The Moral
Recent events..patrik-schumacher-facebook have made me dig out this review which I scribbled in 2009 after a lecture in London Corbusier Debate. It is about architects & morality vs. architects &.. uncritical form making.
London disappoints Winy Maas or how I let us
all down.
I am bashing my keyboard because of something I
have failed to say or do. I seem incapable of asking my burning question at
important events. Last night during the course of what was a relevant debate at
the Barbican (possibly even meaningful on a global scale..?) important enough
to attract the erudite Charles Jencks, ‘eternal optimist’ Cameron Sinclair
& Winy Maas (Zaha herself & Fuksas did not make it) of MVRDV I failed
to raise my hand when FAT’s Sean Griffiths made an important mistake, and it
was all downhill from there.
During the course of comments on the ability of
architects take a moral stand, he asserted that to be moral or ethical, is a
privilege-a privilege that can be afforded only by the wealthy and powerful.
However as anyone who has ever had the misfortune to identify with and fight
for a cause knows, this attitude is much of the problem. Simple logic tells us
that this is not true. If it were, it would be possible to simultaneously map
wealth and moral excellence with geography. Ethics is a matter of individual
agency or culture; it is not simply dependent on wealth. In some parts of the
world wealth & moral degeneracy go together.
So then if I am to source a positive outcome
from the event, this brings me back to Winy Maas, despite, Charles Jencks
interesting observations but ultimately cynical view - that ethics in
architecture is never more than the ‘grubby’ business of architects trying to
get work, or, Sean Griffiths concern that we will just start imposing taste
(again). Winy showed projects which often highlight the absurdity of the brief,
critiquing large scale farming or inadequate post-Katrina defences, which
Charles Jencks stated were not architecture but rather perhaps
‘pre-architecture’. If this work is pre-architecture, in it’s commitment to
taking always the widest view and refusing to be limited by small scale
projects into small scale thinking, maybe its time our profession decided to
expand rather than facilitate the diminution of its influence as every fresh
wave of project managers and technicians seems so to do. Winy Maas
version of ethical practice entails insistence on working at the large even
visionary scale. Acceptance of Cameron Sinclair’s AFH worldview (an
organisation based largely now in the US) where meaningless architectural
careers can be made OK by occasional 6 month stints of ‘meaningful’ work in
developing countries, would be worrying.
Charles Jencks repeatedly reminded us that as a
total % of the built environment architects contributions are small. In theory
if we increase our influence by increasing our share of that we can promote
more ethical building & designing. This does not have to be a ‘grubby act’;
it could be a visionary & moral one.
Zaha’s office received severe criticism being
called ‘the Mugabe’ of ethics in the field by Cameron Sinclair. It may be that some
of that criticism, although many of Zaha’s projects are just polemic, could have
been addressed had someone just done ‘the pre-architecture’. For a long time it
has been obvious that developers cannot give sufficient time or money to
context analysis or mapping exercises, some University Project Offices currently
offer this service when solicited by communities themselves, and there are
other mechanisms in the UK
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