ARCHITECTURE DEPENDS

Description

Architecture depends—on what? On people, time, politics, ethics, mess: the real world. Architecture, Jeremy Till argues with conviction in this engaging, sometimes pugnacious book, cannot help itself; it is dependent for its very existence on things outside itself. Despite the claims of autonomy, purity, and control that architects like to make about their practice, architecture is buffeted by uncertainty and contingency. Circumstances invariably intervene to upset the architect’s best-laid plans—at every stage in the process, from design through construction to occupancy. Architects, however, tend to deny this, fearing contingency and preferring to pursue perfection. With Architecture Depends, architect and critic Jeremy Till offers a proposal for rescuing architects from themselves: a way to bridge the gap between what architecture actually is and what architects want it to be. Mixing anecdote, design, social theory, and personal experience, Till’s writing is always accessible, moving freely between high and low registers, much like his suggestions for architecture itself.
The everyday world is a disordered mess, from which architecture has retreated—and this retreat, says Till, is deluded. Architecture must engage with the inescapable reality of the world; in that engagement is the potential for a reformulation of architectural practice. Contingency should be understood as an opportunity rather than a threat. Elvis Costello said that his songs have to work when played through the cheapest transistor radio; for Till, architecture has to work (socially, spatially) by coping with the flux and vagaries of everyday life. Architecture, he proposes, must move from a reliance on the impulsive imagination of the lone genius to a confidence in the collaborative ethical imagination, from clinging to notions of total control to an intentional acceptance of letting go.

CONTENTS

Introduction: The Elevator Pitch

I. Contingecy

Deluded Detachment

• The Paternoster
• Beaux- Arts Mao
• 2B or Not 2B?
• Purity Is a Myth

A Semblance of Order

• New Labour Vitruvius
• Rogue Objects
• Bauman’s Order
• The Ridding of Contingency
• Counting Sheep

Coping with Contingency

• A Balance of Colossal Forces
• The Juggernaut
• Rorty’s Retreat
• Walking the Girder
• Situated Knowledge

II. Time, Space and Lo-Fi Architecture

Time of Waste

• Waste in Transit
• Rubbish Theory
• Time and Waste

Out of Time

• The Terror of Time
• From Eternity to Here
• Here and Now
• Tampering with Time

In Time

• Le Temps
• Thick Time
• Dirty Old Time
• The Unfinished
• Drawing Time
• From Noun to Verb

Slack Space

• Making Space
• Hard Space
• Social Space
• Inauthentic Space
• Slack Space

Lo- Fi Architecture

• Elvis Lives
• Exploding into Reality
• Monstrous Hybrids
• How They’ll Tell if Your Building Is Gay

III. Architecture: A Dependent Profession

Architectural Agency

• Lost in Action
• Self- Control
• Left Brain, Right Brain
• Remember I’m the Bloody Architect
• The Crucible
• The Problem of the Problem
• Letting Go

Imperfect Ethics

• Bad Ethics
• Phony Ethics
• Social Scales
• Codes of Misconduct
• The Ethics of Responsibility

Hope against Hope

• Gymnasts in the Prison Yard
• The Flight to Utopia
• Formative Contexts
• Angels with Dirty Faces

256 pages, b&w ills / 16 x 23,5 cm / English