Biotech futures.

ARCHITECTURE, TECHNOLOGY AND PROCESS

By Chris Abel. Oxford: Architectural Press. 2004. [pounds sterling]21.99

Chris Abel has been writing, sometimes prophetically, about architecture and technology ever since the 1960s. He saw, for example, how computer-controlled machinery was making Fordism obsolete and therefore undermining some of the basic assumptions of Modernism. Architects' were striving to standardise while production engineers were installing the robots that made standardisation irrelevant.

Now other themes have been added to Abel's repertoire, such as the central importance of energy conservation and the wrong-headedness of the whole cyberspace metaphor. The themes come together in what Abel calls Biotech Architecture, a shining vision of an integrated, collaborative, computerised building design method, more like an organic process than a production line. This book ought to have been the-definitive presentation of the Biotech vision but it isn't, quite. The material is mostly recycled--articles, book chapters and conference papers of the last ten years--and not all of it is to the point.

The chapter on the Australian Modernist Harry Seidler, for example, is completely irrelevant to the main theme, and the straight, monograph-style overview of the work of the Maltese practice AP seems at best tangential. The best chapter is a comparison between Norman Foster and Frank Gehry--a clash of the titans. According to Abel, they represent opposing principles: the Apollonian Foster, serious-minded and progressive, versus the Dionysian Gehry, basically playing it for laughs. It is in their contrasting attitudes to computers that their differences are revealed. For Gehry, the computer is just a tool to realise his essentially sculptural ideas; for Foster, it is like a member of the design team, allowed to make decisions and influence form directly.

Abel is a Foster supporter, but Gehry seems more human. Abel often criticises architects for the narrowness of their vision. His own intellectual range is impressively wide. He can introduce a philosophical concept into a technical discussion without crunching the gears. But there is also a naivety in his approach. He is dazzled by big names and seems to imagine that their skyscrapers and art galleries really make a big difference to the global scheme of things. The truth is that most buildings are not designed by architects and the influence of Architecture (capital A) on the future of the planet is slight.