Architectural Intelligence

Peter Carl

Since World War II, there has been more writing about architecture than in all previous periods combined. If the world�s urban peripheries are taken to be the harvest of this effort, one must concede that the period has also wrought more bad architecture than in all previous periods - despite some brilliant individual performances. Perhaps the two statistics are unrelated, perhaps the phenomenon is equally to be attributed to technology, or to market forces. Insofar as architectural education has any bearing on the matter, however, it is notable that the discipline has taken its university setting as an opportunity for plunder. It has taken material from art history, from linguistics and literature, from theology and classical studies, from philosophy, from media studies, from the physical sciences and engineering, from mathematics and information-theory, from the biological sciences, from management studies, sociology, anthropology and psychology. And yet none of these stole from architecture, it had an empty basket.

On this reading, the contemporary Vitruvian polymath teaches a discipline with no discourse of its own, fills out the urban pudding with candied jellies, and uses the profits to holiday in places built by artisans, merchants, bishops and princes who were deprived of our sophisticated theory and technology - places from which, incidentally, come many of the images used in the teaching.

If one looks to the discourse as it stands, one notices firstly that it has a well-developed sense of right and wrong; informal conversation among architects is regularly laced with examples of work that fails in some way. �Right� here is a mixture of �correct� and �appropriate�, the first manageable by rules or codes, the second invoking moral criteria. Rules and codes have the building as their subject - conceptual clarity making sense of formless matter - and the laws of science, games, syntax and proportion are equally congenial to this style of thought. This is a discourse that inevitably finds itself in tectonics, the art of visibly obeying the laws of gravity according to geometry. Moral criteria have people as their subject. Historically, goodness in architecture has ranged from ergonomic efficiency through patronising piety, from humble �just doing the job� to spectacular fantasies of emancipation, from profundity through irony to hedonism; but, in general, one person�s utopian vision of eliminating evil is worse than the evil that exists. Combining appropriateness with correctness in architecture implies making morality conform to the laws of gravity - a sort of inverse astrology which one might call �geology�, were the name not already taken.

The discourse regarding �getting it right� lies between those devoted to building and to space. Building is the discourse with hair on its chest - sweaty hairs, from the effort of hefting bricks and steels, and sweaty with fear, since building is the obvious thing that can go wrong and is the measure of judicial opprobrium. The art of building most visibly embodies the principle that gravity and morality have something to do with each other, and tends to favour personalities like Lewerentz - the strong, silent type. The technology of building is another matter. Despite, or perhaps because of, the modesty and dedication of individual practicioners, building technology manages to combine extreme abstractness (from molecular analysis to CAD) with egregious, often kitsch, fantasy (product names, the buildings used to advertise materials or processes, a tendency towards gigantism) with power and money at a global scale. That, additionally, technology has served as a paradigm of human possibilities - mainly as power over reality - and, from that, of the meaning of history, makes it a highly volatile domain. Any notion of �just doing the job� under these circumstances is na�ve; and yet it is indicative of the confusion that, in the standard (if vacuous) exchange between �aesthetics and technics�, the latter holds the cards of necessity. The urban peripheries, which building-technology has made possible, indicate that getting it right according to the laws of science or gravity does not automatically lead to getting it right morally. Space, by contrast, is hairless; it is an affair of the mind. A confection of the recent past, a genealogy usually traced from perspective through Schmarzow arrives at Giedion and the proposition that space conforms to the universality of humankind. As such, it potentially stands for everything, a new symbol, yet without any content of its own. In practice, space constitutes itself as a procedure whereby tectonics serves as an anchor for a field of references infinite in scope. From the secular-sacred to branding, these references are culled from the museum of cultural fragments (that is, from all the disciplines of which architecture makes use) and are necessarily arbitrary in their selection, including the supposedly non-referential �pure form�. Having its essence in the three-dimensional collage, space, therefore, is another version of gravity and morality (preserving the supposedly rejected paradigm of style - the correlation of appearance and meaning).

The otherwise incomprehensible attraction of �space� (beyond the real beauty of the very best works) must lie in its promise. It is always the agency of a new, better world, the perfect manifestation of the Enlightenment revolution - whose offer of being able to render the world susceptible to one�s compassion and inventiveness disguises the necessity of doing so, if one adheres to its terms of reference. Nothing can be taken for granted, and all buildings must be transparent to thought down to the millimetre - architecturally, constructionally and legally. This motive of organisational synthesis contrasts markedly with both the ecstatic possibilities of �space� and with the other legacy of the Enlightenment, the perception that human temporality is restricted to history-as-change. Of course the pursuit of futurism is always countered by fastidious preservation or restoration elsewhere (ideally both - antiquity with mod cons); but, either way, adherence to history-as-change amputates architecture from its traditional symbolic content, its qualification of the conditions there for everyone always. Architecture is left introverted, forced to communicate on its own terms, each time from scratch and building by building (which, however, largely comes down to awkward quotations of originally radical propositions). The discipline emerges as a strange drama whereby people (mostly good, imaginative and practical middle class folk, unrewarded idealists) strive to subject morality, meaning and history to more or less coherent arrangements of matter obeying the laws of gravity. Having wrapped itself around space, architecture seems to be taking on the role with space of commemorating the persistent inability of the bourgeois to fulfil its aspirations - veering between art and protest, hope and disgust.

To the extent this sketch is roughly accurate, is this a teachable discipline? Or, as many have argued, is the reverse the case; has there been too much teaching? The university has always rewarded proficiency in language and in mathematics (since the trivium and quadrivium); has architecture allowed itself to be sucked dry by its intellectual colleagues, unable to constitute itself as a discipline in their terms? The architectural curriculum is notoriously unique in a university context - most credits going to a portfolio of creative design, the rest split between the sciences and humanities (whose relation to the portfolio recapitulates the general problem). Every teacher will aver that there is a talent involved - some can do it, others can�t (a bit like music, where everyone listens, some play or sing and fewer still compose). A talent can be cultivated or developed, it cannot be taught from scratch; no theory can do this. If this talent is the basis of architectural intelligence, it represents a kind of understanding that is more practical than theoretical.

I use �intelligence� for that which is able to manage the spectrum, data-information-knowledge-wisdom. However there is also a visceral dimension to the intelligence able to orchestrate three-dimensional configurations which are buildable and are structured around human situations. These situations are necessarily understood in their typicality, since, for example, a seminar room is innocent of whether Hitler or Gandhi speaks there. Typicality is a richer domain than type or ergonomics, since it opens the process of analogy, the continuity of identity within difference. Similarly, the �orchestration� that is design is less like deriving solutions than forming judgements - making-do under concrete circumstances according to experience and tact (arrogant, courageous, straight, witty, generous, humble, servile, etc.). Again, no theory can deal with this; nor does �art� cover what happens here - if the fine arts or aesthetics is meant. It is more of an interpretative circle, passing in and out of the conditions and possibilities. The possibilities develop according to analogy/typicality, the conditions give what is �true� about a possibility. Indeed architecture is mostly about the conditions for praxis.

There is nothing very unusual about this interpretative circle. It forms the core of most varieties of praxis such as politics and anything related to ethics. Since no concrete circumstance is exhaustively predictable, it is what architects do anyway, whatever else they claim to be up to; and it is this �intelligence� which is able to give orientation to specialist experts (even though it is regularly argued that we do not know how to talk to these experts - again recapitulating the estrangement within disciplines). Making takes up most of the time and effort, but it is not the core or the point of what we do - one eats the meal, not the recipe or the pans. Accordingly, the motifs of making new realities or of anchoring meaning or of bobbing in the consumerist tides can subside in favour of what, in principle, are issues common to everyone - �good� buildings and towns�doing it well rather than getting it right. Perhaps if the discipline were more generally understood, and therefore taught, in these terms, the nature of the dialogue or collaboration with other disciplines would be less strange and more plausibly creative.

Peter Carl is Senior Lecturer in Architecture at Cambridge University, England