Peter Cook: reflections on Spanish lunches, Heidegger, and the gap between practice and theory.

A morning session of muddled briefing and messed-up projection was rescued by the wit of the editor of 'Arquitectura Viva', Luis Fernandez-Galiano, getting us cleverly worked up in the round-table session about culture/life/real motives/rationalism/surfacism/architectural prejudice. This provoked the normally circumspect Ben van Berkel into suggesting that Mies was a bit of a bore (something I've thought for years but didn't dare to say). This built up a wonderful hunger for the 3pm start of an endless lunch. Madrid is at its best during this ritual--now being threatened by an Anglo-Saxon logic (or tyranny) of the 'sensible' one-hour break, or grabbed sandwich that leads to third-rate architecture.

So a chance remark, that 'English architects don't really have libraries', comfortably passed me by until a crony reinforced the point by remarking that in our paper-ridden flat, there are only 2000 or so books. 'But Heidegger only had 60 books,' piped-up someone who, presumably, knew that kind of thing.

I was, I suppose, mellowed by the lunch and only afterwards reminded myself how the family Cook is constantly piling, filing and tripping over reams of printed matter. Much of this consists of magazines and catalogues--our favourite acquisitions that pick up the moment, catch the feel of a building or an exhibition, or recall the conversation. They have the freshness and immediacy of the matter in hand. Young friends start getting into corners of the mags--then get whole pages. They bring out funky little catalogues with unreadable texts, then over the months and years, less and less funky formats and more and more readable texts. Becoming important or pushy enough to make it to a book, they then seem to freeze.

Back to the late 80s, and meeting Merrill Elam and Mack Scogin. I was struck how good their work was: not the apocryphal 'black cloak' figures, but coming out of a semi-commercial background and then progressively toughening up their act. They became involved in the major academies (Mack became Chair of Harvard GSD); they produced a solid book of their work. In private conversation they're bright as buttons, yet they somehow felt it necessary to interweave the projects with 'essays' ... and here they came, Bergren, Kipnis et al. Now M & M could be taken seriously! And lose in the process.

More and more we have been conned into a state where OK-thinking architects feel inadequate without the cushion of intellectual credibility. Read such essays: apart from a few, they act as a useful sump for professional theorists to jump off from a few glancing words about the buildings to worrying about Heidegger's references, Deleuze's definitions or something more fashionable.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Worst of all, when they get off on an elaborate version of the chain letter. You know the kind of thing: 'P' is editing a book of essays by 'Q', 'R', 'S' and 'T'. Six months later 'S' is editing a book of essays including--guess who?--'P', 'Q', 'T' and the gang. The universities love it, the brownie-points flash across the screen and another professorship is squandered.

Now I don't specially mind if it were not for two things: 1. The shelf space. 2. (and more fundamentally), the degree to which young architects (and the occasional late launcher) are coerced into believing these books to be about architecture. There is a dearth of people who understand enough about the stuff itself, its relationship to the supportive condition, its playing-out of observations, mannerisms, reflections, manifestations. Why can't we admit that architecture itself is a rich, perverse, evocative CULTURE?

Beatriz Colomina pulls in the personality and gossip aspects of Corb, the Eames, the Smithsons themselves, which is a start. Some designers give good, punchy, semi-literate lectures. Classic magazines, catalogues, on-the-spot reviews catch them. Oh for a contemporary version of Banham on the run in his key 1960s essays in this very magazine. Oh for the partisanship of Esther McCoy on the West Coast, or Mendini's editorship of 'Domus' in the 1980s. We need a few deft communicators to emerge from the ranks of the doers or insiders like Sorkin or Lootsma; designers caught on tape and made just (but only just) palatable in their own words. People get embarrassed about Jan Kaplicky voicing his melancholy and taste for female flesh in print--but it's straight stuff: anyone who has heard him lecture knows how a propos these things are to his work.

Maybe Heidegger just had rather too many books.