SLOGANS AND BATTLECRIES

A series of 300 word pieces for Building Design run in 2012. Here are three of them: there are now 50 altogether, and together with two other series, ‘regulations’ and ‘materials’ they have  been collected into a book and published by canalsidepress.com. See Books section on this website http://www.paulshepheard.com/books/slogans-and-battlecries/

03. Firmness Commodity and Delight.

Firmness, Commodity and Delight comes from the seventeenth century aesthete Sir Henry Wotton, translating Palladio, in turn translating Vitruvius, on the essential qualities of good building. The triad is usually taken to mean that a building should be strongly built, be useful and be beautiful. So many questions are begged there that it’s enough to make you scream like a baby! It smacks of the seventeenth century view of the universe as an ordered progression of planets, rather than the fiery tumult of coincidence we now assert it to be.
The trouble is, essential and qualities are themselves outmoded terms. My friend Ben, digital musician, is sceptical. He says: “Firmness Commodity and Delight? Sounds like an ad for a bra.” I spend the next hour trying to spin him a theory of architecture from this unpromising start. Delight is too relative a term to even discuss. And, immediately, it all bogs down. Is firmness about material structure or organisational structure? Or does it refer to the architect’s intention? As for commodity – what a can of worms! Commodity could be a function thing, designed in by the architect to set the building up, or a use thing that arises through time: we all know a building designed as a chocolate factory can be used as an arts centre. Commodity could even be a finance thing. Or maybe a sustainability thing! Or would that fall under firmness?
In the end, though thoroughly tangled up in the material-and-ideal-at-the-same-time character of architectural thinking, we conclude that firmness, commodity and delight might still be useful to the contingency minded times we live in. The trick is to let each term have its multiple meanings and let them twine and intertwine with each other; and look upon firmnesses, commodities and delights as dynamics, not statics.

04. Form Follows Function

Guy the gorilla sits all day in his cage in the zoo waiting. He has been transported out of the agony and the ecstasy of life, in which death will come either sooner or later, into the permanent sanctuary of the cage, where waiting for death is all that life is. Everything about the cage is geared to his captivity. It is a collection of functions, and if form follows function, as airport makes passenger, as hospital makes patient, this prison makes prisoner. It’s like the Minotaur’s labyrinth. It stretches time.
Guy’s boredom is written on his face as clearly as if he were human. And genetically Guy is only fractionally not human. Biological ancestry is held in code in DNA, instructions that the information theory pioneers described as digital. DNA, they said, is form. The bodies that grow from the instructions are analogues, and these they described as functions. Guy’s body is a function of his DNA. But which comes first? Digital or analogue? And why does this sound as if, contrary to modernist cliché, that function follows form?
The question hinges on whether form is an ideal or a physical presence. Form follows function opts for the latter. But do we have to choose? Alongside the Labyrinth that caged the Minotaur was a circular dancing floor on which the conquest of the beast was symbolically evoked. While the labyrinth was entirely made of walls, the dance floor had none. The labyrinth was all function, in this counterpoint, and the dance floor was all form. It released the dancers to function, to perform their dance, and as they did so, the dance itself became form. So the duality is not enough: we could say instead that form follows function follows form follows function follows form. And so on.

06. A Building is to a City as a Brick is to a Wall

This is Dutch. Een gebouw in de stad is als een steen in de muur. After a thousand year struggle with sea levels, the Dutch have developed an acute understanding of physical context and the hand-over-hand labour that goes into constructing it. A Building is to a City as a Brick is to a Wall depends on a pragmatic understanding that the city is planned, first, and built according to the plan, second: so if you think that cities are emergent, even organic, happenings, this slogan will not be for you.
“Clay is to a brick as a brick is to a wall as a wall is to a building as a building is to a city,” is Ben’s version. “It’s Aristotle,” he says. “It’s matter and form.” Then Billie shows us an image of bombed Dresden taken the day after, a collection of gaunt crags, jagged and tottering, that seems to belie the morphological basis of brick construction as an analogy for anything. She starts saying “A brick is to a pile of rubble as a pile of rubble is…” but we stop her. We think the formal sequitur might as well end with the brick itself. There is a modest beauty in putting one brick on top of another until something big is achieved; no wonder bricks have become the repository of an alternative wisdom against the icon.
But Billie won’t stop. “Have you seen a tub of Lego lately?” She says. “Rectiliniarity in Legoland is over. Every single piece is a special, like a component. A component is to a machine as a machine is to a singularity!” Provoking a discussion about curvaceous iconic buildings persisting because they are the machine age machinic: componential, not material. So what comes next? The brick age or the rubble age?