepts this proposition, is whether architects are indeed all that creative. Look around and decide. Consider too that there are several other professions that can lay as much claim to creativity as architects do, from artists on the one hand to politicians on the other. But these are easy shots. More subtle and far reaching is the fact that basing our personal and professional reputations on creativity greatly weakens our bargaining power when all the parties that have a say in the design of the environment sit down at the same table. To see this, imagine that an impasse has developed. Here is the engineer; here is the owner; here is the contractor, the city official, the neighborhood group representative, the financier; and the architect. Someone has to give. Who will have to be "flexible?" Who will have to go back to the drawing board because she is "so creative?" You guessed it.

Consider another situation: a client comes to an architect with a very tight budget and an ambitious project. The architect believes (as he was taught at school) that cheap doesn't necessarily mean bad or ugly, that creativity is his gift to society, and that if he doesn't take the job, some lesser architect will. Rare is the architect--and then only in the best of economic times--who will politely show the client the door informing them that a Mercedes for the price of a Volkswagen can't be had. Most architects would rather give it a go; do something! Is he not creative? Cannot cheap things be beautiful? Is this not a democracy where even the modestly well off can get to have [my/our] Good Design. And later, when the project has fallen apart logistically or pieces are lopped off or finishes are downgraded or fees are not paid because the budget is being overshot, who does the architect really blame, in spite of what he tells others? Himself, of course. He wasn't "creative" enough.

Creativity is probably the single worst idea(l) that architects could associate themselves with. And yet "the chance to be creative" is the foremost reason students give for wanting to become architects. No teacher will discourage this goal or disabuse them of this value--or at least replace it with any number of other values, such as quality or knowledge or dignity or power--not just because being "creative" has become tantamount to a human right in our time, but because the ideal of material design creativity, of redemption through the combination of art and engineering, goes back to the very raison d'etre of Modern architecture and its promise to humanity. Choose against creativity and we are condemned to make buildings that are unequal to the Challenges of the Modern World. Or so we children of the Bauhaus were told.

I am writing this essay in a three-hundred-year-old-building; the light is wonderful, the electricity courses through my computer just fine, the phone is at hand, and the toilet flushes like a dream. The argument that to build "the old way" was inherently unequal to the Challenges of the Modern World was just so much rhetoric, serving best those constituencies who stood to profit from increasing urban land values and decreasing per square foot construction costs, from wringing out more rent, from building highways, and from receiving architectural commissions from the newly monied class of industrialists.

In Germany, as everywhere in Western Europe in the late 19th century, the countryside was emptying into the cities as the basis for economic development changed from agriculture to industry. Workers needed to be (ware)housed, factories built and manned. The physical destruction caused by the First World War along with the financial crises that followed² allowed the pre-war aims of the Werkbund (in a nutshell: rationalized construction under the banner of Modernity) to take hold, and take over. By 1945 and the end of World War Two, Modernism, the architecture of crisis and of recovery from calamity, had established itself as "the only game in town," a second-growth species that would not go away.

In America, undamaged by war and now home to Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe, the percentage of the Gross National Product accounted for by civilian construction in 1950 was 11%. By 1990 its share had dropped to 7.9%. The rate of building production over the same period increased from 600 million to 3,500 million square feet per annum. This means that a 600% increase in construction volume was achieved with a 25% decrease in percent-GNP expenditure. Efficiency? Enviable "returns to scale"? This is the viewpoint of the economist and those who do not see that the product itself has changed. Clearly we are progressively directing relatively less of our total wealth and effort to infrastructural and architectural quality. This reflects our national values directly. Over the same period, the share of the GNP represented by the banking, real estate, entertainment, and communication sectors of our economy grew in precisely the opposite direction. The conclusion? Our environment has become ever more commodified, ever more the subject of short term investment, income generation, and resale, rather than of lifelong dwelling or long-term city making.³

But we cannot blame "the market." Most of the "nice old buildings" that ordinary people like and that we say we can no longer afford to build--with their high ceilings, operable windows, well defined rooms, solid walls, pleasing decoration, and dignified demeanor--were built in a market context and were not cheap. Indeed, they were more expensive for their owners to build and finance in their own day than they would be to build and finance again in ours. What has changed is the national will to direct attention, labor, and resources to architecture specifically and the built environment generally, be it through markets or governments. And one reason for this change has been the total relinquishment by architects of their role--indeed duty--in upholding standards and modes of discourses about design that ordinary people can understand and that produce buildings that people want to live and work in for reasons other than that they are new.

In societies at peace that can maintain free markets, people get what they want; and what they want depends on how successfully their needs and values are addressed by competing producers. With a modicum of prosperity, people have choices. This is the context in which architecture, as an industry, broadly conceived, has become less and less able to deliver a superior, evolving, and popularly engaging product that can compete with other more successful industries--with the producers of cars, music, movies, sports, travel, computers, and financial instruments, to name a few. And the less successfully architecture has competed with these diverse "growth industries," the less architects have been entrusted with the time and money to do work on a scale and with a quality that could, perhaps, turn things around.

I say "perhaps," because it is far from certain that the knowledge architects currently have and the values architects currently subscribe to could build a world people really wanted, given any amount of time and money. People are afraid of hiring architects, the more so they are well-known by other architects. Now that is a sobering thought; and if there were no exceptions to it, we would all have to pack it in. But let us not use these exceptions to form a screen between ourselves and the world, a screen, that is, between what we sometimes do well and what remains to be done, which becomes evident if we will only look out of the window or take a drive with open eyes.

It is ironic, and yet somehow predictable, that Modernism--fruit of the economic ruin of Europe by two world wars, enemy of aristocratic privilege, and champion of efficiency over sentiment ever since--should finally, with the Neomodernism of today, become the prestige style of the "rich and famous" even as much of America struggles to ignore its consequences: windowless suburban high schools hardly more comfortable than minimum-security prisons, a despoiled landscape of shopping malls, billboards, and deserted reminders of our manufacturing prowess, wire-crossed skies, housing "projects," weedy lots called parks, and, for relief, gigantic blocks of mirrored clouds floating on lawns hiding acres of Wonder-thin office space, fed by interstates thundering through canyons around hills and over and past tinder-box cottages nuzzled by broken cars or too-perfect, Truman Show-esque enclaves of refugees and retirees.

No wonder people go to the movies, there to see what happens when someone takes days to get the light right.

Take another value-cum-credo. Form follows function. Functionalism was a poison pill, swallowed first by well-meaning architectural writers drawing (mistakenly) on the "design" intentions of nature (which is, in fact, profligately rococo); second, by ambitious architects with an eye to getting more work from businessmen using Social Darwinism as an operating principle ("survival of the fittest"); and third by ordinary people, who hardly needed convincing that Progress depended on the power of machines to be ruthlessly focused in purpose.⁴ Instead of inspiring an investigation into what buildings do, however, which is as delicate and multifarious and easy to miss the truth of as is nature's real complexity, functionalism helped eliminate all aspects of architecture for which a robust health-and-safety or cost-saving rationale could not be mustered and forced across the desk of an impassive banker.

I am certainly not the first to decry functionalism. The Postmodern movement in architecture--1965 - 1985, R.I.P.--exhausted itself rebuking the form-follows-function principle, or at least in desperate reinterpretation of it. But it was too late. The ceiling of expectations as to what architecture could and should and would achieve was already lowered, ratcheted down by decades of efficiency-talk and rationality-talk on the consumer end, and on the production end, the failure to develop fresh technology that could lower the real costs of construction fast enough to free up money for a round of ambitious and complex design. Those small economies that could be technologically effected (lightweight structural and wall systems, for example) were quickly made off with by rentiers and financiers, by clients with better things to do with their money. The economic ceiling lowered itself another notch. Every architect who through their estimable creativity and self-application found a cheaper way to build, became an example, willing or not, of what the next architect should be able to "achieve" too. With project budgeting thus cast as an exercise in starving-the-building (if not the architect), it is no wonder that all that architectural effort--all the earnest travel to Europe and drawing Rome in the 1970s, all the pouring over Palladio and breast-beating about Gropius and Mies (who misled us!), all the reading of Wolfe and Venturi and Blake and looking for complexity and contradiction in old plans and then simulating it in ours--should have resulted largely in commercial co-option, pastiche, academicism, and another round of despair about architecture's uses and prospects.

What has been our latest answer? So far, three (major) movements in little more than a decade, overlapping of course. First Deconstruction, then computerization, and now the return to Modernism either in the elite, artworld form of Minimalism, or in the brash, fuck-you form of Undecorated Garage with Large Glass. None of these movements is likely to enable architects to transform the cynical mess that is the postwar environment into a place where everyone is pleased to be a native envied by a tourist, including, when he is at home, the tourist.

• Consider Deconstruction. As practiced by Zaha Hadid, Peter Eisenman, Daniel Libeskind, or Frank Gehry, it will continue to get press. But what these architects do does not follow Kant's Categorical Imperative: work only according to principles you would have others work according to as well. Their architecture is premised on crashingly obvious exceptionalism, and this cannot be a way of making cities. The complex and delicate experience of joy-in-inhabitation, to which we all have a right, comes from a thousand subtleties of position and color and view and touch located in the DNA, so to speak, of traditional city-making. This kind of complexity--the visual and spatial equivalent of a composition by Chopin, say--was still known, at some level, by the notable pre-Modern architects of both Europe and America, but was largely extinct by 1945. Where to plant a tree, how to make a terrace, how to shape and open a window...these manifest a complexity that can only be evolved; it cannot be simulated, represented, transformed, or produced ab initio by formal games and explorations, no matter how elaborate, literate, or "logical." Schoenberg cannot be a model for architects. Nor can Derrida as he is currently read.

• Computerization is not a style, of course, but it is a new way of conceiving buildings, and almost imperceptibly it leads architects to make value judgments they might not otherwise make. This happens even as--indeed precisely because--architects protest that CAD is "just a new drafting tool" that enables them to "offer better service." To their credit, the architects mentioned above use the computer to permit greater complexity of form and depth of design exploration as well to attempt greater precision and ambition in construction.⁵ But the computer is not being used in this way by the majority of architects who are responsible for what you see on the drive to the mall. The computer is being used as it is conventionally used in business: to increase productivity, to stimulate more output per unit labor input. A building that ten years ago would have taken ten draftsmen one year to draw, might now take three draftsmen eight months to draw. Once digitized, details from old projects can be seamlessly incorporated into new projects.⁶ Documents can easily be updated as construction progresses and further economies are found. And so on.

The efficiencies that computers afford raise a critical question: who benefits from the increased productivity? I would venture that it is not the architect. I would venture that intense market competition between architects, focused on service-for-fee and the ability to control costs, has passed these productivity-won savings cleanly along to clients, and that architects have not, with these savings, bought one minute more of their own time to spend on the design or refinement of their buildings. Indeed, so seductive is the computer's capacity to copy files hither and thither and to render "space(s)" in no time at all, that I would venture that less time is being spent in design, profession-wide, than ever before. Moreover, the design being done is being done more and more entirely on the computer--I have yet to meet a practicing architect under fifty who is not proud of this recent accomplishment--despite the plain-as-day fact that the compositional tools provided by CAD software cannot match the fluidity and serendipity and delicacy of hand-guided pencil on molecularly noisy paper, let alone the capacity of this "old" medium for recording the accumulation of thought over time. Add to this CAD's inherent reluctance to represent land forms fluidly, the curves and cuts and twisted surfaces, the plants, the wildness and color...

And so the economizing continues, round after round, the average architect delivering less and so being asked to deliver less yet for less yet: three-dimensional shadows of real buildings.

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Notes:

¹A variant on this belief, 1970s vintage: that architects are "problem solvers."

²Germany's predicament was exacerbated by American foreign policy. Presidents Wilson, Coolidge, and Hoover insisted that war debt to the U.S. by the allied victors of the war be paid regardless of whether these countries--chiefly England, France, Belgium, Italy--received or forgave Germany its debt to them in war reparations. With no choice but to insist on repayments, the allies forced Germany to remain economically crippled and spiritually humiliated for more than a decade, and germinating extremist social ideologies of all kinds.

³Patricia Mainardi in The End of the Salon (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1993) provides an excellent analysis of the importance of economic and market considerations in accounting for the origins of Modernism in art; art, for better or worse, as commodity.

⁴The phrase "form follows function" has an interesting provenance. Begun as an Enlightenment idea espoused by the 18th century Italian philosophers Lodoli and Milizia and informing Boullee and Ledoux in the 19th, the phrase enters the mind of Italophile American Horace Greenough, whence it circulates in the Chicago School of the 1890s with Louis Sullivan and the young Frank Lloyd Wright, and forms the watchword of the Chicago Exposition of 1893, which is visited by Adolf Loos (who also meets with Sullivan), whence it returns with Loos and combines (in the mind of young Le Corbusier, for one, who meets with Loos on the latter's return) with the teachings of English socialist William Morris as filtered and transformed by critics Herman Muthesius and Karl Scheffler who were influential in the pre-WW1 Werkbund in Germany (actually founded by Muthesius) and who followed closely the career and thought of Peter Behrens, architect to AEG industry. It thence establishes itself as the unquestioned truth and unquestionable motivation, dominating all others, of European Modernism, and thence, with the help of Wright, two World Wars, and an army of bow-tied polemicists, modernism, small m or large, everywhere since. It's a tragedy of some proportion that "form follows function" is true neither of nature nor of economic development.

⁵I believe that they are after the wrong sort of complexity, but that is another matter.

⁶Indeed, I predict a market in digital construction details, perhaps whole building pieces like auditoria or staircases, traded between firms, or perhaps marketed by McGraw Hill.

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