Fragment: Architectural Linguistics I

Architectural reality has always shadowed philosophical reality. In the contemporary moment this means extensive dialogues on intertextuality and context, centred around layers of meaning, interpretations of existing conditions, and a strong desire to draw out and interconnect fragments in a novel and illustrative way. Contemporary architectural discussion on context and systemic deformation and skin/structure relations, and of program and form have all taken the form of a linguistics-based debate.

The idea is that this type of analytic construction of space is privileged because it brings light to an alternate set of information while leaving the first intact. The approach is hybrid, taking creation as an act of drawing out from existing data. This process has obvious implications in the fields of interpretive semiotics and comparative linguistics. Combining and intermingling texts, constructing alternate and subtextual narratives, introducing and accentuating decided ambiguity, and even the concept of translation all have architectonic parallels, and it is along these lines that most avante-garde architectural work is proceeding.

(Or was proceeding, perhaps. The rapid speed of urban development coupled with increasing globalization — rather the increasingly rapid realization of the implications of globalization as a fact — have called into question some ideological and methodlogical tenets.)

Mimicry, however, isn't quite enough. To artfully transcribe these ideas of layers and palimpsests we need to be comfortable with them on an architectural (and not just linguistic) level. Pointing to Foucault or Derrida, while certainly fashionable, is hardly justification in itself for any architectonic idea. The architectural reasoning must be carried out in tandem with — that is, side by side with — the philosophical and analytical. The work must be reconstructed, modified, and constantly checked for architectural validity before being applied to the design of a building. This is largely fortunate. First, most of the applicable ideas or theories are architectonically structured (this statement of course begs the question, but that is somewhat besides our main point) and secondly that de- and re-construction keeps these processes alive and vital. If constant examination and re-examination is taken as a serious step to applying the writings of Deleuze or Foucault to architectonic operations then they will be all the stronger in application.

Question: So, why is it that this working methodology has yielded, by and large, works similar or similar enough to be read as producing nothing in nearly two decades?

Answer: Because the operational parameters are extremely limited. Not only because of the focus on contextuality, but also because the design methodology gravitates around a certain kind of flatness, a certain type of phenomenal transparency which flickers on the surface but only halfway entices.

It's a lot of flash and surface hiding in intertextuality and interplay of dialogues. More often than not the analytic work is undertaken behind a sort of magic curtain (that is, the ARCHITECT) and resolves into nothing more than flat posturing without an accompanying monograph. In other words inacessable, obtuse, elite. Above all, unfortunate.

What's happening now, though, is that the increasingly insane speed of construction is destroying any theoretical framework constructed to facilitate it. It's the phenomenon of the expanding African city but in a methodological sense. It's not exactly that the rapid pace and demand for construction — coupled with lack of building code or enforcement — results in an uncontrolled and hyper-organic growth (although there is certainly enough of that to go around), it's more that the old and tested methods of dealing with urban space no longer apply. They are worse than antiquated, they are insufficient.

It is a difficult problem. In all likelihood, it spells the death of the architect.