AN ARCHITECTURE OF DESPAIR?
I i
This past century has left behind in its wake an environment much neglected; the architectural resonance of the concrete monolith, which in seeking to defy history, failed rather to anticipate those change(s) which consequently sealed its fate.
Eastern Europe, fault-line to the western-world,[1] has suffered similarly. Changes which have become inseparable from those topographical indentations; bruises we endeavour to conceal.
Endured, but soon forgotten, as the convenience of a global-wide amnesia [2] helps to drive these fragments of history into oblivion, to become as relics; historicized and processed, yet, even in their death-throes - the actual slips away from reality and these monoliths crumble, the built and corporeal alike - while the rest of us watch on and guffaw.
There is a tension therefore described, inherent of all objects locked within the shadows of their former selves and the utopian has sought the same oblivion; defying, as it does, a past, an origin.
Built in the late 1970s, early 80s as a costly state-operated health spa, (and abandoned since regime collapse), this building (the object of my studies) has lain dormant within the landscape - and so it remained until earlier this year [2005], whereby funds were found - not for its restoration - but rather for its demolition; a resolution, or rather abolition, of sorts - parallel to the different ways in which those of the People's Democracies have had to come to terms with what George Skiiling has termed, an 'interrupted revolution.' [3]
Monument
With this piece of writing, I wish to explore the wider theme of despair, tragedy and loss within the built environment.
I'm interested in what drives us to build, beyond primitive need and how history may assert itself in the process: What does our architecture say of our time and what legacy do we leave behind?
From conception, to the constructed reality of a project; time, in the form of so many human involvements, from architect, to builder, to "user," is embedded, within those "four-walls."
Like Frankenstein's monster, inanimate articles of construction are given life [emergent power].
In this debate I hope to discuss the role of time; legacy and how association and memory can translate into the architectural discipline: I.e. can building's mean/ be representational? [Forty] Can they inspire feelings and emotions, and is this effect even desirable; is it universal, objective or subjective and do these very abstract notions matter in a world where we tend to experience very much in the first-person, the present tense: those elements of architecture which cannot be foreseen, rigorously planned for and controlled by the architect.
What happens when this grand-narrative veers wildly off course, and how can the gap between intellectual ownership and actual use/ inhabitation be overcome?
Left over buildings
'The first problem is one of definition.'[4]
Ernst Bloch, in Building in Empty Spaces, laments this 'de-internalisation,' and 'shallowness;' The modernist aesthetic presented itself as 'cleansing from the junk of the last century and its terrible decorations.' But, 'the longer that lasted, the more it became clear that the mere elimination was all that remained - within the limits of late bourgeois emptiness - it had to be that way' [...] 'the clearer the inscription above the Bauhaus and the slogan connected to it [that] emerged: Hurray, we have no ideas left... The effect is the more chilling as there is no longer any hiding place but only illuminated kitsch...' [5]
As an entity, this Spa building - awkwardly alien to its surroundings, like the perverse montage of a cut-n-paste artist - invokes the same out-of-place-ness.
Emanating, as it does from within the individual, thus we can "feel sorry;" through self-projection and an inner feeling of inertia, disenfranchisement and sorrow: despair, by proxy of the reciprocity of utopian fallacy; the endless tautology of dreaming up "what if..."
In The Uncanny, [6] (1919) Sigmund Freud states that;
'Concerning the factors of silence, solitude and darkness, we can only say that they are actually elements in the production of the infantile anxiety from which the majority of human beings have never become quite free.' [7]
It is the familiar of which we are afraid, never truly the unknown - the very definition of which cannot be translated into the reality of the fabric of time and the built environment - itself a very tangible recollection.
'The territory inhabited by utopia is so polluted that we should start looking for a new term.' [8]
This is the architecture of despair!
1/ Davies, Norman, Europe: A History, (1996)
2/ Maclean, Rory, Stalin's Nose, Flamingo (1993)
3/ Refer to, Czechoslovakia's interrupted revolution / H. Gordon
4/ p.59, Harvard Design Magazine, Fall/ Winter, (2004).
5/ p.187, Building in Empty Spaces, (1959); in, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature; Ernst Bloch, pp. 186-199.
6/ p.14, Freud, Art & Literature, Penguin Books (1990), The 'Uncanny,' (1919) pp. 335-376
7/ p. 376, Freud, Art & Literature, Penguin Books (1990), The 'Uncanny,' (1919) pp. 335-376
8/ p.59, Harvard Design Magazine, Fall/ Winter, (2004).
Thomas Barnes, 2006
27-12-06