The Big Rethink Part 4: The Purposes of Architecture

Author: Peter Buchanan
Year: 2012 (The Architectural Review)
Source type: article
Raw file: raw/articles/buchanan-2012-big-rethink-purposes-of-architecture.md

Summary

Part of Buchanan's "Big Rethink" series, this essay argues that architecture has lost its enriching sense of purpose, producing "toxic anomie." Using Integral theory's AQAL ("All Quadrant All Level") four-quadrant diagram, he diagnoses modernity as over-emphasizing the objective/quantitative right quadrants and postmodernity as over-emphasizing a superficial symbolism in the left quadrants. He proposes that the most fundamental purpose of architecture is as a means by which we "create ourselves" and our cultures, and that progress to sustainability requires redefining who we want to be — a collaborative design task.

Key Claims

• Loss of purpose: like the shift from agriculture to agri-business, architecture (and modern civilization) has been reduced to profit and quantifiable function, losing the qualitative/subjective realm of meaning, morals, and empathic connection.
• The AQAL diagnosis: modernity over-emphasizes objective, quantifiable knowledge (right quadrants: individual behavior/form, and systems/ecology/economics) at the expense of the subjective (left quadrants: personal experience and collective meanings). Postmodernity, conversely, over-emphasizes signs and meanings (lower-left culture) but only superficially, ignoring the "deep subjective" (the unconscious, archetypes).
• Architecture creates ourselves: compartmentalizing experiences in space — and setting them in ordered relationships — is "one of the most fundamental purposes of architecture," a means of projecting and mapping our psyches and driving cultural evolution: "[T]he fundamental purpose of architecture is as a means for creating our cultures and ourselves." Only language rivals it.
• Being at home: by projecting psyches into space we create surroundings we relate to, "so we feel at home in a world from which self-consciousness and awareness of death somewhat displaces us" — a purpose modernity failed (alienation, atomization into consumers).
• Sustainability as redefinition of the human: progress toward sustainability depends on redefining what it is to be human (Thomas Berry: "the universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects"). Design should become "humankind's way of deliberately participating in the constant creative emergence that is evolution," not self-expression or branding.
• Quadrant-by-quadrant purposes: shelter/security/function (UR), urban fabric and public realm (LR), culture, bridge across time, conferring status (LL), beauty, repose, reverie, sense of place (UL). Modernism's failings are concentrated in the left quadrants (e.g. Hillman on ceiling pipes as an insult to the spirit).

Connections

Concepts: Critical Architecture · Everyday Architecture · Atmosphere
Authors: Peter Buchanan · Juhani Pallasmaa
Debates: Critical vs. Projective
Related source notes: Architectural Atmospheres (Borch)

Direct Quotes

"[A] fundamental purpose ... the fundamental purpose of architecture is as a means for creating our cultures and ourselves."

"[A]rchitecture is more than a mere record or reflection of who we are."

"The universe is a communion of subjects and not a collection of objects." (Thomas Berry, as quoted)

"[D]esign should become humankind's way of deliberately participating in the constant creative emergence that is evolution."

Open Questions

• Does Integral theory's reconciliation of the quadrants offer a usable critical programme, or is it a project of self-development that evades the political economy of architecture (cf. the financialized metropolis)?
• Is Buchanan's "architecture creates ourselves" compatible with the flat-ontology and everyday-architecture emphasis on anonymous, collective production?