Followed on from Liam’s crit commentary T23/2
...I think I recall Vinnie saying that to define the word 'character' is a task in itself…
How should the planner, the architect, the architect planner be approaching its definition and so the improvement of place thereon?
As ‘architects’, it seems much of our studio work this year is about how we transfer the character of a place onto paper. Sometimes it is about collecting 'stories', narratives of nearby people, not essentially local, just there, to ascertain what they think of the place. They may just be fleeting visitors too, but we still note their story down with enthusiasm and take a meaning from it…can this be right? “We want our area to be nicer”, “there aren’t enough buses around here”, “I like to walk my dog here”.. Or should it be down to our judgment, as people who have trained for quite a few years now, to ‘look’, to sketch down the inherent qualities of place: edge conditions, ways in, feelings of openness, enclosure, the legibility of our surroundings, light, ‘atmospheres’?
'Instead of being mere visual aestheticisation, architecture for instance, is a mode of existential and metaphysical philosophising through the means of space, structure, matter gravity and light. Profound architecture does not merely beautify the settings of such dwelling, as it articulates the experiences of our very existence, such as gravity, matter, light, time and order...' [1]
These ways of looking seem so far removed from a planning policy. If we are trying to find a better median between architecture and planning, which is what I think this course is about, perhaps we should be finding place for this existential architectural approach. Or maybe planning policies are far too practical to allow space for these leanings.
'Architectural problems are, indeed, far too complex and deeply existential to be dealt with in solely conceptualised and rational manner.’[2]
Juhani Pallasmaa and Peter Zumthor are key reads to our units’ approach. Can their phenomenological stance be transferred into planning speak? It would just be read as fluffy guff (and hence be even easier to misconstrue, or just leave sitting on the paper). There's no cohesion.
'A landscape wounded by human acts, the fragmentation of the cityscape, as well as insensible buildings, are all external and materialised evidence of an alienation and shattering of the human inner space.'
If a policy did elaborate on the definition of character, or alluded a more experiential way of designing, it would probably be written in a way that creates more constraints than opportunities, limit ways forward in changing and improving areas, but it might stop rubbish developments being allowed through.
It seems that we should be getting to know planning policies just so that we can find ways to get around them. It's always a battle against the real, the sober, obtuseness. Re-termed as playing. ‘Architects don’t invent anything: they transform reality.’[3] Alvaro Siza. Do we just transform planning policies to suit our intentions? Is that how it should stay, the ‘arrogant architect’ (to quote Nick Bullock) turning their back on the rubric of planning?
Some policies seem so stale. Conservation areas are hardly re-assessed, the protection law is in place, it took a long time to write it, it’s staying there. We don’t care if the rest of the area has moved on.
Places are temporary, transient, always changing. Conservation areas stay the same. Edges are made. Perhaps it is then about a better way of looking, so that there is scope for change, in order to ‘reveal and articulate what exists and what are the natural potentials of the given condition’[4]. So that it’s not about deciphering the character of a place in terms of how old the buildings are, what architectural era, in ‘those grassy patches must stay there as they have always been there’, but a means of allowing for the re-evaluation of the use of a place without being so romantic (Port Sunlight springs to mind). It's the simple matter of making conservation policies less stringent. Probably not that simple.
Maybe the relationship lies in the imaginations of both parties, this is how we proceed in working together. Being creative and being able to evaluate a place in an economically ethic way.
‘The capacity to imagine – to liberate oneself of the limits of matter, place and time – must be regarded as the most human and essential of all our qualities. Creative capacity as well as ethical judgement calls for imagination…’[5]
Liam likes to imagine.
‘I always thought reservoirs were beautiful places and would never imagine that it wouldn’t be beautiful to live next to one. But if you live in 1 of 1000 houses in a modest estate and are hemmed in by the fences of the water company and couldn’t possibly get within 400m of the water, you probably wouldn’t feel such romanticism.’[6]
[1] Juhani Pallasmaa, The Thinking Hand: Embodies and Existential Wisdom in Architecture.
[2] Pallasmaa ibid.
[3] Alvaro Siza
[4] Pallasmaa ibid.
[5] Pallasmaa ibid.
[6] Liam Morrissey. Blog T23/2
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