Stonehenge and the Tree: Pablo Luis González

A glance at so many of the architecture of the 80s and at the social, cultural and economic situation of the decade leaves in the mouth a bitter sense of disappointment because of the perverse and obscene waste of financial and human resources.

I am a firm believer that the decade which just finished will not only go down into history as a decade of squandering the financial, social and cultural resources concerning society, urban life and Architecture; but also and above all as a decade of rape. Rape of social and cultural values, of the livelihood of so many people and last, but not least, of the qualities pertaining urban life and Architecture.

The importance of the Dockland development and of those inner city developments up and down the length of the country do not lie so much in what was erected, but rather in what could have been built in its place, and how, instead of creating the large expanses of tomorrow’s dereliction. The spectacular theatrical qualities of a Canary Wharf or of a Charing Cross development cannot hide the inescapable shallowness and sterility of the Architecture and the poverty of their insertion within the embroidery of London within a self-sustaining social life. The value of the architecture of Stirling, Foster, Rogers, Hopkins, Erskine, Ritchie, and others, resides in the fact that they continued with a tradition of serious and intelligent architectural explorations within, or without, the best tradition of the Modern Movement rather than tinkering with shallow Post-Modern dressings and fashions. The recent announcement of the creation of a course in Architecture at the London School of Economics is also a positive step in this direction. The following notes are meant to be a contribution, however modest, to this approach.

A hiatus exists between the world around us and our perception and understanding of it. The realm of Architecture is constituted by the resolution and bridging of his hiatus. Within this process Architecture becomes fable, and the Architect a ‘raconteur’. Architecture is then re-introduced into the realm of human institutions, where it belongs. The concept of hiatus is located at the very heart of the human condition and, therefore, of Architecture. Architectural history has fundamentally dealt with the series of gaps which characterise the different periods in the evolution of Architecture.

A place is defined by a process of differentiation from its surroundings. Gaps are constantly being formed around us, and these are inscribed into the physical structure of the environment. A work of Architecture has then been created. In this manner the edges become critical for the understanding of Architecture, as they become the interface between the world around us and the world within us. Architectural history is, therefore, mostly a history of edges, of boundaries, of borders. The core of architectural design is constituted by edge making. Place making is about edge making. Hence the importance of the wall.

The nature of the wall is defined by a paradox: as for it to be able to work it must first be created, then subverted. We realize that a wall is a wall not only because we are able to cross it, but also because the realities of the worlds on both sides are different. A ’here’ on this side of the wall is defined in relation to a ‘there’ on the other side. ‘We’ are because the ‘others’ are.

From this point of view, architecture deals with a process of territorialization, of socially structuring the environment. Therefore the understanding of the process of edge making is crucial to Architecture. A territory appropriated by a cultural group can only be defined in relation to the hinterland where is located and, therefore, in relation to other groups’ territories. This process consequently leads to the de-territorialization of territoriality and to the subversion of the wall, of the boundary, of the edge.

The qualities of permeability and perforability present in the wall can be enhanced or denied by manipulating the edges in a manner which would permit exchanges between the inside and the outside to unfold whilst both realms, within and without, conserve their own distinctive identities. This process is essential for designing within the contemporary urban conglomerates, where a multi-racial and multi-cultural social content is becoming more and more the norm.

This approach may be explored architecturally by working on the edges in manners which would be leading to an inter-penetration of elements in planes which may be correlative with their human and cultural contents, but not exactly and necessarily corresponding with them. The result springing from this shift would be the formation of independent, but interacting, spaces, planes and elements conducing to the generation of a-systematic architectural structures with the resulting human exchanges unfolding between and within the territories contained by and within them.

Permeability and transparency are the qualities which define this Architecture. Cellular organisations exist because there is permeability between the different cellular units interacting, re-shaping, transforming and adjusting each other. This is a transactional process. Such a process requires a base field to evolve and to happen. Deleuze’s and Guattari’s concept of rhizome become a useful tool to describe such a field. Such as the idea of kaos, the universe onto which the universe exists.

Metaphorically, and with the objective of re-stating principles, this condition of Architecture can be defined as Stonehenge and the Tree. Stonehenge is permeability and movement, extension and transparency. It tells a story of ‘they’ and ‘there’, of strange people and foreign lands, and of lovers. The Tree is closeness and a single entity. It is re-assuring as it is home. It tells a story of ‘we’ and ‘here’, of what we know and of what we have always known, of father and mother.