Pop and posh: buildings both enclose and embody memory, and as such, they are a vital part of civilization. Now, we should be exploring in architecture how pop and posh cultures can enhance each other.

Cultures are what we all do; they are the sum of our activities and values. In Western countries, these include sports, junk food and traffic jams as much as the fine arts, philosophy and science. We tend to divide culture into the pop and posh. Pop is largely funded by private enterprise and, on the whole, profitable (sometimes enormously so) to those who provide it. Posh is made with the help of the state, or (particularly in the US) the state-assisted philanthropy of the rich. Distinctions between the two kinds of culture are arbitrary and fluctuating and are caused by the ways in which they are funded, as much as by the kinds of people who are principally involved in them.

Differences between the two forms of culture go back as far as civilization itself (though there are myths from all over the world of primeval societies in which everyone shared the same ideals and values). But from earliest recorded times, there have been distinctions between the knowledge and values of the mass of people and those of the elites: priesthood and nobility, or just simply rich. (Though the myth of unified culture lingered into classical antiquity, when athletics were still integral to religion, the arts and politics in the Olympic Games.) One of the key measures of the pace of the very slow development of modern democracy has been the extent to which the knowledge of the elites has been disseminated to the rest of the population.

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At the same time, there have been reverse influences: for instance a century ago, the elite took little or no interest in popular sports like soccer or even baseball, nor much in popular entertainment. Now, the extraordinary possibilities of penetration of our psyches by the electronic media have enabled those that control them (increasingly, a smaller and smaller group of ever richer people) to promote forms of cultural expression that are globally popular - and profitable. It is impossible for a teenager almost anywhere in the world not to know the latest global musical hits, or football. Even in the remotest parts of the planet (except in the US) you are often required to discuss the state of Manchester United or Real Madrid. Many European countries have appointed ministers to represent both culture and sport. But you don't get back to the much more unitary culture of the original Olympics by appointing a functionary to unite disparate forms of human endeavour.

Sight-bites

Recently, there have been efforts by visual artists to make the arts as powerful in general imagination as pop songs. In Britain particularly, a whole generation of artists with remarkably little talent, except for public relations and the ability to produce saleable, strident banality, has been promoted by a combination of advertising techniques and the thrusting vanity of gallery directors. Architecture has tried the same sort of tricks. PoMo was an attempt to make a headline-hitting universally acceptable form of architectural expression, to be attained by exterior decoration of internally conventional and dull buildings. But where is it now? In the West at least, it has become tatty, shabby and discredited, though it roars on larger and larger, more and more monstrously vast, in China and elsewhere in the Far East, earning huge fees for its practitioners who have long outgrown their role in the '80s US avant-garde.

Contemporary architectural attempts at an avant-garde are, like Brit-Art, concerned to make striking one-liners: sight-bites that can leap for a moment from the page or screen, as the Frankenstein work of the children of people like Koolhaas, Eisenman and Coop Himmelb(1)au begins to emerge. This instant flash-fash architecture will doubtless soon seem as dusty and dated as PoMo. Such is the nature of pop culture.

Yet culture is as much about memory as about instant popular sensation. Without memory, there can be no civilization. Dictatorships invariably try to suppress and distort memory - Nazi book bonfires were the most dramatic recent instances of memory suppression, with their triumphal images of history being destroyed in mass orgasmic rituals, carefully recorded in sound and sight bites. But all authoritarian governments try to force culture into approved channels by censorship and force. Decent societies explore memory as a means of understanding present and future predicaments, giving us perspective of ourselves in space and time.

Memory

Architecture is a medium of memory: it is inherently on the posh side of culture. We understand the ancestors as much by their buildings (however fragmentary) as by what remains of their literature. Architecture is in itself a repository of memory, and buildings can of course be repositories of culture (these are the ones shown in this issue). Medieval cathedrals and mosques were built texts, which could help bring religious truths directly to even the poor and disadvantaged. Some of the wilder remarks of the early Modern Movement, that power stations are the cathedrals of the future, were completely ridiculous. But some of the people who argued in the '80s that galleries, theatres, cinemas and museums are today's cathedrals made a bit more sense, though they were wildly exaggerating. Yet, such buildings can embody and enclose memory, and in so doing sew seams between past, present and future.

Today, in Europe (and to a lesser extent in the US) there are attempts to revivify cities by implanting posh cultural buildings. They can be quite spectacularly successful like Frank Gehry's Guggenheim museum in Bilbao (AR December 1997), which has measurably added to the prosperity of the city by increasing tourism and spurring on local initiative. But such efforts do not always work. For instance the government-backed Museum of Popular Music in Sheffield, England by Branson Coates folded almost as soon as it opened. In Glasgow, which was the City of European Culture in 1990, European Community and British government investment engendered a number of sparkling buildings devoted to both pop and posh culture in the city centre. These are something of a tourist attraction, but as soon as you step out of the centre, you are transplanted to run-down, grimy streets of one of the most poverty-stricken cities in Europe; they seem to have changed little for 50 years, except for the worse. Most citizens needed radical improvement of infrastructure and housing--to them, the cultural bit is either irrelevant or beyond their means.

Even if creation of swanky buildings specifically devoted to culture, either pop or posh, will not solve urban ills, they can help, as Bilbao, Barcelona, Sydney and Seattle are showing. In democratic societies, it should be possible to imagine how pop and posh cultures can enhance each other. In such endeavour, architecture, with its permanence and evocation of memory, has a vastly important part to play in generating counterpoint to the ephemeral values of the electronic media. P.D.