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Reflecting on writing about architecture: Plummer, Henry (2016) The Experience of Architecture London, Thames and Hudson

I decided to reflect on architecture because it seems the most impossible of ‘subjects’ to talk about. Precisely how do we choose a sample of architectural examples to compare and contrast – indeed is it possible to compare the architecture of affordable housing to palaces or mansions, or institutional buildings (of the state or semi-public sector, such as universities) with commercial or manufacturing utilities. Does the same language apply to each? This is not just a matter of function alone since function will depend on the varying legitimacy of a set of functions for different users that any one building has. Does, for instance, someone who merely looks at a building have the right to  be called a ‘user’ of that building and the building’s capacity to meet the needs related to the use which it serves for them taken into account in any assessment. When we assess a dwelling-place do we assess it merely from the perspective of those that dwell in it? Although the answers to these questions may appear obvious, they kept emerging as problematic as I read and as I enjoyed what this book offers.

What is the meaning of the language, for instance, by which Plummer assesses Paul Rudolph’s residential penthouse attached to his architectural office? This is a moot point, since, although described as residential, it clearly has function of showcasing Rudolph as an architect. Yet how are we to understand the language that Plummer uses to assess this piece of architecture as ‘experience’:

What is the meaning of the language of ‘experience’ he uses here and how it maps itself onto the work done by architecture. The binaries used (openness (discovery) and the closed (enclosure), the graspable and ungraspable, boundaried and unboundaried, freedom and imprisonment (the contradiction of the labyrinth from myth)) have a poetic force but they beg questions. To whom do doors to and within this complex ‘open’, to whom does it represent something ‘free’ and unconditional? The tough answer is probably 'no-one' and the language may be suggestive of a language of illusion – where trompe l’oeil passes into fantasy and / or deception. Because this architecture is experienced primarily by the mediation of ownership – whether realised, imagined or fantasised. Only to an owner is this space readable as ‘limitless vectors of experience’.

Perhaps the situation is less stark when we consider building that house public utility, such as churches, but is it. There seems here something like a transcendental  subject wandering in and ‘experiencing’ space and therefore enabled to asses experience of it as again unlimited by institutionalised function and meanings, like ownership, or protocol – or, in this case liturgical matters that might vary between sections of a building like a cathedral (private chapels for instance own a certain amount of enclosure):

It is not easy to imagine ‘deliberative space’ as a space for any range of ‘actions’ you might freely imagine. To do that other protocols than those in liturgy or even individual credo matter too, such as the restrictions on access to tourists or those unlicensed to wander according to institutional protocols and guidelines (to say nothing of internalised rule-systems). Plummer gives this away when he compares our apperception of action within Noyon cathedral to that imaginatively let loose in viewing Piranesi’s Carceri d’Invenzione (222).

Likewise, in art galleries (about the architecture of which Plummer is most convincing), Plummer may stress successful search for meaning more than is warranted by what art galleries actually do, which is sometimes to shut down access to some meanings as fast as they open up glimpses towards uncovered secrets and unresolved mysteries (see p. 200).This he almost admits in a fine analysis of the use of distorting and reflective glass in the wonderful Glass Pavilion of Toledo Museum (178).

Without denying the beauty and usefulness of this book to art historians and learners, I think you have to be careful of the way in which art is sometimes ripped from even the most obvious contexts. Whilst that seems easily forgivable, since we are free to make of a cemetery what we will, short of not offending mourners by our merest acts of sightseeing and experiencing, regarding the lovely descriptions of Carlo Sarpa’s Brion Cemetery – check out the spooky access portal to the Water Pavilion (108), it may not be elsewhere. The excellent analyses of Frank Lloyd Wright’s work weave the architect’s American dream metaphors (‘shaping space into a “figure of freedom”’ 231), into his own. Yet the structures he talks about surely are about more than ‘’”fundamental realizations of freedom”’ in some transcendental sense. Fallingwaters, that dream house, is about claims to ownership and exclusion of the unprivileged from full experience of just as much as all the public buildings he talks about are also about the construction of boundaries and enclosures of freedom. This is a kind of transcendental depoliticised freedom for Plummer but it is only depoliticised ideologically and psychologically for some transcendental Subject. Let’s see how the meaning of this individual Subject’s ‘freedom’ is articulated. It is to use whatever power they can muster to keep themselves at the centre of things:

This is the American Dream. Freedom to appropriate and defend – like the right to a property or the right to a ‘gun’ – only an enfolding American ideology of the triumph of capital can explain this type of ‘freedom’. In the end it has no more subtlety than the renaming of ‘French fries’ as ‘Freedom Fries’ in the build-up to the first Gulf War.

Plummer is however deeply sincere and grounds his thinking in a mix of good, and some suspect, psychology – wherein Fromm’s work is read as the equivalent of Bettelheim – to defend the role of play (or interplay between the built and the buildings users) in the formulation of architectural plans, so that they in-build the self-determining human subject (69ff). To tell truth he does (in passing) deal with those moments when that play is boundaried by exclusion from a participation (150) he also celebrates. For instances, despite his love of difficult steps in Chapter 1, he acknowledges the experience of people who are physically disabled by suchlike free-play of architecture (161), but it is only one reference to the problems of barriers to experience in architecture and nature. Indeed much of this book’s sensibility in relation to experience (citing Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space) lauds the necessity of secrecy and exclusion as the only means to an experience of freedom. About this paradox or contradiction, he is probably correct. Let’s sing then of: ‘common marginal zones (like) closets and cupboards, their voids concealed but also marked by the handles and outlines of doors’ (162). But remember too that many of these portals maintain, without the need for reason, a ‘KEEP OUT’ notice prominently displayed.

But read this book. It is very rewarding in its introduction to the widest range of what we might mean by architecture. Near its end (267), it also deals with how all this reflects on mass-housing in cities. Could that end promise a new beginning where some of the contradictions about power and freedom are opened up? Let’s see!

All the best

Steve