A spectre is haunting architecture – the spectre of meaninglessness. Voices of architects and critics, teachers and students, patrons and curators have entered into an undeclared, and for some unacknowledged, alliance to silence this heretical whisper that, if spread, is feared to threaten the foundations of the discipline itself. It is an unholy alliance that, though either too humble or too deep in denial to say so, believes itself righteous.
When the spectre of meaninglessness is acknowledged, and battled openly, the alliance marshals the arguments to which defenders of faiths always turn. They point to all that has been said and written (Vitruvius, Alberti, Palladio as well as Plato, Aristotle, and Descartes), to all that is being said and written still (Pallasmaa, Pérez-Gómez, Leatherbarrow, and Benedikt to name but a few), to those who have stopped saying and writing because the truth is well established, and to those who never say or write anything because architectural meaning is simply self-evident. The true believers are smug and fairly quiet. The loudest defenders are the leaders who have glimpsed the spectre and are afraid.
Although roots are exposed in the ideas of William Morris, Adolf Loos, Le Corbusier, Reyner Banham and countless lesser figures, the architectural-meaning-is-a-deep-truth cabal seldom questions the source of their certainty or the basis of their authority. Worse, confronted by seemingly confident leaders, supplicants with doubts are cowed from asking questions, much less becoming heretics. Most refuse to look into dark corners for fear of seeing the shadow and hearing the whisper. While many still glimpse, hear or feel the spectre, they pretend otherwise. It is easier to assume that one is mistaken, that spectres and spirits don’t exist, that almost everything of import has been said and most of it correctly, and that others who acknowledge the spectre are not to be trusted. Most, in other words, hide the spectre from themselves.
Architecture is Fiction 