Dr. Z's Insight Into the Meaning Of Architecture

Architecture Starts As Decoration

I was having a conversation with Dr. Z for whom I am doing some work for the next couple of months. The conversation took an interesting turn so I thought I'd write down what I remember of it.

A long time ago, Dr. Z was an architecture student at the University of Sydney - that's where we met.  I was skiving off from lectures at the Med faculty to hang with my old school friend GraGra, and Dr. Z happened to be one of his class mates. At the time, she was struggling mightily with the course because in her own words, the principles of design being preached and the practical application were far from complementary. Thus, as a student, she "struggled mightily" to reconcile the theory, the critiques and the taught practice. Eventually she found herself moving further upstream to understanding the concept of why we even plan cities, and what urban spaces are and how they work; and that's where she ended up with her doctorate, but in the beginning was the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Sydney.

Clearly, the early experience left their scars as well as lasting problematics that she has been pondering about over the years. After years of working in the urban dynamics area and still doing her thinking and reading on architecture, she has hit upon an answer to the age old question that has been bugging her since her days as an undergraduate, "what is the point of architecture?"

And really, she says architecture is the claiming of the right to decorate structures.
So what follows below is a quick retelling of what she told me; but I'm writing it down because it offers some interesting ideas.

In its most primitive instances, decoration, is how architecture begins. In fact, judging from the caves of Lascaux, decoration seems to pre-date our ability to plan, erect and decorate buildings. Every public building built in the ancient world is a representation of that society's ideological framework. If it is the ancient Egyptians, it is built around death and religion. In ancient Greece this was their Pantheon of Gods. The Romans equally built temples, but also public buildings for government, which were adorned with symbols of Roman power.

The point is, in most instances, the powers-that-be got to choose what symbols adorned the building, and the architects made a point of working in those decorations in support of these states. The ability to decide what decorations on the building was the expression of power itself.

Indeed, much of the history of architecture through the ages can be found as the expression of state power, or religious power.  We're interested in common dwellings of the ordinary people from an archaeological or anthropological viewpoint, but architecture is focused on these buildings built by state and religious powers. In turn, most architects in history were faceless servants of the state or religious bodies that sought to build these buildings. This is why we do not know much biographical data about architects of the ancient world. It was much more important that those buildings were built, and that they represented the right values, than who designed them.

All this hit a snag in the late Nineteenth Century with the advent of Art Nouveau. Art Nouveau emphasises ornamentation for its own sake and independent of state power or religious power. People in the burgeoning capitalist world could design their own decorations. Often, we refer to such decorations as kitsch. 'Kitsch' is an important concept here because, what the term does does is it disqualifies the decorations done by people that do not work for the state or for a religious body. The democratisation of artistic expression brings about Art Nouveau - and in turn, this brings about the democratisation of decoration.

Faced with this situation, the rise of Modernism banishes decoration from buildings. This goes hand in hand with modern abstract art, where people and things are no longer depicted with any semblance to reality. Instead the abstraction and abstract art pushes away the decorations giving rise to flat spaces, blank walls, and these spaces become expressly impersonal. The state invests a good deal into Modernism because through Modernism, the state can re-establish its power over the arts. It's a complicated topic at a glance but if you boil things down, the architect, as a hired artist on behalf of the state or the church and more recently the wealthy, can only exercise their skills at the behest of those entities. It is a rare architect who can buck this flow of money. Otherwise, their work is to do the bidding of the money.

This also means that in essence the vast majority of architecture is decorating of sheds, with modernism as an attempt to not decorate at all. The exception to this is Expressionism, whereby large parts of the decoration are given over to the denizens to do for themselves - but this kind of thinking remains largely obscured by the monoliths of Modernism and Classicism.

Dr. Z's great consternation is that because at its core, architecture is merely an extension of the state or the church or the wealthy to play elitist games through choosing the manner of decoration, architects have to be cultural elitists. The bone of contention for Dr. Z back in her architecture student days comes back to the simple fact that all of the course was tacitly supporting a culturally elitist position, denigrating the masses and what people might choose for themselves.

More pointedly, architecture really can be reduced to "decorated sheds" and "ducks". The vast majority of office buildings you see in any city are "decorated sheds", boxes containing functions but with different facades and presentation. Alternatively there are the less functional buildings that advertise their social importance through their appearance, which are "ducks". The Sydney Opera House is a prime example of a duck, where its form - for all its talk - is really not that conducive to it being an actual opera house, but carries with it great social import. In most part, the Modernist architectural dictum of "Form Follows Function" is a utilitarian wet dream, unfounded in the reality of the vast majority of buildings.
So why all the -isms?

All the -isms and the need to know them and to handle them as vernacular of aesthetics itself is actually cultural elitism in action. Thus Dr. Z surmises, architects trained by such institutions are doomed to be cultural elitists with a strong slant towards fascism. In turn, the great intellectual pretension of the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Sydney, is that it is somehow culturally important, but it can't hide its role as purveyors of ugly cultural prejudices. No wonder what they preached and what they taught as practice could not be reconciled, according to Dr. Z.

The flip side of this is giving over the power to decorate, back to the people. The denunciation of 'kitsch' is always done by those who resist the democratisation of taste and aesthetics. The true underlying contempt for 'kitsch' reveals a cultural prejudice that, should people opt to decorate things for themselves, it couldn't possibly be as valid as the decorations and ornamentations chosen by the state/church/wealthy. It totally ignores what the individual wants because the state/church/wealthy seek authority over people. It is by its very nature, imperative that the powerful discredit the democratised aesthetic found in small things.

The real reason why everybody's decorations gets dismissed is because the state (or church or the wealthy) didn't sanction it. To the vested powers, it's just a wildcat attempt at decoration. Such contempt directed at decorations done by people is everywhere. A woman in America decorates her house with medieval trappings imported from Europe. The photos draw comments from the self-appointed taste elite saying she has no taste, even though she exercised every bit of discernment in collecting the medieval fittings. It's deemed bad taste because she is no royalty to be appointing her abode with the trappings of European aristocracy from the middle ages, no matter how accurate and studied her attempts. The very quibbles we might have about taste, is actually a power play to control the extent of decorations. The people who criticise, implicitly understand that decorating one's house like a European castle is an appropriation of decorative authority that used to belong to kings and queens. This is why taste, contains the kind of fascism we see in 'The Devil Wears Prada'. It turns out that Fashion and Fascism really were conjoined twins.

And so Dr. Z sides with Expressionism, where at least the people immediately have a say in the decoration. The participation and contribution made by the people living in a space builds a narrative and thus meaning that is independent of the state, yet fully democratised. It also eliminates the commercial imperatives and lays open the expression of people's genuine aesthetic that is not imposed by the State or the Church or the wealthy.

At her work, Dr. Z has taken to the Expressionist idea of letting the inhabitants of the space decide. A certain wall is painted red, another purple, and another orange and so on. People bring in ornaments and objects with colours to match, and slowly but surely a wall section builds up with a narrative of people participating in the decoration. It is quite the project. Dr. Z laughs and says there is an architecture graduate at the same workplace, who puts it down to Dr. Z's nesting instinct gone awry, but in fact would have all the walls painted white. As a product of the same faculty Dr. Z understands all too well, the architecture graduate is voicing her opinion in support of an imaginary Modernist State, sanctioning her own aesthetics of blank, white walls without any decorations whatsoever.

So the next time you're at a party and an architect goes on about taste, and 'kitsch' and how terrible things are with one building or another, be sure to tell them their tastes built from education at some architecture faculty, is a Statist bit of fascism.