David Kolb
A centerless sprawl of development
replaces the older opposition of cities to small country towns. In some places
the sprawl pulls itself together into Edge Cities}; in others it just spreads.
Its economic, social, and political difficulties are well known, and while
sprawl was encouraged by particular incentives and subsidies in the U. S., it
has become an international condition in other regulatory and transit regimes.
To many it is a prime example of modern and postmodern
"placelessness." In response to formless sprawl, many theorists urge
the creation of resistant places. In this essay I contrast and criticize two
such strategies, Kenneth Frampton's bounded enclaves, and Karsten Harries'
centered communities.
Kenneth Frampton seeks ways to
resist the "infinite megalopolis" of sprawl and commodification. He
proposes strategies of resistance through the creation of regionally inflected
zones. In his influential article, "Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six
Points for an Architecture of Resistance" (Frampton 1983), Frampton argued
that the modern global economy diminishes human life in order to increase
efficient exchange and profit. This shows in the impoverished functions
recognized in International Style architecture and modernist planning. It shows
in the continual loss of density and texture in places under the pressure of
market efficiency, and in the increasing similarity of places and buildings
constructed with standardized techniques.
In order to resist the reduction of
places and buildings to tokens of exchange that are optimal for their brief
function, the same everywhere and gone tomorrow, Frampton urged that we
emphasize local particularities of design and construction.
The
universal Megalopolis is patently antipathetic to a dense differentiation of
culture. It intends, in fact, the reduction of the environment to nothing but
commodity. As an abacus of development, it consists of little more than a
hallucinatory landscape in which nature fuses into instrument and vice versa.
Critical Regionalism would seem to offer the sole possibility of resisting the
rapacity of this tendency. Its salient cultural precept is "place"
creation; the general model to be employed in all future development is the enclave,
that is to say, the bounded fragment against which the ceaseless inundation of
a place-less, alienating consumerism will find itself momentarily checked.
(Frampton 1983a, reprinted in Nesbitt 1996, 482)
Frampton is not recommending a
simple return to traditional place making. Local modes on their own can be
oppressively narrow and exclusive, but when cross-bred with the universal
technical civilization they could create bounded areas that might resist
leveling. Local identities can put humane constraints on technical
rationalization and optimization -- for instance, local activity patterns might
oppose the global reliance on air conditioning or standard wall styles. Nor are
local identities easily traded in for newer fads.
It is local identities that will
provide the resistant core for bounded enclaves. In his study of the
information age's flows and mutations, Manuel Castells remarks that
Identities
are so important, and ultimately so powerful in this ever-changing power
structure -- because they build interests, values, and projects, around
experience, and refuse to dissolve by establishing a specific connection
between nature, history, geography, and culture. (Castells 1997, 360)[1]
Frampton believes that a critical
regionalism can work an interplay of local identity and universal system, and
so create more livable places, at least as resistant islands within the global
flow.
The
fundamental strategy of Critical Regionalism is to mediate the impact of
universal civilization with elements derived indirectly from the peculiarities of a
particular place. . . . It may find its governing inspiration in such things as
the range and quality of the local light, or in a tectonic derived form a
peculiar structural mode, or in the topography of a given site. (Frampton 1983,
in Foster 1983, 21)
Critical
Regionalism is a dialectical expression. It self-consciously seeks to
deconstruct universal modernism in terms of values and images which are locally
cultivated, while at the same time adulterating these autochthonous elements
with paradigms drawn from alien sources. After the disjunctive cultural
approach practiced by Adolf Loos, Critical Regionalism recognizes that no
living tradition remains available to modern man other than the subtle
procedures of synthetic contradiction. Any attempt to circumvent the dialectics
of this creative process through eclectic procedures of historicism can only
result in consumerist iconography masquerading as culture. (Frampton 1983a,
reprinted in Nesbitt 1996, 472)
Frampton insists that we must resist
the leveling effects of global optimization toward technically similar but
superficially localized places. As a remedy his critical regionalism has much
to recommend it, yet however perceptive Frampton's attacks may have seemed, the
diagnoses and prescriptions in the original essays feel insufficient now. Less
often these days do we see the blandly functional universal architecture
Frampton originally attacked. Those boxes are now dressed up in local symbols
and allusions. The mall has gable fronts, and regional touches in its kiosks
and decorations. The local is emphasized in themed marketing streets and
affirmed in themed villages selling a history to passersby on Interstate 80.
Local identities and forms have become tools of the universal economy. The
dominant means-end rationality Frampton resisted has developed a stronger
marketing component. Far from enabling resistance to the universal system,
local place characters have become a way to further integrate us into a system
of fads and fashions and purchased identities that can be endlessly exchanged
for one another.
In response, and without backing
down from his critical regionalism, Frampton has increasingly emphasized the
component of tectonic honesty that was always present in his theory. He insists
that we should design and build so as to dramatize the act of construction and
the building's standing amid physical forces, "the presentation and
representation of the built as a constructed thing." In revealing its
tectonic character as a built and standing thing, the building will need to
take account of local differences in climate and materials and construction
techniques. This will produce something more than a standard box covered with a
local scenographic scrim. Frampton now states his general goal as "A
'transavantgardist' desire to return to the timelessness of a prehistoric past
. . . as a potential ground from which to resist the commodification of
culture." (Frampton 1990, reprinted in Nesbitt 1966, 527)[2]
While I am sympathetic to Frampton's
goal of creating places where global and local interact in complex ways, his
emphasis on tectonics causes problems. First, if one claims that expressing
tectonics is the fundamental architectural strategy, then there is a strong
temptation to go on to the claim that "The sense of gravity is the essence
of all architectonic structures and great architecture makes us aware of
gravity and the earth." (Pallasmaa 1996, 47) This is overly restrictive.
Not all past tectonic effects have dramatized the building's relation to
gravity, and future techniques are likely to make that an optional effect.
There will be new building materials -- fiber composites, self-modifying smart
materials, and the like -- which will allow effects different from what we now
expect. Such strong or self-adaptive materials can minimize the physical
presence of the act of resisting gravity. Recall what iron construction did to
the height/width ratios of Corinthian columns in late nineteenth century
buildings. The new materials can do again and more what iron and steel once
did, namely support a building in one way while allowing the illusion of a
different mode of support, or of none at all:
The
widespread treatment of facades as computer screens . . . only goes to show
that tectonics in its classic sense can no longer be claimed as the fulcrum of
architecture. On the contrary, structural mechanics become either invisible
(just as typewriters shed their mechanical clap-trap and transmogrified into
laptops) or transformed into mere rigs on which to suspend the equipment for
atmospheric effects." (Forster 1999, 29)
Frampton wants a building to
dramatize its tectonic acts so that it has more presence than a mere token of
commodity forces. On the other hand, linkage and self-conscious inhabitation
might want to build so as to emphasize those economic and cultural effects.
"Architects are no longer content to articulate symbols of utility or the
mechanics of construction. Other forces, chiefly invisible ones, have begun to
manifest themselves through the physical properties and the experiential
effects of buildings." (Forster 1999, 29)
Tectonics will be very different,
too, when we build stations in space. It may be important to emphasize the
built quality of such structures, as a sign of reassurance and control in a
threatening environment. But there is no base for the structures to rise from.[3] They will instead deal with
centrifugal forces from rotation and air pressure. Space buildings may seem
extraneous to a discussion of terrestrial sprawl, but they are signs of new
construction techniques and ideals, showing "an environment where even
gravity holds no sway, a place that requires no corners, no orthogonality, no
directionality. . . . and our concept of space back on earth can hardly be
unaffected." (Giovannini 2000, 119)
Frampton's insistence on the
creation of bounded enclaves is problematic in another way. Frampton has been
concerned about what happens when local meanings and tectonic effects are
picked up by the universal flow and turned into commodities. Against that he urges
bounded enclaves. But there are problems with boundaries when we consider what
might happen when particular local tectonic effects, symbols, and meanings are
picked up by other particular localities. Suppose we create a
place using our ethnic or religious symbols and local construction techniques,
producing tectonic and meaning effects that affirm our local identity just as
Frampton would wish. Then some other people over there in another enclave use
our symbols and build our tectonic effects, but with quite different purposes
in the service of different identities.
Perhaps they parody ours as a way of affirming themselves. That is bad
enough. Their earnest use would be even more threatening, since parody keeps a
reference to our original usages while serious use suggests that our symbols
and tectonics aren't really ours, that they can also appear with quite
different histories and connections. Should we let those others appropriate
"our" symbols and ways of building? How much local ownership is
possible or desirable here?
Strictly speaking, any symbol and
any constructional technique or tectonic effect can be borrowed and used in new
contexts. We cannot stop that without resorting to legal maneuvers or deadly
fatwas. Surely Frampton does not mean that each locality should violently
assert restrictions on foreign use of its tectonics and symbols. If we reject
the notion that each group has a right to forbid the reuse of what it considers
local essentials, is local identity weakened by this potentially unrestricted
circulation? What happens to the boundaries of the enclaves? Local regions
could become blurred or compromised.
The
simplest way to deal with such conflicts would be to embrace total mobility: everyone
is free to use any symbols and tectonics they wish. Anything goes, anywhere. A
strategy of non-ownership would avoid hostile localities battling over who had
the right to build onion domes or use a given decorative symbol. But the environment could then become a jumble where everything goes,
everywhere. We would then have the bland homogeneous mixture that Alexander
worries about in his discussion of the mosaic of subcultures (Alexander 1977,
42-50). This would produce a more jumbled version of what Frampton opposes as a
commodified monoculture. Thus the issue of the ownership of symbols and
tectonics does strike at Frampton's program.
These problems can also arise within
a single enclave. Does a majority have the right to forbid or restrain a minority
from building in a way the majority finds offensive? Or could a minority in one
area forbid or use violence to keep the majority from building in ways that the
minority found excluding or oppressive? Could Boston Irish prevent the
construction of a Hindu temple in "their" suburbs? Could Turkish
immigrants protest the Greek columns on the post office, or Native Americans
protest Colonial houses? Again a liberal solution might dictate that the
majority can build in its way but not so as to exclude. But who decides what
counts as exclusion? What if nomads arrive who find any fixed building
excluding? As with current debates
over speech codes, one group would attain veto power over another's design
possibilities, resulting in a universal banality lacking regional character. In
other words, does Frampton's hope for distinctively local bounded areas depend
on the existence of exclusive populations?
Frampton's
reply might be to disengage locality from ethnic or cultural identity, and
emphasize the natural environment. In the American southwest, for instance,
whatever your ethnic identity you have to deal with the sun and the desert.
Techniques and building forms that succeed in meeting those challenges give an
identity to the place as a natural region rather than as the home of a
particular cultural group, even if these techniques and building forms may have
originated with one or another particular
group. Obviously the success of this reply presumes
that rights of ownership are not asserted over tectonic and constructional
effects. Also, this reply does not deal with borrowings across similar climatic
zones, such as New England, Scandinavia, and northern Japan. Also, the
"natural response" to a region's environment depends on the current
state of technology, and there is no reason that responses must be the
historical ones with earlier materials and techniques. Alterations in
construction technology or ecological balances might force the adoption of
non-local practices (for instance, if ceramic construction materials were
perfected that made wood construction ecologically less desirable).[4]
All these problems stem from the
mobility of persons, symbols and tectonic effects across the porous boundaries
of enclaves. My own suggestion would be to break down the closure of bounded
areas. Use linkage to open up the locality so that not everything here refers
to here, so we experience here as within a multiplicity of places and grammars.
With today's communications we will know that in China or Botswana they are
using our styles or symbols in odd ways and odd combinations. We can accept the backwash effects on our own
identity, as we see our symbols and tectonic effects in new contexts, which
open new possibilities for us, too. This does not, however, mean that all
places need to become the same. We can celebrate the particularities of linkage
interpenetration and encourage place characters to vary in their complex
mixtures, rather than in fixed single identities. We are all in the symbolic
flow together, without owning fixed identities, but the flow varies, and we
still find ourselves within the density of history and natural location, with
all their links and complexities. As places and identities get more complex,
strategies of thinning can have less hold on them.
Like Frampton, Karsten Harries hopes
for places that provide a shared community dwelling, but he emphasizes centers
more than borders. This will provide more flexibility in dealing with the
mobility characteristic of our age. Also, Harries appeals to what he calls the
natural language of space, which is both universal and particular in a way
parallel to Frampton's dialectical mixture of the two, but more open to change
and mixture.
Harries reworks the old distinction
between humdrum everyday buildings and special decorated architecture. He
argues that it is the precise task of architecture to provide a central marker
for affirmations of unified community.
Such a central building "re-presents itself in the image of an
ideal, thus creating a fiction about itself. By its choice of what to represent
and the form of representation, it communicates a particular understanding of
what is taken to matter in architecture, signifying a particular ideal of
building and thus of dwelling." (Harries 1997, 120)
A "particular ideal of dwelling" affirms what it
means to be people in this community, here, with its customs and values, in a
tradition that defines its members. "Sacred and public architecture
provides the community with a center or centers. Individuals gain their sense
of place in a history, in a community, by relating their dwelling to that
center."[5] (Harries 1997, 287) Today we
need such centering because "Instead of genuine proximity we are
increasingly offered only its perverted analogue: the equidistance and thus the
homogeneity, the indifference, of place. . . . there is a sense in which most
of us today live in mobile homes." (Harries 1997, 172) In the midst of
modern mobility we need "a
tradition that determines our place and destiny, in which we stand and to which
we belong" (Harries 1997, 210). Harries concludes that "architecture
will have a future only if the place once occupied by temple and church can in
some sense be reoccupied." (Harries 1997, 324)
That reoccupation is no easy task.
We cannot simply return to building churches and temples. Furthermore, Harries
agrees with Frampton that simple celebrations of locality run the danger of
becoming oppressive. H warns against "the ideal of a completely integrated
dwelling, a dwelling that leaves behind the fragmentation of atomic individuals
and returns them to the community . . . [erasing] the boundaries between
aesthetic, ethical, and technological considerations." (Harries 1997, 330)
Harries sees more clearly than many critics that we should mistrust the "dangerous
dreams of an architecture strong enough to return us to what has been
lost." (Harries 1997, 12) While Harries urges that we must be part of
something larger than ourselves, his experiences in war-torn Germany
demonstrated the risks of such recommendations. Nonetheless he insists that
some centering around shared ideals will be demanded for any community that is
to be more than a temporary utilitarian alliance.
Like Frampton's, Harries' ideas are
affected by the issues I raised earlier concerning the ownership of symbols and
tectonic effects. Which centers are to be celebrated in an age of mobile and
multiple groups, some of them non-geographical? However, because he emphasizes
centers rather than resistant borders, Harries recommendations are more
flexible than Frampton's.An area with multiple populations could possess
multiple centers that re-present different or ovelapping community ideals of
dwelling. Harries' own recommendations aim at a stronger and more uniform
community, but his ideas are more readily adaptable than Frampton's to an age
of multiplicity and mobility.
However, that multiplicity and
mobility tend to damage a fragile aura of non-arbitrariness that Harries feels
we need in our traditions. Harries' insistence on the importance of tradition
and centering parallels Frampton's attempt to create a dialectical relation
between the local and the universal. Although he celebrates local centering,
Harries insists that we moderns have won a long battle against the restrictions
of place (Harries 1997, 168). Traditional places have closed horizons:
"Inseparable from a strong sense of place is a lack of freedom."
(Harries 1997, 163) After describing an eighteenth century German farmhouse
such as Heidegger invoked so fondly, Harries continues, "I suspect that
most of us would find having to live in such a house spiritually confining,
even as we are likely to feel twinges of nostalgia when we now visit. But we
have learned to demand more freedom, more openness." Our needs for freedom
and openness stem, Harries thinks, from the modern need to reflect on the
particularity of our social and place norms. We cannot abandon this modern
freedom and self-awareness. As a result we are caught between the need for
freedom and the need for some foundation that will give weight to our choices.
"Where do we find a ground or measure in the infinite realms opened up by
reflection? How can we justify the way we live?" (Harries 1997, 68).
Multiple coexisting traditions and
mobile symbols pose a problem, because they undermine the naturalness of
accepted traditions, as I suggested earlier when discussing Frampton's borders.
But without that naturalness how can we accept the authority of any central
ideal of dwelling? Harries claims that we cannot simply decree meaning and
weight into some ideal of dwelling. "Any center that we know to derive its
authority only from our own free will has to strike us as arbitrary. Meanings
must be discovered; they cannot be willed without self-deception."
(Harries 1997, 291) To live fully we need a shared dream that allows us to
measure our life in terms of some
ideal of dwelling. Yet such projections will seem arbitrary unless they are
experienced as responses to an obscurely glimpsed essence. "Values or
meanings cannot finally be made or invented. . . . To carry authority they must
be experienced as creative responses to a more primordial and still
inarticulate understanding of what it is to dwell." (Harries 1997, 212)[6]
For Harries, we are thus caught in
an unresolvable tension, but to some extent he has manufactured our dilemma
because he is not willing to accept justifications that are not based on
ultimate grounds, and he cannot accept ultimate grounds, yet he demands
justifications. The dilemma also depends on a questionably sharp division
between critical reflection and simple unreflective living. The older modes of
life were secure but unreflective; ours are reflective but unjustified. He sees
nothing in the middle and no other dimensionality to the processes of
reflection.[7]
Harries' way of limiting the
multiplicity and mobility of modern symbols and peoples is a sophisticated version of the return to nature. He argues that there are meanings
implicit in certain spatial arrangements and movements.[8]
That this
particular configuration of verticals and horizontals [in a Greek temple] moves
and speaks to us presupposes what I shall call the natural language of space.
This natural language has its foundation in the way human beings exist in the
world, embodied and mortal, under the sky and on the earth; it is bound up with
experiences of rising and falling, of getting up and lying down, of height and
depth. Buildings speak to us because our experience of space and therefore of
particular spatial configurations cannot but be charged with meaning."
(Harries 1997, 125)
[This
language] can be called natural in that [it has its] foundation in the nature
of human being in the world, in experiences of lying down and getting up, of
climbing and descending, of lifting, raising, and supporting: experiences of
the opposition of earth and sky, darkness and light, matter and spirit.
(Harries 1997, 187)
These species-wide responses cannot
be simply transcribed into buildings or city plans, yet they can still guide
our constructions. Although any appropriation of these natural responses will
be an interpretation, not a transcription, of the natural meaning-effects, it
will not be an arbitrary choice. Harries suggestion, then, is to seek out these
natural meanings and build so as to reveal and work with them in re-presenting
local ideals of dwelling.
This appeal to a natural language of spatial effects gives Harries conceptual resources that Frampton lacks. The natural meanings are universal yet they do not reduce to the language of world-wide technology which Frampton sees as today's only universal idiom. Furthermore, Harries' natural meanings are both universal and local, since they are incorporated into local modes of building to express local ideals of dwelling. They also include more than the tectonic effects that Frampton appeals to. So Harries' reference to local building practices offers more substance than Frampton's similar appeal.
However, this appeal to a natural
language of space does have its problems. Even granting that such species-wide
architectural effects exist as something to be taken into account in the
creation of architectural and civic places, Harries' prescription is phrased in
terms of tight dualities between
revealing and ignoring the natural meanings, between necessity and arbitrariness,
and between reflection and simple living. Just as with his prescription for
centers, a more relaxed approach to these dualities might suggest different
ways of taking them into account.
It might be important to some local
ideal to flamboyantly build against such meanings. Communities can overlap; the
same area can "be" multiple centers. This situation, which is very
common today, poses problems because it demands an ideal of openness and
tolerance that seems to create a larger shared ideal of dwelling, but one that
Harries would rightly claim is too weak to do the work of community-building he
requires. This can be seen in today's monuments. Many of our more
impressive monuments, such as the
Grande Arche in Paris, or the
Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, do deploy natural meanings and effects such
as Harries describes, but these effects do not strongly identify with a
particular historical community or ideal of dwelling. They touch our human situation without affirming a
particular community. The danger, then, is that in a time of pluralism and
mobility the recommendation to use natural meanings may provide only a high
seriousness without clear direction.[9]
So the problem remains how multiple
and mobile communities are going to live together.[10] Harries' centered communities are more flexible than Frampton's bordered enclaves, but
Harries still needs to consider other modes of community and the interaction of
multiple centers. Harries' understanding of centered community is very acute,
but he does not sufficiently consider what new kinds of unity and cohesion
might be coming along in our new modes of embodiment and spatial dispersion.
He, like Frampton, appeals to a set of "traditional" definitions of
what institutions and community "want to be"that presuppose
relatively a homogeneous population sharing a single ideal of dwelling. This
grows less common in a world of linkages and connections creating multiple,
often non-geographic unities. Both Frampton's dialectic of universal and local,
and Harries' combination of natural meanings and local centerings, can help us
deal with our mobile situation, but only when these ideas are used
more flexibly than their authors may have intended.
List of Works Cited:
Adam, Ian, and Helen Tiffin, editors.
1991. Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Post-modernism. New York: Harvester.
Alexander, Christopher, Sara
Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein. 1977.
A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Brydon, Diana. 1991. "The White
Inuit Speaks: Contamination as Literary Strategy," in Adam and Tiffin
1991.
Castells, Manuel. 1996. The
Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. Volume I: The Rise of the
Network Society.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Forster, Kurt. 1999. "Why Are
Some Buildings More Interesting Than Others?" Harvard Design Magazine (Winter/Spring 1999): 26-31.
Foster, Hal. 1983. The
Anti-Aesthetic.
Port Townsend: Bay Press.
Frampton, Kenneth. 1983.
"Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of
Resistance," in Foster 1983, 16-30.
Frampton, Kenneth. 1983a.
"Prospects for a Critical Regionalism," Perspecta 20 (1983): 147-162. Reprinted in
Nesbitt 1996, 470-482.
Frampton, Kenneth. 1990.
"Rappel ˆ ordre, The Case For The Tectonic," Architectural Design 60 nos 3-4, 1990, 19-25.
Reprinted in Nesbitt 1996, 518-528.
Frampton, Kenneth. 1995. Studies
in Tectonic Culture: The Poetics of Construction in Nineteenth and Twentieth
Century Architecture.
Cambridge: MIT Press.
Giovannini, Joseph. 1999. "Time
on his side" Metropolis (October 1999): 171-3.
Harries, Karsten. 1997. The
Ethical Function of Architecture. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Harries, Karsten. 2001. Infinity
and Perspective. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich.
1988. Hegel's Aesthetics. Two volumes. Translated by Malcolm Knox. Oxford: Oxford University
Press. Hardcover edition in 1975.
Kolb, David. 1986. The Critique
of Pure Modernity: Hegel, Heidegger, and After. Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press.
Kolb, David. 1990. Postmodern
Sophistications: Philosophy, Architecture, and Tradition. Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press.
Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The
Production of Space.
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. London: Blackwell.
Nesbitt, Kate, editor. 1996. Theorizing:
A New Agenda for Architecture: an Anthology of Architectural Theory 1965-1995. New York: Princeton
Architectural Press.
[1]Castells
himself despairs of any positive interaction between local and global cultures,
and he proposes a quite different architectural strategy than Frampton, namely
"the architecture of nudity . . . whose forms are so pure, so diaphanous,
that they don't pretend to say anything. And by not saying anything they
confront the experience with the solitude of the space of flows. Its message is
silence." (Castells 1996, 420). For Castells, architects have a difficult
choice to make. "Either the new architecture builds the palaces of the new
masters, thus exposing their deformity hidden behind the abstraction of the
space of flows; or it roots itself into places, thus into culture, and into
people. In both cases, under different forms, architecture may be digging the
trenches of resistance for the preservation of meaning in the generation of
knowledge. Or, what is the same, for the reconciliation of culture and
technology." (Castells 1996, 423) There is no middle or interactive road
between the poles of Castells' duality, because he defines places as closed
unities.
[2]An
emphasis on tectonics is not a modernist desire for naked expression of
construction. Frampton says that "We are not alluding here to mechanical
revelation of construction but rather to a potentially poetic manifestation of
structure in the original Greek sense." (Frampton 1990, reprinted in
Nesbitt 1996, 519) Frampton accepts that many tectonic expressions, from
Renaissance pilasters to Miesien I-beams, are really applied decoration rather
than "honest" self-presentation of construction. But he insists that
we must build so that the building shows its act of standing and its
interaction with the forces of nature, rather than primarily showing itself as
a fungible token amid the flows of the economy.
[3]It
might seem that a space station without a base to rise from would not be a building. But this begs the question, for it would still be a place, and the issue
concerns what constructional effects can do to offset the commodification of
places as well as of buildings narrowly defined. It would also be possible to
build a space station as a chaotic assemblage of units stuck together with no
constructional unity; this may well happen if space stations develop the
equivalent of suburban strips.
[4]There
can be another turn to the issue of ownership: "Authenticity has also been
used by [native peoples] in their struggles to regain power over their own
lives. While postcolonial theorists embrace hybridity and heterogeneity as the
characteristic postcolonial mode, some native writers in Canada resist what
they see as a violating appropriation to insist on their ownership of their stories
and their exclusive claim to an authenticity that should not be ventriloquized
or parodied. . . . Ironically, such tactics encourage native peoples to isolate
themselves from contemporary life and full citizenhood." (Brydon 1991)
[5]Harries's
claim that communities need to be structured by a dialogue between everyday
buildings and special edifices is similar to the New Urbanist principle of
differentiating everyday from civic buildings, though Harries puts more
spiritual-political demands on the central edifices (Harries 1997, 362). On the
other hand, when he speaks about what building types might carry on the
community-defining legacy of temple and church, Harries does not stop with the
suburban holy trinity of church, school, and city hall. He suggests many other
building types that could center a community: monuments, theaters, museums,
landscape parks, open festival spaces, and architectural follies. Values do not
have to be literally monumentalized; they can be made present through modest
architectural events that become important to a community. Throughout, however,
Harries argues that our need for some ongoing connection with the past and
tradition demands centered modes of spatial and community unity.
[6]"We
moderns have become too reflective, too critical, simply to entrust ourselves
to what has been. . . . We have no choice but to attempt to articulate what is
essential and natural. . . . our confusion leaves us no reasonable alternative
to reappropriating the lessons of the Enlightenment. We, too, have to try to
recover origins. "(Harries 1997, 114) There is a natural order to be
glimpsed, not created; yet our glimpses provide only a precarious
interpretation of "the transcendent and thus never quite comprehended and
shifting ground of all our valuations." (Harries 1997, 298) At times,
Harries also claims that communal values need to be established by artistic
creation. "Pure reason has shown itself incapable of discovering the true
ends of human actions. Such discovery requires the aid of myth . . . the
mythopoeic function of art remains indispensable." (Harries 1997, 282) I
would argue that reason can provide more in the way of goals, though they need
particular schematizations that may be provided by art. Sometimes Harries also
seems to intend such a view, when he speaks in a more Habermasian vein: we
pursue "unending attempts to defeat arbitrariness by grounding (or
criticizing) the established and accepted. And here 'reason' and 'nature', even
if never 'pure,' remain as the only still available authorities." (Harries
1997, 382-3n1) For more on how Harries understands the genesis of modernity,
see Harries 2001.
[7]Harries'
sharp dualism between lived experience and reflection follows Heidegger's
reading of modernity as Cartesian. I have argued elsewhere that Heidegger moved
beyond that reading to the theory of modernity in terms of das Gestell, and that neither of Heidegger's analyses does justice to the more
intricate mediations and mutual constitutions involved in modern consciousness
and society. Likewise, we should not be so quick to presume that our ancestors
did not possess modes of critical self-reflection, though they may not have
been institutionalized as firmly and centrally as they have become today. (See
Kolb 1986 and 1990)
[8]A
full discussion of Harries' proposals concerning the natural language of space
would have to consider the extent to which the effects he cites exist as
already interpreted, and whether or not this "language" includes any
"syntax."
[9]Henri
Lefebvre points out that "a particular institution may have a variety of
functions which are different -- and sometimes opposed -- to its apparent forms
and avowed structures. . . . The same abstract form may have opposing functions
and give rise to diverse structures. (Lefebvre 1991, 149, 152)
[10]Harries
and Frampton both urge more distinctive architectural characters for regions of
the sprawl. This is a worthy goal but it is dangerous to equate distinctive
architectural character with single and bounded sets of local norms and social
codes. Not only are such unities often unavailable, but when taken as goals
they are too easily commodified and themed. Places today need more complex
unities, in order to resist systemic pressures toward easy consumability.