‘OUTRAGEOUS’ TRUMPS EVERYTHING EVERYDAY

The article in the ABC News Australia,17th February 2019, reported on the subject of the impact of Twitter, and noted how the ‘youngest-ever congresswoman,’ Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, ‘the freshman Democratic representative’ aged 29, was gaining a Twitter identity and following that challenged President Trump’s notorious presence on social media: see - https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-02-17/donald-trump-has-he-finally-met-democratic-media-match/10803148

He (Trump) has narrowed his approach to two mediums: Twitter and TV.

The Donald Trump Facebook and Instagram accounts are controlled by professionals, and it shows.

Critics say the tone is impersonal. The slogans are stale. The spectacle is lost.

Mr Trump's former social media strategist, Justin McConney, TOLD Politico the pair perfected the Twitter approach early in the campaign.

Even now, it takes just one outrageous tweet for the President to dominate the US cable news networks, which will rebroadcast his tweets, in their entirety, as graphics on the screen.

Likewise, he makes one call into his favourite network, Fox News, and the Twitterverse is aflame with outrage.

As in architecture: it takes just one outrageous [building] to dominate the news; yet this one building is such a minor matter in the numerical count of structures in the world, and the number of lives intimately involved with the ‘other’ buildings.

We have what could be called ‘the bleach of suburbia’ that is the everyday for most lives, a world seen as bland, uninteresting, and monotonous, stripped of everything meaningful and lively; where ordinary little things become intimacies that shelter and shape lives, living, mental health, and well-being. Light and air, and place and space, are managed by these forms and proximities. These are the walls, the windows, the doors, the rooms, the fences, and the details lived with; looked at every moment of the day; constantly felt; and touched of all of the time. These backgrounds become the home, extensions of the body; the familiar places that make space for the spirit and soul, and provide comfort for feeling, being, thinking and happiness: but these are the places, the buildings, that are ignored, shunned by architects who seek something more exclusively dramatic; more expressive of something, frequently themselves: see – https://voussoirs.blogspot.com/2019/02/building-dreams-how-to.html where Gehry says it clearly. The vision is for a grand design like a ‘Ronchamp’ home, or a ‘Sydney Opera’ house, something ‘different’ that will catch attention and spruik ‘ME.’# The irony is that such buildings only ‘stand out’ because of the ‘background’ buildings; they rely on the bland, the modest, the humble, for their bespoke identity.

Historically, social housing has been pushed aside as something of an embarrassment, like suburbia today. In the much self-praised HOT MODERNISM exhibition - see: https://voussoirs.blogspot.com/2014/10/hot-modernism-architecture-in.html - the display of government-designed social housing, (the ‘war-service’ and ‘Housing Commission’ homes), was squashed into an awkward, small corner that was further obstructed by the grand, central reconstruction of the Hayes and Scott house. The tiny, cramped, arrangement of images was handled as an irrelevance, reluctantly squeezed into a minimal area without any of the artful consideration to setout given to other slick, ‘architectural’ illustrations; but these are the houses that the majority of people live in, the places that make up most of our cities. They deserve an exhibition of their own.

This is suburban place, space – home for the multitudes that should not be ignored. If the cry from architects is ‘educate the masses so that they understand what we are doing’ has any substance beyond its cliché call, then it must mean that architects need to become ‘teachers’ by turning their attention to these dwellings, to try to understand what they are and what they can become – what they might be (see: https://voussoirs.blogspot.com/2019/02/building-dreams-how-to.html); not as some ‘artistic’ statement, but as home – enriching place for ordinary, everyday life that is never ordinary at all. We need extraordinary dwellings for the everyday. This does not mean that budgets have to be increased, or attitudes towards architects changed by ‘education.’ It means that architects must earn their right to be respected, not as geniuses who can build the outrageously bespoke structures, but as catalysts, unknowns, who can make place beautiful in an ordinary way so that life is fulfilled, enhanced, supported, and changed for the better.

The question is: What can be done? What must be done? The first response to these questions is that the concept of ‘architecture’ as something outrageously grand has to be dismissed. It really is just too easy to be outrageous, as Trump has shown us. What appears to be happening now with attitudes like those seen on McCloud’s Grand Designs is that the outrageous is becoming ordinary, an ambition for the everyday that only worsens our suburban lives. What should not be done is to, Corrigan-like, turn suburban expression into an outrageous art form; to drag ordinary foibles into a clever, new language that intertwines quirky shapes and images collected from mocked suburbia and collaged into MY unique, architectural expression in forms and texts.

Edmund & Corrigan housing

Things are more serious than this smart, ‘Post Modern’ game. We must begin with respect for life, with an ambition to allow it to be fulfilled rather than seek out some status in the profession, prestige as a brilliant practitioner or clever theorist. Architecture is more than this.

What might these places want to be?

# The proposition here is not that Le Corbusier’s Chapel at Ronchamp and Utzon’s Sydney Opera House are ‘outrageous,’ but that the desire of others to construct eye-catching things with such prominent difference everywhere, in every project, as self-expression, is.

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