BUILDING DREAMS – HOW TO

 

The sign on the metalworker’s shed declared boldly and clearly: You bring the dreams, We’ll bring the How To. It seemed to define everything that seems to be problematical with our era that appears happy to build dreams without any ‘know how’ or substance: just for appearances and ephemeral intentions; vague, ill-defined ambitions; loose expressions of whatever.

It is a practice that first appeared in the art world. Artists would make submissions for various projects, and if they were given the opportunity to complete their work, they would sublet the making of the ‘art’ to companies that had been set up precisely for this purpose: to fabricate art for artists. These firms could advertise using exactly the same words as the metalworker. Indeed, it is possible that the metalworker might have already been a fabricator for an artist: see – https://www.uapcompany.com/; http://www.artplusdesign.com.au/artist-fabrication-services/; and http://www.thylacine.com.au/what-we-do/fabrication/

see: https://voussoirs.blogspot.com/2019/01/gold-coast-dazzle-removed.html

The system is that the artist provides the sketch or model of the intended completed work – the diagram – and the specialist firm completes it. This fragmentation, the separation of the conceptualisation and the making, made the concept of the thinking hand, the intellect of the body - see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juhani_Pallasmaa - a droll ‘extra’ something, an irrelevance that could have no input into any finer changes and development in the making. The dream is forced out of its schematic stage by others with a commitment only to its appearance, knowing little to nothing of its roots, its beginnings, its possibilities. Art becomes a stage set. Herbert Read’s book, The Origin of Forms in Art comes to mind.

 Juhani Uolevi Pallasmaa

Sir Herbert Read

Louis Kahn

In architecture, this division might appear to be a matter of course, with contractors building the architect’s design: but there is a significant difference. The architect envisages the concept and then develops it to such an extent that it is detailed and described as an item, specified precisely to be what was contemplated, how to construct it, and from what, so that the outcome can be predicted. This procedure engages the architect intimately in the process of understanding what the design might be and become. Louis Kahn described is as “What it wants to be.” It is a subtle process that involves detailed development of the ‘dream.’ It is not just a matter of achieving the identity of the sketch as might shrewdly be fabricated by a third party. There is the thinking eye, the feeling hand, the sensing body, the probing intellect involved in seeking out what Kandinsky described as the ‘inner necessity’ of the work – its integral reality. The relationship between the object and its maker involves a quiet, inner, vibrant resonance that is subtly revealed in the final work. Consider Utzon and his Sydney Opera House, his struggles with form and its making, and the final outcome. We can only be pleased that the shells were completely resolved prior to his departure.

Kandinsky, untitled, 1921

This development process could involve significant changes and other variations that a remote maker might never become aware of or ever contemplate, having been given the brief to make ‘this’ – whatever it might be. What is neglected, not understood, is that the making is not merely a neutral participation, some mechanical act or process; that it can have a significant impact on the outcome; indeed, should have. This third party brings certain skills in manufacturing to the task rather than involving reverie and revision, a searching that is always checking for the clear reality of the work, its purity, its rationale, its logic in being – the revelation. There is an intimate involvement that can reveal new possibilities. Using the Sydney Opera House as the example once more, one can see how Arup worked cleverly and tirelessly to find a way to construct Utzon’s winning sketch submission. Many possibilities were explored, but none were satisfactory, even though it was shown that the flat shells could be constructed. It took Utzon to discover the solution of using shapes from the one spherical surface, a notion that changed the form and expression of the initial sketch, gave it a coherence that echoed in the reasoning of its making, its ‘how to.’ His resolution never made the engineers very happy – they had spent years in seeking out a solution - but there are stories that tell the opposite story, where an engineering solution drove the outcome. Apparently it was a real struggle to design the entry stairs and platform as one single span. Arup kept telling Utzon of the problems, and finally Utzon agreed that intermediate columns could be used. By this stage Arup had worked out a way to achieve the single span so fought against the columns to give us the beautiful solution we see today.

The recent schism in the art world does not allow the artist to bring and exercise a simple skill in the work, or any sensitivity that can ‘talk’ to the work and the maker/designer in the development process. The sense of the ‘between’ becomes alive in this interaction. The process could be spoken about as the poet seeking the poem, waiting for the muse: see sidebar – ON ART & METHOD; THE MUSE – GETTING IT RIGHT; THE AIM OF ART; HOW POETRY COMES TO ME. This separation is a sad loss for art, but architecture is now more and more adopting the ‘build a dream’ idea, where it appears that the master/mistress scribbles, and the team details an interpretation for the contractor to erect.

Good work involves an integrity, a wholeness that reverberates throughout. That sign on the shed really defines our era – dream anything and we can build it, leaving us with fabricated visions that have never been put through a process of revision, rethinking, feeling, testing, clarifying, discovery, . . . and more – precisely what art/design needs to be about. This development work is as much a part of art and architecture as the primary ‘creative’ envisioning is. The inspired sketch might be brilliant, but building diagrams does not make good architecture, no matter how astonishing or ‘expressive’ the work might appear. Art must address the facts if it is to endure. Build a dream and, like dreams, the work might look interesting for a few minutes, and then fade away as a fuzzy experiment. Our problem is that we have the ability to construct almost anything: we need to know what not to do.

A quick review of the new work in architecture seems to suggest that we have many sketches being pieced together by engineers with clever programmes. One can be amazed, but what is being missed? Kahn spoke of architecture as arising in the numinous, being transformed by the facts, and then returning to the numinous. We forget that a thing of beauty is only enhanced by the ‘facts.’ The idea of art as a sensitive, feeling world too special for any analysis; too fragile in its unique subtlety to be questioned; too ephemeral to be involved with raw, disturbing facts, is a modern vision that sees art as the ‘self- expression’ of personal genius: MY vision. The traditional world was clear that art is otherwise; that nothing could be beautiful unless it conformed to the facts and the rules. History shows how this substance still reverberates with us.

Have we been seduced by the ‘art’ that is seen in a ‘modern’ expressive scribble, a pretty, interesting skin? Has the ‘art market’ blinded us with huge figures? Do we believe in our own ‘fashionable’ hype? Is this why we are getting scribbles for buildings, built diagrams? A beauty rooted in reality seems far more seductive than some mysterious scrawl that even the artist knows nothing about. Try pulling a flower apart and be astonished by what it is; study a leaf and its connection to the branch.# Mies said that “God is in the detail.” We can try to understand this in several ways, but in all of these interpretations, the detail is important, the real world: the ‘how to.’ Our era is being fudged.

Artists and architects need to make a greater commitment to this ‘how to’ or we will all be left as scribblers who know not what they do. The implications for education are clear too. The ‘expressive’ written and spoken world today sees only meaning as being critical, not the spelling, grammar, and punctuation. The critical matter is the message. In architecture this has become ‘building the dream.’ The first step is to know what one is doing and not doing, and then go and do it: design and build with awareness; with good spelling, grammar and punctuation. This is one way to try to understand the process that is vague, emotional and experiential, but critical. ‘How to’ is important, an essential part of a design. Without it, one is left stranded in an impossible ‘Brexit’ situation that only survives on basic bullshit, something that our era seems to thrive on; see – https://voussoirs.blogspot.com/2018/12/design-strategy-brexit-whims-wishful.html; https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/may/22/post-truth-era-trump-brexit-lies-books; and https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/02/bullshit-not-lies-is-the-real-corrosive-influence-blighting-our-public-life

# Consider Louis Sullivan’s: The function of the rose is the form of the rose; the form of the rose is the function of the rose, and ponder the power, the importance of ‘how to.’

Christopher Alexander The Nature of Order