Reading Between the Lines
Architecture chases reality. To be precise, architects chase after assurances that their chosen discipline is important to humanity and, to be even more precise, work to ensure that it is recognized as such. Architectural educators, theorists, and practitioners concerned with the discipline’s critical reception or the possibilities of creating buildings of lasting significance spend a lot of time thinking, writing, and otherwise arguing for architecture as a foothold for fulfilling ever more pressing human needs. Architecture is necessary, according to these arguments. Whatever issues humanity faces, architecture is essential to addressing them. With every challenge raised to its veracity and every doubt suffered regarding its meaning, the apologists double-down. Le Corbusier, Carlos Scarpa, and Louis Kahn are often exhumed and dragged in as character witnesses. The resulting testimony is always the same: Architecture is affective and effective and, it should go without saying, real – the most real of all the arts.
This is not to suggest they all agree or to attempt to create a strawman or unified group of straw-people. Apologists’ positions are diffused widely over the field of possible arguments for architecture’s importance, from defenders of subjective experience as the discipline’s primary purpose (the affect camps) to those who dismiss experience in favor of a wide array of performance metrics (the effect people). Experientialists utilize haptic perception of materials, cognition of styles or forms in light, the latest discoveries in neuropsychology, or some combination of these to argue the discipline’s central and innate role in human evolution and our continued existence. The non- or anti-experientialists conceive architecture in similarly divergent ways, from the sustainability technologists fighting climate change[i] to the buildings-as-scaffolds-for-social-justice advocates[ii] to recent proposals that architecture is an essential foundation for all relationships and its value is thus best measured in its success in forging new or deeper connections between people and people, people and buildings, and buildings and other buildings.[iii] Grand ambitions indeed.
None of this sits right. The ambitions are admirable, and it seems correct to imagine that architecture should strive to perform in multiple ways while also fostering memorable, or at least momentarily affective, experiences. Still none of this sits right. To some extent, the problem is architecture (here defined simply as any intentioned building) can’t achieve these grand ambitions. Programs and institutions that fund, run, and/or utilize buildings can strive to make the world better in important ways. The example set by architects, architectural offices and their business practices, schools of architecture and their hiring and admissions policies as well as the degree to which these teach ethics and inculcate empathy are extraordinary agents for change. In short, practices, policies, and people can save the world. Buildings themselves, however, are dumb – and ugly or beautiful, high performing or not, all can be used for evil as easily as for noble ends.
More broadly stated, the problem lies not in the ambitions themselves but in the contradiction between the certainty, the fervor and self-assurance bordering on truthiness with which architecture is asserted as a solution to these basic human problems, a sort of bourgeois socialism on the one hand,[iv] and the unassailable observation, on the other, that architecture is not a basic human need. Physiological and safety needs can be provided by huts, tents, or caves. Stock premanufactured metal buildings accommodate most client functions. Arguably, any recent building whatsoever – deemed good or bad – is a huge advance performatively on most of the history of human dwellings. Architecture is not necessary for our health and safety; buildings, maybe, but not architecture. Nor is architecture necessary for fulfilling interpersonal psychological needs of intimacy or prestige. Those things are provided by human relationships – even if many people misidentify their homes as constituent of status or a sense of self. Freud might call this projection. Or delusion.[v] Charted on Abraham Maslow’s hierarchical pyramid, the self-actualization that drives architects and other artists to create is icing on the civilization cake.[vi] That is not to suggest self-actualization through design isn’t enriching and therefore highly important to individuals, groups, societies and cultures (it is) but to state clearly that it ranks very low in any metric of necessity.
Overestimating the value of one’s chosen profession is a common and forgivable error. It can even be defended as a necessary fiction motivating people toward self-actualization. Its chief drawback is the tendency of misplaced belief in the nature and seriousness of what one does to reduce the power and effectiveness of what one could do.
Everything that follows is an attempt to dispel the grandiose delusions of what architecture is believed to be (a fellow being or a talisman endowed with magical powers to save the world) and recoup the richness of what architecture can be – and, at its best, what it already is. To this end, Architecture is Fiction is presented in three sections similar to a voyage of discovery. “Manifesto Against Truth-Telling and Messiah Complexes” disengages architectural thought from its moorings in philosophies of Being and traditional metrics of goodness and plots an alternate course for meaning-oriented practice toward meaning-orienting buildings. “Fiction and Meaning Ecologically Considered” is the long working part of the voyage – from losing sight of one shore to spotting another – across mostly uncharted seas. During this section, new methods of describing physical experiences rooted in ecological psychology and philosophical approaches to perceptual common knowledge as well as literature and literary theory are developed to replace those of phenomenology, functionalism, and perspectival illusionism that have dominated architecture and architectural education for nearly six decades, a century, and six centuries respectively. “Architecture as Material Fiction” describes the discoveries made possible by the long voyage, reframing conventional tropes of the discipline, and subverting expectations. There, in a new place, we find all that we were afraid of losing flourishing in abundance in a climate more conducive to its growth.
Architecture is Fiction is a voyage. It is also a meditation, or series of meditations with a singular focus: to expound upon the nature and meaning of a discipline I love to uncover what it could do if people would give up some of their ideas of what it is. As a result, it possesses the variability of correspondence accumulated over a very long relationship. There are mixed emotions and the collection is but a fragmentary record of untold complexities that make up the whole. In that sense, there is much left unsaid. Most of the entries are short reflections on isolated aspects of the problem, or a revealing anecdote, comprised of six- to seven- hundred words each. For clarity, these are best read in the order presented. Individual entries have been given titles, however, that work together to form a cohesive, if abbreviated, outline of the argument. A quick read through the Table of Contents conveys the trajectory-in-miniature of the whole and allows the reader to revisit passages in the way someone might reread an old letter – though likely for different reasons.
It is a meditation. Architecture is Fiction is also a manifesto insofar as it is a public declaration of views on a topic of significance. Some words implicit in that last sentence are worth making explicit in the context of the previous statements regarding the tendency to overestimate architecture’s importance. This is a manifesto insofar as it is a public declaration of my views on a topic I believe to be of significance to most people – even if they are not cognizant of the role it plays in their lives.
My views … I attempt to write in the manner in which people think. More accurately, I write in the manner in which I think so that, without the self-conscious veil of academic style or scholarly publishing conventions, it can be read at face value. As a result, the entries contain limited jargon, few traditional academic references, and absolutely no long summaries or reviews of the ideas of others. While I owe an enormous debt to a host of writers and researchers across several fields, the line of thought connecting the fragments that follow is essentially an amalgam – fueled as much by ideas I have disagreed with as those that align with my own – and years of speculation that go back to childhood.
I believe to be … There are few appeals to authority in Architecture is Fiction. The reader will find no quotations from Aristotle in ancient Greek. There are very few quotes from anyone in the following pages, and none in ancient anything. These pages are suffused with the insights and challenges presented by architects such as Steen Eiler Rasmussen, Juhani Pallasmaa, Alberto Pérez-Gómez, and Michael Benedikt as well as non-architects including philosophers Paul Ricoeur, Edward S. Casey, and Gaston Bachelard, novelists Italo Calvino, Marilynne Robinson, and Walker Percy, and, most importantly, perceptual psychologist James J. Gibson. These insights and challenges, however, are presented here in the manner and to the degree that my experiences from nearly two decades as an architectural educator, a previous decade in architectural practice and graduate research on the nature of awe, and a lifetime of being enamored with the character of places have filtered them. The resulting worldview is not expected of others nor does its perspective have to be accepted as true or correct by the reader in order to be useful – oppositional reading is welcome.
To most people … This is an educated guess. Anecdotal evidence for this guess resides in the vast number of non-architects I have known personally or merely overheard who have loved or hated a particular city or street, building or room. Most people, it seems, have strong feelings about some space or other. Everyone I asked, and many people I didn’t but who assumed I’d want to know, preferred to be in some places more than others. And that fact, perhaps more than any other, should both fuel and temper architects’ ambitions and actions.
Even if they are not cognizant of the role it plays in their lives … This is not a re-glorification of architectural omniscience. Architects are not deities or prophets or soothsayers. Non-architects simply shouldn’t be expected to know every condition that makes them love the buildings they love or dislike the ones that leave them cold. It is the architect’s job to intuit and decipher the particularities of each client and project while supporting the broad physiological-, safety-, belonging-, esteem-, and self-actualization- needs of people in general. As I have said to architecture students throughout my career, if you have to tell non-architects what your built work means or explain to them why it is valuable, your work doesn’t carry its own meaning and is valuable only to other architects – and possibly only to you. Architecture is Fiction is therefore written for architects who want to serve others. Architecture can do more. But first we have to give up some of our seriousness and wander away from shores we think we know.
[i] A five-minute web search for sustainable architecture-focused organizations resulted in three dozen entities. No doubt there are many more.
[ii] For instance, “We acknowledge the role of design in creating and perpetuating differential access to basic public services, including housing, green space, education, and health care, to name a few.” ACSA, “Call to Action to Seek a More Equitable Future,” accessed June 2, 2020, https://www.acsa-arch.org/2020/06/03/acsa-statement-addressing-racial-injustice/. Within two days, the Society of Architectural Historians and the US Green Building Council followed suit with similar statements.
[iii] See Michael Benedikt, Architecture Beyond Experience, (San Francisco: Applied Research + Design, 2020).
[iv] It is a bourgeois socialism in Marx and Engels’ use of the term insofar as it represents an honest desire of the privileged to improve the lot of society without risking their own position or role in that society. Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 110-12.
[v] Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, translated by W.D. Robson-Scott, (Mansfield Centre, CT: Martino, 2010, 1928), 54.
[vi] Maslow, A.H. (1943). “A theory of human motivation”. Psychological Review. 50 (4): 370–96.
Jassen Callender
Architect, author, professor and artist, I am concerned with broad relationships between seemingly diverse aspects of making and perceiving architecture and the relation of these to the success of cities. These concerns have prompted my unique path. In the ‘90s and early 2000s, I worked with firms on award-winning projects in the American South. Still an occasional practitioner, I am a member of the American Institute of Architects, the Society of Architectural Historians, the US Green Building Council, and former board member of the Mississippi chapter of the American Institute of Architects. My educational background underscores this range of interests, from undergraduate training in both architecture and philosophy, culminating in a Bachelor of Architecture, to graduate work in painting, sculpture, and art history leading to a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Minnesota. Former Director of the Jackson Community Design Center, today I am Director of the MSU School of Architecture’s 5th Year Program in Jackson, Mississippi, where I teach advanced design studios, Philosophy of Architecture, and advise thesis students. My books Architecture History and Theory in Reverse (2018) and Building Cities to LAST (2022) are available from Routledge.
Architecture is Fiction 