Lusty passions.

VISIONARY ARCHITECTURE: BLUEPRINTS OF THE MODERN IMAGINATION

By Neil Spiller. London: Thames & Hudson. 2006. [pounds sterling]35

Apart from catalogues--or catalogue derivatives--there have been few attempts to celebrate the existence of visionary architecture since the 1970s, despite its generative importance, despite its intriguingness and despite the continual exploratory work still going on.

Neil Spiller wades in where others fear to tread and ill conceals his kinship with many of the protagonists. Why should he anyway? Indeed it is this role of fellow protagonist that fascinates me. His own Surrealistic compositions weave in and out among the rest of this lavishly illustrated book and need no apology for being there. His overriding fascination with Salvador Dali transfers itself through the association with Gaudi and thence to the work of Mark Bury who is recreating the momentum of Gaudi's Sagrada Familia via the computer.

In such a way, Spiller exposes his motivation and certain characteristics of his method. An adherent to the nanotechnology and fluid technology wing of current thinking, he is nonetheless much more an art person than a mathematician or analyst. He knows more than I do about the fashionable philosophers (but not enough to make him boring). He knows most of the people who crop up in the book as friends, rivals, academic visitors or the subject of gossip on the part of those friends, etc. This helps him to get inside the subject in a way that the detached non-designer, non-combatant can never do. Of course it makes his coverage uneven: with such a rich and complex set of protagonists, pulling this way and that around the issue of discovery, technology and invention via what we would both agree must be a form of art: how could it not be so?

Maybe those old German Professors: Conrads, Sperlich, Phent (the only people that my generation could read on the subject) seemed to be more objective, more ordered--and more dull.

Neil Spiller sets out to create a historical background and invokes some of his characteristically juicy headers such as 'Lusty Machines Brimming with Desire' or 'Faustrol and Frustrated Machines'. On the other hand he can be coy in his explanations of the significance of some of the younger work. It results in a curious unevenness between the text and the pictures (and the otherwise useful 'Indexical Glossary') whereby various projects get quite a fulsome description but are never illustrated, or conversely--delicious though they may be--there is sometimes a proliferation of similar drawings by the same person.

I am delighted to find Nat Chard, Gordon Pask, Ben Nicholson and NATO in the mainstream of the story and I am tweaked into recognition of the creative talent of Kevin Rhowbotham when on form. I am surprised that C.J. Lim is concentrated around only one of his many exploratory works. Thus I have exposed a seam: for these are all London-based names. It is, after all, a London-based view. Reinforced by a semester at the University of New York at Buffalo where the best archives and memories about the London scene of the late 1950s seem to be.

Of course The Situationists, Diller and Scofidio, Lebbeus Woods, are surely there, but who is missing?

The French contribution to twentieth-century visionary work--heroically championed by Frederic Migayrou and Marie-Ange Brayer through the catalogues of FRAC exhibitions that have turned into books--also appear in T & H's list. Spiller usefully cuts this down to size. The Austrian contribution (to my mind one of the most creative) is there too, but devoid of some of the key second-wave work. But the Japanese? Where are they?

My hunch is that Neil doesn't resonate so well on material that actually gets made or built. The Tokyo contribution--through from the Metabolists via Ito, Hasegawa, Takasaki and many others--is as inventive as anything in the book: but it often emerges in reality (even if it then seems to get pulled down very often so becoming, 'usefully', a remembered vision).

It suits his position as a lapsed working architect and (I suspect) it suits publishers, academics and the non-sympathetic to round up drawn, modelled, declaimed material as 'Visionary', thereby detaching it from 'buildings' and keeping it as a non-combatant element of the architectural scene. 'It's all right--it'll never happen' being a hidden agenda. Yet it is just at the point when Neil Denari (rather under exposed in this book), Toyo Ito or Co-op Himmelb(l)au make visions happen so that the 'Modern Imagination'--to borrow Neil's subtitle--really explodes.

Someone, maybe him, maybe not, must create a parallel book that weaves its way among the imagined and the made, a book of explosive architecture where computer, airbrush, pencil, twisted metal, oozing plastics interweave and are chronicled as one.

Meanwhile, any red-blooded architect or fan of architecture must get this one. It is not perfect scholarship but rather better than that--it is involved and sometimes--in its Spillerish way--quite passionate. A document of our times.