Irénée Scalbert: Earth City Architecture.

Architecture within the limits of the earth

0:00Hello. After the exhaustion of modernist functionalism and Kulhassian bigness, architecture should be reconceived within the limits of the earth, as craft, stewardship, locality, bricolage. In short, architecture is just more complicated than that. So suggests Irene Scalbert, architectural critic and historian, if, like me, you choose to stitch together the essays in his recent book, Totems, Selected Essays on Architecture, published by Park Books this year. But look at the cities we live in. Does unbigness and relationality really have any

0:30play beyond the edges? Cities are increasingly like Tolkien's Smaug, hoarding all the gold, belching poison over the hinterlands. The title image of the totem, an object whose power comes from its correct form and from its community investment in it, and not from mere symbolism, seems to me to gather in Irene's whole project. Architecture is something made, charged with collective life, and irreducible to either pure function or decoded meaning, whatever that means. Somewhere in there, too, are buildings, which are very precious things.

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1:15A is for Architecture, a podcast about architecture, buildings, urban culture and space.

Introducing architectural critic Irene Scalbert

1:19Hello, and welcome to another episode of the A is for Architecture podcast. I'm delighted and honoured today to be talking to Irene Scalbert. Irene, many thanks for coming on the podcast. We're going to be talking about your recent and very elegant book, Totems, Selected Essays on Architecture, which you published with Park Books, and I think you published it this year. It's a fascinating book. It's a fascinating book, a kind of overview of some of your thinking, I suppose, from the last 20 to 25 years, as far as I am aware. I think essays from 2000 through to now. Before we get to that, Irene, would you be so kind as to introduce yourself?

1:56Okay, so I am an architecture critic, and I supplement my life as a teacher. And I have taught, I have studied first at the Architectural Association in the 1970s, early 80s. And then I have been in practice, and then I have been in practice, worked as an architect for a few years, mostly in London, but also in Japan and Korea.

2:30And I then started to teach and to write at the same time, first at the AA for quite a few years, where I did a number of things that was in the 1990s. And then I, in the mid 2000s, I left the AA, and then I was a visiting professor in various countries like America, and Italy, and France, and Japan, and so on.

3:01And then I recently, about five years ago, I came back to the AA, which is where I teach presently. But I think of myself primarily as an architecture writer, partly historian, partly as a critic, and I write essays of various langues. This is my preferred form. So that's, roughly speaking, this is me.

3:33I should perhaps say, so it's not necessarily relevant, that I am a French-born, but I came to England, to London specifically, at 18, and never thought of living yet.

Early years in northern France

3:46What part of France were you from? I was born in the very north of France, in Lille, so very close to Flanders and the Netherlands. And my family then moved to Amiens, which is particularly famous for its cathedral, arguably the most beautiful cathedral, Gothic cathedral in France. And then moved for the last three years of my secondary school in Paris, where my mother was from.

4:24So essentially, it's the northern part, but now my family is scattered in various parts of France, and also occasionally elsewhere, like myself.

Critiquing Rem Koolhaas and Euralille

4:34Having been to Lille relatively recently, what do you make of that strange stuff that's been built in the centre? And I ask this because I think there's essentially a critique of that within Totems. Well, I assume that you mean Euralil, the project by Uma Remcoehouse. I always had a very difficult relationship with the work of Uma, and I started my studies at the AA when Remcoehouse, I think, was still teaching at the AA.

5:13I would have to check this, but certainly he was very present and lecturing regularly. For me, Coehouse has always been a bit of a nemesis, and Euralil came as a justification for that nemesis, I think. I thought, and I still think, that it was an essentially misguided plan. And I once invited, actually, the client, a man called Bayeto, to lecture at the AA much later, because there was an interest in the role of clients, and in particular, the role of private clients, at a certain point in the 1990s.

6:01And Bayeto was talking about the need to create a dynamic from hell, that's the expression which he used in order to get this project off the ground.

6:14I think the idea of rushing things through created all kinds of difficulties for projects, and I think the architects certainly didn't give their best performance on the scheme. The one redeeming feature is the roof of the station, which was actually designed by Peter Rice, a great engineer, and which is interesting, overcomplicated for my taste.

6:48But everything else, I think, is not wonderful, the parts which have been designed by OMA, is not wonderful. The Congrexpo building, designed also by OMA, looks like a cheap building, and quite often, with projects by OMA, it looks great on paper, or it looks interesting on paper. The reality looks shoddy, and not very well conceived, so I think it's a great disappointment, but my disappointment is limited to the extent that I left Paris when I was five, and so my commitment to Paris is not so fundamental.

Studying at the Architectural Association

7:36What was it like studying at the AA in the 1980s, and who was the leading intellectual lights at the time there? Because, again, in the book, there is this discussion around James Sterling and his preeminence within your thinking, as I understand it, as I read it. Was that postmodern spirit very much at play? I came to the AA in 1976, and the person who was running the AA at the time was Alvin Boyarski. Quite often, when one thinks about the AA during this period, one thinks, one associates the school with figures which have since become famous, like Remco House, like Saha Hadid, and others, Bernard Choumy, etc.

8:24Actually, there is no question in my mind that the leading intellectual light at the AA was not them, however good they were, but Alvin Boyarski. Alvin Boyarski was the spirit of the school. He was extremely sharp, very demanding, but also very supportive, at least to people he wished to support. And I was lucky enough to benefit, I guess, from that support a number of times.

9:00And he actually gave me my first job, teaching at the AA later. But I was coming from France, and France is a country which is formal in many ways. You know, you still have to take, for instance, exams to actually graduate from one level of teaching to another level of teaching. It is almost 19th century in many ways. And I didn't like the secondary school system in France, and I deliberately decided not to actually study architecture in France.

9:45There were a number of reasons for this. But I arrived at the AA, and it was a huge liberation. There was a sense that you could do absolutely anything you wanted, and that there would be somebody who was there to support you. It was really exhilarating. It was absolutely marvelous. And the first three years in particular, regardless of who taught you, it was really the climate of the school, which was extraordinary.

10:19I should add that the climate of the school is still good. But there was something in those years, and which are also partly associated with what London was at that time. London was a very different city from what it is now. And all this was, I mean, maybe that's a word, it's a bit strong, but was quite explosive, and led people to quite often do extraordinary things.

10:52Spurred always, rather forcefully or in a prickly way, by Alvin Boyarsky. And everybody looked up to him, and his comments were quite often devastating. It was a very, very tough place. It was a tough place where to study.

11:11And it was relatively, it was in fact quite easy to get in the school, but it was difficult to get out. And it was difficult to get out because Alvin Boyarsky and teachers collectively, but it was always Alvin who had the last word, could say that, no, this person was not ready to graduate. And this person could be kept in limbo for a number of years, and many people I know have never had their diploma for that reason.

11:46It was very tough in that respect.

11:50And at the same time, as I said, usually exciting. You had a sense that people were doing what they wanted and were being creative, very creative, and passionate about architecture. Yeah, I get that feeling from Totems as well, that there is a sort of unambiguous passion about architecture in the way that you see it. You're not sort of sitting on the fence. You're not trying to be, in a way, polite about what you mean when you talk about architecture.

12:24And I do want to come on to that.

Collecting essays in Totems

12:26But how did this book come about? There are precedents to it. It's a third book, which I have been doing with Park Books. The first one was Never Modern, which was a collaboration with 6A, Tom Emerson, and Steph MacDonald. The second one was the first collection of essays, which has this long and impossible title, A Real Living Contact with the Things Themselves. There are more essays about history.

12:58Now, Totems has not such an obvious history because the essay in the book, which gave the book its title, which is called Totems, was an essay which I first wrote as a standalone piece. And I initially wanted to publish it alone, even though it's quite short.

13:29And I had discussions with Park Books, and they were keen to do it. And then we talked with the architects, Night's Link Street Dyke. And nowadays, it's very difficult to put together the right financial equations for books and architecture.

13:47And so we, for various reasons, we didn't manage to have it take off. And then it was, in the meantime, I had always thought that I would do a second collection. And so I have thought about it for several years, and I went through a number of models that is since the first collections, and a real living contact with the things themselves, and decided to do a book with much shorter pieces,

14:28with a more critical tone, with Totem somewhere in the middle. And actually, the strange thing is that Totem, which in its format is, that is a format of the essays, is comparable to the format of Never Modern. It is partly objective, partly subjective. It takes a lot of liberties with the material, in this case, the work of Nightlings-Bredyke,

15:00and I go on tangents quite often on subjects that interest me. So there is this, the odd one in the middle, and then it is surrounded by smaller pieces, which have some kind of, address particular kind of questions, or have some kind of critical goal attached to them. So the history of it is a bit ad hoc.

15:30And I started also with a book, which was much longer. I think it had initially about 40,000 words. And then I removed pieces, one after the other, until I was left with 20,000 words, and with only essays, which I thought were, in my view, worth including. So in other words, there was, you know, there was a measure of finding,

16:07being confident about the quality of all the pieces, and thinking that they are okay for publishing a second time. And because many of these essays here have been published before in magazines, but of course never collected, and I thought it would be interesting to do that. It is. It is very interesting. And as a consequence of that editing process, it comes across as trying to communicate some kind of core key ideas.

16:40You must correct me if I misread, of course. But these are postmodern days, so my interpretation is just as valid as your intention. I'm not sure if that's true. But for me, it seems that there is this, as I said earlier, a desire to kind of establish a kind of identity for architecture, which moves beyond this very late modern, late 20th century, early 21st century conceptualism towards something that is more fundamental about architecture,

17:13something that is about architecture as a formal, almost a conceptual practice. Is that a reasonable way of kind of, I guess, summarizing some small part of its spirit? It's the first time I might think about it in this way. Essays, the way I write essays is basically I'm always looking for subjects that interest me and things which I like. And occasionally I am motivated to write something about a subject or a building

17:48or something that I don't like, but that's very rare. And so I would find it difficult that there is an overarching approach to architecture. I think it's for other people to say. The closest I could agree with you on that is that there is perhaps a sensibility there, a sensibility towards the things which I like.

18:21There is possibly something unifying there, but that would be, I think, difficult to identify. And there is probably a sensibility towards how one looks at things. I think there is a lot of looking going on when one writes these kind of essays. Before you even put pen on paper. And then there is also, I hope, a sensibility regarding the actual writing.

18:57And my writing has changed at a certain point and has become much simpler and more accessible. But also, I have become a lot more exacting as I was becoming more proficient in the English language about which words I might use. And I take a great pleasure in learning more vocabulary and refining the expression of the word.

19:34But as far as the architecture is concerned, it varies. I think pieces there have all their own history.

The surge of housing in the Netherlands

19:48And Totem, for instance, I decided to write Totems because I had been very interested in what was happening in the Netherlands in the 1990s. Partly because there was little work in the UK. My friend in London were not doing very much. They were all saying they wanted to do housing, but were not able to do any. And then suddenly in 1995, you saw this enormous surge of housing building in the Netherlands and by very interesting people.

20:25And so I traveled quite regularly to the Netherlands to actually have a look. Then this mind somehow became, or the work started to dwindle in the Netherlands. And many years later, I said, gosh, I should write. Having been a witness, I should write a longer piece on what happened in the Netherlands. And that's why I wrote Totem on Neutling's Ridaic.

20:54And so every piece, you know, has a different story. There is no overall plan in the book. And you were asking me in your prompt, which you send me in writing, you know, how this come together. Well, I wouldn't say it's random, but it depends on what is being built when.

21:28And occasionally also, which person has me to write and which, yeah, what the circumstances are at any particular time. 25 years, you know, 25 years involved in the writing of these essays that covers quite a lot of time and quite a lot of possibilities as to what might happen in architecture. Yes, for sure. From the turn of the millennium to now, there's been a lot of water under the bridge.

22:03We've gone from that kind of euphoric, as you say, that euphoric playfulness of the early 20th century and the deconstructivism of it through to a more, I suppose, serious and perhaps less joyful approach to architecture. But we've also seen the recession of architecture as a discipline as well in those years. Architecture struggles now to even self-justify to the public, which does change everything, really.

22:36Yes, I agree. I was talking very recently to a political scientist, a friend in Paris, and she was talking about uncertainty and how different countries deal with uncertainty. And I think it feels very much the same, that it's a word applies in the world of architecture at the moment. There is a great deal of uncertainty about the kind of commitment which architects should have and how they should relate to the world of practice.

23:12It's a kind of confidence, the kind of confidence, the kind of confidence, which was associated with, I suppose, the pre-2008, in other words, before the Great Great Recession. This is gone. And I feel for architects, especially young architects today, I really feel for them. It must be difficult and perhaps less enjoyable than the experience of their elders.

23:47But I do look quite favourably on the years preceding 2008. I think there were very great things which have been done during those years. And I sometimes think, having spent, you know, some time in Korea, when Korea was in the beginning of its fantastic rising curve as a country,

24:18that the level of energy in a country as a whole is quite often linked with people's attitude to architecture and the energy and creativity which they invest in architecture. I found that in Korea, certainly. I saw that in Korea, certainly. I saw that in Japan and I saw that in a few other countries.

24:51We are certainly not in that period. I think we are in a very interesting period because the questions that are being asked are important. For instance, the relationship between architecture and the natural world would be one. That's a major question people ask themselves today. But at the same time, there are questions that are difficult to answer in words and perhaps even more so through the architecture one actually designed and eventually built.

25:31I mean, I find it difficult as a critic and I would imagine it's ten times more difficult as an architect. And also, the situation is moving very fast. Yeah. And how you manage a climate of this sort must be keeping people awake at night.

26:02Yes.

26:05The lead times on architecture being so long that these sort of small blips, this incredible speed of change, the instability, political instability, for example, how many prime ministers has Britain had in the last ten years is ludicrous. So how anything gains confidence in that kind of setting. But I do want to come to this idea, which I picked up in your first essay around James Stirling, which is called Powers of Mind, which you first wrote in 2009 or first published in 2009.

James Stirling and architectural functionalism

26:38Which seems to me to present Stirling's work as an image of an effective architecture insofar as architecture consolidates or embodies social objectives or social meaning of unity. And I was thinking about that because you were talking about this energy of society and career and leading to an energy in architecture. And I wondered whether that embodiment of energy is part of this as well. Is that architecture's role is to be involved in the production of that and is to consolidate and then illustrate or to materialize that for society as a whole.

27:18And that we see that quite well in certain architects like James Stirling. Is that an intended interpretation or just something out of flight of my fancy? I mean, of course, to some degree, I think architects are reflection of the periods they work in. But I mean, OK, here I should make a personal point. For many architects of my generation, certainly in the UK, Stirling was the reference.

27:52And I remember when Stirling has an exhibition of drawings at a gallery, which was then called the Heinz Gallery, but which depended on the RIBA, the Royal Institute of Racial Architects. And I thought those drawings were extremely beautiful because of their concision, their precision, their imagination, their capacity to actually show the essence of a design.

28:22And this is something which many people, at least students, aspired to. And there was a little publication, which I still have and greatly admired, which was a catalogue of that exhibition. It's a little white book with green writing and the cover. And Stirling became, because his view was very clear, actually, on architecture, I think, and also it was a period when he was doing very important projects in his career.

28:59The second half of the 1970s, it is a period of the German projects, three competitions, one of them built, which is the Stadts Gallery in Frankfurt. And, sorry, Stuttgart. But, you know, you talked about postmodernism before, and people often think of Stirling as a postmodernist architect. But, I don't, and he didn't, and he reasserted a number of times his belief in functionalism.

29:42In other words, what he started with as somebody who was, in effect, coming from, you know, several years of a long influence of Le Corbusier. And he even said that for him, functionalism was the greatest idea in architecture in the 20th century. And he said this quite late in life, you know, sometimes in the 1980s.

30:14At the time, I agreed with him, and I, modern architecture also was, seemed interesting for that reason. And what perhaps I kept, and other people have kept, is a will to actually relate design or forms or buildings, on the one hand, with experience, on the other.

30:56And this is a form of functionalism, though we do not give it this name. And this is something which, you know, architects, with whom I was associated in the 1980s, and especially 1990s, were all striving to do. Which was to find sensitive way and imaginative way of relating architecture with everyday experience.

31:30And I certainly related to this very strongly. I wrote about it a number of times. And I still think that how one relates architecture, which is something which is unfortunately static, with something which is fortunately mobile, such as life, is the most interesting question in architecture. In architecture.

32:00That is, at the end, if you were, I couldn't, I couldn't tell you what idea governs what I do, but I can certainly tell you what's the, what for me has been the most, not the only one, but the most interesting questions in architecture. And it is this one, how one relates, you know, so sadly static architecture with something as exciting as life.

32:31Yeah. And it is, it is difficult. Yeah. Yeah, I get that. And the way that you're describing the functionalism of Stirling and the people that followed him and the architects that still operate within his very long shadow, or very long light, maybe, is a better way of putting it, seem to be sort of trying to get to the heart of what architecture is supposed to be. And in a way, therefore, what architecture isn't, sort of trying to define and refine a concept of architecture, which to me seems, and I think in your book as well, has some correlation to ideas of a kind of a primitive form, a totemic form, perhaps.

33:11Architecture as, architecture as almost like an avatar of what architecture is, if you know what I mean, like the instance of architecture in some way, reflecting back on the ideal, the platonic ideal of architecture, of what it means, and that complex interaction between the static, the firmness, the trivian firmness, and then the mobility and imagination of the person. Again, is that fair?

34:08Well, in the case of Stansted, the terminal Stansted, which I greatly admire, at the end, you know, the way this piece started was when I first wrote about it, and I wrote a very poor piece of writing when I was very young, and a correspondent for a French magazine. And so, and I walked through the entrance, it was, it had just been finished, and my jaw just dropped.

34:43I thought, I thought, I thought this was astonishing, and there are things, you know, it sometimes happened to me, and that's where, and there are moments which are absolutely marvelous, you know, where you visit a building, and you, you are amazed, you, you, there is something there to, to admire, but there is also there something to understand. And, and in other words, and I think many of the pieces I write are actually guided by something as basic as this.

Icons, form, and everyday experience

35:24Now, when you talk about the totemic aspect of something, so, the totems is something which really refers specifically to that, to the work of Neutling's Ridaic, to this particular essay, which gave its name to the book. And so, and so it, it's, and it means some, it means something to me, in the sense that they, they are, these architects are interested in making an architecture which is generally popular, which is generally liked by the public, and irrespective of the, of the canon of architecture.

36:11And in fact, they are, and in fact, they are, and in fact, they are pretty much opposed to the canon of architecture, and to what architects in certain milieu called the discipline of architecture.

36:24But, there is another, another word, which is maybe more useful, which is, it was a word of icon, icons, totems, it's a very similar notion. And, and, as a word, icon in architecture has been there for quite a few years. People following Chang's have talked about iconic architecture. And iconic architecture has, has been thrown upon ever since, at least since 2008,

37:01as being, as being, and even Chang says that, as an effect of the market. Basically, it, if one reads his book, one gets the sense that it is, I mean, that architects are essentially responding to the private sector, providing something spectacular, which Chang's called iconic. Which I think is very unfair on the word, because icon is, is a beautiful word.

37:34It is also a beautiful notion. It is a notion of an image, which is liked, and sometimes revered by people who looked at it, and, and sometimes it goes further, and it is a manifestation of the sacred, of course. And, and I am certain, you know, you know, we come back to this relationship between architecture and everyday life. I am interested, and I think it is, it should be part of the purpose of architecture to engage with the public in a successful and meaningful way.

38:18Now, okay, okay, there is another association with icons, which is the world of form. Now, as I, I love images, and I have always loved images since the age of, I wouldn't, since when I was very young. This is arguably what brought me to architecture, just looking at images. So my, I have a visual sense, which I think is quite developed.

38:55And so for that reason, I am very sensitive to forms in architecture. But I see forms, not in isolation, but forms in relation to the way it is received, both practically and in terms of its meaning. And it is true now, forms has become a kind of taboo subject in architecture. And I think it's wrong to actually throw anything, which, whether you want it or not, is part of architecture.

39:41I understand why people are suspicious of forms today. And to some degree, I support it, because I think, at least, that I am socially committed as an architecture critic. That's why I have written quite a bit, for instance, on housing. But I also think that you cannot actually analyze architecture without some kind of sensitivity, knowledge of its formal qualities, its part of formal and material qualities.

40:25I think it's inevitably both. I would like to think about this idea of what you mean by the everyday experience or everyday life as a distinct thing, because you seem to me to be distinguishing it from, in terms of architecture, from those spaces, those spectacular, those iconic spaces which do not cultivate that, are not orientated towards the manufacturing of that. Is that what you're saying, is that architecture can accommodate and frame and facilitate everyday life, but it also has this capacity to not do so.

41:03And in the times that it doesn't do so, it produces these slack spaces, these kind of ambivalent, ambiguous spaces. There's many big museums we might look to from the last 20 years that have done this, that they are not sort of doing the job. Well, I mean, I wouldn't necessarily separate everyday experience from an experience which might be exceptional occasionally. In the same way, that is, one can have an everyday experience in a building which is highly visible, which has strong forms.

41:45In fact, one does all the time.

41:49I mean, I don't think that there is necessarily a contradiction between, to take that expression again, and I should be careful about using that expression because it doesn't reflect my interest, ultimately, but it's been used in a way where I want to defend icons and say that icons just happen to have sometimes beautiful forms. But at the end, but at the end, any kind of experience can still take place in them, it's not because a building is very sophisticated in its appearance, that it cannot perform its role.

42:34And I wouldn't be surprised if there were, in fact, in fact, a backlash at some points, a reaction to the mood in which architecture is at the moment, and say, well, actually, form is all right. And we perhaps went too far, and form is an important aspect.

42:58But I haven't really answered your question about everyday experience.

43:07How does one respond to this? Well, one could make a comparison, and perhaps a comparison will be in a way a bit old-fashioned. I mean, there is an essay in the book on the cemetery designed by Aldo Rossi, San Cataldo, in Modena.

43:38And this is a project which, in my view, being so concerned with architecture as a discipline, architecture surviving times, architecture to some degree being outside time, that at the end, it is quite unable, in my view, to respond to the everyday experience.

44:16Okay, it's not an everyday experience, but it is an, you could say, an ordinary, a common experience of mourning, which is why people go to cemetery. So, in that sense, this is a building which doesn't do it, and I would say, I would go further. At least, I think it is a building which is a failure.

44:38And a comparison might be made, and that's why I said old-fashioned before, with Asplund's designed for the cemetery in Stockholm, I should say, Asplund and Leverence, but I'm especially thinking of the contribution of Asplund, where Asplund is acutely sensitive to the experience of mourning, and has, I think, responded to it in an extremely successful way.

45:09And I think it's not by chance that there was an Asplund revival in the 1970s, when Stuart Reed wrote his book. And some of my friends, who became later, you know, advocates of an architecture of everyday life,

45:39took, I mean, for them, Asplund was a very important figure, for that reason, I think. And Asplund was important for reasons to do with his sensitivity towards experience, acute sensitivity, while Leverence was important for his sensibility to the fabric of architecture, to what nowadays we sometimes called the tectonics of architecture.

46:13And, okay, this seems like a long time ago, and so on, and that we have moved on, but I think the questions remain, in my view, central to architecture, one that is difficult to ignore. It is not as clearly expressed in the book as I would wish, possibly,

46:47because you seem to have understood it differently. My essay on Rossi, which I wrote for San Rocco, San Rocco, a magazine I greatly admired, which was put together by Italians, not only Italians, but who are much younger than me, and which was essentially a reappraisal of the project of Aldo Rossi and Giorgio Grassi. And I thought this was very interesting,

47:18and in a way it's a project which advocates, you know, the value of seeing architecture as being autonomous, as people have said.

47:31This is certainly not my position. And so my essay, which compares the cemetery in Modena and its indifference towards people who are in pain for having lost somebody, this indifference to me is a failure.

47:59And, okay, in a way that is a difficulty of architecture, that we're dealing with something which is static, and therefore, to a large extent, unable to respond to us and to what we do now, what we want to do, and what we might do in 10 years' time, and who we are and how we change,

48:30and basically what we were talking about before as a mobility of life. So this piece, in my mind, is actually a criticism of Aldo Rossi and Giorgio Grassi. And I criticize them for that reason, for actually valuing architecture above ordinary life. And that seems to me contrary to the profession of architecture, which, by definition, is about relating the two together.

49:05Yes, as an image, and I've not visited San Cataldo, but as an image, it always struck me as being very much like this idea of why people have developed a problem with the notion of forms. This idea of a thing which, in a way, has no obligation to that which it serves. Rather, it is what it is, and you relate or you don't to that thing. And I think you're right. I think architecture, in a way, if it is to maintain its obligation to the commons, to the good, has to sort of, and I think it is,

49:36and I think it is, and you see this in a lot of contemporary, successful contemporary architects, Niall McLaughlin and people like that, Sergius and Bates, and many architects across the world, there is a reappraisal of the notion of form. That housing looks like housing and does housing things. I was thinking about it in relation to EMBT's Scottish Parliament building, which externally, perhaps, is playful with some of the notions around representative space or democratic representation, but at its heart, it retains a very traditional democratic space.

50:08So even when you get past all the kind of leaves on the outside, all of the kind of foliage, at its heart, the building is self-evidently a democratic space. Everything is there. So the thin veneer, the last five millimetres, does this kind of playfulness, but really it's not messing around with its fundamental function. And perhaps also, this is why volume house builders retain this absolute stranglehold on both the market and the public imagination,

50:40is that they don't eschew the form. They have a terrible idea of what that form is, but they are well aware of what constitutes home or house to a public in a way that the profession of architecture, or the discipline of architecture, has perhaps abandoned, much to its discredit and much to its self-marginalisation. I agree with you. I think that house builders, in a way, are more in tune with the public

51:12that many people who design housing today. It's a very difficult point to make, and it is one which, of course, is open to all kinds of caveats, etc. But I think architects, when they design housing today,

51:44are perhaps more concerned with precisely those issues of form than they are to aspects of experience. Well, for house builders, form has very, very little interest. They barely think about it. And so they know certain things that architects don't, I think.

52:14And I say this very cautiously because I, at the same time, I am aghast at the quality of what passed for housing architecture in this country in particular. I mean, it is a situation which is quite desperate in its banality. and its lack of creativity.

52:50And, but I think if I, you know, if I, obviously, so I have plenty of criticism for house builders, but I also have criticism for architects in this country who would like to build housing. And my criticism is that, it is an excess of preciousness, I think. And a lack of realism and, in a way, an unwillingness to actually engage

53:23constructively with the difficulty of the situation. And that's one of the reasons, okay, I'm a bit too harsh, I realize when I say this in my comments on architects. But nevertheless, somewhere I feel that way.

The legacy of high-tech architecture

53:44And when I think about those issues, I often think about high tech.

53:50I think for me, high tech is the elephant in the room. High tech, we haven't quite yet realized the enormous significance of that movement in England, in the UK, in particular, but also well beyond the UK. Perhaps British architecture has never in its history reached this kind of high and this extraordinary influence

54:26worldwide, in fact. I mean, they were onto something of great significance, I think. And the reason for this was to do with a genuine interest in the real world to understand how it works and to be able to actually work on commissions which many other people would think

54:56would be impossible for architects. That's where commissions which would be beyond the remit of architecture. And typically, industrial buildings, I mean, high tech architects started with designing industrial buildings at a time nobody who was an architect was looking at this kind of commission or at least very few of them.

55:26And that's the kind of thing which I would love to see happening today in the context, for instance, of housing to have this level of realism in how one might engage the situation. and I'm certainly not denying the enormous trickiness of the situation for architects to actually engage with house builders and so on.

56:00But it's it makes me sad to see architects kind of drifting apart from what they have often done in the past and seeking refuge. Okay, for a long time they sought refuge in cultural buildings and museums and so on and now seeking refuge in other things and sometimes

56:31very small things. I feel concerned about the scale of the ambition of architects today and perhaps I mean architects of a young age and as I said I really empathize with the difficulty of their situation but I am concerned. I think that at the end I as you said yourself at the very beginning

57:02I feel passionately for architecture I really think that architects can do great things and to do great things I think entails having a meaningful significant impact on how people live and that's why for me modern architecture was one of those extraordinary

57:33success for architecture that they managed to reach an enormously wide public in the way nowadays we can only dream about. I want to finish on one last question which relates to that which is the way you talk about everyday life and the way you talk about the architect's relationship to that presupposes a kind of anthropological study or at least a sensitivity towards the study of society as a

58:03whole and a vigorous rigorous study of society as well and possibly in parentheses an enjoyment in that as well a kind of cultivation of enjoyment within that which I think Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi got to but perhaps is a little bit absent now and that anthropology as I take it from your writing is very much inspired by Claude Levi Srauss and his followers in architecture this sort of deep cultural engagement that happens through anthropology but also his

58:34proposal of the idea of the bricklayer which I know that you have written about previously in some of these other books that you mentioned earlier and the function as I understand it of the bricklayer is and to connect it back to what you were just saying about the high tech that seems to me to be the bricklayer right there that is the architect as bricklayer adopting the technologies of the moment and reintegrating them into spatial construction which is never really thought about it like that and I think that's a really wonderful and enlightening approach or a way of thinking about them and that helps us

59:04dissolve that bricklayer helps us to dissolve this artificial boundary between the ambivalent architect designing radically indifferent buildings and real life I like that a lot I think you expressed it very well thank you it's um I probably don't need to provide an answer for this

The architect as bricoleur

59:24but I will

The architect as bricoleur

59:25how did I come to the bricklayer okay when I was much younger when I was a student in fact I was reading works of anthropology or works of history and so on which related in some ways to this idea and and to as you said yourself when you send me prompts to an approach to knowledge which was intuitive

59:55and fast and perceptive and effective and to this idea which the Greeks used to call metis which is in a way an approach to knowledge which is an alternative to reason in the same way say that in Levi Strauss bricolage is an alternative to engineering

1:00:26it is because it is something which draws from many things at once while engineering is looking for a system and I by temperament I am certainly predisposed to likes of the former better and then it came from conversation I had over a number

1:00:56of years I think with Tom Emerson of 6A and Tom was uncomfortable with the idea of craft at the same time very interested in how one make things and I suggested well why not bricolage and and that's that's the way I came to writing about it I'm still a bit even though this

1:01:27essay the architect as bricolage has become a kind of cult pieces sometimes I meet you know young even students and they come to me with great reverence and say wow you know this piece is incredible and I it's I think it's fine as a way of being suggestive about how one can make architecture

1:01:57at the same time I'm slightly uncomfortable by the possibilities that it might indent it might lessen the professionalism of architects I slightly worry about this because that's certainly not what I would like but then coming back to what you were saying about high tech Foster describes described himself as a

1:02:28belt and braces architect to me a belt and braces architect certainly means a bricolier and so and he said this in relation to the Sainsbury Center for the visual arts in Norwich which is incredible because you know everybody thinks that high tech architects are definitely on the side of the engineer and they have always made a great deal of their collaboration with

1:02:58engineers in fact I think it might be more appropriate to see them as precisely these very intuitive people who are deep in the process of making architecture but when I was writing that piece I was also worried that people who would be thinking about architecture as briconnage might end up working on very small things things which are more to do with design than architecture and

1:03:29so I was looking for large examples and it so happens that sometimes before I had written an essay on Gothic architecture called The Nature of Gothic Essays and it told me that actually it is possible to look at Gothic cathedrals as a gigantic work of bricolage because it involves all kinds

1:04:00of decisions taken at different times and which are very often improvised there are examples of people starting to build cathedrals they lay the foundation to build the columns up to two meters height that's the case of Milan and then they stop and they call in people from various countries France in particular but others and

1:04:32to consult them about what to do next I think this is extraordinary and I must say I am predisposed as I was saying towards this kind of intelligence intuitive sensitive to situations and probably an even more genuine

1:05:03form of intelligence because it is so it is so so live and close to what needs to be understood yeah but I still feel a bit cautious when I use the word in fact I use the word less often than I used to yeah it's like Bruno Latour's actor network theory rejecting both the actor and the network but quite liking the theory you've got your millstone that you've

1:05:33got to carry for the rest of your life I wanted to ask one last question around the nature of the essay itself and as an essayist and a writer how do you feel situated within the broader discipline do you still feel as a I mean you went through architectural training so you have that right to the name and to that connection but do you feel in some way that your role is as an irritant you are the sand you are the grit in the oyster that your role as an essayist is to in a way hold the profession or hold the discipline to account

1:06:04I'm not sure I put it that way because as I said I tend to write about things which I love and are questions that I want to find answers for and so and I feel generally uncomfortable with the word critic I wish they had invented a different word for what I do because there is a kind of negative connotations which I just don't like I

1:06:35suppose and I mean I know some critics and some of whom I think extremely well of who think of that task as finding what is wrong in what is being done I mean and I think that's a useful role it should be there is room for that but that's certainly not what I do and so for instance I don't think that I hope at least that I don't

1:07:05irritate people and but I what I what I would like to think is that some of the essays I might write might open new possibilities for some of the readers and you know I have no formal training as a writer as a historian as a critic I never

1:07:35studied at all I mean I was a passionate reader of Colin Rowe when I was in my third year at the A but that's about it I met Colin Rowe once and that's and I think that was the end of my formation and the rest I had to work out for myself by publishing essays in magazines like A Files and so on and I learned a tremendous amount from editors so I think

1:08:06of I mean you might think that this is a bit pretentious but for me writing essays is a way of being an architect and there is a comparison I like to make it is a comparison between the essays I write and the drawings James Sterling made and

1:08:37I would like to reach this degree of clarity and concision which is perhaps why what I write has a tendency to become shorter over the years as Sterling did making axonometric but also other types of drawings which are usually quite small with few lines and which attempt to capture what is

1:09:08particularly important about about a project and you know clarity concision precision evocations all those things I value very greatly and for me my perhaps my greatest ambition as an essay writer would be to be read twice I'm sure it never happens

1:09:38but if it did if some people were to read something I had written twice I would see it as the ultimate compliment that there is something to explore in what is there and which is and to be invented on the basis of what there is invented by the reader as I said it is

1:10:09the essays opens a field of possibilities at best and the possibilities are not for me for the readers and I like that idea exactly in the same way as some drawing some project seems to be carrying something which is begging to be discovered and transformed and maybe through bricolage and then

1:10:41maybe and then implemented for the pleasure and also the needs of others I think that's a good mission in my mind yeah it's a wonderful mission it's a wonderful mission thank you so very much Irini that's wonderful to hear you talk and it's a pleasure to meet you Ambrose and thank you very much for asking me it's been very nice talking to you the rest

Poetry and closing reflections

1:11:12is solitude the church grown old stands stark and grey beneath the burning skies well nigh again its mighty framework grows to be a part of nature's self withdrawn from hot humanity's impatient woes the floor is ridged like some rude mountain lawn and in the east one giant window shows the roseate coldness of an Alpert dawn that's from Edith Wharton's poem Chartre and it's true beautiful and good thank you to Irene for the amazing chat and Dominica Park Books for the organisation please see the podcast description for links to the book to Irene on

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