“The ‘Canon in Architecture’ reinforces the autonomy of architecture in two ways. On the one hand, it structures our image reflected in the architecture itself. Second, it allows us to look at architecture autonomously (“architecture through architecture”)”.
This “Canon in Architecture” is increasingly tone-deaf as each of us are forced, right now in sequestration, to see our world from our own individual places, rather than “the autonomy of architecture.” Each of us has always had our own vernacular, our own aesthetic language, now our culture may be rediscovering that in our isolation. This realization counters a century of “Canon.”
Before the end of World War I, the global had coexisted with vernacular architectural languages, such as the Prairie School of America, the Amsterdam School of the Netherlands, the Gothic Renaissance of England and the Arts and Crafts Movement, which focused on fabrics and know-how of many individual cultures. In addition, there is a nascent concept of a “modernist” vision of architecture in Central Europe.
With the full realization of the Industrial Revolution, things changed by 1920. A Brave New “One World” imperative fostered expressions attempting an Architectural Esperanto throughout the world and, “The International Style” soon became Canon. In 1927, Le Corbusier famously wrote in his book “Towards a New Architecture” that “Our world is strewn with the detritus of dead epochs”. For the last 100 years, this effort at universality morphed into “Modernism”. Defining a universal language of building is just part of what some aspire to build. That perspective is neither “Right” nor “Wrong,” but the exclusivity of the last century’s Canon is inevitably incomplete as it shortchanges our latent diversity.
The world is having its collective nose rubbed in each locus: that idiosyncrasy will change: the way all of us see the world, and that perception is not controlled by any Canon. Each of us is being force-fed our idiosyncrasies while everyone sequesters in situ.
I present to several architects from all over the United States, their words and their projects.
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“Originally a component of a 300-year-old agricultural space, the five acres in Jamestown consisted of open pastures covered with stone walls. Some of the original buildings still exist and one of them, an old tractor shed, set a strong visual precedent for the new design. The vocabulary of the old buildings and the new space is similar and the interiors are a continuation of blank and undeniable exteriors. “Estes Twombly Architects
In the accepted architectural Canon of this last century, the word “vernacular” has been a negative pejorative that according to that Canon manifestly eschewed innovation and suppressed creativity, and excused mediocrity of thinking. The essential perspective of our present Canon is that vernacular realities are seen to trivialize a higher human spirit. But that was before COVID-19. Right now, being International is to be endangered, transit is dangerous, open borders spread infection, and density has risk. What was our highest value, our common humanity, may have become a baseline liability.
“The Eurocentrist bias, now aided and abetted by Globalization, that has been a part of American architecture since the earliest stylistic eclecticism is still there in different guises. But working in New Mexico, you simply have to deal with wind direction the movement of the sun – and the iconic landscapes in a Built architecture. We have so much throughout America to draw from.” —Antoine Predock
How does architecture respond? I think at dawn we can remember the vernacular aesthetic of the place, the user and the time. These are not “traditional” or “style” precedents. There is a meaning in indigenous materials, our environments, even geometries, as well as the context of our time and our communities. Maybe we’re rediscovering that.
Architects would possibly position themselves rethinking their view of the global, and this would possibly not be a vision of the total global without time or position, but a vision with their position and why we all love those positions. A new definition of what connects, encourages and focuses us can also be refocused from the universal to the realities of the context: climate, geographical, curtains and historical.
The cliché archetypical architect cultivated over this last century defined their own criteria for success and meaning. If you write your own rules for success, you will always succeed. This silo-ing of expression of architecture to its own world, apart from any other, is easier to understand, critique, teach and promote. The world beyond the silo of celebrity and product joy offers innovations and expressions found in perception rather than rationalization. Right now, in COVID-19, perception is becoming exquisitely localvore, and based in each person.
If you try to rationalize art, or distinguish it from our humanity, it begs the reality that its joy is essential and personal. If you try to control building to a universal standard as defined by designers, then anything can be defined as beautiful, because the designer is the beholder and judge – not a greater culture, let alone the idiosyncrasy of the user. The freight train of the Canon’s inevitable universality may have hit a speed bump.
Perhaps the imposed quarantine to avoid COVID-19 in common necessity will indict universal expectations. This period may force us to deal with who each of us actually are, instead of who we want to be. Makers of things want to do more than to satisfy the minimums, so architects may find inspiration in idiosyncrasy. Makers spend their lives defining the crack between the prosaic and the sublime, combusting those parallel worlds into the meaning of creation to express more than the minimum.
“Indigenous architecture taught us the beauty of light, convection and natural materials. Built from local materials without power tools, this home celebrates the hands that built it, with exquisite craftsmanship evident in every detail.” —House + House
Without the lilt of vision, or an aesthetic, any attempt at beauty becomes artless commentary—as dry as a history book or a tweet. It is only when we have one foot in who we are and value and the other in what we see, feel, and know that art reflects our lives, especially when our lives are now fully bathed in our intimacies.
“Architecture plays the singular role of an active, archival touchstone, tangibly connecting us to the past. Nothing unites us with our ancestors so practically.” —Clay Chapman
Over the last century, it has become an expectation that architects design for other architects, and the rest of us benefit from their genius. It naturally resulted that those who made and celebrated buildings lauded and taught those who defined the problems they were solving. Like models strutting through a fashion show, no questions are asked, and only one vision of beauty was offered. The buildings that are generated from a designer’s black box are not enough when you live in a world where thought and place and perception have been made central in everyone’s lives over months of isolation.
“We are sociable creatures who need personal space. Kitchens and room-sized porches overlook a shared commons buffered with layers of privacy.” —Ross Chapin
In our COVID-19 separation, we all need more than survival, or even love, we need and good looks. Instead of aspire to the universal and abstract, in a post-pest world, we can see a good appearance in our own values.
The universal intellectualization of the architecture of the fine arts can move on to another universal global: the human reaction of joy in experience, reminiscence and meaning. This can be an herbal result. When we hear the song of a bird, we see that they are feathers, they are strangely charming to us and the bird ignores them beyond their usefulness. This does not make me arrogant or ignorant of the bird, however, the architects can grow to see that each and every baby we know has a good look that is deeper than anything we can do. Architecture will have to aspire to be of our lives, to reflect what we need our lives to be like.
“A recent assignment has its bureaucracy derived from a local precedent built in the 1860s. A team from our workplace sent to help whiten one of the forts with Texas Parks and Wildlife to learn about the classic limestone approach. that limestone would have come from the site or could have come from the site: oak wood, wood shingles and even cedar and cypress used as harvested columns of the ranch. —Michael Imber
Human beings need to create this beauty. No other being needs to make beauty, it just is. Perhaps an uninspired aesthetic, a reaction and idiosyncrasy aesthetic, will begin to compete with a Canon that has its vernacular.
This new chapel uses the ‘why’ of history to create it from a 50-year-old position in an exquisite setting taking the form of its original chapel, its sign, its cross and lifting them in the arms of architecture. It is now 3 times larger and follows its heritage and landscape. “Dickinson Duo
Duo Dickinson has been an architect for more than 30 years. Author of 8 books, he is an architecture critic for the New Haven Register, writes about design and culture for Hartford Courant and is a member of the Building Beauty Program at the Sant’Anna Institute in Sorrento, Italy.
This article was originally published on ArchDaily.
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