Towards a Congruent Architecture

Essay by Daniel Rosbottom

This essay was the introduction to a keynote lecture Distant Relatives, on the work of
DRDH, for the 2011 Antwerp Design Seminars and Lectures (ADSL) conference, which
engaged with the theme of Congruence. The conference was hosted by the Artesis
Hogeschool Antwerpen, Belgium
7 February 2011

Contemporary architecture is often incongruous. For some architects this dislocation is a

necessary consequence of prevailing cultural conditions. For others it is expressive of an
overriding individual creativity. In large measure though it seems the resultant condition of
an ungrounded architecture, consumed by complexities of programme and an increasingly
universal and globally regulated infrastructure of building procurement.
The critic Alan Colquhoun has noted that given the world wide and almost instantaneous
dissemination of technologies and codes, which results in an underlying similarity of all
Western and most Eastern countries at any one moment modern post industrial culture is
more uniform than traditional cultures, because the means of production and dissemination
are standardised and ubiquitous. (Colquhoun, Regionalism 1)
With that thought in mind, it is perhaps imprecise to suggest that the architecture that
results from such conditions is ungrounded. It is rather that the ground that has been
prepared for it is the leveled, graded resultant of the earthmover - an abstract, universal
space of optimised production, rather than a particular place, in which to dwell.
Such universalising tendencies might be understood as a logical outcome of what Kenneth
Frampton has described (Frampton, Towards a Critical Regionalism) as civilisations focus
upon instrumental reason, since the period of the Enlightenment. For architecture, this
ideological trajectory, which has, in large measure, resulted in the abstraction and reduction
of the building to the status of a product, accelerated enormously with the emergence and
subsequent dominance of mainstream modernism, through much of the 20th Century.
For many of the primary protagonists of that movement though, the drive towards technical
and functional determinacy was underpinned by social and moral concerns, within an
essentially humanist discourse. Moving to the present, such concerns have been almost
wholly usurped by the overwhelming economic imperatives of an, at best morally neutral,
globalised market.
In the immediate aftermath of modernisms apparent demise, post-modernitys loudly
proclaimed rediscovery of the rich treasure trove of architectures history, through which it
was to relocate its traditional cultural role - turned out in most cases to be little more than
the robbing of a tomb. History understood as signage, devoid of cultural meaningor, as
Loos said, ornament as crime.
In reality, the underlying conditions were little changed and the reinvention of neoclassicism as kitsch faade, was not much more than a temporary mask for what has since
emerged as an almost entirely technocratic construction industry, largely uninterested
in architectures role in the world, or in the traditions of culture and craft, except where
they can be wholly commodified. The more recent resurgence of what might loosely be
described as a reinvented modernism, but one severed from its ethical root, has made that
schism transparent, often quite literally so.
Adam Caruso, of British practice Caruso St John, has written that mainstream practice has
embraced the rhetoric of the market to make work that is infused with brand recognition.
Strategies of cybernetics, phylogenics, parametrics, mapping each strive to generate
completely original forms, unusual shapes, in plan, in section, sometimes both. These bold
profiles can amplify or even replace corporate logos he says, and he wonders where this
is taking us, given that architecture is practiced at an unprecedented global scale, and the

Copyright 2012
DRDH Architects 4 Northington Street London WC1N 2JG drdh@drdharchitects.co.uk drdharchitects.co.uk

major players seem to be egging each other on. Who will produce the largest, and most
formally outlandish project? he imagines them asking each other, Who will finally say stop?
And yet this desire to establish credibility through the increasingly incredible, an attribute
apparently to be discovered in the endless objectification and reinvention of form and
space, is sharply counterpointed by the sterile anonymity and banality of much of the
contemporary architecture that constitutes our actual, everyday experience. Here,
un-phased by shiny improbability, we are instead confronted by scale-less, place-less,
ubiquitous reality.
We should not forget that this sense of displacement is not simply a result of a buildings
visual presence, but also of the way in which much current architecture engages, or fails
to engage, our other senses. Heidegger suggests that The fundamental event of the
modern age is the conquest of the world as picture. (The age of the world picture, Questions
concerning technology and other essays) As Juhani Pallasmaa and others have pointed out,
it is in part this undue privileging of our visual relationship with architecture that has led us
to an overbearing preoccupation with its image, reducing it from a space of encounter and
reciprocal experience, which situates us in the world, to mere object. For him Modernist
design has housed the intellect and the eye but has left the body and the other senses, as
well as our memories, imaginations and dreams, homeless. (The Eyes of the Skin)
Because technology has allowed us to make everywhere equivalent, everywhere has,
increasingly, become nowhere. The interiors of modern buildings are often hermetic
spaces, held in a kind of technologically induced stasis where, on a deep floor-plate,
permanently illuminated by a plethora of electric light fittings, one breathes filtered,
climatically controlled air, of constant temperature and humidity. Such spaces feel the same,
whether they are in Brussels or Beijing.
Of course, the massive energy consumptions and emissions of such buildings have, in the
last few years, caused increasing alarm, given the scale of imminent environmental change
to which their profligacy contributes. Paradoxically though, both the building codes put in
place to respond to these concerns, and our responses to them as architects and engineers,
largely seem to look for solutions in the problematisation of existing modes of thinking.
Often employing further layers of technology in the form of screens, louvres, double skin
glazed facades and ever higher levels of airtightness and thus further distancing the
relationship between interior and exterior - the body and the world.
Such instrumental, technologically driven strategies might indeed have positive effects in
energy use terms, yet their physical attributes only seem to exacerbate the disconnection
and de-scaling of a building relative to its surroundings often ignoring the potentially
positive contributions of local topography and climate, or the form and character of existing
built fabric. Given these concerns, might not another unintended effect of such strategies
be to actually increase the lack of empathy between the inhabitant of a building and their
wider environment? This question should concern us all.
In 1974 the Norwegian writer, Christian Norberg-Schultz, (Genius Loci, towards a
phenomenology of Architecture) wrote that Modern man for a long time believed that
science and technology had freed him from a direct dependence on places. This belief
he suggested at the time has proved an illusion; pollution and environmental chaos have
suddenly appeared as a frightening nemesis and as a result the problem of place has
regained its true importance.
Forty years on, this assertion seems optimistic but no less critical. What remains striking in
his statement is the suggestion that it is contemporary societys displacement that is both a
primary cause and an ongoing concern in tackling the challenges that face it. As architects
therefore, whilst it goes without saying that we should enthusiastically adopt whatever
appropriate opportunities technology offers us - in order to understand what might be
appropriate, we first need to conceive of and compose a building that is contingent upon its
place. Establishing reciprocity, where each is able to define, or reinforce, the character of
the other.

This thought echoes Kenneth Frampton in his essay, Towards a Critical Regionalism,
written ten years later, where he calls for a critical architecture which distances itself
equally from the Enlightenment myth of progress and from a reactionary impulse to return
to the architectonic forms of the pre-industrial past. An architecture which instead has
the capacity to cultivate a resistant, identity giving culture whilst at the same time having
discrete recourse to universal technique.
Drawing these statements into dialogue, is an understanding, from Heidegger, that the
place is architectures share of truth, the concrete manifestation of mans dwelling. One
might then say that his identity depends on him belonging to places. If that is so, then any
determination of appropriateness must first consider the manner in which form, material,
structure, scale, proximity, topography, orientation and threshold can each draw out or
consolidate the latent or manifest qualities of a given site. Whilst ameliorating, as far as
possible, its negative aspects. Only when these conditions have achieved a particular and
optimised equilibrium, does recourse to technology become legitimate.
Here, we must distinguish the idea of a buildings tectonic presence from its technological
resultant. Whereas technology offers a solution to a material problem, tectonics can be
considered as having a far more encompassing role - that of making place manifest through
the physicality of architecture. This pre-empts technology, ordering the inter-relationships
of material, constructional and spatial structures, with respect to inhabitation and situation.
The interplay between these factors is complex, across many scales and it is unlikely ever
to result in an identical outcome, without the imposition of some kind of universalising
technique. Of course such processes of rationalisation have always been necessary and are
often highly beneficial in determining a buildings successful outcome. As we have already
discovered, it is only in the overbearing nature of such impositions, whether they are internal
or external to the building itself, that modernity has undermined our sense of place.
That being said, history tells us that typical outcomes do emerge. They might be
morphological, in response to local conditions, i.e. the vernacular, or develop as a
consequence of wider practical or cultural usage. The typical forms, scales and proximities
that emerge as a result of these common concerns must equally be considered as essential
components in determining the resultant character of a place, constructed by culture, in
response to nature.
The idea of building type again needs to be distinguished, this time from the postmodern
appropriation of typology that we touched upon earlier. The latter addresses purely formal
concerns, through an abstract, instrumental and reductive relationship to the history of
architecture. A type on the other hand might be understood as a paradigm to be developed
through creative, interpretive actions, in response to history - rather than as a literal model,
to be copied.
Drawing these thoughts together, as Frampton succinctly puts it the built comes into
existence out of the constantly evolving interplay of three converging vectors, the topos
(site), the typos (type) and the tectonic. (Frampton, Studies in Tectonic Culture)
The issues and concerns I have outlined thus far are well rehearsed. Colin St John Wilson
and others have long championed the other tradition of modern architecture, exemplified
in the work of architects such as Aalto and Lewerentz, and characterised by exactly the
balance of relationships between the universal and the particular; the tectonic and the
technical; the poetic and the pragmatic or culture and nature for example - that I have
referred to. Indeed such debates have been occurring since at least the birth of modernism.
St John Wilson recounts Hugo Haering at the very first meeting of CIAM, calling for an
architecture that would not impose a regime of pre-ordained geometrical forms on the one
hand, nor the mass produced models of industrial technology on the other, but would evolve
through a less pre-judged enquiry into the way things wanted to be. (Colin St John Wilson,
The Other Tradition)

Unfortunately, such practice has remained marginal and it is with increasing difficulty
that the contemporary architect achieves anything like such a sense of balance. In fact,
the concern in any such discourse is that when one attempts to apply it within an actual
situation it appears, to a greater or lesser extent, as a romantic idealisation, out of touch with
the pragmatic and contingent realities of day-to-day practice - a sense that crystallises as
projects grow in scale and complexity.
Let us refer back to Norberg Schultz, for example, and his assertions that Man dwells when
he can orientate himself within and identify himself with an environment and, following
on, that the task of the architect is to create meaningful places whereby he helps man to
dwell. Underlying these statements is a strong sense that the architect needs to be able to
identify with the place in which he builds, to an extent at least equivalent to the person or
community for whom he is building. Yet the reality, as we noted earlier, is that architecture
has become an increasingly global enterprise. Other concerns, which might be understood
as equally valid, such as economic and political transparency or equality of opportunity, have
led instead to trans-national systems of procurement that deliberately invite the architect
to work in unfamiliar territories. How then is it possible for him or her, within the commercial
restrictions of a given project, to attain sufficient knowledge to be able to offer a meaningful
interpretation of place?
To take another example, Frampton concretises how one might manifest a situated
architecture, in ways that initially seem self evident - through the establishment of
responsive topographic and tectonic relationships. Yet how does one negotiate the tension
between the desire for a building to acknowledge the irregular topography of its site, as
he suggests, and the ever-multiplying panoply of regulations that govern fundamental
issues such as disability access or, at another scale, flood management. The wholly
legitimate prioritisation of such concerns often denies the opportunity to work with existing
topographies or to form natural relationships with a buildings surroundings. Indeed often,
contemporary strategies of urban planning and regeneration result in a reconstruction of a
sites topography and character that is almost total, prior to the architects arrival.
Similarly, the complex inter-relationships of legislation, economics and liabilities, which
inevitably govern performance criteria, product specification or procurement systems,
restrict the architects ability to have free-rein in establishing tectonic relationships relative to, say, local materials or traditional construction methods. As David Leatherbarrow
has wryly suggested The orders of contemporary architecture are not types of column, but
purchase agreements for the production of shop made elements (Uncommon Ground,
Chapter 4, Pg. 120)
Conversely, misunderstandings or oversimplifications of how the character of a place can
be enhanced could be seen as equally problematic. How does the architect negotiate the
uncomfortable fit between an overly restrictive, typologically driven local plan, which might
seek to establish local rules on heights, roof pitches and materials for example, relative
to contemporary programmatic needs that require a sensitive adjustment in scale, or a
different, emergent type?
One could go on and onand thus we arrive at a dilemma. We have understood the pressing
need for contemporary architecture to re-situate itself in response to place. Clearly though,
if we are also to understand it as a Practical Art (Colin St John Wilson, The Other Tradition),
then we cannot ignore the myriad opportunities, benefits and restrictions offered by an
increasingly rationalised, global infrastructure, nor our lack of intimate knowledge, as
international architects. In identifying criticality with the regional, Frampton inadvertently
allows its dismissal as some kind of mythic nostalgia. We need to find the means to critique
from within this globalising condition.
This suggests that his apparent condensation of topos, typos and tectonic into a
kind of trinity, a concrete set of conditions to be systematically addressed, might be
better understood as a looser constellation of inter-related, emergent concerns both
determinate and indeterminate. As architects, our approach to such a constellation
might have to oscillate, metaphorically, between the precisely calibrated observations

of astronomy and the figurative, mythic narratives of astrology -constructing a common

ground from which to build, that lies somewhere between a physical site and the site of the
imagination.
Appropriating the words of Vittorio Greggoti, we might describe such an architecture as
a system of relations and distances, as the measurement of intervals rather than isolated
objects (Territory and Architecture)
We might call such an architecture Congruent.