Space and identity - Comment - International Union of Architects conference

Architectural Review, The, July, 2002 by Peter Davey

The UIA congress in Berlin offers opportunities, which must be seized, to reconsider the priorities of architecture by focusing on space and identity, the built and the natural, urban societies, and innovation and tradition.

Every three years, the International Union of Architects (UIA) has its congress. Both the events and the UIA itself are strange and often ridiculous. The Union is a body that is supposedly representative but scarcely democratic. It has virtually no money, so private purses often weigh heavily in its councils. It attracts to its deliberations a kind of time-serving international bureau-architect, who may not know how to design anything that can move our hearts, but understands bylaws as if they are the very heartbeat itself. Its proceedings are usually in a form of portentous meaning-free international American archi-sprach. At the last UIA congress, in Beijing, the plenary sessions (apart from the notable exception of Kenneth Frampton's inspiring but dead-pan delivered opening speech -- printed in AR November 1999) were largely of the usual architectural kind: 'look at me, I'm so clever, and this is what I've been doing for the last 20 years'.

But the congresses do attract huge numbers of architects and students -- last time ten thousand sat down in the Great Hall of the People for the main lectures (AR August 1999). And they are moments when we as a world-wide profession can try to focus on what is really essential to our calling.

Of course, the UIA's bureaucratic problems will infect this year's congress. But there are grounds for hope -- principally because the congress is to be held in Berlin. The city has been the crucible of modern urban architecture for two decades (ARs April 1987, January 1999). Huge amounts of money and resources of every kind have been spent to try to make the city the crossroads of east and west, and physically emblify its new role as the capital of the unified state and the notion of European integration. In the late '90s, never were so many construction cranes gathered together in such a small area as the revitalized east part of the centre.

Berlin has not only been a focus of political change, but a confrontation of approaches to architecture, varying from Libeskind's portentous caperings (AR April 1999) to the harsh scraped rationalism of the followers of the Ungers/Stimmann school. Between the extremes, many very fine things have been achieved, such as Schultes's extraordinary concrete forest crematorium in Baumschulenweg (AR January 1999), Gehry's amazing unfolding in Pariser Platz (AR August 2001) and Renzo Piano's brilliant sketch at Potsdamer Platz of how we might provide for an enriched modern urban life (AR January 1999).

Berlin causes all of us to think, not just because it is a great city, but because it is in Germany. The country is unusual because it has a very large economy, and no extensive underground resources of modern energy. Looking back at the last 50 years, it is clear that Germany has been blessed not to have oil or gas. An extremely sophisticated society responded to what might have been thought to be an economic handicap by invention and resourcefulness. Approaches to architecture and energy control have been developed that cause us all to rethink how we should build.

The four main themes of this UIA congress: Urban Societies, Innovation and Tradition, The Built and the Natural, and Space and Identity are clearly derived from the German traditions of ecological and social consciousness. There is much to hope for, but much to fear if we as a profession are to try to make an impact on politics. It is essential to change the minds of political decision makers if we are to make the world a better place to live in. The UIA could be really important if it could get itself together, and act as a voice for the spiritual drive of what makes us become architects.

But the UIA will never get very far if it continues to try to promote such concerns with waffly and hectoring rhetoric like 'Aesthetics as an expression of social and cultural identity, which can be found in culturally conveyed architecture and given form and structure in public spaces, needs to be revitalized ... Contemporary aesthetics as a criterion for environmentally quality and sustainable architecture should be redefined in connection with the creative use of new materials and technology.' (1) It is easy, as an Englishman, to mock other people's writing in my language, but the sentiments, however oddly expressed, are surely right, even if over-inflatedly put.

Less aesthetics

'Aesthetics' is a word that few of us would now use in discussion of the nature of architecture -- it resonates with the bow-tied, effete image of the architect as a dealer in images. Architecture is not simply an art -- though of course it is one, but it is very different from the fine arts like painting and sculpture in which practitioners can do what they like, provided that the results can be sold on the market. Fine artists can now literally turn shit into gold. Architects, and other people who struggle with the problems of three-dimensionally transforming the world, cannot afford the luxury of whim or aestheticism. Our art is simultaneously contaminated and ennobled by practicality and by function: by structural imperatives and by ecological responsibility.