Once and future architecture

Architectural Review, The, March, 2005

Integral part of the drama

JUHA LEIVISKA, Helsinki

Twenty-five years is a very short timespan in architecture. The basic values and creative principles in architecture remain the same throughout the ages.

I have the flaw that to be able to concentrate on my work in peace I cannot follow international architectural publications. Many of them only present the newest and most astonishing trends that lead astray especially the youth and make me all confused.

The most important architectural events and ideas are born locally and individually. They are born out of the task and environment in which they are rooted in a natural way as a part of an entity, at times in an overpowering, at times in an accompanying or complementing role. Instead of emphasizing our own work we need to concentrate on whole environments.

To me, architecture is creation of spatial events and processes. Architecture, like music, is experienced by moving from one space to another. There are pauses, there are highlights. One needs to create subtle yet dynamic solutions where buildings and their interiors are an integral part of the drama with the environment.

Reconsidering life

ITSUKO HASEGAWA, Tokyo

Looking back on the past 25 years means thinking back to a 25-year career for me. During my trip to Europe right after graduation from college, I met Archigram in London and Hans Hollein in Vienna for the first time. Nothing but the experience told me a new wave was coming in architecture. After that, when I was working at the Kazuo Shinohara studio at Tokyo Institute of Technology, another movement of 'Disconstruction' by Arata Isozaki, which was started as a series of articles in a magazine, made a strong impact on me. These two deeply affected my philosophy of architecture.

It was innovative enough to reset conventional fixed ideas one after another. I liked the free and pure feeling of it. I found something intriguing in architecture then.

Especially graphical, enjoyable, beautiful and intense drawings by Archigram made us reconsider our life, architecture and cities as living individuals of freedom and fun. Instant-City, Living City, Walking City and Capsule Homes, symbiosis with nature showed us possibilities of designing architecture related to urban dynamism from the point of view of us as living things.

Again, for me, the '60s architectural movement, which was in the midst of my school days, could have been the most stimulating in my life.

A real flowering

EDWARD CULLINAN, London

With the overthrow of social democracy by Thatcher in 1979, the birth of monetarism and the old-fashioned Falkland War; there emerged from the backwoods various establishment figures, moaning about Modernism and tilting at concrete towers long after the last was built. And the most powerful of these was Prince Charles whose tastes exactly reflected the tastes of his landowning class, which grew up in Georgian mansions. He made a speech in 1984 which semi-closed the doors on invention, thoughtfulness and the exercise of imagination in architecture over large areas of these islands for the next ten years. The planners' question: 'Would Prince Charles like this?' became commonplace. But the Modern tradition lived on and developed and grew, mostly in other parts of Europe and in America, but here in many heads. Now we are experiencing a real flowering and development of imagination and invention in architecture. Long may it last. At least let it last for the next 25 years while the lovely concept of abstract composition can respond poetically to the demands of sustainability.