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TIME, SPACE AND ARCHITECTURE
Architect and author Tony Watkins suggests that "strong communities are
built from the bottom up, not the top down" stating that "beyond world
wars and so many other skirmishes since the industrial revolution the
overarching struggle has been between empowering and disempowering the
individual. It is an architectural question."
The fossil record is a valuable portal through which we see into other worlds. In their moment of dying fossils crystallise the time that brought them into being. They teach us about a living history, which left them behind.
The common architectural fossil also allows us to see into other worlds. Buildings make it possible to see both how people lived and what their priorities were. The servants’ quarters speak to those of us who no longer have servants. We see the rituals rather than the spaces. Our generation in contrast will be remembered for kitchens and bathrooms. We celebrate the spaces rather than the rituals.
Sometimes buildings are fossilised by a cataclysmic event such as a volcanic eruption or the collapse of an empire. Sometimes they are fossilised by architects in a desire to give immortality to some heroic architectural moment in their own history. The Farnsworth house. Falling water. Ronchamp as a building rather than a place of pilgrimage. Sometimes they are fossilised by institutions such as the Historic Places Trust to become part of society’s institutional memory. The people have gone, but we remember them through their buildings rather than their stories. They left a mark on the land. Important people fear that they will be forgotten.
Fossils can be more beautiful in death than they once were in life. With the messy accretions of life stripped away we see purity and simplicity. The Parthenon is serene in our world, where democracy is more likely to be an excuse to invade another nation rather than an attempt to give any meaningful power to the people. The remnant vote is but the fossil record of an ideal that has died. Voting is easy, while living with diversity can be very tricky.
Students of architecture study the fossil record. They admire the beauty of death rather than the vigour of life. An Egyptian temple. An Aztec pyramid. Ephesus with the water long since gone. These dead objects of other civilisations set up both expectations and desires. Architects are trained to create dead objects though which our civilisation might be remembered, rather than a living civilisation. Universities fear the maverick.
From student beginnings professional attitudes are born. For architects death becomes a way of life. Architects make no effort to understand medieval theology. It is the cathedral that is important. The fossil for its own sake. An architectural brief is concerned with space, not time, and architecture is judged by giving form to the brief. Architectural magazines glorify fossils. Beautiful objects divorced from life. Objects furnished with everything the discerning and cultured might need in the afterlife. Artfully arranged designer objects, such as we might find in an Egyptian tomb. People, if they appear at all, are objects too. The beautiful fossils decorating the lounge suites of a Schuleman photograph. Time frozen forever.
Planners go further. They see whole cities at gigantic fossils. Time frozen at a moment of their choosing. Perhaps now, or perhaps thirty years time. It matters little, if the city is never allowed to be alive either now or in thirty years. Dead spaces, with thousands of pages of regulations, and even more thousands of inspectors, representing the planner’s fear that life might break out in some unexpected way, at some equally unexpected point. People paralysed by a process concerned with space rather than time. Beneath it all there is underground subversion as people struggle to have a life in spite of the bureaucracy.
Space crystallises a moment of time. Spatial planning is anathema to life. Space-architecture is fossilised architecture. Only time-architecture is alive. Using the last resources of a dying planet to create artificial fossils is a double futility. On the one hand they tell us nothing about life, because they never were alive, and on the other hand it seems rather pointless if there will be no one around to admire the beautiful artificial fossils. Thus we have endless architectural fossil award schemes now, because we are afraid that history might not recognise them.
The awards for the new Waitakere City buildings needed to be given before the paint was dry and the City disappeared. In contrast it was not Le Thoronet that achieved immortality, but rather the Cistercian monks. Architectural tourists tick off their list of ruins, and arrive home none the wiser. We do not need to save ruins because we love building them.
Life walks over the top of plans. “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert…” Real fossils are the rich layering and dynamic story. If we forget our story we forget who we are. Real planning opens up possibilities for what might be. Planners who write the last chapter of their story bring their civilization to an end. The subliminal death wish of planners is as frightening as their inability to read the environmental signs all around them. We plan to catch the last fish. “Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.”
Time-architecture can seem to be very threatening to space-architecture, preferring modesty to arrogance, and gentleness to power. Time-architecture, like time-planning, plants seeds and nurtures them with love. It takes time, but one spring day everyone is amazed when the world is suddenly full of flowers. The garden city seen as architectural form is a fossil. Beyond this subdivisional pattern is the ideal of empowering people to lead their own lives. The garden city was once seen as the architectural answer to the industrial revolution. The garden city was an attitude rather than a plan.
The industrial revolution had taken away personal dignity. The garden city restored it. In a garden city everyone could grow their own vegetables and plant their own fruit trees. Children could play happily in their own back yard. Grandma could grow her favourite roses. There was a shed for building a boat or repairing a car. Skills were passed down from one generation to the next without the need to drive anywhere. This was everyman’s arts and crafts movement.
The garden city also embraced an egalitarian ideal. Everyone had a place in the sun. A beekeeper could climb Everest and go on to build schools and hospitals. Council planners now concentrate power in their own institutional hands. Intensification is just PR spin to justify creating an architectural gulf between rich and poor.
No other city embraced the garden city ideal in the way that Auckland did. Our nation was built on the concept of personal dignity. The classless society. You were limited only by yourself. New Zealanders took it for granted that they could be world leaders in every field of endeavour. The Unitary Plan buries this heritage beneath layers of mud and silt. When a nation forgets to tell its stories Alzheimer’s sets in. One day the fossil record of our once proud nation will be discovered and the question will be asked. Why did it become extinct?
Architects and planners trash the living environment with great abandon. Peter Blake, for example learned about yachting on the hardstand at Bayswater. The Council has now destroyed this hard stand to create what it calls a community space: a grass wasteland with no soul. Strong communities are built from the bottom up, not the top down.
Beyond world wars and so many other skirmishes since the industrial revolution the overarching struggle has been between empowering and disempowering the individual. It is an architectural question.
The Auckland Unitary Plan is fundamentally concerned with cultural and architectural genocide. The end of our story. The death of respect for the individual. Unity is to be achieved through intolerance of difference. The sanitizing and homogenizing of life into bureaucratic mediocrity. The seeming disunity of Mount Eden being unlike St Heliers is deemed to be unacceptable. One is set against the other, with a 1600-page fight to the death in an adversarial legal process yet to come. Villages are out. Everywhere is to be the same, so that nowhere will be anywhere in particular.
Rather than creating the most liveable city in the world the Unitary Plan will turn Auckland into a well-designed corpse. End game. The last architectural hurrah. Poverty for creative individuals and money for lawyers.
Design is not the issue. A corpse might be beautiful, in the sense that Chandigarh, Brasilia or even Canberra, can be seen as beautiful ruins, with architecturally dispossessed citizens eking out an existence, trying to bring concrete to life. Planning needs to begin by getting the process right. Einstein understood that you cannot solve the tawdry slums of Hobson Street by using the same process that produced them.
The Auckland Unitary Plan, once known as the Spatial Plan, begins by forgetting our garden city story. Human dignity is now being destroyed by the corporations. The problem with the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement is not that the price of pharmaceuticals will go up. The problem is the lost of personal sovereignty. Personal sovereignty is an architectural question.
At the very time when we need to empower people we are being presented with a Unitary Plan that disempowers people. The most liveable city in the world is being sold out to the corporations.
Design is not the issue. A corpse might be beautiful, in the sense that Chandigarh, Brasilia or even Canberra, can be seen as beautiful ruins, with architecturally dispossessed citizens eking out an existence, trying to bring concrete to life. Planning needs to begin by getting the process right. Einstein understood that you cannot solve the tawdry slums of Hobson Street by using the same process that produced them.
 Persepolis 29 May 1964
First published in Architecture NZ November/December 2014
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