Peter cook: a thought-provoking meditation on the meaning of the actual stuff of architecture.

It is some time now since I was invited to stick my finger into a building. My host was a serious American architect and the building looked real enough, but two inches into it I realised that this piece of Georgian pastiche that had found its way to (the other) Georgia was balloon frame, clad in polystyrene. Fortunately, there are not too many architect tourists in that neck of the woods and I suspect that the edifice still stands there, more or less intact.

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Yet you can wander around the walls of Rome, Jerusalem or Athens and experience the reverse take: everything that you see, everything that you touch, is authentic yet contradictory to everything else. Not only through symbolism but also through material. If stone is formidable and brick practical, then so is marble heroic. We read effort and aspiration in every move. Taught that the birth of Classical lies somewhere in the logic of timber construction, we itch to move quickly on to a more oblique set of references bolstered by ideas of scale, proportion, quotation, hierarchy and (occasionally) finesse.

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Faced with a Carlo Scarpa or a Louis Kahn we appreciate the struggle for expression as the one manifests an idea through carefully laid layers of plaster, the other through skeins of translucent marble, and how both of them crave to conquer the impassiveness of in-situ concrete.

I am increasingly nostalgic for such conversation as I sit in front of numerous presentations of buildings that could end up brown green, blue and almost invariably shiny, fashionably skimmed, layered, muted, draped and hung over a predictable carcass. Whatever happened to the glittering crystal, the brooding hulk, the humble shed? Is it that they were too much? Too challenging? Too limited to being themselves?

The intellectual buzz that came from the notion that almost any form now can be wrought in any material has died down--in fact it has become something of a double-edged sword, placing demands upon our criterion of appropriateness (but it's ALL appropriate), testing our knowledge of durability or economics (but if you listen to the manufacturers it's ALL highly durable and--somehow--economical, in the end). This leaves you with the simple realisation that (a) you get what you pay for and (b) it's all a matter of taste.

If you lived in Bath and built in Bath stone, it wasn't a matter of taste but a matter of logic, consistency, orthodoxy or folklore. In the end the stucco had to imitate the stone. Similarly, the buildings of Frankfurt are faced, dressed, painted--even extruded--in that slightly sad, greyed-down red of the stone quarried somewhere behind the Taunus hills, in keeping with the faded beauties who sit in the Frankfurter Hof Hotel.

No wonder that the Modernist cry was of glass and whiteness. An emancipation from bourgeois cosmetics, only to be followed by the realisation that much of that same abstracted white was simply a surface coating over any old conglomeration of bricks, blocks, rubble and gunge.

The ease of prediction offered by a computer rendition conveniently dulls the issue: we pitch and squeak over the logic, the organisation, the parts, the profile and (let's admit it) the form. And then ... 'pling' let's see it in pale green ... no, 'pling' ... in textured grey ... no, 'pling' ... in translucent pixillated something ... no, 'pling' ... in serious opaque slate (but it might not be actual slate-slate of course). We no longer have to agonise over the solidity issue (any surface can be backed, impregnated, wired, glued, pinned) and some of us are quite interested in the idea that it doesn't really have to be there at all!

So we have reached a far more heroic moment in architecture than we care to admit: not only is all not what it seems, but it might not matter that it seems what it is not. But hold on a minute--architecture has a value: it is a set of responses that are, surely, more than rationalised ergonomics, good cost planning and streamlined delivery programmes. It is about the feel of a place, the setting for discovery and delight and it might even (still) be about the touch of the thing.

We need to think seriously about the stuff of architecture once again. We need to be able to compose with as much wit and sensitivity as the old craftsmen--but with the whole (ever expanding) range of techniques. With serious discussion, with academic backing (not just left to half an hour under 'Construction 3' on a wet Wednesday), we need the best brains, the coolest cats, the strongest design talents to make the case for stuff as stuff--or its corollaries.

Think desert, think shadow, think Yves Klein blue, think film, think pebbles, streaked concrete, squidgy surface, Japanese punctured metal, think mustiness, windiness, warmth, stuff, stuff, stuff.

So you noticed? No names dropped this month. No gossip. No fancy locations. But the stuff around us is worthy of a bit of chatter.

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