Letter to a psychogeographer (version)
I have recently signed up to a service called ‘School of Everything‘, which lets anyone advertise offers to teach anything, on any terms they want, an idea that, as a follower of Ivan Illich, and (slightly paradoxically) also a founder of a small, alternative school, appeals to me a great deal.
The site shows you other members who have identified themselves as living close to you, and one of these has labelled himself a ‘psychogeographer‘. Originally coined in the ’50s by the precursors of the Situtationist Internationale, the term is not strictly defined, but implies an acute sensitivity to the experienced realities of place, implicitly rejecting separation of different aspects or thoughtless devaluation of any. It has recently become a little trendy, having been used by Will Self and associated with the work of Iain Sinclair – an example of recuperation in effect?
As someone who has always been excited by situationism and the anarchic view of life, I was intrigued to find someone calling himself a ‘psychogeographer’.
Looking at his website, I was interested immediately in his work on ‘complexity maps’ – I am convinced that the next stage of our metaphysical progress (the only ‘progress’ that really matters) must be an engagement with complexity, even if only for something as mundane as survival (the global ecosystem being one of the more complex systems we know of).
I delight in the wilful, playful, deliberately paradoxical flavour of situationist events and artefacts, but my own paradox is that I am an architect – the things I build are permanent, hugely energy intensive, and need to nurture and support life.
In the work I choose to do (making everyday, practical buildings), embodying disturbing, psychologically aggressive elements (as does most of the architecture which claims or is recognised as having been influenced by situationist/deconstruction theory), would be obscene to me. The ‘situations‘ which should occur here are those that happen when real life is supported, when the character of people, materials, the natural world, sensitivity to micro-climate, delight in beauty are the drivers of architectural decision making.
This requires me to welcome complexity, to engage with it, to attempt to develop a feeling for the flow of life, so that my buildings can support it. This is hard – hard for two reasons; one, I live in a culture formed by four centuries of cartesian thinking, of finding success in the radical simplification of systems that underly the ‘scientific’ approach; and two, humans are fundamentally poor at dealing with complexity – we can hold very few ideas in consciousness simultaneously.
I am fortunate to have been a student of Christopher Alexander, who, in his relentless pursuit of understanding beauty, of wanting to be empowered to create beauty, has employed rationalist means to approach the irrational – another way of saying he has sought to expand our metaphysics.
His invention – the notion of ‘pattern languages‘, is, I am certain, one of the new tools we can use to help work creatively with complexity – to get out of the nightmare that we are in, where our paradigm for learning about something is to kill and dismember it, so that we can build some terrible crude simulacrum, animated by brute force alone.
Enough!
I am hugely pleased to have written this letter – it has helped me crystallise some thoughts, forge some relationships between aspects of my thinking that can sometimes seem at odds.