Fragmentation and Imploding Meaning in Contemporary Architecture

Boris Yeltsin, hissing like a treacherous cat on top of the tin roof of a T-72 tank altered not only the nature of the urban spaces which staged the recent upheavals shaping the Russia of the 21st Century but also highlighted the transient characteristics of contemporary cities; which are no longer characterised by an orderly evolution of a repetitive self-generating geometry, but by the dramatic shifts of a violent juxtaposition of geometries resulting from the collision of conflicting economic cycles and from the diversification of their social and cultural content, a consequence of the magnetic attraction exerted by the urban conglomerates over a culturally, and often economically, impoverished hinterland and the gradual loss of validity of the prescribed values of an elite. Therefore contemporary cities do no longer mirror a monolithic society permeated by the social, ideological and cultural values of its ruling classes.

Chaotic series of spaces and volumes, structures and grids, have been wedged into the order of the traditional city. We are living in the era of the rape of the City. The resulting urban qualities range from an inherent raw lyricism, often manifest in this distorted and often powerful disorder, to the boredom and desolation of an ever extending suburbia and the dereliction of inner cities areas, ghosts from a shining past. Cities are not only built and lived, or unlived, history, but also stages for the unfolding of events which will mould the future, sometimes dramatically, sometimes imperceptibly. The bleak square in front of the White House gained a different value as its singularity was transcended by the sum of particularities which comprised the eight days in August which shocked the world. These events became not only a part of the collective memory of the Russian people, but this memory is specifically attached to a place. The efforts to get through to another day are as much an indelible part of the urban history of Moscow as the August coup. Even the moon has a dark side: Leicester Square is better known as a pool of cheap under age prostitutes than as a constituent of a tier of urban spaces comprising Trafalgar Square and Venturi’s Sainsbury Wing, or as a tourist spot exhibiting film premieres at the Odeon cinema.

The space of the city, the space of Architecture, is not the space of modern Physics. It is not homogenous, continuous, nor undifferentiated. Emphasis, edges, nodes, roughness or smoothness of textures, light, shadow, are words which come to my mind to describe its qualities. There are a ‘there’ and a ‘here’, it can be either ‘ours’ or ‘theirs’. It is never experienced as an abstract construct, but rather as a tier of experiences tinted by our perception, our laughter and our tears. Above all, the values which we attach to it are constantly changing. The repetitive and homogeneous Cartesian grid of Foster’s Standtedt Airport Terminal is indifferent to the modulations which are able to transform a purely physical space into a ‘place’ that we can dwell.

The Modern Movement became a repetition of shapes, a stylistic attempt to legitimize and physically inscribe the institutions of political and economic power in the core of the Architecture of the City. Corporate Modern Architecture became as abstract and banal as the grey men in grey suits with their grey laptops hiding behind grey and anonymous facades. If there is a word which can describe the current situation in the contemporary social, cultural and architectural scene, that word is ‘collapse’. The collapse, at worst, and the disenchantment, at best, of pre-packed ways of interpreting reality. What can describe this situation better than the senseless shelling of historical buildings and the unspeakable atrocities committed in the war torn cities of Croatia, reality and metaphor of this collapse?

Concurrently, architectural meaning imploded, resulting in the collapse of a coherent single system of realisation and interpretation of architecture. Cultural and ideological fragmentation is the defining characteristics of the contemporary cultural and architectural scene, a paradox in this age of the global village. The assumption and addressing of this condition is essential for the understanding of the praxis of Architecture for the last decade of the century. There is certainly a promise of liberation of our minds from the ties of narrow and frozen ideologies administered by taxidermists and affecting both the West and East politically, socially, culturally and architecturally.

The interaction of the architectural work as ‘artefact’, and the Architecture of the City must be located at the beginning of this process of addressing this fragmentation. The assumption and formal interpretation of the diversity of its cultural content is not only a requisite for this process, but it constitutes its very lifeline. The addressing of this condition of fragmentation and imploding meaning should be started by the act of place-shaping to enable the different cultures, either as individuals or groups, to dwell and to dream. The question of architectural style is relevant in so far that it relates the specific architectural work to the ideological layers of Architecture and, therefore, to its social and cultural containers.

Therefore for Architecture to mean in a grey, faceless and culturally reductive epoch it must first ‘be’. It must engage the senses, the imagination and the intellect. An Architecture of non-detailing and an Architecture prescribing values of a bygone era, values which can lo longer be assumed that they represent society as a whole, has to be rejected in favour of an Architecture made possible by the sensuality of forms, materials, textures, spaces, proportions, interplay of light and shadow, and the intrinsic nature and diversity of the grain of the cultural realms embedded in it. Certainly there is no place for the speculative grey Architecture of the corporate Modern Movement or for the banalities of a Poundbury, which would be innocuous but by the implicit aim of being presented as a model for development. The salvation of contemporary architecture lies in the roaring of laughter around a good bottle of red wine, or, perhaps, of sake, in Erskine’s Ark.