howardpark/architecture

Lebbeus Woods is an "architect," one of the few I have any respect for. He's not "really" an architect because he no longer builds anything; he only draws. Why? "[Architects] believe themselves to be creators, or innovators, when in actuality they are nothing more nor less than the executors of a physical and social order designed by those institutions presently holding political authority and power." Unlike painters, musicians, writers, and poets, architects can only dream about defying the rich and powerful, because unlike paintings, music, books, and poems, architecture can't come into being without their patronage and approval. Other arts may glorify those who rule or ridicule them, but architecture by its nature can only glorify them.

I'm not sure whether people who buy those gigantic in-your-face mansions realize that building a huge house means cutting down a huge number of trees, using a huge amount of "embodied energy" to make the wiring, plumbing, flooring, and other materials, burning huge quantities of oil or coal to heat and cool it, and dumping a huge mess of carbon into our atmosphere. Is it really worth all that just to feel bigger and better than your neighbors? Now I'm not saying that everyone should live in a 2.6-meter cube (I'm pretty sure that I personally would go insane), but it's worth keeping in mind as a point of reference.

I was an architecture student once (at Harvard no less), but I quit in disgust. One reason for my disgust was the total lack of progressivism, both in the consumers of architectural services and in the architects themselves. Cars were invented only a hundred years ago, but since then they have been continuously improved, with better engines, more features, greater safety, etc., while houses are still being built with the same basic technology available to John Quincy Adams (when environmental and social concerns were quite different from today). Cars and houses both have windows, but car windows incorporate dozens of technologies that have somehow escaped the notice of those who build houses.

Partly this is due to a lack of sophistication among house buyers, especially in the U.S., who are looking for nothing more than a "style" (Tudor, Craftsman, Aztec, whatever) that has nothing to do with the actual utility of the building. But it's also partly due to the precious attitudes of the architects, whose notions of "progress" are limited to the most current fashions. Gone are the days when architects were respected alongside doctors and scientists as people possessing specialized and valuable knowledge (in ancient Egypt, Hatshepsut's architect Senmut was worshipped as a god, right next to Osiris). Now they are just fashion designers.

How did this happen? According to Jan Kaplicky of Future Systems, "The reason you get better and better products out of the car industry, aerospace and racing yacht design is because they are all businesses that depend on performance to succeed. In architecture success doesn't depend on performance but on value. To get better performance you need a lot of research and development---to get value you only need scarcity."

Some people will look at this site (Houses of the Future) and laugh, or snort, or otherwise dismiss it. But I look at it and think how great our built environment could have been if architecture hadn't been banished to the Land That Progressivism Forgot.