Social life.

At the end of the sixteenth century, Pope Sixtus V established a water supply to the hill areas in Rome. These elevated parts of the city had been without water since the destruction of the Roman aqueducts built by Alexander Severus some 1300 years previously. The monumental entry of the Acque Felice into the city is marked by the three-arched Moses Fountain built in 1587, a somewhat ungainly structure that juts out of the Strada Pia. Even in the seventeenth century, this fountain was considered as being in bad style (pessime stile),(1) yet it was never intended as a showpiece. Instead, it acted as a reminder that this part of Rome had had no water for over a millennium, and, above all, it was a social institution. Three large basins served as reservoirs for the local inhabitants, protected from animal pollution by marble barriers. Egyptian lions spat water for the use of passers-by and on one side was a special basin for the use of horses and cattle. The provision of a vital commodity was elevated into a social focus for the community. Through this and other acts of paternalistic provision, Sixtus could be described as one of the first modern town planners. He saw the city as a complex organism, and recognised that the beauty and power of architecture as revealed in open squares and wide streets must be underpinned by a social dimension.

Despite one redundant politician's assertion that 'there is no such thing as society', all the projects shown in this issue embody a strong social concern. Each is a physical expression of the ways in which different societies respond to the task of educating, informing, nurturing, governing and caring for its citizens. From courthouses to kindergartens, from town halls to centres for handicapped children, each articulates an important aspect of human life. Without this social dimension, humankind is reduced to an assortment of individual private pursuits, with no notion of community or the greater good. As the most social of the arts, architecture has always had a critical role to play in this expression, providing the built framework that mirrors, regulates and defines society. This may be through macro institutions such as the state, church, law, and big business, or through smaller, more intimate structures such as the community, neighbourhood, and family. Yet much recent architecture has retreated from social responsiveness, becoming instead self-referential and self-motivated. Empathy and social conscience have been replaced by narcissism and self-indulgence. As Juhani Pallasmaa has observed - 'Architecture is nervously seeking its self definition and autonomy in the embrace of the culture of consumption, which turns it into a commodity and entertainment'.(2)

More particularly, in Britain, after decades of neglect of such essential social components as housing, transport, education and healthcare, coupled with the effective privatisation of the public realm, there is a pervading sense of numbness and despair. By assuming that the market will provide, the Conservative government has presided over a systematic assault on British society - now as paralysed and polarised as perhaps at any time in recent history. This greed and alienation has found the perfect mirror in the farcical eclecticism of PoMo, a pliant applique used with increasing desperation to paper over both architectural vacuity and widening social fissures. The prospect of social redemption through architecture, which underpinned and then overwhelmed the Modernist cause, now seems remote in the extreme.

Architecture's current failure to achieve a wider social responsiveness and consensus can be attributed to many factors, but one of these must surely be the way in which buildings are viewed simply as economic commodities. Large-scale, commercially driven projects are inevitably divorced from local conditions of place, scale, tradition and society. The end users of speculative offices and housing are generally unknown, so an immense effort revolves around projecting a saleable image. The brute colonisation of London's Docklands by a pre-packaged Central Business District imported from America is just one example. Canary Wharf is architecture parlante at its most foul mouthed, yet its vulgarity should not be so surprising since it is the outcome of architecture viewed exclusively as an economic transaction.

Against the suffocating homogenisation of big business and bureaucracy, what response can be offered? Clearly it is essential that we should try to make places in which ordinary people can find rewarding lives that achieve satisfaction at many levels. In this issue, for example, the centre for handicapped children by Hennin-Normier-Lelievre (p48) is not only a stimulating haven for a disadvantaged section of society (who would otherwise suffer the ghettoising indignity of more conventional institutional care), but also acted as a regenerative catalyst for the surrounding urban area. It is a regrettably rare but nevertheless inspiring symbiosis.

Another important aspect of architecture's social dimension is the ability to respond in a perceptive way to traditional patterns of life with interpretations of contemporary technology and need. In this respect, Adrien Fainsilber's new town hall at La Fleche (p36) is an invigorating juxtaposition of historical and new elements, that eschews municipal bombast to create a humanely-scaled complex of interconnected squares and courtyards that encourages use by the town's populace.

In these and other projects in this issue we hope to show that although architecture can never aspire to be ideologically neutral, it should do more than merely reproduce society's prejudices. At its most inspired it can act as a vehicle for social criticism and possibly even as an agent for social change. In striving to achieve what Pallasmaa calls 'a radical ordinariness', it should aim, like Pope Sixtus' ancient fountain, to lyricise the social transactions of everyday life.

1 Space, Time and Architecture, Sigfried Gideon, Oxford University Press, 1967, p103.

2 Six Themes for the Next Millennium, Juhani Pallasmaa, The Herman Miller Lecture, RIBA, 1994.