Can Architects & Traditionalists Unite Against the Slop?
While they argue, the Slop Sprawl grows stronger. The time to fight back is running out.
There’s a huge disconnect between architects and the general public. Whether you’re on the side of the public, detesting ‘Brutalism’ with all your heart – or on the side of the self-anointed architectural elite, you must be aware of this disconnect before any attempt at dialogue.
People have an intuitive understanding of beauty and harmony. They instinctively like historical cities and instinctively detest contemporary ones.
When you enter architecture school, the biggest rite of initiation consists of shedding this intuition. Everything you thought you liked is meaningless and arbitrary. You are told you have to *justify* your design choices, and beauty as a purely subjective emotion, is no way to do it.
You are then initiated in a new way of seeing. Something resembling tunnel vision. You rebel at first, yet eventually yield and submit, just so you can get decent grades. After years of training you eventually start to 'get it'; your tastes are shaped to love the international style. Your eyes develop the habit of zooming in on the 3d model of the building as if it were a scaleless sculpture with perfectly aligned 'lines of force'. Like a grammar nerd spotting a misplaced apostrophe, you wince whenever a Corbusian rule is broken. Context becomes a nuisance; you don't want to see humans, street lighting or tree canopies in front of your pure designs. Everything premodern becomes sordid, arbitrary, reactionary, forgettable.
Since this way of seeing things is a mere thought exercise, every architect can unlearn it. Even the most ardent supporters of modernism CAN enjoy the environment of Skyrim or Dark Souls. They can enjoy the picturesque character of a village in the Cotswolds or a city like Edinburgh. They can have a sense of transcendence while contemplating the interior of Sacré-Cœur de Montmartre. When they switch to designing things, however, they struggle to create in classical or vernacular language. Shifting between the intuitive and the ‘educated’ gaze happens imperceptibly, making them enjoy both languages simultaneously.
The non-initiate, on the other hand, is stuck with his intuitive appreciation of beauty, which makes him denounce every form of modernism uncompromisingly. By non-initiate I don’t mean uncultured or philistine. On the contrary, the more erudite and historically-savvy an intellectual, the more likely he is to denounce architectural ‘Brutalism’, by which he means everything from Bauhaus to Zaha Hadid.
This disconnect is visible on traditionalist forums like ‘Architectural Uprising’. The more earnest and conservative an intellectual, the more they will reject any form of dialogue with a contemporary architect. This means the intellectual will most likely focus on preserving the heritage at all costs, while denying any reliance on contemporary building materials, industrial means of construction, BIM tools, 3d visualisation etc. If a TradPunk community were dominated by non-architects, it would lead to something like Sir Roger Scruton’s ‘Build Beautiful’ governmental commission - curbing some excesses but still yielding sterile, Potemkin-like developments.
The architects, on the other hand, are often ill equipped in understanding historical contexts and ways of building. Their total reliance on computer tools and virtual ways of viewing buildings has robbed them of any chance of an embodied interaction with their design and its context.
There are, of course, many ways to bridge the gap between the two groups. There is a growing number of architectural studios that not only build classically, but are glad to share their knowledge through courses and summer schools. There are also architectural associations like New Urbanism Forums, INTBAU, Architectural Uprising, attracting a growing number of architects, helping them deepen their classical knowledge, while providing a direct interaction with enthusiastic enjoyers of this style.
Towards a TradPunk Vernacular
The main problem that remains unaddressed is still significant. The architectural field will never give up its computerised tools, its industrialised mindset or its reliance on emerging building materials. I don’t expect to see any new styles resembling Art Nouveau or Art Deco emerging from existing classically-minded forums. They will insist on preserving historical orders and materials, and of course, they have good reasons for it. The thing is – by doing this, they’re giving up the chance to ‘woo’ the architectural mainstream. They’ll never capture the minds and souls of architecture freshers; they’ll never capture the imagination of pop culture (a thing they reject on principle). You will never see ADAM Architecture’s projects being featured in alternate fantasy films, like Art Deco buildings are. They will also reject any attempt at synthesis with emerging fields like contemporary landscape architecture, which unlike its adjacent fields of architecture and urbanism, is entering its golden age, proposing a rich organic language inspired from natural forms, with which it integrates seamlessly.
The rigour and order of classical European architecture can be enhanced by a new Vernacular or TradPunk approach to architecture. When discussing historical centres, Leon Krier distinguishes between fully ordered façades of civic or monumental buildings and what he calls ‘vernacular’ or ‘spontaneous traditional architecture’. These latter buildings are a key ingredient in the charm of historical cities, and Krier acknowledges that a balance between the formal and the vernacular is what makes traditional urbanism so rich and livable.
This organic charm is most often overlooked by rigid classicists because it is ‘impure’. But it is precisely the impure nature of contemporary architecture that which can recreate a sense of organic depth. Discerningly relying on algorithmic complexity, Rem Koolhaas’s ‘superimposition’, various low-rise high density experiments, a dialogue with Landscape Architecture – all these can offer a fresh Vernacular, something which has the chance to rekindle the fire of imagination in the minds of young architects and help them break free of the rigid inertia that has taken over their profession.
This is TradPunk and it shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. Classicism won’t sway the mainstream. If TradPunk won’t do it, the Slop Sprawl will fill every square inch until nothing’s left.