Draft of Lecture, Musashino Art University, Tokyo Peter Lynch 21 October 1998 What is the purpose of architecture? What is it, as architects, we're "supposed to do"? I think that this question is urgently felt now, because architecture, like all aspects of culture, is under pressure of instrumentalization. There is pressure for architecture to justify itself, to be of service to production-- either directly, that is functionally, or indirectly, as entertainment or propaganda. I think we need to frame a definition of architecture at this moment, to see if its instrumentalization is implicit or possible, or if that would contradict its fundamental nature. One note: our definition, to be valid, doesn't need to conform to past definitions; Vitruvius or Corb wouldn't have to agree. But our definition should accommodate, in a revealing way, the built testimony of architecture. Otherwise we run the risk of speaking at cross-purposes, or of cutting off a collective body of practical knowledge. At this point in history, we know that the traditional role and training of the architect is not required to produce shelter, neither for humans nor for technical programs. But while the functional definition of architecture recedes, the idea of "representation" gains importance; namely the idea that a work of architecture is a representation of personal, social or class values superimposed upon a programmatic vector. But representation is always in service of ideology-- and isn't ideological persuasion just another kind of function? I think that the focus upon representation, which characterizes architectural theory and education in the United States, is potentially a very reactionary force. I would like to find yet another way to understand how our work carries meaning. In a non-representational way, a work of architecture can manifest "what is the case" and contain, within it, what has never been before. It can spring from the status quo and exemplify a capacity for change, as action does in the political sphere. "Action" is the speech or deed of one person which is heard or seen, understood, changed and perpetuated by others. "To act, in its most general sense, means to take initiative, to begin, to set something into motion," in the words of Hannah Arendt. Action in this sense is less predictable than a process (say a chemical reaction), less self-sufficient than an act of force or violence. It is an expression of freedom, as Arendt says in The Human Condition: "the fact that man is capable of action means that the unexpected can be expected from him, that he is able to perform what is infinitely improbable." Because it takes place "among men in plural," action requires a "space of appearance"; not simply a physical space where action is remembered. I would propose, as others, like Alberto Perez-Gomez, have, that architecture is one way of forming this space of appearance. This definition proposes that architecture serves those aspects of life that are open-ended; discourse and debate, chance encounters, collective manifestations, shared attention, conversation, mediation, and so on. These aspects may have no instrumental function. To frame a definition of architecture this way, and to consider instrumentalization as the most serious problem facing architecture, is nothing new. Lou Kahn, for one, was very articulate about these things. For example, he says: "The architect's job, in my opinion, is to find ways that the availabilities that are not yet here can have spaces, and those that are here already can have better environments for their maturing into that which talks to you. The spaces that you make must be the seat of a certain offering of a person to the next person. It is not an operational thing; you can leave that to the builders and the operators. Already they are building eighty-five percent of the architecture, so give them another five percent. Take only ten percent, or five percent, and be really an architect, not a professional. The professional will bury you." (quoted in What Will Be has Always Been, ed. Richard Saul Wurman) Well, how does one do this? I marvel at Kahn's sketches-- I ask myself, why did he shift the marks from one sketch to the next, what was he thinking, why was this configuration better and that less good? The working-out of architecture is somehow this process of arranging, locating, shaping, and so on. This is literally what the architect does every day. Architecture is a practice of ordering--through physical acts such as arranging, shaping, locating and so on-- to form a setting for life, or more explicitly, to form a space for human action. "Ordering" in this sense is not absolute, perfect, immutable; it may be contingent or open-ended, just as the figures and spaces in Kahn's sketches restlessly jockey against one another. On one side is "life" in all the instability of its days and forms; and on the other side are these "acts" of arranging, placing, and so on. What this lecture must confirm, finally, is how these two sides speak to one another. This way to frame an essential question about architecture is too general to belong to one person. A number of speakers in our lecture series on the history of architectural thought-- Guido Zuliani, Kent Kleinman, Chris Bardt, and Elizabeth English, to name a few-- presented related thoughts, based on their historical research. And I think that much self-directed student work in the Cranbrook Architecture Department is now exploring similar ground. Of course, I'd like to encourage this, by posing related initial questions to the first-year students in their first semester of study. In this lecture I'd like to answer that question for myself. First I offer to show you a few examples of my architectural work. Then I'll review them in light of our last question: in our society, how does (or how might) the practice of architecture, in its specific acts of ordering, locating, and so on, form a space for human action? (examples of work) I've offered you a number of examples of my work. We should now return to the question I asked, and see in what way they may shed some light on it. How does architecture hold together its two different preoccupations? One preoccupation is with the deliberate and silent practices of placing, gathering, arranging, locating, and ordering, applied to spaces and elements. This is, in part, the craft dimension of architecture-- what can be taught and what can be learned from existing works. The other preoccupation is with life, or more precisely, with preparing spaces for human action. How can tasks so specific as stacking etc. be in the service of something so general? By the way, how can one prepare in any precise way for events or actions which are, by nature, unpredictable and open-ended? A superficial answer, a neoclassical answer, is that the relationship between certain uses and certain types of spaces, styles, methods of construction etc. is established arbitrarily, by convention. This places architecture completely in the realm of representation, which I've mentioned to you with distrust. Another answer, phenomenological or even behavioral, would be that certain types of spaces, by their attributes and primal associations, lend themselves implicitly to certain stances and modes of occupation. I think this argument is partially true but difficult to develop. It certainly doesn't do justice to the conscious reflection, the premeditation, that a pursuit like "action" requires. Certainly the link between freedom and physical space is very fragile; it can be inverted in times of fascism, for example. All I can propose is that the connection is made through empathy and intersubjectivity. Empathy is not an arbitrary link; neither is it an automatic or conditioned reflex. I suggest that we understand physical spaces and constructions as offering themselves for life and action, because we can recognize the historical presence of life and action in the preparation and preservation of those spaces and things. We recognize the gradual work of someone's hands, or see that something has been made and remade by different people with different desires. A space allows one to imagine oneself in the place of another, to acknowledge a different experience. The piazza of southern Europe works in this manner; the primary differentiation in a piazza is the groups of individuals standing in the square. An invitation for these gatherings can be inscribed into the plan itself, or in the definition of exterior courts, for which the passer-by becomes the "fourth side." A space may invite us, bodily, to occupy it. Or it may reveal itself after a long intellectual acquaintance -- in which we build up a temporal or sectional understanding of its hidden properties. The architect inscribes the open-endedness of program into plan, section, elevation, and detail. This is the exact job of the architect; this is what he or she is trained to do. This inscription requires practices of design and construction which have duration, which are flexible, which require care and judgment, which can't be formalized. Of course, this aspect of architecture, too, is threatened by mechanization and standardization. For the acts of ordering to have anything to do with life, the order inscribed in the detail, plan, section, and elevation must be commensurate with the order of our life as lived-- that is, without a-priori function, without strict terms of evaluation, without logical self-sufficiency. I think this is the reason that, in my work, aggregation doesn't lead to straight repetition, simple alternation, or randomness. Sometimes there is more than one tendency or force which directs the work-- forces which sometimes contradict and sometimes coincide. Finally, I think this why there must be occasions of surplus, of generosity to an unidentifiable end. If this idea has any merit, then there is at least one important consequence. Architecture is being pressured to justify itself instrumentally. This pressure is exerted by those who commission works, that is, those who establish programs, budgets, schedules, fees, and stylistic constraints. The American suburban landscape demonstrates that all social functions can be addressed in this instrumental way and nominally satisfied. In that landscape there seems to be no architecture, anywhere, just as there is no public space, no intentional setting for collective life or unpredictable action. But the root of architecture is like a fever, a restlessness, which can only be prevented and obstructed with difficulty. The fever expresses itself in a roving desire, which places, gathers, and sets things and spaces in fragile, provisional, ordered, strange relationships. An instrumentally calculated world cannot completely resist this fever, because calculated interest, by definition, only attends to a portion of the landscape-- that portion which can be turned to profit. It leaves the rest neglected and unattended; on these margins the fever can take hold. These acts of ordering, placing, arranging and so on have influence. The open-endedness of their making is inscribed in them; and I think this open-endedness can be understood by anyone who comes upon them, as an invitation to life, as an invitation to action. Architecture is opposed to instrumentalization. There is a place for architecture as long as two stones are left unfastened to the earth.