On the limitations of architecture

I have been thinking about the limitations of architecture a lot lately. That i am doing so rather than thinking about the possibilities it presents is probably instructive of where my thinking is going. As a profession we have never been less valued, either in esteem or fee value yet many architects still believe they have the skills and power to make an appreciable positive impact in the way we live. But do they? I am increasingly less sure. At the same time i have also started to question the extent to which architecture itself matters.

This situation is not particularly new. We have been sliding inexorably in this direction since the eighties. The abolition of the fee scale and opening up of competition in the profession had an undoubted impact. At the same time procurement changed radically. With design and build the architect was no longer central to the process. He certainly wasn't getting paid as if he was either. Our customers don't seem to need us and they don't want to pay us. Can we really say that we are giving them good value?

As much as i would like it to be, our ills are not all down to Thatcher and the greed-is-good culture of the eighties. We sowed our own seeds of destruction long before that by failing to change and to really understand where technology was taking us. We have clung to notions that we are somehow gentleman artists. Polymaths. Renaissance men who can turn their hand to most any design task, from tea spoon to city plan. We dislike justifying design decisions as if that casts aspersions on our judgement. Heaven forfend that we might try to base our choices on some sort of evidence base! That sounds awfully like engineering, we are artists. We believe in our highly developed sense of taste and aesthetics but this leaves us arguing for designs on the basis that they might "look better". How trivial this sounds. Is that the best we can do? A little voice crying in the philistine aesthetic wilderness for something which looks just a little bit better than the poor quality product that our clients/contractors/engineers/QSs (or indeed whoever it is we are blaming for our irrelevance this week) has proposed?

We don't even have any ammunition in this battle of taste. Architectural theory has long since disappeared up its own firmament. Reading such texts is an exercise in alienation and frustration written as they are in an obtuse, self-referential internal language. Where are the polemicists today? Le Corbusier may have been wrong but he had a view of architecture that engaged with the world. Now we have silly debates about silly shapes and the software we use to make them. We debate, on a bi-annual basis it seems, the relative merits of modernism vs classicism. And that's just about it. That seems to be the level of debate around architectural theory at the moment. Inspiring isn't it?

I sort of blame Frank Gehry. We are all living with the fall-out from the Bilbao Effect. This is the fallacy that urban regeneration can be driven by crazy architectural gestures. The Bilbao Effect is the thinking architect's 'wow factor'. It is the evidence we crave that architecture matters. Not just architecture though ARCHITECTURE!!!!!! Architecture that needs 50ft high flashing neon letters never mind a surfeit of punctuation on order to express it's importance. This gave us icons. In the past we were happy with attractive functional buildings that did what their users required and contributed in a positive way to the streetscape. Sometimes we fretted a bit about form and style but that was about it. Now everything has to be 'iconic'. It doesn't matter if it is an art gallery, a school, a waste processing plant or a morgue, if the brief doesn't ask for something innovative (what does that even mean architecturally?) it is wanting something iconic for whatever locale it is going to raise from mediocrity.

But steady on folks, is it really possible for *everything* to be an icon? What happened to good manners? To an understanding of the spaces in between the buildings? Where did we lose any conception of civic hierarchy?

What happened to the things which *really* give a sense of place?

Lets look at an example. Florence say. Florence has its share of icons, there is no doubt about that. The Duomo is about as iconic as they come, at least in the old sense which didn't involve swoopy silver blobs copulating in a windswept plaza next to a shopping mall packed with the same stuff that is packed into all the other shopping malls. The Duomo is allowed to be iconic though. It was the key civic and cultural institution of its time. Something which is shared by everyone can stand out. It can shout for attention because it deserves it. The Dumo gives Florence structure. It stands physically higher than its surroundings and acts as a navigational device from many parts of the city.

Any visitor to Florence will surely be impressed by the architecture of the Duomo. They might also find Santa Croce memorable. They may be awed by the scale of the Palazzo Pitti and the Palazzo Vecchio. You can be certain that while they will linger in the Piazza della Signoria they wont take any notice of the vast majority of the buildings surrounding it. They are unremarkable for the most part but that doesn't matter, the space in between them is the thing. These hypothetical tourists will enjoy strolling the streets and alleys of the Centro Storico. They will remember the charming shops and the picturesque streetscape. They will think very little of the buildings that line these passageways.

"The mother art is architecture" said Frank Lloyd Wright but that sort of thinking is dangerous. Cities are more important than buildings. Buildings are nothing but the Lego bricks that come together to make cities. Indeed they aren't even all the bricks. We have little control of street furniture, infrastructure, paving surfaces, economics, demographics, culture. Architecture is a minor player when you really consider the multitude of influences that make a place what it is.

Rather than pompously wiffling on about being the "mother art" i rather wish architects could have adopted a version of the hippocratic oath and vow to firstly do no harm. Architecture in isolation is demonstrably more likely to damage the qualities of a place than to enhance it. Looking out of my office window here i can only see one or two buildings which are positive influences on the urban environment. That's pretty atrocious. Our manifesto should be to conserve, maintain, repair where necessary and to improve where possible but to do it with humility. Most importantly though we need to start with the understanding that the space left over around our buildings are more important than the buildings themselves. Lets get back to thinking about people and how they interact with the urban environment.