O O Ø O O O O
Berkely Prize, Take Two
Another awkward essay.
The Berkeley Prize competition has rolled around again. That means you have the unfortunate luck of having to slog through another round of my architectural navelgazing. Last year, the winning essay came from a Waterloo student. Since I don’t want anyone to think for a single second that Waterloo has anything on Dal, I have resolved to make a better attempt at it this time.
On their website, the Berkeley Prize people preface the competition with a rather good essay containing this remark:
If social architecture is to become the norm, rather then the exception, the public must be persuaded of the value of design that reflects human worth. If social architecture is to be built, rather then simply discussed, the public must be persuaded that there is added value to building buildings much different then (sic) most of the architecture being built today.
For the purposes of this exercise, please consider yourselves my public. And for those of you who suffered through last year’s entry, you will be happy to know I wrote this piece almost entirely in the bar.
Now. The question:
When architects strive to create lasting monuments, some become part of the significant cultural heritage of our age. These successes seem to embody the most socially important values of a city, region, country, or even the world. Other attempts are only the reflection of the vanity of the designer or client and pass into oblivion. Worse, they become a permanent blight on the environment. As an architect, specifically, how can your work simultaneously embody the social values of one place, a particular culture, and universal human concerns?
In this context, I understand the phrase “universal human concerns” to be a roundabout way of describing buildings with dignity, an appreciated personality, and where required, a degree of reticence. These universal concerns occupy one end of a spectrum on which I am basing my argument. The other end is populated by the specific values of one place. The degree to which I address these global concerns is the degree to which I’m exercising my professional responsibility. The specific values are my own, personal concern.
Everyone Likes A Porch
We can look at everyday developments in Calgary, where I was reared, to illustrate this spectrum. Developers are expanding Calgary’s suburbs in a dramatic and predictable fashion. Their new residential housing is equal parts formulaic, functional, and dignified. This largely covers these universal concerns, and thereby dispenses with the developers’ responsibilities as professionals. Everyone wants a two car garage with a bonus room. Everyone likes a porch.
Next, we can discern cultural touches: the classic Canadian two storey, stick frame house, secure from the frost line over a concrete basement. Consumer preferences also come in to play, delimiting the number and type of household appliances, and the presently popular finish of cabinetry. These are all culture-specific, non-universal details, at which our Albertan developers excel. This takes us to the middle of the spectrum.
When we get to the values of a single place, however, our Calgarian developers fall flat, as we see that their Cape Cod-style New Urbanism homes have nothing to do with Calgary, Alberta proper. To explain, we need only look at identical earlier voids in the spectrum in Calgary, which has a complete history of parachuting foreign architecture onto its foothill setting. The first European forts, with their rectilinear plans defined by upright, timber stanchions—in an environment devoid of forests—stood in sharp contrast to the ground-hugging shelters of the indigenous Tsuu T’ina people. Later, the rational beauty of the native prairie building, the sod house, was supplanted with another import, the two-story wood frame house, often with a false front to lend a genuine eastern-Canada feel.
Objects In A Landscape
This false inheritance continues today, where only the occasional structure takes pride in how it situates itself among its surroundings. Only the occasional structure makes sense in Calgary. We have imported non-indigenous buildings, and simply dropped them, fully formed, on the foothills.
Now rather than simply insulting faceless “developers,” this is the ground on which I have to exert my personal stake in Calgary. Obviously, this can’t come easily: if an appropriate sense of place was simple to achieve, we would not be decrying so many inappropriate interventions on the part of builders.
How can I help? First, swearing off cynicism, I can resolve to build only for those locales and cultures I know intimately. That means assuming the role of a Cow-town architect, creating Calgarian buildings, using local materials in a climactically and culturally suitable fashion. Without being prescriptive, I can say this means forms that can make something positive out of Calgary’s well-deserved reputation as a town that takes work very seriously, and play even more so. Something can be done about its compartmentalized zones for living (the ’burbs), zones for employment (the core), and zones for consumption (the commuter paths between the two). Specifically, I see a continued, sprawling architecture that keeps close to the ground, but one that layers itself on its surroundings to create a more unified city fabric, rather than the present case of discreet lumps perched awkwardly on the landscape.
I’m not so naive as to believe that architects can’t build sensitively outside their immediately intimate surroundings. But my own stake in building on the foothills is both professional and personal. As I widen my net, my responsibility becomes increasingly professional in nature, isolating the personal component. If I cast even further afield. I have little at stake as an individual who must experience and inhabit the space defined by what I build. This is the dangerous condition that makes possible the so-called vane monuments in our cities, relating to nothing except the architects themselves. My solution, although perhaps essentially regional and conservative in nature, is a reasoned course of action that I know I can make work.
Boston Architect Benjamin Thompson put it incredibly clearly:
In practice, we must stop designing for ourselves and the critics and instead begin to identify with the joys and terrors of the man who will spend his life in what we build.
It takes at least 18 years of education to train an architect in Canada. How many fewer years should I say is sufficient to give an individual a sense of the environment in which she must build? A number too large smacks of birthright aristocracy. Too small, imperialism. The compromise colours a spectrum between professional responsibility and personal intent.
Addendum: Lessons From Lethbridge
As an example of a difficult intervention, we can look at Arthur Erickson, arguably Canada’s greatest modern architect (and perhaps my personal favourite), who managed to embody an entire region’s virtues in his architecture of the lower mainland BC, yet who failed in very many ways in building the University of Lethbridge.
Students who interact with this, Erickson’s only Alberta project, grow to hate it in a very short time, citing the dungeon-like corridors, and the depressing location of the residences in the bowels of the building.
Anderson’s understanding of the place of Lethbridge was only cursory. A statement he actually made, after observing some of the inclement weather we can have in southern Alberta, was “In Lethbridge it’s a pleasure to stay inside.” To a British Columbian, perhaps. But Alberta’s weather generally works for Albertans, and his flippant observation and subsequent design decisions sentenced generations of Lethbridge students to months-on-end of lightless, indoor schlepping.
It is little wonder then, that at UofL, it is perennially fashionable to bash “the architect.”
Evan Spence
Tuesday, December 3,
2002
PD DLXXVI