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Today architecture and urban planning are in a state of flux,
not only in their methods and achievements, but in their
professional structure. Like other professions and
employments, their anticipations and certainties are shrinking
and disappearing, while a raft of temporary objectives comes
forward to take their place. This state of affairs is not
unique. We live in a new era, a time when, increasingly,
agriculture, industry, and even the service undustries, no
longer necessarily provide jobs, and jobs in any case no
longer provide security. It is a time when, trade by trade,
profession by profession, all the old careers are being picked
off by digital systems that lie in wait for them like snipers.
Over fifteen years of 'downsizing' and 'rightsizing' in
industry, commerce and professions has inflicted tremendous
casualties on the workforce. One by one each certainty has
stumbled, felt a stab of pain, and joined the ever-lengthening
queue for compensation. In this way all of us are, or will be, victims of a war that is being fought between the future and the past. It is an action so savage that, instead of rushing forward to storm the Millennium in the manner of the pioneer Futurists at the beginning of the 20th century we, their descendants, are in full retreat. We flee the battlefield, running from the future and searching desperately for a refuge in the past. Among us are artists, intellectuals and scientists who, less than half a century ago, enthused over great highway settlements and linear cities, and thought nothing of proposing the demolition of every surviving evidence of history. Today our view has changed. Eyes bulging with terror we resist the decentralisation we once called for. We sieze upon anything old that reminds us of its opposite. We build fortresses in our minds out of the castles, palaces, churches and cathedrals that have been bequeathed to us by history. These we vow we will defend to the death. Our families may be atomised, our social structure destroyed, but these ancient treasures we will cling to until the advance of a new century finally tears our fingers one by one from their ancient stones and casts us naked into the jaws of tomorrow. It takes continuity to provide certainty of the future. The kind of continuity that enabled one single regime to survive for 3,000 years in ancient Egypt. We have no such continuity, and none to look forward to. We are not marchers but motorway drivers in a long tailback. We can neither see what is blocking the road in front of us, nor can we predict when we will escape from it. We have no idea whether we will be hurtling along the road at 80 miles an hour in ten minutes time, or be standing still in a traffic jam. It comes hard to us to realise our powerlessness in the machine world. We feel as though we used to know everything, and now we know nothing. We are used to being taken seriously, and now we lack self- respect. As Europeans we are used to being rich, and now we are relatively poor. We used to consider our continent the centre of civilization, but now the world has revolved away from us and we have become a tiny Polynesian island. Perhaps more tragically our state can be compared to that of the North American Plains Indians in the 19th century. They were a native civilization swept aside by a massive tide of European immigration, a society atomised by exclusion from an industrial revolution they did not understand. As long as they lived, the new technologies of mechanized farming, repeating firearms, railroad networks and machine production were used against them. They had no means of replicating these innovations: nor could they prevail over them. The white man's industrial revolution bred uncertainty and terror in their hearts. They were condemned to a state of perpetual wakefulness, never to be certain of their future. In the final stages of their disintegration they began to dance, just we have. They wove shirts that were supposed to be bulletproof, just as we weave environmental ideas. As the history books tell us, the magic shirts of the Indians did not work, and their dances ended in drunkenness and death. In the same way our culture of urban treasure houses will not save us from the onslaught of the information revolution. Like those Indians we shall have no peace until we surrender ourselves to its superior power. Consider the 'Ghost Dance' of planning and the 'magic shirt' of architecture at the end of the 20th century. Its last great hope is the city. The rebirth of the grand 19th century city, whose Royal Palaces, Grand Avenues, Department stores, Great railway stations, Opera Houses, Theatres, Great Parks, Parade Grounds and Military Barracks have become hotels, museums, art galleries, high-priced apartments, air-conditioned shopping centres, restaurants, bars, clubs, movie theatres, air-rights offices, cash-dispensing banks, underground transport interchanges and car parks. This 'replacement city', capable of reoccupying and re animating the corpses of the great cities left over from the past, hypnotises the embattled defenders of the culture of architecture in Europe just as the idea of a new surface of the earth hypnotised the 'Ghost Dancers' of Wovoka in the Dakota Badlands one hundred years ago. To us the 'replacement city' promises a new lease of life, a revival of the economy of those Old World European cities whose hearts had almost stopped beating from the overthrow of Empires, the ravages of wars, the disfigurements of redevelopment, and the evacuation of investment to other continents. Were it not for the 'Ghost Dance' of the urban professionals, these cities would already be recognised to be in as hopeless a state as Indian villages in the path of a railroad. A century after their main development ceased, all these cities are breathing with difficulty, and only with the aid of tourism. That corrosive oxygen that burns out urban lungs even as it prolongs a feeble economic pulse. Florence, for example. The great Italian city of art and culture that has been addicted to tourism for more than a century, has striven to protect its historic centre at any cost, creating in the process a vast ring of suburbs without infrastructure that is slowly choking it to death. The 'Ghost Dance' answer to the crisis of Florence is the Vittorini masterplan of 1993, with its promise to create a new polycentric 'Florentine urban zone'. It is a project that is incapable of success because its modesty displays its disproportion to the magnitude of the crisis of the city. London is ten times larger than Florence, and its problems are proportionally bigger, so it tries to solve them differently. London still pins its hopes on development, on an agreement reached in the 1980s between the forces of development and the forces of conservation, wherein it was decided that the former would be permitted to insert vast new air-conditioned, sealed buildings with electronic satellite communications systems into old parts of the city centre -- but only behind the preserved facades of ancient buildings already there, and only within the framework of the medieval street pattern and uneconomic lot sizes bequeathed by history. Unlike the Florentine plan, the result of this London compromise has been the birth of a new architecture of sorts. An architecture with many of the characteristics of Esperanto, the artificial language whose purpose everybody understands, but no one can speak with authenticity. According to the directive of this new style, both 20th century Modern architecture (which required that a building be designed as a complete organism, von innen nach aussen, 'from the inside to the outside', as the Bauhaus taught), and the historical preservation of old buildings, have been re-evaluated. Both have been replaced by 'Stealth architecture', which is omnidirectional serviced floorspace clad in wafer-thin stonework shaped to look crudely 'historical,' like the backdrop to a play, or else inserted behind the retained facades of demolished historic buildings. At the same time a strange and predictive new role for the great ecclesiastical relics of the past has been created. Westminster Abbey, one of the great cathedrals of England, dates from the 13th century. It was first restored in 1601. Since then seventeen successive restorations have been carried out on its fabric. All of these programmes have involved substantial alterations as well as remedial measures to preserve the fabric of the building. The most recent restoration programme at Westminster involved replacing, not original work, but the work of previous restorers, and it too involved substantial changes. All thirty Medieval Cathedrals of England spend an average of stlg4 million a year on restoration work of this kind. It amounts to an endless construction project that is in effect an undeclared revision of use. The 'use' of these Cathedrals today has become the business of restoring themselves like Japanese Shinto shrines. Nor do such undeclared changes of use merely effect the Cathedral buildings themselves. Saint Paul's Cathedral in London now reaches out to monitor development all over the city because it has become a major element in its urban planning strategy. Ever since the abolition of the Greater London Council in 1986 there has been no height limit on buildings in Central London. Instead a complicated system of sightlines centred on the dome of Saint Paul's has been developed to provide a topographical height and bulk limit for all new buildings. Thus the 'use' of an early 18th century Cathedral has become the control of 21st century development.Matters promise to go even farther in India. There the Taj Mahal, built as a memorial in 1650, is now visited by 11 million tourists every year. Its marble structure is disintegrating through age and acid pollution. A restoration fund has been established to repair it. At the same time a political campaign has been launched to declare a two mile exclusion zone for motor vehicles around it, and to remove all smokestack industries from the city of Agra by the year 2000. This political programme has not merely become the main business -- the real 'use' -- of the Taj Mahal. It has become part of the politics of India. In Berlin the case is more complex. Trapped by the force of history for 50 years, the city emerged as from a dream into the post-urban world of reunification in 1990. Its attempts at comprehensive urban planning dated from the National Socialist period when a giant North-South axis was begun and abandoned. During the period of partition, planning in West Berlin had been confined to demolition and clearing, the construction of modern housing developments, and the building of the Culture Forum, whose Philharmonie and National Gallery were erected on land originally cleared for the great axis. Because no major interventions were carried out in the Western part of the city, in 1989, when the wall came down, West Berlin was a virtual time capsule of infrastructural inactivity. Since then the city's accession to capital status, together with the identification of half a dozen large development sites, has failed to extricate it from this paralysis. The arguments surrounding the Reichstag competition, the construction of the new Chancellery, the Stock Exchange complex, the Potsdamer Platz and even the rehabilitation of Kreuzberg, show that even the making-good of an epic lack of investment cannot save a city from a crisis of meaning. And today it is the meaning of cities that is threatened by the information revolution. Today a new electronic information environment is taking over the job that public urban space used to do. The urban space once used for transport, gossip, riot, demonstration, display, parade and spectacle is no longer necessary. Run down and neglected, it is now no more than a risk to public order. Its problems remain problems, even when approached afresh after 50 years. Urban space and public buildings have become meaningless. Two Berlin examples are the former East German Palace of the Republic, and the Reichstag. The former is to be stripped of its 'Socialist' glass cladding and rebuilt as a palace. The latter, despite its notoriety, was the seat of German government for only ten years out of the one hundred and one since it was completed. The new transformation of this building threatens to continue this dismal history. By 1999 its will have become the largest facade-retention project ever executed in Europe. The architects are said to be Sir Norman Foster and Partners, but in reality there is no living designer. Despite its new transparent dome the Reichstag promises to be the biggest 'Stealth Bomber' in Germany. It will be a building whose old exterior reveals no hint of what goes on inside it. What does this mean? Let me give you an example from another continent. In June 1995 the Los Angeles Variety Arts Center held an Interactive Media Festival. Part of the programme consisted of the world premiere of a play by the Firesign Theatre Company entitled "Anything You Want To" which was described as "William Shakespeare's Lost Interactive Comedy." The advance publicity for this play described it as follows:- 'Firesign's Shakespearean parody will allow the audience to direct the plot of the piece and determine who lives and who dies... Will the next scene take place in a Venetian boudoir or in a storm at sea? The decision is in the hands of the audience. As Edmund sword fights to the death with the wicked Bishop, you will decide who is at the wrong end of the fatal thrust... Be there as Firesign turns ye olde Globe Theatre into the Global village.' Now I did not seen this play, although it does sound interesting. What I want to point out is that something formerly thought crucial was missing from the production. The casualty was the original story, the play itself. It is that loss that parallels the disappearance of planning and architecture under the impact of information. In the Reichstag scenario it is as though the precisearrangement of all the omponents of the building -- the creative composition that constituted its 'architecture' -- were suddenly abandoned, and the world were to decide to apply the term 'architecture' instead to the inventory of materials of which a building looking like the Reichstag might be made. There is the impact upon architecture. No play, only characters. No architecture, only quantities of material to be arranged in different ways. Ways as different as the Christo cladding of June 1995 and the Foster internal transformation to be completed in 1999. A few months ago I took part in a debate held to celebrate the 100th anniversary of an English magazine called the Architects' Journal. In order to support the motion -- almost embarrassingly titled 'British architecture can only get better' -- I found myself in need of a stirring phrase or two, the kind that comes more naturally to Americans. Something along the lines of 'We have nothing to fear but fear itself'; 'I have a dream,' or 'Ich bin ein Berliner'. But when I searched my lexicon of memorable American expressions for something appropriate to the prospects for architecture and urban planning under the impact of information technology, the most apposite expression I could find was distinctly anticlimactic. It was; 'Honey, I shrunk the kids.'
Those of you familiar with this Disney epic will not mind if I
summarise the plot. In the film of this title, the speaker --
a boffin bearing a close physical resemblance to Microsoft
supremo William Gates III -- develops a machine for making
large objects very small. Ironically the first victims of his
machine are his own children, who suddenly find themselves on
the floor of an attic as vast as the great outdoors, and then,
as tiny as ants, hopelessly fleeing an advancing lawnmower in
their own garden. As the depredations of those half-mythical beasts, the Information Superhighway, Virtual Reality, and Cyberspace are reported in the offices of the great property agents and developers of London, so are the 'Kings of Infinite Space' (as Charles Jencks once christened the great stars of the architectural profession), beginning to tremble on their thrones. Long since stripped of a popularly credible ideology, they increasingly fear that even 'culture' is betraying them. They feel as though they are dwindling to the size of pygmies while their most ambitious creations are growing massively overlarge, outgrowing any possible profitable use. It is as though the built environment they have worked with for years has suddenly been magnified one million times and they, its former masters, have become no more than micro organisms. And that is what has truly happened for today there truly is infinite space, but its Kings and Princes are not architects. Even the word, 'architecture' now belongs to the machine world of the designers of silicon wafer chips.......... I have made a number of trips to America recently, talking to the senior partners of some of the largest practices -- nowadays called 'design firms' interestingly enough, for the phrase 'architectural practice' is seldom used over there. One of these conversations sticks in my mind. It concerned the fate of the Burger King World Headquarters in Key Biscayne, Florida. Completed in 1991, this building was gutted by Hurricane Andrew a year later. The architect I spoke to remembered visiting the scene.'It was deathly quiet. All the glass was gone. There were hundreds of computers out on the grass everywhere, blown right through the building, all covered in sand and soaked in sea water'. The original architects immediately refurbished the building, but in doing so they 'downsized' Burger King's use of it so that only half as many people work there now.'Corporate America is walking away from architecture,' is how the same architect puts it. 'Corporate America is walking away from city centres. There is no more private money for urban renewal. Nobody knows when another downtown high-rise will be built.' I also talked to the senior partner at Hellmuth Obata and Kassabaum, the largest architectural practice in America. He told a surprisingly similar story, based upon an examination of the runes of another natural disaster, the Los Angeles earthquake.'What I would call the age of corporate frivolity is over,' he says. 'The Los Angeles earthquake led to the opening of a lot of temporary satellite offices on the fringe of the city. They are now permanent, so we know the demand for big downtown addresses can vanish quickly. But we were the last to know that.' We are also the last to know that the kids have been shrunk, and their box of tricks, the magnificent display of forms under light, has been turned into a video game. With the same electronic swiftness as the eclipse of Barings Bank, a 200- year old London bank of impeccable reputation that was ruined by dealing on the Singapore stock exchange, the legatees of 4,000 years of architectural history have been left holding a fistful of worthless currency. Today the architectural profession gazes out over millions of square feet of redundant floorspace, rather as polar explorers must once have gazed out over endless sheets of pack ice, incapable of supporting human life. It is information technology that has done this to architecture. Behind the 'Failure of the Social Programme' of Modernism; the endless, unrefuted attacks on architects by Princes, politicians and the popular press; the massive expansion of architectural education; the uncoordinated development of building technology; the proliferation of unnecessary regulatory, consultative and advisory bodies; the competition racket and the coup d'etat of art history; the spectre of 'security', the rise of risk assessment, value engineering, design and build and project management, the homogenization of building types... Behind all these lies one thing. The threat and reality of redundant floorspace. The growing conviction of the needlessness of architecture and planning in their present form.
If you think this is far-fetched, consider what the electronic
information revolution has already done. The coming of
'Stealth Architecture', and the disappearance of an organic
connection between the inside and the outside of buildings,
represents the greatest change in architectural design of the
last 50 years. But it too is not isolated. It parallels what
is happening in other fields. In cosmetic surgery and
geriatric medicine, attempts to prolong life or enhance
appearance by organ transplants, prosthetic devices and body
shaping are producing similar results. Just as we have come to
terms with the existence of 'spare-part people' with
artificial hips, hearts, kidneys, breasts, noses and brains,
so have we come to terms with 'spare-part architecture', put
together Frankenstein-style out of different elements from
different periods for different purposes into a homogenized,
fake-historical scene. In the world of computers there has only ever been one use for outmoded equipment, and that is to access old data that cannot be retrieved by any other means. Apart from a few exotic museum specimens, those examples of old computers that are kept in use, are kept not because they are 'Priceless Heritage artifacts', but because the data in their storage systems still has archival value. In the case of old buildings there is no such practical justification for keeping examples intact. There is no demand for old buildings 'as a means to access old behaviour'. What we are talking about here is obsolescence. About the limits of 'spare part surgery' and traditional aesthetics in architecture. Today, when money can circumnavigate the globe in fractions of a second, even the newest financial services buildings face obsolescence, not so much from advances in information technology, or new ways of building, as from changes in the financial climate -- the air, so to speak, that they were born to breathe -- that can take place in hours. In this sense, many of the most prestigious financial services buildings of the 1980s are obsolete today, and can be said to have been obsolete before they were even completed. In the world of business economics there is no market for a telephone system delivered three years too late, or an airliner with insufficient range to reach its destination, or a non-industry standard recording device. Yet when buildings are commissioned into a business environment, and fail to perform as expected because the anticipated market opportunities have evaporated by the time they are finished, they are just as functionally obsolete. As Darwin taught us long ago, it is futile to take pity on the ill-adapted species because the environment is hostile. The species must conform to the demands of its environment or face extinction. In architecture today we make endless excuses for the unadapting species -- 33,000 Listed buildings 'at risk' as we quaintly put it -- and never understand that 'at risk' simply means 'useless'. Future Shock, the link between technological innovation and changes in human perception, was first charted by Marshall MacLuhan over 25 years ago, most vividly in his two picture books 'The Medium is the Massage' and 'War and Peace in the Global Village'. In these books MacLuhan showed that the price mankind has paid for control of the natural world through technology has been the shock, or numbness, produced by each new level of innovation. This shock is a survival function, not for people, but for technology. It acts as a general anaesthetic upon society, paralysing its judgment while destabilizing technological advances take place uninterrupted, despite strong and vocal assertions of undying opposition from carefully prepared positions. Just as the railway and the motor car transformed the pre- industrial city and colonised the countryside, so have electronic information technology and the new media transformed all our relationships with the environment and with each other. The invisibility of the new media, together with the totality of all the global connections they have made possible, have combined to render old architectural values -- permanence, and individuality of place and form -- as archaic and irrelevant as the old social values of interdependence and community. Today the duality of 'home' and 'job' is progressively eroded and survives only as an atavism in a bewildering mosaic of new employments that are dependent on car phones and faxes, 'distance working', 'job sharing', 'hot- desking', 'downsizing' and so on. It is the inner shock of this continuing change that renders our grip upon the past so tight that the present can hardly be acknowledged. Caught half way between living in a new and largely invisible environment, but thinking and acting out of an old factitious one, induces a mental state of high anxiety, not a reasoned response to change. As a result change comes sweeping through like an armoured division. For architects and architecture the ephemeralisation of the permanent brought about by the information superhighway brings two immediate consequences. First, with all the factors of the new environment in a state of active interplay, like aircraft in a holding pattern over an airport, the validity of permanent form has come into question. Second, if as soon as information is acquired it is replaced by still newer information, and if all information is freely available and refuses to be compartmentalised, even the notion of a separate profession, like architecture, with a separate, expert body of knowledge may have become obsolete. At the same time the dawn of Virtual Reality promises a three-dimensional capability in cyberspace that outstrips in opulence any full-size architecture. In the next century these virtual reality displays will have become the overt celebrations of economic and cultural power that great architectural commissions used to be. We are presently on hold, awaiting the terminal decline of the real property market and the rise of the virtual property market. We live in a time of the dual existence of 'architecture bodies' and 'information bodies'. Of recognised but defeated cities, and unrecognised but triumphant non- cities. A time perceptively described by the Japanese architect Toyo Ito. In Japan he sees a society "permeated by information and penetrated by communications systems. A society in which each individual has two bodies: a 'real' body consisting of its physical presence, and a 'fictional' body, shaped by the information directed at or received by it." In Ito's view, these two bodies have not yet been clearly differentiated in everyday life, but the 'fictional' body is becoming more and more demanding. Soon, he believes, the presence and growth of our 'fictional bodies' will dissolve all traditional communal links in our cities. Communities, localities and families and all their contingent relationships based on face-to-face physical contact, will be replaced by non-space-demanding relationships between 'fictional bodies'. A kind of de-socialisation will take place within the city which will then be perceived as a 'fictional' structure, its spaces no longer needed to serve the needs of a 'real' population. At this time the non-city will emerge as the only 'real' answer. In this urbanism without urban design that which will remain for architects will be a supporting role in the production of pure 'zero-defect' enclosures, modeled on the design methodology of those Modern paradigms the airliner, the racing yacht, the curtain walling system and the Grand Prix racing car. And what of the old architecture? Starting in the late 1970s, all rural Europe in a great dorsal belt running from London in the North to Southern Italy, began to be converted into a new economic landscape. In place of town and city centre shops, millions of square metres of warehouse and distribution centre floorspace have been constructed at breakneck speed. Outside old towns and cities, at thousands of off-ramps and crossings on nearly 50,000 kilometres of auto route, one million new commercial complexes have sprung up with no reference to urban context or the supremacy of art history at all. In England alone more than 100 out of town shopping centres were projected between 1985 and 1989, nearly half of them more than 100,000 square metres in covered area, and no less than nine of them located on the M25 London orbital motorway. Now frenzied efforts are being made to reverse this trend, but to no avail, for these are not 'intelligent' buildings, they are fast buildings. They are part of the unsentimental, computer-generated face of electronic disurbanisation. A manifestation of the abstract, digital communications that link the EC countries and beyond in a seamless web of consumption outlets served by ports and airports, automated freezer stores, sealed warehouses, vast truck parks and transient dormitories of mobile homes. This is the architecture of the new media: the urbanism of the non-urban network of consumption that is enveloping the world. This new 'abstract urbanism' -- interestingly its locations are digital, often only designated by numbered exits -- is ignored by architects and urban planners, historians and critics. Yet in economic terms it is already more important than all the art- historical architecture ever built. It is, in the terminology of the immigration officer, 'undocumented' construction, for there is no one to document it. No one who understands it. What is the culture of truck drivers whose position is plotted and checked by satellite? Who comprehends the lives of high-mileage car drivers? What is the space occupied by those who sit, day after day, before instruments and monitors? Warehousemen, machine minders, checkout persons, air traffic controllers, traffic policemen, ambulancemen, mechanics, linemen, computer troubleshooters, cashcard loaders, maintenance men, photocopier repairers, security guards... Are these the prototype non-communal persons of the future, linked only by the global heartbeat of satellite TV, FM music and radio news? If they are, then in our future centrality will be an unknown concept. Today's architecture and urbanism as a derivative of the ancient cities of the past will be forgotten. The forgetting has already begun.
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