Brian MacKay-Lyons and Juhani Pallasmaa look over the boathouse.
Robert McCarter
Whatever space and time mean, place and occasion mean more. For space in the image of man is place, and time in the image of man is occasion.
—Aldo van Eyck, 19601
We gathered in a place of distinct qualities and character, a remote, windswept, and fogbound peninsular coast on the northeast edge of the continent, coming together to think about the way in which, for architects and poets alike, ideas only exist in things. The gathering of leading international practitioners and critics, sharing their works, thoughts, and aspirations for architecture, took place within a set of carefully constructed buildings, woven over and among the foundations of an ancient village—a place known to the participants as “Ghost.” The discussions, reactions, and insights arising from the meeting of peers of a uniformly high caliber, along with the positive reinforcement of their individual trajectories, will no doubt prove to be the most constructive outcome of this event, and the source of its lasting influence. These collegial and constructive dialogues among disciplinary peers bring to mind the only real precedents for such meetings in the modern period—the International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM), starting in 1928, and the Team 10 group that emerged from CIAM in the 1950s. It is worth noting that the meetings of CIAM and Team 10 are most often remembered today by the names of the places where they gathered—Athens, Dubrovnik, Otterlo, Royaumont.
The Ghost 13: Ideas in Things symposium began by revisiting the concept of “critical regionalism,” originally defined in the early 1980s by Alexander Tzonis, Liane Lefaivre, and Kenneth Frampton and understood as a shared characteristic of the work being presented. In addition to being defined as a constructively critical continuation of modern architecture, critical regionalism also addresses how to see and respond appropriately to a particular place. As Harwell Hamilton Harris noted in 1954, what he called “restrictive regionalism” closes itself off from the outside world and contemporary developments, while “liberative regionalism” engages ideas coming from the outside world and thereby is not restricted by its place, either in the limitations of the place or in the potential reach of the work’s implications.2 This concept of regionalism, and its relation to contemporary global developments, is paralleled by that proposed in 1961 by Paul Ricoeur, who noted the dichotomous relation between what he called “local culture”—the grounded character of places that allows them to be the source of our identity—and “universal civilization”—the technical and material benefits of modernization that all of mankind, irrespective of location, wish to receive. “There is the paradox: how to become modern and to return to sources,” as Ricoeur noted, and this paradox pivots around the relation between the historical form of a place and the modern intervention within it; “The problem is not simply to repeat the past, but rather to take root in it in order to ceaselessly invent.”3
The symposium participants all share the characteristics of being contemporary critical practitioners, engaging emerging ideas and ways of making from around the world, as well as being from places that have shaped their character and their work. As a paradoxical result of their grounding of universal conceptions in local material cultures, the work of these architects has had significant impact on the larger, global context. These architects share an acute sensitivity to place, rural and urban. Their empathic engagement of the context has resulted in designs that are at once responsive and responsible—responsive to existing material culture, both agricultural and urban, and to patterns of previous inhabitation of each place in which they work; responsible in that they pursue a minimal intervention that nevertheless results in maximal experiential enrichment.
Another shared attribute of the assembled architects is their eagerness to engage not only the work of their contemporaries, but also the works of the generations of practitioners who went before them—Frank Lloyd Wright was mentioned on more than one occasion during the symposium. As part of what we might call “the tradition of practice,” their works, despite being richly diverse, are invariably characterized by a combination of the practical and the poetic. The practical engages those aspects of appropriateness, functional suitability, limited use of energy and resources, proper solar orientation, and local material culture, all learned from the vernacular of a place—as Brian MacKay-Lyons has said, “what you make when you cannot afford to make mistakes.” On the other hand, the poetic involves the efforts to enrich the experience of the inhabitants through the engagement of local climate, context, and culture, understanding that architecture is where life quite literally takes place. With surprising modesty, Wright said that architecture was the “background or framework” for the rituals of daily life, and at the time of his statement, the beginning of the twentieth century, only the poetic qualities of an architect’s work were considered worth noting.4 This was so because, for those engaged in the tradition of practice, the practical aspects of architectural practice were considered the minimum definition of professional competence, and thus not worth mentioning; if one did not take care of the practical matters in one’s first design, one would not receive a second commission. The tradition of practice, which we have inherited from architects such as Wright, is an integrated, synthetic fusion of the poetic and the practical.
Yet today we have witnessed the rise of the “specialist” practice, which addresses only a small portion of the traditional definition of architecture. This subdivision of the discipline has led to firms that advertise their specialization in a few practical capacities of often-dubious value (such as the ubiquitous LEED certification, to name only the most egregious). Such a limited definition of professional expertise in architecture would not have been considered even minimally competent in Wright’s time, one hundred years ago—why is it that we are willing and indeed eager to accept it today? An architecture that considers placemaking to be its primary task could never be so narrowly defined, and the work of the architects who gathered in Nova Scotia collectively suggests an opposite approach to the definition of the task of architecture. In this integrated way of working, the appropriate response to a very particular context—where the architect “learned to see the place,” as Wendell Burnette said at Ghost 13—is not limited in its implications to that specific place, but in fact has far wider import.
In a similar way, the symposium provided the grounds and opportunity for a far broader discussion of the state of architecture and architectural education today. In this, it could be argued that it is precisely the three thematic anchors of the symposium—place, craft, and community (or the public realm)—that are most at risk of disappearing from the world. These three concepts are also joined in the definition of “critical practice” that characterizes the symposium participants and their fellow travelers. Here I am engaging Kenneth Frampton’s recent definition of critical practice as inherently involving constructing and caring for place:
While craft is required to construct place, Hannah Arendt pointed out in 1958 that place is required in order for the public realm to come into existence.6 Architects take the lead in the construction of the place that houses the public realm, yet the community is essential to the caring for and maintenance of that place. This brings to mind the more integrated definition of placemaking given in 1960 by Aldo van Eyck, developed in his discussions with his fellow members of Team 10 as they searched for an experiential definition of modern architecture—an alternative to the abstractions of Sigfried Giedion’s space and time, and a definition that appears as the epigraph to this essay.
This definition of place and its relation to architectural practice is grounded in the daily experience of the inhabitants and suggests, as David Chipperfield wrote in 1994, that any theory as to the nature of architecture should be generated from practice, and not the other way around.7 In editing a history of architectural education in America, Joan Ockman found that the separation of theory from practice in academia reached its most extreme point during the late 1990s, leading to what she called “the exhaustion of theory” in architectural education, which was followed by a renewed emphasis on practice beginning around 2000.8 It was around that time that the dean of a prominent Ivy League school of architecture told the faculty that they would need to choose either thinking or making—and given that, in his definition, academia was the province of thinking, they should leave making to the practitioners. Standing directly opposite this disintegrative reasoning is Richard Sennett, who noted that his first thought regarding his book, The Craftsman, was that “making is thinking.”9
A pair of primary themes emerged in the discussions at the symposium, the first being the relation between critical practice and place, and the second being the relation between ideas and the things we make that form those places—the fusion of thinking and making understood as “the thought of construction,” to use Sverre Fehn’s apt phrase. Giambattista Vico, the early eighteenth-century philosopher, held that mankind’s history is quite literally embodied in what we have made. Vico’s aphorism, verum ipsum factum, “truth is in the made,” could have served as a motto for the architects gathered in the eighteenth-century barn on the Nova Scotia coast. Upon his appointment as dean of IUAV, the school of architecture in Venice, Carlo Scarpa took Vico’s verum ipsum factum as the motto of the school, to be inscribed on the diplomas and carved over the entry gate he designed. Translated by Scarpa as “we only know what we make,” this thought embodied in construction precisely defines Scarpa’s understanding of both the education and working method of an architect, where thinking and making, “construing and constructing” (to use Marco Frascari’s telling phrase), are irrevocably joined in the enacting of a work of architecture.10 Today we need a renewed commitment to this understanding as a way of counteracting the contemporary bias toward thinking without making, and making without thinking, both of which tend to dominate architectural education and theoretical discourse.
Here it would perhaps be helpful to introduce a distinction recently made by David Van Zanten in framing the differences in modes of practice between Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Louis Kahn and their respective contemporary practitioners of the globalized styles of École des Beaux-Arts classicism and mid-twentieth-century International Style modernism. Van Zanten notes that the method taught at the École des Beaux-Arts, and paralleled by the later International Style of modernism, was in fact not a design process at all, but rather a predetermined compositional procedure, an “art of command” where the architect dictates the form of the building, based on preconceived models, and both the place for which it is intended and the materials out of which it is made have no effect on the design—a separation of thinking and making. On the other hand, Van Zanten argues that Sullivan, Wright, and Kahn practiced what he calls the “art of nurture,” a process of design where the architect seeks an appropriate fit between function and form, fitting the spatial geometry to the pattern of human activity, and where both the place in which the structure is built and the nature of the materials with which it is made have significant effect on the design—an integration of thinking and making.11 Weaving metaphors abound in this conception of design as nurture and fit, and the work of the architects assembled for the symposium may similarly be characterized as a weaving of enclosures that make interiors of both outside and inside space, as opposed to the sculpting of freestanding objects. Also implicit in this conception is design defined as doing what is appropriate—the only thing Kahn thought he could teach his students.
As a way of counteracting the accelerating tendency for architecture, through the various ways in which it is publicized today, to be reinterpreted as yet another expression of ever-changing fashion, we should remember that Alvar Aalto pointed in exactly the opposite direction when he said that what matters in architecture is not what a building looks like the day it opens, but what it is like to live in thirty years later. In speaking of what a building is like to live in, Aalto articulated a concept of what we would today call sustainability, one that recognizes that the most sustainable buildings are not only those that are most efficient in technical and economical terms, but those that sustain life—those that people want to live in, thirty years after they are built. Truly sustainable architecture involves the three themes of the symposium—place, craft, and community—and both culture and ecology are involved in the construction of place. Truly sustainable architecture of this type is also never simply the result of building industry–determined technical formulas but, instead, as a fundamental act of placemaking, always involves criticality and resistance. Place is intimately bound with making, and place should be understood as the most important thing we make. The symposium theme of “ideas in things,” unfolded in the making of place, craft, and community, finds resonance in Peter Zumthor’s recent statement, “There are no ideas except in things”—a close rephrasing of a line from a poem by William Carlos Williams.12 As a cautionary closing note for a symposium on architecture, where words are employed to communicate ideas among those who make things, the last word should go to Ralph Waldo Emerson: “No answer in words can reply to a question of things.”13
1 Vincent Ligtelijn and Francis Strauven, eds., Aldo van Eyck: Writings, Vol. 2 (Amsterdam: SUN, 2008), 293.
2 Harwell Hamilton Harris, “Regionalism and Nationalism in Architecture,” Texas Quarterly (February 1958): 58.
3 Paul Ricoeur, “Civilization and National Cultures,” in History and Truth (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1965), 277, 282.
4 Frank Lloyd Wright, “Architect, Architecture and the Client,” in Frank Lloyd Wright Collected Writings, Vol. 1 (New York: Rizzoli, 1992), 36.
5 Kenneth Frampton, The Evolution of 20th Century Architecture: A Synoptic Account (Vienna: Springer, 2007), 145.
6 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 49.
7 David Chipperfield, Theoretical Practice (London: Artemis London Ltd., 1994).
8 Joan Ockman, in a talk given at Washington University, April 2, 2011.
9 Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), ix.
10 Marco Frascari, “The Tell-the-Tale Detail,” VIA 7: The Building of Architecture (1984): 24.
11 David Van Zanten, “Kahn and Architectural Composition,” unpublished paper read on January 24, 2004, at the conference “The Legacy of Louis I. Kahn,” Yale University; courtesy of the author.
12 Peter Zumthor, quoted in Michael Kimmelman, The Ascension of Peter Zumthor,” the New York Times Sunday Magazine (March 2011).
13 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Over-Soul” (1841), Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Library of America, 1983), 394.