In context - Comment

Architectural Review, The, Oct, 2002 by Peter Davey

Contextualism, an often decried approach, redolent of '70s attempts to mitigate the worst effects of High Modernism, deserves a more thoughtful examination which could lead to a multi-layered relationship of past, present and future.

'Contextualism' is a word that has been completely out of vogue in architectural circles for at least a couple of decades. Not surprising, because in many cases 'contextualist' buildings tended to be either dull pastiches or silly proto-ProMo pieces.

There is of course a (very limited) case for exact reproduction in certain circumstances. For instance, no one but an idiot or a mountebank would suggest anything other than faithful replacement if an element of a great Classical composition were to be destroyed. The Place des Vosges in Paris or the Circus in Bath would scarcely be improved by a brash concrete or steel and glass insertion. But that does not excuse smearing acres of elevations with pastiche second-rate Classicism or Pseudo-vernacular, a practice that seems particularly prevalent in English-speaking countries, Britain in particular, where the architectural criticisms of Price Charles are still taken seriously by provincial planning committees. Such behaviour sets up a downward spiral of contextualism, with bad copies being copied badly, to be emulated by even worse distortions, until at the end of the process, huge quantities of a dreadful distillation of the second-rate, compound insensitivity, ignorance and greed seeps out to corrode and devo ur the surroundings of every city of the wealthy world.

Yet sensitive response to inherited context is undoubtedly needed. One of the many errors of the twentieth century was to believe that Modernism, generated out of a not always happy menage a trois of abstract art, technology and social mission, was so very different from everything that had ever been before that a complete revolution was necessary, severing brave new from exhausted old. For all its often quite sincere commitment to social justice, under the post Second World War Modern professional and political consensus, developers, system builders, architects and civil engineers were given extraordinary powers and were usually determined to demonstrate that the new must be different from what had been inherited.

Hence the fragmentation of many of the traditional cities of Europe and North America. It is absurd to suppose that we are different as a species from previous people. We may have greatly developed technologies, have changed social relationships and (in the West) greatly increased prosperity. But we are still human beings, and we have to live with each other, and so we should with our ancestors who gave us context. It is not difficult to understand Colin Rowe's unhappy remark when he was asked to contribute to the Roma Interrotta exhibition in 1979 'to protract the errors and later irresponsibilities of modern architecture does not seem to us to be a very useful procedure. We assume that, on the whole, modern architecture was a major catastrophe except as a terrible lesson best to be forgotten'.

Obsessive with objects

Though some aspects of architecture have improved (to an extent) in the last two decades, the urge to produce object buildings severed from context beats as strong is ever in the hearts of some developers and their architects, particularly those who pose as the avant-garde and embrace the blob school. By definition, blobs are anti-contextual and, while we may need a few isolated monuments for special reasons, such an approach is scarcely sustainable for the whole environment which, if the approach were to be pursued to the full, would end (as it has in some parts of the US) in total disintegration of the city. It is quite clear that the disjunctions of urban fabric resulting from the arrogance of the postwar politico-professional complex have intensified social divisions and individual anomic. Far too many of the creators of the huge social housing estates of that period had no more notion of the concepts of context and community that they had a ecology or cybernetics. 'Community' has certainly been an overwo rked concept in certain circles, but even in the most affluent, individualistic and material societies, it still has both meaning and functional importance. Intimate members of an individual's community may now be very widely scattered geographically because of the powers of electronic communication, but there is another level of living in which community is grounded in quotidian affairs: local transactions like shopping, getting the bus, going to the match, visiting the clinic, having a snack and so on.

If all this falls apart, so do our lives too. There is a social dimension to contextualism that we have ignored with dreadful results. I am not trying in the least to suggest that social relationships should (or even can) be set down for all time in masonry, glass and steel. Only that we should respond to the phenomenal and social contexts in which we work with sympathy and courage to try to relate past, present and decent future.