Future tense.

Any attempt to predict the future is inevitably fraught with uncertainty. But, in some ways, we can have a profound effect on what will happen. Ultimately, what matters much more than any discernible trend in technology or politics, is the set of values that we bring to the struggle to forge a better tomorrow.

Our May number looked at the past of the Architectural Review and the strange and wonderful things that have happened over the last 100 years. Here, in the centenary of the actual month in which the magazine was founded, we attempt to look into the future, and anyone who does that must risk retrospective ridicule, like the man who a century ago predicted that London would grind to a halt because of the depth of horse dung in its streets. It is impossible to look to the future with the clarity with which we were able to look back on the past century.[1] To try to look forward with any precision for a hundred years is patently absurd. But just as the past is what we make it when we tell its story, so to some extent is the future, for what will happen partly depends on what we think can happen. In broad terms, we can approach the future with optimism and the belief that we can make the world a better place to live in, or we can gloomily accept that we are at the mercy of forces largely out of our control which are changing our lives at such a rate that we are nothing but flotsam on the surface of a gigantic torrent. This issue is optimistic and all the work shown in it suggests different approaches to the future.

The increasingly frenetic pace of change is perhaps illusory: 100 years ago, the world was being transformed by widespread provision of electric power, the telephone, the internal combustion engine, asepsis, new building materials like reinforced concrete, the re-alignment of the productive capacities of the Great Powers, psychiatry, the new physics, and huge gains in agricultural productivity in places like America and Australia. To our ancestors the pace of change seemed as rapid as it does now to us. But we are perhaps more frightened of the future than they were. We have seen that progress[2] is not inevitable, that for instance the best educated and in many ways most civilised nation in Europe could be reduced to previously unimaginable depths of evil, partly because of the powers that early twentieth-century technology gave to the Nazis.

It is easy to say that because the old ideals of progress are clearly absurd, there is no hope of achieving better and more decent conditions - that we are subject to systems (like the market) completely indifferent to the concerns of humanity, so we should cultivate greed and selfishness, and concentrate on what little we can hope to influence: ourselves and perhaps a little of our immediate surroundings. This is the literally anti-social creed of Thatcher and Reagan, expressed in high cultural terms by people like Jacques Derrida and his architectural disciples like Peter Eisenman. The fundamentally noble programme of Modernism is seen as either irrelevant or ludicrous: any attempt to improve the human condition must be pathetically ineffectual. Charles Jencks has vividly summed up the anti-human nature of much of this new thinking in his embrace of Hans Christian von Baeyer's aphorism that 'in the twenty first century, the atom will replace man as the measure of all things'.[3]

Against this reductive and belittling set of values, it is possible to suggest other criteria that may lead to better and richer lives for the individual and society. They are more difficult to articulate than the one-dimensional arguments of for instance the mad marketeers,[4] or those computer-net worshippers who believe that we will never need to leave home again. Compared to the inane eye-rolling, mouth-foaming certainties of such people, more complex proposals based on human values seem lacking in clarity. But this is a virtue as well as a defect, for it allows us to speculate in a more wide-ranging and inventive fashion than the fanatic futurists.

The fulcrum 

One of the most exciting changes in our perception of the world since the death of bureaucratic Modernism[5] is the understanding that the present is a fulcrum between the past and the future, and that we discard the past at the risk of overbalancing the future. It is a commonplace that the work of the greatest masters of the Modern Movement, people like Aalto, Mies and Le Corbusier, is deeply imbued with lessons from the past, yet the architectural references were so deeply abstracted, and the written rhetoric usually so futuro-logical that the rank and file of the architectural profession might be forgiven (a little) for supposing that the past was immaterial and that a Utopian future[6] could be achieved by simply harnessing the powers of industry to transforming a razed world for the better.

We can now see the drear results of disregarding history - and the follies of what emerged as a riposte to that attitude in the early '80s: PoMo, the tattered signage of which looms over places as dull and inhumane as any produced by bureaucratic Modernism at its worst. Knitting together the physical fabric of past and present for the future will certainly not cure the deep wounds of society in itself, but it seems unlikely that they can be brought anywhere near being healed unless the play of human life can be enacted against a coherent and decent set of values that celebrate society as well as those of the individual, and remind us that we have roots in the past as well as branches into the future. It is clear that links with the past cannot be fostered by slapping pilasters on to a dull box. We do not need crass histrionic gestures, but sensitive engagement with old buildings and traditional notions of place and space. Such initiatives need not necessarily be dramatic: modesty and gentleness are usually much better strategies than radical gestures.

But this is no reason to embrace namby-pambiness a la Prince of Wales. There are cases that call for imaginative boldness and great daring. This issue shows two completely different instances. First, Greg Burgess' visitor centre at Ayers Rock in the middle of Australia (p46) explores literal and conceptual links between the geomorphology of the place, the lives and immemorial myths of the Aboriginal people who live near it and the possibility of a future in which the local people will be able to teach those who come to see the place much about how to live in harmony with the continent. The second example is Renzo Piano's sympathetic yet radical approach to Matte-Trucco's magnificent car factory in Turin (p62) which turns it from a redundant self-contained production plant into a focus for future urban and communal life without losing the heroic dimension of the original building.

Both these projects are reminders of another great principle with which we must approach the future. Just as we ought to try to identify our responsibilities in the time continuum, we must strive to find our way in the environmental one. All our actions as architects have relevance to the biosphere, and hence to the lives of the planet, particularly humankind. Ecological awareness, greenness, has only recently become one of the crucial criteria for architectural activity. Though the ideas have circulated in architecture for well over 100 years, only recently have they begun to have serious effects on building, largely because governments of oil-poor countries like Germany have started to introduce incentives to make environmentally-friendly architecture - largely to cut down the huge demands for artificially produced energy made by conventional buildings.[7]

Plainly energy consumption at this rate cannot continue, for fossil fuel resources are limited, and even if the theory of the greenhouse effect is without foundation,[8] other pollutive effects of consuming so much fuel in a short time are likely to be cumulatively catastrophic. So consideration for the planet must be a key criterion with which to judge possible futures. Important lessons can be learned from buildings shown here as different as Stansfield Smith's Portsmouth architecture school - p55 (largely passive) and the office building at Wurzburg by Martin Webler and Garnet Geissler (dynamic) - p52.

Technology with a life of its own 

Clearly we must not be ruled by our own inventions as the whirling-eyed fanatics yearn for us to be. Yet the electronic media, for instance, seem sometimes to have a life of their own. At the infra-red end of their spectrum is the carefully calculated mind-deadening effect of most television, which is designed to the lowest common denominator, and is intended to reduce people to passive receptors of advertising messages. At the ultra-violet end is the implicit possibility of the worldwide web, that virtually all human knowledge will be available at any keyboard, and that a great deal of intelligence and judgement will be required to make any use or sense of the colossal range of information on offer. Broadly, technology is neutral. What matters is how we use it.

In terms of building, foreseeable technological changes could be harnessed to make quite large alterations in the form and spatial organisation of buildings. But, in general, the new techniques are likely to emerge from the traditional range of building expertise, rather than by (as some hope) technology transfer from, for instance, the aerospace or automobile industries.[9] Buildings must be robust and last for a relatively long time, hence their materials and systems have to have low costs and maintenance requirements, and be versatile enough to take a wide range of everyday happenings. Compare for instance a traditional wooden floor (or even a conventional raised office one) with the aluminium honeycomb sandwich panels used for the decks in aeroplanes. The latter are much lighter and in every way more elegant. But their impact and fire resistance is low; they are difficult to patch; they need very precise fitting and demand a highly disciplined environment. The saving in structural costs that their lightness offers is completely outweighed by the expense of the panels themselves.

Innovations that might work

Yet there will be sustainable innovations in building: photochromic glass for example will soon perhaps be cheap enough to use on a large scale; electrochromic glass[10] is very expensive now, but will presumably become cheaper. Other smart materials are coming, for instance shape memory alloys (which change their states according to temperature or degree of vibration) will probably be used in applications ranging from opening ventilators on hot days to providing damping in earthquakes. Polymer composites and visco-static materials are beginning to be used in buildings while a host of others wait in the wings. Devices like the Odyssey lift, in which the cars can move horizontally as well as vertically, could have a profound effect on the planning of buildings - and even cities.

The Japanese exploration of robotics in building will doubtless lead to a renaissance of prefabrication, and (at least initially) a rash of ghastly reductive buildings in which product is subordinated to process. But, compared to the '60s (the last decade in which prefabricated building systems were in vogue), this time it may be possible to learn from the organisational techniques (rather than the technologies) of the automotive industries which allow a very wide range of end products and are continually developing in scope.

Environmental control systems will undoubtedly become more ingenious and have increasing effect on buildings. But it is ludicrous to talk about 'intelligent buildings', though some are gradually becoming more sensuously responsive (like Webler + Geissler's building, which incorporates the most advanced dynamic techniques for climate control available). Yet even the most elaborate uses of sensors computer-connected to climate modifiers have produced buildings which react to internal and external stimuli with rather less sophistication than an amoeba. The horrors of the building which develops its own personality and starts to attack its makers portrayed in Philip Kerr's novel Gridiron[11] are very far away indeed. Much more worrying is the tendency to partial failure of buildings which use dynamic rather than passive systems: all those electric motors, louvres and delicate sensors at Wurzburg must surely go wrong sometimes: how often? how easily can such buildings be maintained?

At least as important as the technological dimension is the political and economic one. Much American architecture has been literally marginalised, with the development process permitting architects to make no more than paper-thin gestures on the outsides of buildings. Moreover, place-making in that country is dominated by exclusion and enclaves, giving rise to endless tracts of what Michael Sorkin calls 'cyberbia'.[12] In Britain, though the heyday of design and build may be over in the private sector, the Government continues to be broadly committed in its own buildings to generating as much enclosed space for the smallest amount of money; architectural concerns do not even come into consideration.[13] There are exceptions, like the Norwegian and French governments and those of many of the German Lander, but for each of those, there must be tens that are completely indifferent to architecture, indeed in many cultures there is no longer a concept of the public realm at all and the creation of the built environment is left to the tender mercies of the market. All over Asia, for instance, magnificent old cities are being torn down to make way for crass commercial buildings, with here and there an ancient monument preserved in a kind of spatial formaldehyde. There is a Holiday Inn even in remotest Lahsa, built while the tissue of the ancient city around the Potala Palace was being ripped away.

Homogenisation of the world

This homogenisation of the physical fabric of the world runs parallel to what Manuel Castells has called 'the space of flows' in which 'the logic of dominant organisations detaches itself from the social constraints of cultural identities and local societies through the powerful medium of information technologies'.[14] At the same time, post-modern culture,[15] according to David Harvey - one of its most perceptive analysts - has complementary and equally confusing and deracinating characteristics. He suggests that in 'its total acceptance of ... ephemerality, fragmentation, discontinuity and the chaotic ... postmodernism responds to the fact in a very particular way. It does not try to transcend it, counteract it or even to define the "eternal and immutable" elements that might lie within it. Post-modernism swims, even wallows, in the fragmentary and the chaotic currents of change as if that is all there is'.[16]

It is easy to despair in such circumstances. Yet post-modernity offers many grounds for hope. It emerged as a rebellion against the certitudes of Modernism at its worst, which with intense single-mindedness fragmented culture into often mutually antagonistic components. The very plurality of post-modernity may offer ways of seeing the world and our activities on it in a much more holistic way than Modernism allowed.

The chief proponents of post-modernism would find the thought repulsive, for they will remain in eternal rebellion against Modernism and will never accept that there can be another attempt at unity. They will doubtless be attacked in their turn, but any new rebellion will perforce be informed by their achievements and surely cannot be as simplistic as Modernism could be, though it could aspire to Modernism's humane nobility. Harvey proposes that 'it becomes possible to launch a counter-attack [against post-modernity] of narrative against the image, of ethics against aesthetics ... and to search for unity within difference, albeit in a context where the power of the image and of aesthetics, the problems of space-time compression, and the significance of geopolitics and otherness are clearly understood'.[17]

Transcending post-modernity

We must comprehend the nature of the post-modern condition to transcend it. As Castells says 'the new techno-economic paradigm imposes the space of flows as the irreversible spatial logic of economic and functional organisations. The issue then becomes how to articulate the meaning of places to this new functional space'.[18] It is the calling of architects to make satisfying physical places. All the buildings and projects shown in this issue are distinguished instances of place-making: at one extreme is Rafael Vinoly's colossal Tokyo International Forum (p38) in which a huge programme has been given a sense of particularity by deft handling of space and figure, and at the other end of the scale, Giancarlo De Carlo's jolly gate to San Marino (p68), which defines the edge of one of the smallest states in the world. The two demonstrate in their very different ways the need to command the opportunities offered by the new technologies and systems, while not forgetting that our values must be based on ecology and humanity. P.D.

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to conversations with Tony Sheehan and John Berry of Ove Arup & Partners about the nature of technology in the immediate future. Any mistakes are mine.

References

1 The clarity is illusory. A different team of editors, or the same one at another time, would have chosen other extracts from past issues to print and told a different story.

2 In the nineteenth-century sense of an inevitable gradual improvement of the physical (and hence mental and moral) condition of humanity.

3 Jencks, Charles, The Architecture of the Jumping Universe, Academy Editions, London, 1995.

4 That the market is not the only force which drives economies is shown by the large degree of state involvement in the most successful ones of the last 30 years, for instance those of Japan and the Pacific Tigers. (Even in Britain, devoted to market worship as it has been for two decades, elements of the economy that work best often have heavy state participation, for instance in the arms and road-building industries.)

5 By this I mean the appropriation by big bureaucracy (and big business) of the forms of Modernism in the '50s and '60s. Its liberating spirit was largely ignored.

6 To be fair, most of them did not know how very unpleasant and authoritarian Thomas More's Utopia was.

7 In developed countries, buildings typically use about 50 per cent of all non-ambient energy, vehicles another 25 per cent.

8 Which it seems less and less likely to be.

9 There are exceptions, for instance photovoltaic systems seem highly promising in building.

10 Photochromic glass darkens according to light intensity; electrochromic glass changes in relationship to an electric current passed across it.

11 Kerr, Philip, Gridiron, Chatto & Windus, London, 1995.

12 Transcript of lecture given by Sorkin at Stockholm 'Form Follows Anything' conference October 1996. I am indebted to my colleague Catherine Slessor for this observation.

13 The picture may be changed by the Private Finance Initiative whereby the Government passes responsibility for raising capital for building to the private sector, but there is no evidence yet that this will lead to better architecture: so far, it seems unlikely to do so. The National Lottery should however produce some new public buildings of quality.

14 Castells, Manuel, The Informational City, Blackwell, Oxford and Cambridge, Mass, 1993, p6.

15 This is a condition wider than PoMo, post-modernism's most obvious (though not only) expression in architecture.

16 Harvey, David, 'The Condition of Postmodernity' in The Post-Modern Reader, Ed Charles Jencks, Academy Editions, London, 1992, p303.

17 Harvey, David, The Condition of Postmodernity, Blackwell, Oxford and Cambridge, Mass, 1990, p395.

18 Castells, op cit, p350