Thinking about Architecture

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.

During 2002, we had an intriguing enquiry from a chap who said he had a site in the Cotswolds, on which he wanted to build a serious eco-house. Were we interested? Yes, we were!

He told me he wanted to build a large house, and about his hopes that it could be ‘off grid’. Clients who are deeply committed to building something sustainable are rare and wonderful – many of our clients have certainly been sympathetic, but have had other pressing needs and calls on their budget, and generally some sort of balance has to be struck. It was clear that the enquiry was serious – he had done a fair amount of research before talking to architects, and knew what he was letting himself in for.

But there was something about his idea that was strange to me. He wanted a VERY large eco-house – one with six bedrooms, all with en-suite bathrooms. And a three car garage.

It took me a while to get my head around this. The typical person who is self-building an eco-house is someone with a ‘small is beautiful’ ethos, generally looking to reduce their ecological footprint in many ways.

I wasn’t sure whether we should get involved – had I misjudged the client’s seriousness? The proposal required exceptional planning support to succeed, as it was significantly larger than the existing house it would replace – was the ‘eco’ angle just greenwash for the planners? At last, I remembered something Christopher Alexander had said when asked whether he shouldn’t be designing cars out of a new town project he was working on.

“You see,” he said, “we take the way people say they want to live rather seriously.”

And I realised that if all the eco-houses which got published were either hair-shirt, humble places (or  billionaire’s showcase holiday pads), that it would be hard for most people to understand that this was a way of living they could look forward to.

So I went to visit the site, put together some proposals (which I thought rather good, you may not be surprised to hear), and did a short presentation.

And … we didn’t get the job. I had a brief, friendly note, saying that they had chosen a local architect on the basis of his greater experience with the local planners, and we heard no more. We had explored some interesting ideas working it up; chalk it up to experience – that’s it. I thought no more about it, until a few months ago, I was idly looking at one of the many magazines we get full of adverts for building products.

There was a picture of an interesting looking building, set into pleasant countryside, and I was feeling faintly jealous – it was described as ‘a luxury eco-house in the cotswolds’ – why don’t we get those jobs? And then I remembered; was this it? Had he really built it?

A little research told me that he had, and led me to the Moonstone Project  Website , which is an interesting read covering the first part of the process of getting an ambitious self-build project under-way, although it seems clear that the process of building the house has taken over from building the website at a certain point.

It’s a fairly heroic story, as John (John Croft and Leigh Grainger are the heroes) has obviously driven the project forward all the way through two changes of architect, a complete reversal of opinion in the planning department, doing his own production drawings, and running the job on site.

And when I ‘phoned him up to congratulate him, he still sounded borderline sane! We’re hoping to find time to take him up on his offer of a guided tour.

To cap it all, he has said some remarkably nice things about us on his site (which of course I’d just love you to read), not to mention quoting us most gratifyingly and linking to our website!