Forever Young

Semalam masa aku berborak-borak sama kawan aku di Malaysia,dia telah menceritakan sesuatu yang membuatkan aku turut bengang.

Al-kisah ketika kawan aku si Ridha sedang melepak bersama rakan taulannya,salah seorang kawannya memperkenalkan kakaknya seorang arkitek berdaftar (Part 3) kepadanya sambil menjelaskan kepada kakaknya yang Ridha juga seorang arkitek. (more…)

The first part of The Language of Postmodern Architecture addresses the issues and the theories that has become the backbone of Modern Movement in the context of architectural language and criticizing it in the sense of intention and execution into the physical form. Jencks also questions the validity of the ‘rational’ Modern theory. The first part of the article describes the death of Modern architecture complete with its date and its cause of death. Charles Jencks stated that during the Pruitt-Igoe Scheme demise, it had been previously brutally tortured and mutilated by its inhabitants. The public cannot appreciates the project although the architects intention was to ‘ instill, by good example, corresponding virtues in the inhabitants.’ Quite clearly the project aimed to create a healthy behavior community. The pursuit for this ideal has lead to the demise of the project and Modern Movement in one go, once and for all. It also linked to the Modern Movement’s interpretation or rather misinterpretation of Rationalism

“Like rational schooling, rational health and rational design for women’s bloomers, it has the faults of an age trying to reinvent itself totally on rational grounds.�

Malcolm MacEwen wrote ‘Crisis In Architecture� that focuses on what is wrong with the Modern Movement. Jencks described MacEwen’s summary as “masterful, but his (MacEwens) prescriptions were wildly off the mark.� Jencks realizes that the problems solution is more than ‘changing a style here and a heart there�. He suggested that the crisis is no longer caused by one problem. Instead, it has multiple causes and the remedy forwarded by MacEwen was no magic cure at all. However, Jencks praises MacEwen’s effective method of analysis and he uses it to analyze the modern hotels. His subject was the Penta Hotel in London, where he suggested that the hotel is a product of the ‘crisis’ mentioned by MacEwen. Then Jencks proposed a list produced from his attempt to untangle the multiple causes of the crisis. The diagram lists architectural production into three systems, Private, Public and Developer each with 11 characteristics. Through the diagram, it is suggested that the Public and Developer method of architectural production has resulted to be ‘out of scale with historic cities and alienating to both architects and society. This has been caused by the diminishing level of intimacy between the architect and the client, until to the stage where there is no human emotion and relation attached to it, resulting to the capitalistic attitude towards architecture. The production of the design run parallels with the amount of money the client are willing to spend, the bigger the amount the bigger the building be until it has went beyond Ivan Ilich Law of Diminishing Architecture where

“ For any building type there is an upper limit to the number of people who can be served before the quality of the environment falls.�

Worse, the big building, in this case the Penta Hotel was designed for the client who might not be using the hotel after all. The hotel was meant for the targeted consumer where all of their needs were determined by the absentee clients who will never care about the real needs of the end users and depending on the commercial values to attract the targeted users in example combining the Ancient architectural language with the modern amenities thus creating a certain ‘theme’ for the building. Jencks stated that the 11 causes need reformation yet he does not explain any immediate solution to those problems.

After analyzing the multiple causes of the crisis, Jencks move forward to reveal the confusing world of the confused Mies. He uses Mies work to elaborate the architecture created around one or a few simplified value (univalent). Mies’ works were described as the most univalent formal system

“ …because it make use few materials and a single, right angled geometry. Characteristically this reduced style was justified as rational (when it was uneconomic) and universal (when it fitted only a few functions).�

The result was a series of steel-and-glass boxes, which had been used widely throughout the world. The main problem was the box form was used not only in office buildings, but also in human dwellings and civic centres. Mies formulated this from his understanding on Rationalism in which he over simplify it to a point where there is a single, unified, ‘ideal’ language of architecture that where it really dependent on its floor plans to describe and express its functions. Even the critiques of the time only focuses on the philosophical aspects of the building, accidentally discarding the more obvious questions such as ‘what if housing looked like offices?’. As an example, Chicago Civic Centre and Lake Shore Drive Housing looked like a pair of long lost twin to a point where we thought that both of the buildings were office towers made by a single architect. These confusions made the users cannot appreciate the buildings. When Mies said

“I see in industrialization, the central problem of building in our time. If we succeed in carrying out of this industrialization, the social, the economic, technical and also artistic problems will be readily solved .(1924)�

then it is clear that Mies simplified form responded to the notion of faster production of building components plus the huge amount of the production. This view proves that he had this noble intention to serve the society and curing all of its problems. But problems is not singular. It’s multiple and its complex thus a single solution (industrialization) cannot be the magic remedy.

How noble Mies’ intentions were, his confusing architectural thoughts became more chronic in the Illinois Institute of Technology campus. Here Jencks revealed that the chapel’s boiler house looked like the chapel itself and vice versa, the classrooms looked more like a factory and the ‘Presidents Temple’ is actually the School of Architecture’s Building. Was Mies trying to re-elevates the status of the architects as pagan gods? What with the chapel’s boiler room? Was it to get the people to worship the boiler instead the Holy Cross? That the boiler is holier than the Cross?

The Mies’s confusion was no special case in the Modern Movement. It also happens to the formalist like Frank Lloyd Wright and to the Team X, where Jencks reminded us that both of them reacted against Mies’s views. The Marin County Civic Centre uses references from various architectural languages that are familiar to the public yet the image expressed did not explain the function of the building nor its relation to the public. Gordon Bunshaft’s museum for the Hirshhorn Collection were supposed to express ‘power, awe, harmony and sublime’ where it ended up having the public interpret it as a bunker, a pillbox. It’s humorous but unintended. The Smithsons dependency on traditional symbolism has also been criticized. Jencks argued that it is practically impossible to communicate the meaning from a new language based on the machine metaphor, where

“…for the machine-supported present day cities, only a live, cool, highly controlled, rather impersonal architectural language can deepen that base-connection, make it resonates with culture as a whole.�

and

“The great irony is, however, that they also believe in providing essential humanist values of ‘place, identity, personally, home coming.�

Jencks believe that the root cause of the contradictions was

“…based on the nature of architecture as a language. It is radically schizophrenic by necessity, partly rooted in tradition, in the past.�

He suggested that architecture is as slow as spoken language and as fast as science, which means the effects of architecture upon society is slow while the evolution of its tools and methods are fast.

Later part of the article reveals the four new social orders where architecture has enslave it to. It strengthens the opinion where the Modern Movement architectural language was influenced by economic strength, technological advancement, desperation of finding social solution and wealth enslavement. All of these discarding the cultural values make people to worship the technology and becoming devout slaves of commercialism. The noble intentions of the Modern Movement gave birth to a new, serious cultural sickness.

In conclusion, Charles Jencks delivers his arguments in a humorous yet provocative ways in analyzing each of the Modern Movements formulas and proposals for social cure, where the formulas devour back its creator in which contributed to the demise of Modern Movement. He also proves that there can be no singular solution for a complex problem and simplification of the solutions cannot solve the problems. The damages done by Modern Movement are serious and we have to admit that to cure the situation, we have to wait patiently and might not happened in our lifetime.

Bibliography

1. Jencks, Charles, “ Part One: The Death of Modern Architecture�, The Language of Post Modern Architecture, London: Acaedemy, 1991.