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Dreams of Houses Karsten Harries, The Ethical Function of Architecture * dreamlike [Ed.] - - - Harries’ concerns in architecture are to attempt a rapprochement between the reductive functionalism of the Moderns, domestic archetypes, historic and more recent representation and those potent, primal and phenomenological acts of dwelling. The quotation above touches on those points of reference and challenges us with a situation more various, layered, complex and darker than much contemporary reading of or writing about the house affords us. Susan Doubilet and Daralice Boles, for example, in their European House Now can manage little better than the travelogue shallowness of: The subject of house design is a delightful one, and one that interests almost everyone, from the average person who can imagine living in one or another of the houses on these pages, to architects who are inspired by exceptional house designs. A sentiment given no greater substance or authority by the specious intellectualism of Claire Melhuish’s introduction to the Modern House 2, which seeks only to enforce a normative trajectory from Modernism to its antithesis and beyond through a discussion of essentially Modernist preoccupations such as construction and spatial organisation with a compromised and unsatisfactory essay on identity as apologia. Bracketing opposites, she states unbelievably and parochially that: These [houses] reveal, and sustain, a commonality of language across the work, even though much of it may appear visually distinct, and be physically located in far-removed places with highly contrasting, even conflicting, environmental characteristics and cultural histories. This commonality resides in an affirmation of a relationship with the recent architectural history of Europe, notably the ideology and technology developed by the architects and theorists of the Modern Movement... Jean Baudrillard sums up the dichotomy between Harries’ archetypes and Melhuish’s straining at a Modernist orthodoxy in two observations; the first, on what he terms simply the "Traditional environment": What gives the house of our childhood such depth and resonance in memory is clearly this complex structure of interiority, and the objects within it serve for us as boundary markers of the symbolic configuration known as home. and the second, on the revolutionary nature of Modernist design emancipation entitled "The modern object liberated in its function": The organisation of space changes, too, as beds become day-beds and sideboards and wardrobes give way to built in storage. Things fold and unfold, are concealed, appear only when needed. Naturally such innovations are not due to free experiment: for the most part the greater mobility, flexibility and convenience they afford are the result of an involuntary adaptation to a shortage of space... Acute as always, Baudrillard is not seduced by Modernism and its aesthetic justification of minimisation but recognises at once the managerial and functional demands on space of which its aesthetic treatment by Modernism is a secondary characteristic. The determinist approach of the Moderns has been consistently to foreground their aesthetic actions as the first and prime cause in the development of ‘ideal’ or idealised space standards thus imparting both to the reduction in ornament of the bounding surfaces and to the reduction in the actual volumes contained, an aesthetic/moral imperative. Melhuish and Baudrillard, in support of their various arguments, raise Modernism and its ideologies and theories. But what were they? We have, most of us, grown up with them almost as we grew up with our mother’s love and, no doubt, fondly imagine we have total recall. I make no apology for a bit of memory-jogging. "A house is a machine for living in!" declaimed Le Corbusier in 1923, continuing, by way of amplification, "baths, sun, hot-water, cold-water, warmth at will, conservation of food, hygiene, beauty in the sense of good proportion." A stripped down specification entirely suited to those "men – intelligent, cold and calm" that he felt were "needed to build the house and lay out the town." That his programme would require a societal change, Le Corbusier had no doubts: If we eliminate from our hearts and minds all dead concepts in regard to the houses and look at the questions from a critical and objective point of view, we shall arrive at the "House-Machine," the mass-production house, healthy (and morally so too) and beautiful in the same way that the working tools and instruments which accompany our existence are beautiful. Beautiful also with all the animation that the artist’s sensibility can add to severe and pure functioning elements. And so houses were reinforced as housing: what we have come to know in other circumstances as existenzminimum or, pejoratively, panely dûm. Mindful of potential private clients with rather more than an existenzminimum budget, however, the wily old crow had an alternative, more sumptuous if a trifle perverse, set of principles for house design in The Manual of the Dwelling which he hoped "the temperance societies and anti-Malthusians [family planners to you and I]" would distribute to "mothers of families" – such a catalogue of rage, repression and misogyny in those few lines. He insists inter alia: Demand a bathroom looking south, one of the largest rooms in the house or flat, the old drawing room for instance... An adjoining room to be a dressing room... Never undress in your bedroom. It is not a clean thing to do and makes the room horribly untidy... Demand one really large living room instead of a number of small ones... If you can, put the kitchen at the top of the house to avoid smells... Demand that the maid’s room should not be an attic... Take a flat which is one size smaller than what your parents accustomed you to... But what of the dreams of houses? Le Corbusier is concerned, despite his obvious asceticism, that houses should express and intersect with the life lived – and in this he has something in common with Harries – and not become the mere repository of furniture for furniture’s sake. His life, however, which was to become all our lives through his work, is coloured by a personal pathology explored by Charles Jencks. Le Corbusier’s objectification of the house, his obsessive concern with hygiene and his almost schizophrenic need to have everything in its proper place perhaps become more understandable the closer we approach the man. Consequently, he knows that society as a whole - if not Le Corbusier, for he is already convinced and living a segregated bourgeois version of it - must subscribe to the manifesto: We must create the mass-production spirit. The spirit of constructing mass-production houses. The spirit of living in mass-production houses. Such a personal manifesto as expressed in his platonic designs of the 1920s could only have found widespread acceptance with architects throughout the twentieth century as a basis to promulgate mass-production houses where there existed already a persistent line of architectural thinking which associated the simple with the moral with the beautiful. This, however, is precisely where architecture seeks to preserve a pristine, clinical model of connectedness between intention, action and consequence. In The Fate of Art J.M. Bernstein observes of Kant’s critique how naive this model is: Of course, the architectonic goal of [Kant’s] third Critique is, through reference to the supersensible, to engineer a reconciliation or unity of nature and morality, understanding and reason, truth and goodness, through judgement and beauty. Kant’s argument in this regard has convinced no one since the German Romantics. If my argument is correct, then what issues from the experience of beauty is not the recognition of a possible reconciliation of morality and nature in a transcendent beyond, but rather a recognition of their present intractable but contingent separation. What Le Corbusier had clearly demonstrated and codified, in both theory and practice, was that the benefits of the new thinking, seemingly democratic in intent, are not to be equally shared throughout society but that a language and programme of rigorous aesthetic similarity had been created to camouflage actual, substantial difference and a loss of a vigorous ethical sensibility. Today we would possibly understand such a programme in the parallel formation of ‘social inclusion’ where the trappings of a societal commonality are employed to mask the fundamental, long-term and structural economic and opportunity deficits in a large section of that society and in which there is no intention to engage, for that would be to confront real issues. Of course, Adolph Loos had been here before in 1908 where the virtues of aesthetic simplification and standardisation were clearly stated as a social, cultural and moral gain extending through all strata of society without differentiation: the consumers to benefit from the reductivist aesthetic and the producers from reduced working hours in a "less is more", win/win result: ...And if there existed no ornament at all, a condition which might arise in millennia, man would only need to work four instead of eight hours, as the time spent on ornament represents half of today’s working day. Ornament is wasted manpower and therefore wasted health. It has always been like this. But today it also means wasted material, and both mean wasted capital. A statement, which in itself, was a paraphrase of John Ruskin: The idea of self-denial for the sake of posterity, of practicising present economy for the sake of debtors yet unborn, of planting forests that our descendants may live under their shade, or of raising cities for future nations to inhabit, never, I suppose, efficiently takes place among publicly recognised motives of exertion. Yet these are not the less our duties; nor is our part fitly sustained upon the earth, unless the range of our intended and deliberate usefulness include, not only the companions but the successors, of our pilgrimage. The problem for Loos and Ruskin is that craftsmanship is craftsmanship and is time-consuming whether the aesthetic requires metres of dentil moulding or the precise fitting in absolutely flat planes of thin sheets of book-matched marble. Neither option is especially moral other than in the sense of good work well done and neither is especially conservative of natural resources or in expenditure. But this is, as we have seen, a specious argument. I want to be clear: I am not advocating mindless consumerism or the benefits of ornament, simply questioning where the originating reductivist bourgeois philosophies, however they are argued, end up, how they produce such divergent results when applied to mass-housing and why is it that their essentially aesthetic intent remains the basis for architectural criticism today. Dorothy L Sayers’ surprising 1930s rumination on consumerism (surprising, given that it appeared in a popular crime novel), born of her previous employment as an advertising copywriter, begins to touch on the structural inequalities that Le Corbusier’s aesthetic programme sought to disguise: He had never realised the enormous commercial importance of the comparatively poor. Not on the wealthy, who buy what they want when they want it, was the vast superstructure of industry founded and built up, but on those who, aching for a luxury beyond their reach and for a leisure forever denied them, could be bullied or wheedled into spending their hardly won shillings on whatever might give them, if only for a moment, a leisured and luxurious illusion. Phantasmagoria – a city of dreaded day, of crude shapes and colours piled Babel-like in a heaven of cobalt and rocking over a void of bankruptcy – a Cloud Cuckooland, peopled by pitiful ghosts... Baudrillard has much the same message: ...there are no limits to consumption. If consumption was indeed what it is naively assumed to be, namely a process of absorption or devouring, a saturation point would inevitably be reached. If consumption were indeed tied to the realm of needs, some sort of progress towards satisfaction would presumably occur... Its dynamism derives from the ever-disappointed project now implicit in objects... Consumption is irrepressible, in the last reckoning, because it is founded upon a lack. It could be objected that Le Corbusier’s seemingly anodyne strictures on what to possess – "buy only practical furniture and never buy decorative "pieces"... [p]ut only a few pictures on your walls and none but the good ones" – which he got from William Morris – "have nothing in your house that you know to be neither useful nor beautiful" – are no more than common-sense, without political or societal value, or if they have value, it is one whereby the apparent simplicity has acquired those moral, even pious, attributes we have observed earlier. If we review Sayer’s or Baudrillard’s descriptions, however, we can begin to understand how such a standpoint as Le Corbusier’s could touch only the smallest percentage of the population. The house for that group within society is now an aesthetic stage-set and its ethical function, beyond that of a kind of consumerist monasticism, has been confined to cupboards or the attic leaving the arena of occupation bare both literally and figuratively. Bernstein observes in this connection: The path from Van Gogh traces the disappearance of substance from art, while the development of abstraction (into the aptly named ‘minimalism’ that, at worst, conflates materiality with sensuousness, and at best uses materiality as a reminder of a loss of sensuousness) traces an increasing loss of sensuousness. The banishment of the ethical function and a loss of sensuousness is matched in the decline of what is in effect the philosophical basis of a lifestyle of aestheticism: a decline already noted by Bernstein but strangely unrecorded, even today, in architectural philosophy. It was the late nineteenth century aesthetes, inspired by Morris, who appropriated from the early nineteenth century German painters, the Nazerenes, and in particular their brother-poet, Philip-Otto Runge, the concept of gesamtkunstwerk. Runge’s notion, however, of architecture, painting, music and poetry joined in one glorious artistic experience was simply downgraded by the Arts and Crafts movement to a regime of design consistency – architecture to teaspoons – which, a century later, can be bought at IKEA. In a brief 80 years our domestic archetype has gone from a machine to a warehouse. Is it then the case that our dreams of houses are destined to evaporate in the cold light of day? One of the other components of Modernism, though not one acknowledged by Le Corbusier, was the Japanese house. In contrast to the aridity of Le Corbusier’s self-denying ordinances the Japanese house seemed to represent a softer model, redolent with the earth-magic of natural materials and the philosophies of Zen and Shinto and providing a link to the ‘organic’ component of Modernism: Frank Lloyd Wright and second-generation Moderns such as Aalto or Scarpa. Again we may have been misled. Chris Fawcett is at pains to clarify, in The New Japanese House, what we have been looking at: [Peter Smithson’s] comments typify the stock images of Japan and its buildings that the Western architect has long nourished: ‘Temple, ‘House’, ‘Garden’, ‘Castle’, ‘Ise’, ‘Katsura’... But these stereotypes are in fact a bunch of isolates wilfully grabbed from the authentic Japanese environment... What has made it possible for us to mistake this hotch-potch of figments of our Western imagination for the real thing is the deep-rooted misconceptions by which we surround the ‘exotic’. In the chapters ‘House/Home’ and ‘House/Ritual’ Fawcett confronts an altogether messier picture of the Japanese house, one where the abstracted and courtly rituals of the tea ceremony of Western perception have been replaced by the immediate business of family life and the tackiness of some of its representations: the house as museum, storing objects, recording histories, representing change, and the house as temple, celebrating or commemorating births, adulthood, marriages, deaths. This evocation of the house as an altogether more complex and shifting entity – where attention is transferred from a contemplation of largely mute spaces and surfaces and perfect objects to the significance of transient ephemera such as the Christmas decorations that we store and add to year on year; or to the real meaning of collections of objects beyond immediate aesthetic or acquisitive pleasure; or to the laying out of the recently deceased in a formal room; or to the inchoate creation and maintenance of family traditions or private words; or to the holding-on to junk furniture because it is psychologically comforting when it is manifestly not physically comfortable – requires an expansion of those very spaces and surfaces to support these and other non-functional attributes. Fawcett goes further and categorises dwellings as "ritual-affirming" or "ritual-disaffirming". He throws down a challenge: One is entitled to ask that a house should be something other than a fine intellect, which makes us forget. There are tasks more urgent, more pressing, more deserving of our attention than the manipulation of forms in harmonic constellations... But real genius is rarer than the architect fancies, and hangs on a judgement that his age is not qualified to give. The lofty self-adulatory way certain architects go about designing ends up with pompous and tautological parodies, at best eccentrically portentous, at worst mediocrity personified. So here’s the dilemma. Modernist architects own an intellectual baggage of asceticism. It tends to lead them to abstraction where physical objects are to be valued solely for their use or aesthetics and where other meanings, which might be attributed to those objects, are eschewed. In their own work and in their work for willing clients they focus on space and spatial organisation, form and structure, construction and technique, surface and material, colour and tactility with alacrity while becoming evasive, diffident or simply embarrassed at the fecundity that houses must contain. The architect twists and turns and corkscrews through the years, dragged hither and thither on a Cartesian grid from Harries’ ethics to Melhuish’s aesthetics, from Le Corbusier’s mass-production house to his villas, from conflicting architectural ideologies to the demands of the market. Modernist architects may simply have misconstrued their dreams of houses and their alienation from the populace at large, which is their constant complaint, a reflection of that misconstruing. As Harries points out: It is therefore not surprising that... architectural modernists should have found domestic architecture an especially challenging problem: houses are more than complicated machines. Dwelling does not just mean being sheltered.
Roger Emmerson Views expressed on this page are those of the writer and are not necessarily shared by those involved in INTBAU. Click here to go back to the index of essays.
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