The Future Is Hairy

Author: Jeremy Till & Sarah Wigglesworth
Year: 2001 (in Architecture: The Subject is Matter, ed. Jonathan Hill)
Source type: article
Raw file: raw/articles/till-wigglesworth-2001-future-is-hairy.md

Summary

Architect-practitioners Jeremy Till and Sarah Wigglesworth write against the "technocracy" of architectural detailing — the Miesian credo "God lies/is in the details" that elevates architecture above mere building through exclusive technical mastery. Reflecting on their own self-build project (9 Stock Orchard Street, London), they treat the detail as a disciplinary defense that "divorces design from public recognition," a "security blanket against the realities, disruption and disorder of everyday life." Against the autonomy of the fetishized detail, they argue for an architecture open to the everyday, to amateur and collective authorship, and to the environmental imperative — a "hairy" future that welcomes imprecision and collaboration.

Key Claims

• Detailing as technocracy: "Detailing is one way in which architecture elevates itself above mere building ('architecture is not building' being another rosary bead)." The discipline of the detail excludes the amateur and polices the territory through specifications, contracts, and standards.
• The moral project is false: the Miesian conflation of "honesty and transparency in visual expression... with truth and order in society" is "deeply flawed and delusional." "These days it is not so much God that lies in the details but Guilt" — the profession retreats to tectonics as a security blanket against the failure of modernism's redemptive claims.
• Even "significant" tectonics (Frascari, Scarpa; Frampton's "call to order") can distract: the detail becomes "a place to get lost in," "a forgetting of the social and political implications of spatial production." "The true resistive strength of architecture lies in its engagement with... contemporary spatial-social production, and not in its rearguard retreat into the essences of tectonics."
• Architecture's materials canon is artificially restricted; the everyday materials of "mud, thatch," DIY, mass-produced industry, and the domestic are excluded. "The materials of the everyday... present an opportunity for architecture to open up its gates... it asks why architecture is disinterested in the normal; it encourages us to transgress."
• Authorship is collective and contingent: in the self-build, the builders "assume aesthetic control over the process" — "they, and not us." The brief consistency rule of the master-architect is broken ("By being inconsistent, we break this rule").
• The environmental crisis recasts "many of the iconic details of the twentieth century" as "bad details" lacking connection to values outside architecture. Till & Wigglesworth avoid both disingenuous technocrats and eco-fundamentalists, proposing a "future which is not fully controllable or measurable — this is not a sign of weakness but an inevitable condition of architecture."

Connections

Concepts: Everyday Architecture · Authorship · Consumerism
Authors: Karsten Harries (architecture vs. building; ornament) · Reinhold Martin · Beatriz Colomina (cited on Mies)
Debates: Genius vs. Bureaucracy — corrodes the sole authorship/hero-genius myth
Related source notes: The Bread & Butter of Architecture (Agarez & Mota) · The Ethical Function of Architecture (Harries) · Making New Connections in Vernacular Architecture (Groth)

Direct Quotes

"Disciplined making has become a security blanket against the realities, disruption and disorder of everyday life."

"It is time to break the hold of authority and mystification that the technocracy of architecture has induced. The materials of the everyday... encourage us to transgress."

"The true resistive strength of architecture lies in its engagement with the various sites of contemporary spatial-social production, and not in its rearguard retreat into the essences of tectonics."

"It is acceptable for architectural technologies to be claimed by others (women, amateurs, untrained eyes) and for architecture to claim other technologies." ("Relax, boys.")

Open Questions

• How does Till & Wigglesworth's critique of the detail's "forgetting" connect to the critical/projective and spectacle debates — is their "everyday" openness a form of resistance or of complicity?
• Does the designation of iconic details as "bad details" on environmental grounds reframe the iconic architecture literature in the wiki?