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The death of architecture

Contribution to The Yearbook for the School of Architecture at KTH, 1994

Lars Marcus



The emblem for the School of Architecture in Stockholm is the well-known drawing by Leonardo, depicting a man inscribed in a circle and a square. Leonardo is here illustrating the human proportions according to Vitruvius, whose text on the subject is included on the original. It shows a man, looking at us with a severe and self-assured expression, while the absolute logic of geometry is proving his body fit to be the measurement of the world. What we see is the birth of Man in the spirit of Humanism. Until then God had been the guarantee of order in the world, and Man was left to act according to his Law. With Humanism Man began the venture of writing his own Law, interpreting the world according to his own concepts and his own physical body. In a sense this was also the birth of architecture. Before the renaissance, what Man built, can more or less be regarded as adjustments of nature, given by God. But Humanism created a gap between the world of God and the world of Man, between the real and the artificial, which severed architecture from nature. Leonardo’s has given us a double exposure, showing the birth of Man and the birth of architecture, in one picture.

         But is the severe expression in the man’s face caused by pride, or is it pain. If we take a look at Leonardo’s drawing again, it is very hard to tell if it is Man that is giving shape to the geometric forms, or if these are shaping him; are they describing Man or are they limiting him. Humanism freed Man from ignorance, but freedom had its price. Under the Law of God, Man always knew right from wrong and was well aware of the limits to the role given to him. With Humanism it was Man that had to formulate the Law, to create a new understanding of both the world and himself. In this, architecture was to play an important part, since it was the medium in which Man could give shape to this world of his own. So, Leonardo’s drawing is also showing us the new state in which Humanism put Man; whenever he tried to lay down a rule for himself, or whenever he tried to express who he was, he was also expressing the limits of himself; the borders he could not pass, the rules he could not break. It seems like Man in Leonardo’s picture, while shaping a world to live in, also is building his own prison.

         But Leonardo is also expressing something essential in architecture. Whenever you build you are creating a world according to your will, but at the same time defining the limits of this world. Architecture makes man choose: What world is he going to build? And in choosing to build one world, he is also choosing not to build other worlds. Now, since building through history has been a privilege, the more relevant question is rather: Who's world are we building? Which is a question that formulates the political sense of architecture. Further, the world chosen will also be a representation of our understanding of ourselves as humans; so we can also rephrase the question thus: Who is telling me who I am? We are then formulating a political sense of the self.

         This political sense of Humanism is often forgotten, but since there no longer was a power outside Man that was writing the Law, but Man himself, the world had become thoroughly political. The Law could no longer be considered absolute but relative; always biased by some ideology according to how Man chose to understand the world and himself. Man's way of getting rid of this burden was through inventing a new god, knowledge, or more specifically science. Different ways of accumulating knowledge, natural studies, experiments, rational reasoning, freed man from the responsibilities of the new Law. Through knowledge man also managed to hide the utterly political state of the world, replacing a series of difficult political choices with a set of absolute truths. Truth that earlier was guaranteed by God, was now guaranteed by science. This put knowledge in the powerful position it has kept up to our days.

         As for the relationship between architecture and knowledge, it’s a history not yet written. Yet we know that the spirit of Humanism gave birth to a series of treatises on architecture, as well as an intense study of the rediscovered Vitruvius. These treatises managed to define architecture as a discipline of its own, based on knowledge, and were to shape the rules of architecture for centuries. It’s important to remember how they not only was the fundament for the design of buildings, but also were applied to the scale of cities. This considered, it’s hard not to see the power of knowledge and the political impact of architecture.

         Common to all these treatises was the humanistic ambition of relating architecture to the experience of man and more specifically the body of man, letting it be its measure. But as Leonardo’s drawing shows, this means that architecture also will be measuring man. Living in the man-made world of houses and cities, Man will always be measured or even put to a test by architecture. Architecture becomes the norm which tells Man what he ought to be! It’s not just a matter of the body; architecture is the world in which Man lives, the background to all his experiences, the stage where his life is set! For a long time though, architecture was a rather crude measurer of Man, but the modern era was to refine the technologies thoroughly. The knowledge of the human body, Man’s senses, psychology and needs grew rapidly, forming a powerful force that extensively was to be expressed in architectural form and space. Modern architecture set a political stage that in every detail shaped, measured and tested man. The more man’s knowledge of himself grew, the stronger the prison-walls were built.

         It’s quite obvious that Man today is trying to escape this prison of his own making; the world that left him wit the truth, nothing but the truth. Through disguises, aliases and roleplaying he is searching for freedom again, beyond Humanisms truths of the self. “I am not the one you think I am; I am only what i present as me.” We can see it in the superhumans of Madonna and Michael Jackson, but also in the everyday exercises of jogging and weightlifting, as well as in the different courses in personality improvement, common these days.

         In architecture accordingly, there is a search for buildings and spaces not related to Man, that does not measure the body, stimulate the senses in a preconceived manner or in any other way tries to manipulate. In short an architecture that does not have the ambition to tell me who I am. A post-human architecture. This search leads us to new fields of architecture, like industrial buildings, designed not for humans but rather the production of ships or the refinement of steel. It makes us find cathedrals of non-human space under the bridges of our motorways, dramatic form in high-tech utensils, sensuality in the materials of advanced machinery. It’s the esthetics of an architecture that no longer tries to be architecture, that no longer tries to relate to the experience of Man, that relieves Man from the truth of himself and makes it possible for him to appear according to his choice. We seem to be trying to find a world where you can choose who you want to be, where it is alright to form your life into a piece of art; a world already conceived in the virtual worlds of computers.

         But at the same time, this seem to threaten the well-defined discipline of architecture expressed by humanist minds. Modern technology is reconstructing the world and letting it be born a-new through translation into the modern medium of information. This is in a sense the revival of nature in the form of technology, which like the nature given by God, does not draw a line between artificial and real. It’s a new paradise where Man is to machines what bees are to flowers. The great disciplines of knowledge are swallowed by nature again. On the other hand, it is also the fragmentation of the political to the micro-politics of the network, never to reach a public. But for the time being, we seem relieved; Leonardo's drawing is obsolete, the spell broken, and Man set free from the geometries of knowledge. As for architecture, not able to defend its territories or defining it’s boundaries, what we're witnessing is nothing less than it's death.

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