Architecture Of Good Intentions

Colin Rowe displays a witty and inspirational view of today's architectural scene.

Colin Rowe has achieved legendary status as one of a handful ofoutstanding studio teachers of architecture and urban design to emergewithin the last two generations. Colin Rowe has achieved legendary status as one of a handful of outstanding studio teachers of architecture and urban design to emerge within the last two generations. His writings reveal the powerful insight and dispassionate, authoritative intelligence that mark him as one of the preeminent architectural thinkers of this perplexing half century. Divided into three volumes, in more or less chronological order, As I Was Saying includes articles, essays, eulogies, lectures, reviews, and memoranda. Some appeared only in obscure journals, and many are published here for the first time.

The chief focus of the book is on the symbolic and linguistic. The purpose is to develop an integrated theory of architectural description and architectural intention (and this includes the intention of the user as well as that of the designer), insofar as architecture is an art. Norberg-Schulz is a practicing architect; his buildings stand in several countries; and he elucidates the nature of architectural reality with a practiced eye and from a practical viewpoint. Although the methods and theory that his book develops are uncompromisingly rigorous and tightly formed, they are everywhere related to actual building, through specific examples and through the use of over 100 photographs. The structure that Norberg-Schulz has fashioned is surely one of the most impressive intellectual edifices that any architect has ever produced. The materials that are organically worked into it include Gestalt psychology, the mechanics of perception, information theory, modern analytic philosophy, and in particular, linguistic analysis, and the general theory of signs and symbols. The result, however, is not an eclectic hodge-podge; all these materials have their place and purpose; none is applied extraneously for "show" or purely decorative effect. And all this divergent material had to be joined according to plan within formal bounds in order to produce a theory with equally divergent applications: one that can treat not only of the aesthetics of architecture but equally well of its social, psychological, and cultural effects. The chief focus of the book is on the symbolic and linguistic. The purpose is to develop an integrated theory of architectural description and architectural intention (and this includes the intention of the user as well as that of the designer), insofar as architecture is an art.

House and home are words routinely used to describe where and how one lives. This book challenges predominant definitions and argues that domesticity fundamentally satisfies the human need to create and inhabit a defined place in the world. Consequently, house and home have performed numerous cultural and ontological roles, and have been assiduously represented in scripture, literature, art, and philosophy. This book presents how the search for home in an unpredictable world led people to create myths about the origins of architecture, houses for their gods, and house tombs for eternal life. Turning to more recent topics, it discusses how writers often used simple huts as a means to address the essentials of existence; modernist architects envisioned the capacity of house and home to improve society; and the suburban house was positioned as a superior setting for culture and family. Throughout the book, house and home are critically examined to illustrate the perennial role and capacity of architecture to articulate the human condition, position it more meaningfully in the world, and assist in our collective homecoming.

Inspired by the rise of environmental psychology and increasing support for behavioral research after the Second World War, new initiatives at the federal, state, and local levels looked to influence the human psyche through form, or elicit desired behaviors with environmental incentives, implementing what Joy Knoblauch calls “psychological functionalism.” Recruited by federal construction and research programs for institutional reform and expansion—which included hospitals, mental health centers, prisons, and public housing—architects theorized new ways to control behavior and make it more functional by exercising soft power, or power through persuasion, with their designs. In the 1960s –1970s era of anti-institutional sentiment, they hoped to offer an enlightened, palatable, more humane solution to larger social problems related to health, mental health, justice, and security of the population by applying psychological expertise to institutional design. In turn, Knoblauch argues, architects gained new roles as researchers, organizers, and writers while theories of confinement, territory, and surveillance proliferated. The Architecture of Good Behavior explores psychological functionalism as a political tool and the architectural projects funded by a postwar nation in its efforts to govern, exert control over, and ultimately pacify its patients, prisoners, and residents.

In Making Dystopia, distinguished architectural historian James Stevens Curl tells the story of the advent of architectural Modernism in the aftermath of the First World War, its protagonists, and its astonishing, almost global acceptance after 1945. He argues forcefully that the triumph of architectural Modernism in the second half of the twentieth century led to massive destruction, the creation of alien urban landscapes, and a huge waste of resources. Moreover, the coming of Modernism was not an inevitable, seamless evolution, as many have insisted, but a massive, unparalled disruption that demanded a clean slate and the elimination of all ornament, decoration, and choice. Tracing the effects of the Modernist revolution in architecture to the present, Stevens Curl argues that, with each passing year, so-called 'iconic' architecture by supposed 'star' architects has become more and more bizarre, unsettling, and expensive, ignoring established contexts and proving to be stratospherically remote from the aspirations and needs of humanity. In the elite world of contemporary architecture, form increasingly follows finance, and in a society in which the 'haves' have more and more, and the 'have-nots' are ever more marginalized, he warns that contemporary architecture continues to stack up huge potential problems for the future, as housing costs spiral out of control, resources are squandered on architectural bling, and society fractures. This courageous, passionate, deeply researched, and profoundly argued book should be read by everyone concerned with what is around us. Its combative critique of the entire Modernist architectural project and its apologists will be highly controversial to many. But it contains salutary warnings that we ignore at our peril. And it asks awkward questions to which answers are long overdue.

Spanning a period of over half a century, from the early 1940s until his death in 1999, Colin Rowe wrote a multitude of letters to his parents in England and to friends Henry Russell Hitchcock and Ernst Gombrich; to colleagues Stanford Anderson, Robert Maxwell, Michael Spens, Alan Colquhoun, Alvin Boyarsky, John Miller; to architects Louis Kahn and Peter Eisenman; and most intimately and candidly, to his brother, sister-in-law, and nephews in Oxford, England.