Professional Documents
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H A RVA R D D E S I G N M A G A Z I N E
2001 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and The MIT Press. Not to be reproduced without the permission of the publisher
Conflicting Values
Conflicting Values
and finance again in ours. What has
changed is the national will to direct
attention, labor, and resources to architecture specifically and the built environment generally, be it through
markets or governments. And one reason for this change has been the relinquishment by architects of their
roleindeed dutyin upholding standards and modes of discourses about
design that ordinary people can understand and that produce buildings that
people want to live and work in for
reasons other than the fact that they
are new.
multifarious and easy to misunderstand as natures real complexity, functionalism helped eliminate all aspects
of architecture for which a robust
health-and-safety or cost-saving rationale could not be mustered and
forced across the desk of an impassive
banker.
I am certainly not the first to decry
functionalism. The Postmodern
H A RVA R D D E S I G N M A G A Z I N E
2001 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and The MIT Press. Not to be reproduced without the permission of the publisher
H A RVA R D D E S I G N M A G A Z I N E
read.
Computerization is not a style, of
course, but it is a new way of conceiving buildings, and almost imperceptibly it leads architects to make value
judgments they might not otherwise
make. This happens even asindeed
precisely becausearchitects protest
that CAD is just a new drafting tool
enabling them to offer better service. To their credit, the architects
mentioned above use the computer to
permit greater complexity of form and
depth of design exploration as well as
to attempt greater precision and ambition in construction.5 But the computer is not being used so skillfully by the
majority of architects responsible for
what you see on the drive to the mall.
The computer is being used as conventionally used in business: to increase productivity, i.e., to stimulate
more output per unit of labor input. A
building that ten years ago would have
taken ten draftsmen one year to draw,
might now take three draftsmen eight
months to draw. Once digitized, details from old projects can be seamlessly incorporated into new projects.6
2001 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and The MIT Press. Not to be reproduced without the permission of the publisher
Conflicting Values
H A RVA R D D E S I G N M A G A Z I N E
2001 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and The MIT Press. Not to be reproduced without the permission of the publisher
Conflicting Values
H A RVA R D D E S I G N M A G A Z I N E
2001 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and The MIT Press. Not to be reproduced without the permission of the publisher
Conflicting Values
Conflicting Values
and others.
meets with Sullivan), whence it returns to Europe with Loos and combines (in the mind of
young Le Corbusier, for one, who meets with
Loos on the latters return) with the teachings
of English socialist William Morris as filtered
and transformed by critics Herman Muthesius
and Karl Scheffler, who were influential in the
prewar Werkbund in Germany (actually founded by Muthesius) and who followed closely the
ers at school. This is not a call for empiricism per se. This is not about creating a body of architectural
knowledge. This is about raising a
submerged Atlantis of architectural
sensibility, a realm of facts and insights
that can support popular connoisseurship of the qualities of buildings equal
to that devoted to the valuation of music, cars, and movies. To take this material seriously, technically and
poetically, will help us to make a powerful case that architecture matters at
all, and can produce genuine effects
that people will notice, appreciate,
measure, value, and ultimately demand.
So begins but does not end a list of
projects to accomplish architectures
revaluation. If you have been persuaded that work on them must start, then
the mission of this article has been
achieved.
Notes
ances).
H A RVA R D D E S I G N M A G A Z I N E
WINTER/SPRING 1999