Hardwick Hall - Robert Smythson - 1597

High Great Chamber

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Book review: Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation

Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation: The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production

Dalibor Vesely

MIT, 490pp., June 2004

                  To exclude architecture from cultural history would be absurd. But to incorporate architecture, with its peculiar blend of abstraction, fantasy and pragmatism, into a history of culture is problematic. When they are not practical or clear, the intentions of architects are difficult to accurately comprehend. In Dalibor Vesely’s opinion the problem is that the architect has become a spectator in culture. The dominance of science and technology has caused alienation by denying humans a truthful experience of the world. One example is the authority of abstract systems – railways, canals, ring roads, etc. - in the cultural context of a city. Architecture, in its communicative role, is the most important form of representation. Here representation is defined as our involvement and understanding of the world. Vesely’s intention is that architecture can recuperate culture and human existence.

What we now understand as science originated from the codification of perspectiva artificialis in the fifteenth century. Medieval optics, perspectiva naturalis, understood how space was structured by light before it is formed geometrically. This transition from space shaped by natural phenomena to abstract, idealized rules changed architecture and the relationship between the self and the world. The history of perspective as Edwin Panofsky noted is “a triumph of the distancing and objectifying sense of the real”.

Vesely describes the human relationship to space through experiments by Paul Schilder where the body is denied the visual experience of space. These experiments addressed the discontinuity between the visual and other fields of perception. The situated human body is revealed as the basis of spatial reference. From this, Vesely considers a staircase. Fundamentally it is for moving from one level of a building to another. Whilst it serves a clear purpose, it contains a series of relationships that are not always visible. Whether the staircase is in an office or a museum it has a certain character. As participants in culture, we have in mind precise relationships between the space, the light, the size and the material of the staircase. Its true nature is only partially revealed by visual appearance as the stair contains a series of references to social and cultural life. Identity and truth are rooted in the habits, customs and rituals of culture. At a recent seminar, Vesely reduced this line of thought to: “You are not creating, instead you are discovering and articulating the latent world”.

This is not an easy book to read. The reader's discomfort is mostly to do with the scope and depth of the author's argument. What he does successfully is explore the relationship and relevancy of philosophy and design. However, Vesely's writing does not flow smoothly. He and his intellectual contemporary Joseph Rykwert share the distinction of being both brilliant and testing writers. Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation would be easier to follow if it were stripped down to the bare structure, but it would also lose much of its value. Illustrations and photographs enliven the text. Some of these images are of his students’ work: he taught a design studio first at the Architectural Association and then at the University of Cambridge. Certain reviews of the book neglect the fact that he also taught an MPhil course at Cambridge for twenty years. This book summarizes that course. Magnum Opus is a ghastly term. Despite this it seems the only suitable way to describe the book: it took him thirty years of teaching and research to write it.

However, what has been the impact of the book eight years on? The Department of Architecture at the University of Cambridge lies in ruin without a diploma course: the heart of any civilized school of architecture. Any similar diploma, now taught by his ex-students, is relegated successfully to former polytechnic universities. Arguably, in intellectual terms, there is no equivalent MPhil course in the UK.

Understandably, as Robin Middleton points out, this book 'stirs apprehension, a deep unease', and as a result has not become a contemporary lodestar. Instead current architecture theory raises the little finger to pseudo-Marxism, localism or a war between stylistic preferences. Few acknowledge the problem of representation. Instead the rise of the Townscape Consultant and accurate computer generated imagery leads many to believe that this is no longer a problem. We remain in the situation that Vesely described eight years ago:

“The rather narrow contemporary vision of architecture as a discipline that can be treated as an instrument, or as a commodity, is the result of a transformation in which the broadly oriented art of building became a separate profession, judged mostly by the criteria of technical disciplines.”

M. J. Wells

August 2012

791 Words

Queens College, Oxford

Queens College, Oxford.
Frontage by Hawksmoor. Other parts are 18th Century.