BOOK REVIEW
The Case for Contingency
by Michael J Casey
L ess is more.
Less is a bore.
Mess is the law.
Jeremy Till opens his book ARCHITECTURE
DEPENDS (MIT Press, $24.95) with a personal the-
sis that derives from two opposing dogmas of 20th
century architects Mies Van Der Rohe and Robert
Venturi. This trio of outlandish doctrines sets the
tone for Till’s humorous and deeply intellectual
dressing down of some prolific and egomaniacal ar-
chitects, and summarizes the main premise of his
book: Despite an architect’s highfalutin claims of pu-
rity or autonomy, architecture is inherently contin-
gent upon context, and will be unavoidably affected
by forces completely outside the designer’s control. A
seraphic vision of pristine volumes and whitewashed
walls will always be brought back down to earth
by the realities of dust, dirt, and inevitable decay.
Critique of established ways of thinking is nothing
new to architectural literature. Robert Venturi’s dec-
laration that “less is a bore” was a tongue-in-cheek
play on Mies’ minimal, functionalist approach to
architecture. Venturi was cleverly voicing his dis-
content with the tired state of modern architecture
in the 1970s and 80s. By then, what had once been
a noble attempt at capturing the zeitgeist of a new
post-war culture had become just another style.
Just as the post-modernist Venturi hijacked
modernist Mies’ credo and retooled it to his own
counter ideology, Jeremy Till declares his own
canon by thoughtfully laying out a case for the in-
herent contingency of architecture. Till’s main
premise: the reality that any building will be sub-
ject to “uncontrollable circumstances: users,
time, weather, historians, and new technologies”.
Using a disarming sense of humor to skewer no
less than Mies, Le Corbusier, and Vitruvius, Till
challenges the puritanical philosophies and exclu-
sive attitude of established forebears in his own field.
He convincingly debunks their revered ideas by
emphasizing that even the best laid plans can never
take into account the whole future of events that lie
ahead of a completed building project, striking a
populist tone by challenging what he sees as “clear
lines between us architects and them unwashed”.
An architecture that anticipates and embraces
uncertainty is what Till calls ‘lo-fi’ architecture. Cit-
ing musician Elvis Costello as his inspiration for the
term, he reminisces on a radio interview in which
Costello explained that during a recording session
he has sound engineers play back his music over
a cheap radio, in order that he may “hear how it
sounds in real life...over the noise of a breakfast table”.
 BOOK REVIEW
The analogy between recording popu-
lar music and the contemporary architectural
process is direct. Just as musicians are cut off from the
rest of the world in a recording studio, manipulating
their voices and instruments until a song has been
perfected for distribution, architects hole themselves
up in studios, “creating hi-fi architecture on high end
equipment, dreaming of that perfected delivery in the
polished aura of blue skies and happy people”. Those
polished visions are an idealized fantasy. No matter
how many hours you spend in front of your Mac,
rendering a perspective shot to stunningly realistic
qualities, the built iteration of your design will never
truly resemble that flawlessly presented depiction.
Till is criticizing the elitist tendencies of highly ed-
ucated and admired architects who see their build-
ings as purely autonomous or worse, as expressions
of their own artistic vision. He mocks architects who
design based on idealized images of what the building
will look like and cater to specialized and exclusive
categories of users, arguing that those in the business
of dreaming up beautiful objects often fail to consid-
er the “ethical consequences of one’s action toward
that object or person”. A candid referral to Frank
Gehry’s seminal, tourist drawing Guggenheim Mu-
seum in Bilbao, with its abstract bulges and undulat-
ing titanium masses, drives Till’s critical point home.
Despite architecture’s importance to social and
civic discourse, its sheer pervasiveness has created
a condition where buildings are mere objects that
“when placed into a wider chain of exchanges, be-
come primarily a commodity of capital exchange
rather than a crucible of social exchange”. This cri-
tique of the monetary bottom line that drives much
design work will resonate with anyone who has dealt
with the sobering realities of “value engineering”, a
process that tends to limit an architect’s more grandi-
ose ambitions. The substantial monetary investments
required for commercial and institutional building
construction can put a choke hold on architects who
think beyond the immediate needs of the client and
dare to philosophize over a building’s deeper meaning
as a part of unpredictable urban and social contexts.
Interspersed with a cerebral and thoroughly re-
searched prose that conceptualizes his philosophies,
Till repeatedly digresses to humorous personal
anecdotes of life as both a student and practitio-
ner of architecture. These punch lines strengthen
Till’s proletarian appeal and invite readers who
may be daunted by the acutely intellectual compo-
sition of his manifesto to continue reading, if only
for another laugh. Although his dense language
and frequent references to architects known most-
ly within the design field might leave some read-
ers high and dry, Till consistently stresses a level
playing field where you me and everyone who in-
habits a built environment has an effect on it. Ac-
cordingly, his ideas appeal and apply to the masses.
The act of designing buildings for construction and
occupation is dependent upon a set of needs aris-
ing from a group of potential users. Architects are
trained to interpret the demands of their client and
to design a solution that satisfies practical require-
ments while accommodating a specific program of
needs. This so-called ‘design process’, starting with a
required program and ending with an occupied
product, reflects a societal condition where ar-
chitects are only seen as responsible for their
buildings up to a certain point. Once the final
touches have been made and the keys have been
handed to the client, the architect’s role is suppos-
edly over. In Till’s reality, this is the point where
the true cause for architecture becomes apparent.
When the users move in and make the space their
own, when something that has traveled from sketch-
es to construction documents to tectonic reality is
now accommodating the messy lives of imperfect
humans, that is when architecture is truly function-
ing in all it’s ‘lo-fi’ modesty. Architecture is not the
accommodation of particular lifestyles, rather it is
the background provided for life to unfold.
Architecture Depends by Jeremy Till. Cambridge:
MIT Press, © 2009. 254 pages.