Architecture in Limbo

Aaron Betsky

Any architecture today must answer the question : how can we be at home in, make sense of and find our way through a landscape that changes in computer and communication technologies and the massive redevelopment of physical, social and cultural space they occasion continually make unrecognizable to us ? It is no longer enough (if it ever was) to make elegant compositions in façade or plan, to make things that are sensible or sensuous, or to make forms that make sculptural sense. We must do all of these things, but we must do them in such a way that they work in a situation dominated by celphones, the Internet, urban sprawl, and global culture. Making single buildings is not enough when it all we see is signs and all we experience is the screen in front of our face.

I write this in Shanghai for a conference I hope to attend in a few weeks in Orleans. Outside, new skyscrapers fade off in all directions into the polluted haze that is punctured only by the sharp colors of advertising for brands we know everywhere. Inside, air conditioning and the cushioning blandishments of not-quite natural materials pad the cell. In front of me, the screen presents the face of invisible technology that courses all around me, all the way back to my home in San Francisco. Plugged in and removed from the street, I could be anywhere. I am in limbo.

Such space of floating in the haze of sameness, slick surfaces, spaces defined by codes, familiar signage and a materiality that always everywhere recedes is not just reserved for those traveling along the lanes of business. We all wait endlessly for our train, in traffic, in fast food restaurants. We work in our offices, factories and institutions housed in the same boxes of absence. We live in always changing surroundings defined by economy and codes as much as by our own sense of ourselves and surrounded by a web of social relations whose contours are indefinable and uncertain. The massive dislocations caused by the globalization of our economy give this world a violent undercurrent that to many millions is a distinct reality.

It is not, in other words, just a question of the boredom of the haves. For those who have not, or very little, the glare of fluorescents, the blare of advertising, the disappearance of any sense of horizon, the imprisonment by closed forms and the lack of variety is inexpressibly worse. The very logic of global capitalism is evident not in the abstractions of statistics, but in the experience of everyday life. We may try to alleviate such conditions by designing better housing or giving offices windows that open, but in the end such blandishments are already subject to the iron laws of economics that provide the commissions.

What I would suggest is that architecture in such a world must first –as always—respond to the context in which we construct its artifacts. It must make what Michael Bell has called "slow space" : mirrors to the limbo effect that suspend us willfully and clearly within the web of modernization in such a way that, encased and removed from it, we can understand it. Certainly the clarity of materials, the abstraction of form and the deformation of shape that are mainstays of modernist architecture can help achieve such an effect, though they run the danger of so far removing the building that it becomes a monument to values and sensibilities rather than an active antidote to modernization.

It is when such tactics lead to a sense of the unhomely that architecture becomes more effective. The "come back effect" of the familiar that somehow is now strange because of changes in use, scale, or form can have the effect of deepening a sense of the unreality of the world we make for ourselves. Such work has the effect of being enigmatic. It continually wakens our wonder, awe and fear in such a way that we cannot consume the object, space or image. Making the strange part of our everyday lives, such work reminds us of the strangeness of that existence.

Third, an architecture that would mirror our suspended landscape would itself be uncertain in its relation to that datum which we think mediates between others, the physical landscape and ourselves. Architecture must be an unfolding of the landscape, rather than the placing of an object upon it. Against the tyranny of the orthogonal or the smoothness of the buildings shaped by codes and conventions, it poses the elongated, the cantilevered, the provisional and the continuous. An architecture without beginning or end in section or plan can accommodate and respond to modernization.

Such an architecture would be a collage of forms gathered together from the world around it rather than the invention of something new. For reasons that are only too obvious, we must recycle and reuse. In order to make forms that all those who are not architects do not see as merely alien, we must make out of the culture around us, rather than against it. The rich stew of images that rises every day around globe waits for us to mine it for our constructions. We must build in such a way that our buildings continue the weave of our environment, rather than stand out from it. We must understand our statements as re-statements. Finally, we may have to accept the fact that architecture is not building. Rather, what we think of as the articulation of built form in such a way as to critically reflect the site on which it appears—whether that is a social, economic or physical one—might find its place within the realms of art or in the unreal world of the electrosphere. Architecture has an effective place in the organization of information in such a way that it does not just communicate, but becomes something in which we can be at home. At the same time, architecture can be a form of unbuilding that reveals the world to us. Many architects and those who practice architecture are engaged in experiments towards the making of such slow space. As I sit in the cocoon this writing has created for me, I await the astonishment of such space with eager anticipation.