Future tense - architecture

Architectural Review, The, Nov, 1996

Any attempt to predict the future is inevitably fraught with uncertainty. But, in some ways, we can have a profound effect on what will happen. Ultimately, what matters much more than any discernible trend in technology or politics, is the set of values that we bring to the struggle to forge a better tomorrow.

Our May number looked at the past of the Architectural Review and the strange and wonderful things that have happened over the last 100 years. Here, in the centenary of the actual month in which the magazine was founded, we attempt to look into the future, and anyone who does that must risk retrospective ridicule, like the man who a century ago predicted that London would grind to a halt because of the depth of horse dung in its streets. It is impossible to look to the future with the clarity with which we were able to look back on the past century.[1] To try to look forward with any precision for a hundred years is patently absurd. But just as the past is what we make it when we tell its story, so to some extent is the future, for what will happen partly depends on what we think can happen. In broad terms, we can approach the future with optimism and the belief that we can make the world a better place to live in, or we can gloomily accept that we are at the mercy of forces largely out of our control which are changing our lives at such a rate that we are nothing but flotsam on the surface of a gigantic torrent. This issue is optimistic and all the work shown in it suggests different approaches to the future.

The increasingly frenetic pace of change is perhaps illusory: 100 years ago, the world was being transformed by widespread provision of electric power, the telephone, the internal combustion engine, asepsis, new building materials like reinforced concrete, the re-alignment of the productive capacities of the Great Powers, psychiatry, the new physics, and huge gains in agricultural productivity in places like America and Australia. To our ancestors the pace of change seemed as rapid as it does now to us. But we are perhaps more frightened of the future than they were. We have seen that progress[2] is not inevitable, that for instance the best educated and in many ways most civilised nation in Europe could be reduced to previously unimaginable depths of evil, partly because of the powers that early twentieth-century technology gave to the Nazis.

It is easy to say that because the old ideals of progress are clearly absurd, there is no hope of achieving better and more decent conditions - that we are subject to systems (like the market) completely indifferent to the concerns of humanity, so we should cultivate greed and selfishness, and concentrate on what little we can hope to influence: ourselves and perhaps a little of our immediate surroundings. This is the literally anti-social creed of Thatcher and Reagan, expressed in high cultural terms by people like Jacques Derrida and his architectural disciples like Peter Eisenman. The fundamentally noble programme of Modernism is seen as either irrelevant or ludicrous: any attempt to improve the human condition must be pathetically ineffectual. Charles Jencks has vividly summed up the anti-human nature of much of this new thinking in his embrace of Hans Christian von Baeyer's aphorism that 'in the twenty first century, the atom will replace man as the measure of all things'.[3]

Against this reductive and belittling set of values, it is possible to suggest other criteria that may lead to better and richer lives for the individual and society. They are more difficult to articulate than the one-dimensional arguments of for instance the mad marketeers,[4] or those computer-net worshippers who believe that we will never need to leave home again. Compared to the inane eye-rolling, mouth-foaming certainties of such people, more complex proposals based on human values seem lacking in clarity. But this is a virtue as well as a defect, for it allows us to speculate in a more wide-ranging and inventive fashion than the fanatic futurists.

The fulcrum

One of the most exciting changes in our perception of the world since the death of bureaucratic Modernism[5] is the understanding that the present is a fulcrum between the past and the future, and that we discard the past at the risk of overbalancing the future. It is a commonplace that the work of the greatest masters of the Modern Movement, people like Aalto, Mies and Le Corbusier, is deeply imbued with lessons from the past, yet the architectural references were so deeply abstracted, and the written rhetoric usually so futuro-logical that the rank and file of the architectural profession might be forgiven (a little) for supposing that the past was immaterial and that a Utopian future[6] could be achieved by simply harnessing the powers of industry to transforming a razed world for the better.

We can now see the drear results of disregarding history - and the follies of what emerged as a riposte to that attitude in the early '80s: PoMo, the tattered signage of which looms over places as dull and inhumane as any produced by bureaucratic Modernism at its worst. Knitting together the physical fabric of past and present for the future will certainly not cure the deep wounds of society in itself, but it seems unlikely that they can be brought anywhere near being healed unless the play of human life can be enacted against a coherent and decent set of values that celebrate society as well as those of the individual, and remind us that we have roots in the past as well as branches into the future. It is clear that links with the past cannot be fostered by slapping pilasters on to a dull box. We do not need crass histrionic gestures, but sensitive engagement with old buildings and traditional notions of place and space. Such initiatives need not necessarily be dramatic: modesty and gentleness are usually much better strategies than radical gestures.