shifting the view

Antje Buchholz and Jürgen Patzak-Poor of BAR delivered their recent AAI lecture to an audience of architecture students, ecturers and tutors, in the noticeable absence of other practising architects. The venue, for both the lecture and the exhibition of their work as published in their recent book 'Shifting the View', was the Red Room at UCD School of Architecture, Clonskeagh. This was an unfortunate choice, firstly because architecture students are more likely to go into the city than architects are likely to come out of it, and secondly because practising architects probably have more need for a 'shifted view' than students.

While the language and pitch of the lecture proved challenging to students, its content was certainly more provocative for architects. This was not the usual slide show of architectural objects, meticulously photographed to exclude all the messy traces of their occupation and appropriation. In stark contrast, BAR concentrated on the thick soup of activity and experience that permeates buildings and cities. The point in the lecture never arrived at which the architect jumps from their theories of architecture to an often disappointing realization of these ideas in the built work. In fact it puzzled some that no completed buildings at all were shown.

It was through their processes of documentation that BAR communicated this interest in the everyday experience and interaction with our built surroundings. This 'documentation of the commonplace' revealed an insight into the complexity and richness of use, of what is usually and mistakenly overlooked as architecturally banal. However, rather than a 'touchy feely' approach (the architect makes friends with the public), the documents appear to be executed with a dry anthropological distance. This avoids the tricky issue of attributing value to other people's everyday environments and experiences. For the less fortunate, the everyday may be truly banal because they have neither a choice in their environment nor easy escape from it, The 'commonplace' is often more interesting for those who document it when the everyday environment or activity investigated is not their own - if it is in a different place, or is left over from a different time or way of life. Those who document should be aware that in such situations their activities may appear nostalgic or like some advanced form of tourism.

Documentation is not just a transparent process of observation and transcription, but one that is itself a realized project. Waiter Beniamin, whose writings BAR deftly draw on, would perhaps describe this process as 'the task of the translator'.* Two of the methods BAR utilise in their documents offer exciting possibilities for further exploration of this intersection of anthropology and architecture. These are firstly the use of non-architectural techniques of documentation to analyse our built environment (e.g. film), and secondly the use of architectural techniques (i.e. sections and plans) to document those things we would not usually use them to document. Combining the two and using non-architectural techniques to document that which is not considered architecture - could be fun.

* See Waiter Benjamin, Illuminations (Fontana Press : London 1992).

Dougal Sheridan, architect