We live in innovative times. I carry in my pocket more music than I could fit in my car trunk when I was in college. The rental car tells me, in a languid purr, the best route to Pasadena. A friend at Pfizer describes technology, now in development, that would allow real-time monitoring of my vital functions via my cell phone. (Or would that be my tri-corder?)
People love this stuff—except, perhaps, when it comes to buildings. Why is that?
Maybe it would help to ask of the innovations described above: What, in fact, is new here, and what’s not? In each case, something people already value—listening to music, being able to find Pasadena, knowing that one’s heart is beating properly—is facilitated by the innovation.
The same happens in architecture, sometimes: innovation helps achieve an already valued quality. Special glazing keeps the room cozy in winter; a novel structure forms a grand, civic span. People value the innovation for what it makes possible: coziness, or an uplifted spirit. Elsewhere, innovation in architecture doesn’t support—or even respect—people’s values. It doesn’t make things good, it just makes them different.
Now, sometimes difference is itself a positive value. I, for example, would be delighted if my five-year-old would agree to listen to a different CD in the car. That would be OK.
But it’s not OK when difference leads to a loss of qualities that people, for good reason, value. It’s not OK when an architect replaces desirable qualities of entry (shelter from the rain, for instance) with an “innovative” “sign” of “entry.” It’s not OK when the museum architect, in service of an “innovative” formal scheme, places the vitrines too low to see them. It’s not OK—forgive me, friends—when a whole town full of architects replaces the gracious, traditional bay window with a smaller and less spatially integrated rectangular bay, just to assert our non-Victorian-ness.
But my purpose is not to pit New against Old; it’s to suggest that we measure innovation not on a scale of difference, but on a scale of provision and integration. Louis Kahn made an observation about a stair, which went something like this: A stair should have a landing, and at the landing there should be a window, and a chair, and a bookshelf, so that the old person can ascend the stair with the child and can stop and say, “I’ve always wanted to look at this book,” and not have to admit that he can’t make it up the stairs in one go.
Kahn’s buildings don’t look the way this passage sounds, but he thought of his innovations—the windows at Exeter, the vaults in Ft. Worth—in this way: as an integration of “ands.” How much value can I integrate in this moment? Can I design a device that fits comfortably in my pocket, delights the touch, can be controlled with one hand, and holds all the music it used to take four orange crates to carry?
I mention these things, because our current issue is on “sustainability,” an idea that carries within it a conundrum. It seeks to maintain valuable things the way they are (breathable, potable, non-toxic) but requires innovative thinking to do so. Such innovative thinking, rather than novel forms, makes a progressive architecture.
Originally published 4th quarter 2005 in arcCA 05.4, “Sustain Ability.”
