The Unrealized Architect

There has become a sort of mini-cult of architects that deal only in theoretical designs. This isn't unheard of. In the past there have been numerous designs by architects that were never built, and some of those were never meant to be built. Etienne-Louis Boullee is but one example. A few of Bramante's works were theoretical, as well as Michelangelo, Serlio, and Palladio. Since the Modernists, there has arose an architectural vocation unto itself that deals only in theoretical architecture. To name a few of the Modernists: Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Bruno Taut; and to name a few Post-Modernists: Lebbeus Woods, Zaha Hadid, Peter Zumpthor. In fact, Lebbeus Woods is only known for his theoretical designs, and that's how he makes a living. Hadid is really a theorists with a few built works, as is Zumpthor, Eisenman, and so forth.

I don't want to barrage this post with architects no one knows, nor works no one knows, because that's not the point. This isn't just a rant about theoretical designs, which, in fact, I find intriguing and sometimes excellent. The problem is that architects have become divorced from material reality, which really is what the vocation is all about.

Architects have become a bit like mathematicians, in that they come up with a lot of really cool ideas and forms, but these are so distant from physical reality, that they get stamped with the label of "theoretical" and are supposed to be honored as some sort of misunderstood artist's genius, worthy of our respect. While theoretical designs serve a purpose, usually to challenge what architecture is and can be, today it has become a circus of ugly bullshit that deliberately cannot be built, or built at a very high price. For instance, Le Corbusier's Maison Domino was really designed to illustrate how we can build, and how that method of building can impact aesthetic design. Lebbeus Woods' works explore parasitic relationships between post-apocalyptic industrial wastelands with post-apocalyptic, bug-shaped buildings latching onto these other buildings. GENIUS!

But today architects have to be unrealistic. Architects have to divorce themselves from reality, like a mathematician. A mathematician thinks in abstractions, and ponders intriguing mind games from there. For instance, did you know you can mathematically turn a sphere inside-out? The rules are you cannot crease or tear the sphere, which is made up of an incredibly fragile, yet elastic material that is capable of passing through itself. It's strange but proven possible, at least mathematically. You can also take a sphere and break it up into an infinite number of smaller pieces, and reconstruct two spheres with identical mass and volume as the first (Banach-Tarski paradox). And did you know mathematically you can never get anywhere. It's called Zeno's paradox. In traveling from point A to point B you must go half way, let's call it point C. And from point C to point B you must go halfway again, called point D. And halfway from point D to B... it's an asymptote, and you never arrive.

But we live in a real, physical, material world where we do get from point A to point B just fine, and we can't turn a sphere inside out without putting a hole in it, and we can't form two spheres from one. Architects have become just as unrealistic as mathematicians. In fact, non-theoretical mathematicians tend to be more realistic than architects.

When you look at pictures of the stairs in the Armani flagship store in New York, they look awesome. See them in real life, you realize there was no possible way to build it without it just looking like shit up close. But who cares! It's for magazines! And that is part of the problem. Magazine architecture, architecture built for pictures, becomes the real thing. The actual building is less real than the pictures.

This is a problem I have. I used to love Steven Holl's Simon's Hall at MIT. Even when one visits it, outside it is still pretty cool. But once I went inside, well, let's say I was pissed. Those curving, undulating, cavernous walls looks like concrete, and therefore amazingly gorgeous in pictures. But walk up to them and put your hand on those walls, and you find out they're hollow fiberglass. Of course those walls couldn't be built out of concrete (note that no architecture magazine or book on this building will admit it's fiberglass, nor show pictures of them building those walls). But it looked cool in pictures. I felt the building was more alive, more real in pictures than when I was actually there.

Then we get design competitions, such as eVolo, which asks for the "reinvisioning" or "reimaging" or "rethinking" architecture. What that means is to produce the most slick, sexy, and absolutely unrealistic thing that computers can digitally render with algorithmic programming.

No wonder contractors and developers are thriving in the construction industry. They produce real buildings. Architects live in a fantasy world where materials are subjective, and buildability doesn't matter. Like in Whose Line Is It Anyway? where the materials are made up and the physical reality doesn't matter. And isn't it the truth? I mean, in architecture school, often "thinking about materiality" means "recognize that this isn't going to be a solid block of concrete, but otherwise who cares exactly what material it is! Be free and expressive!"

And all of this is just on the form and physical substance of a building. I don't even want to get started on political, social, psychological, or functional aspects of theoretical design... where the sociological behavior is made up and the people don't matter.

Architects have questioned and reinterpreted architecture to the point they don't even know what it is. Ask any architect what a house looks like and watch them struggle.