Vesely at last.

ARCHITECTURE IN THE AGE OF DIVIDED REPRESENTATION

By Dalibor Vesely. London: MIT Press. 2004. [pounds sterling]32.95

In the attainment of knowledge, learning is less important than unlearning. Perhaps this is why for Robin Middleton, who contributes a back-cover blurb, this book 'stirs apprehension, a deep unease'. To receive its message clearly, it is necessary to let go of the unthinking prejudices, mostly associated with science and technology, that masquerade as truths in the modern world. And this is indeed a de-stabilizing experience, like throwing away crutches. The argument of the book is simple, but that doesn't make it easy to grasp. Any discussion of the lived or natural world is exceptionally difficult because we ourselves are inescapably part of that world. It is 'an articulated continuum to which we all belong'. We are not objective observers, standing outside reality, measuring it and manipulating it, but participants in 'the communicative space of culture'. Our very minds are 'fields of identity in the situational structure of human existence'.

Representation, as defined by philosophers like Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Hans-Georg Gadamer, is the primary mode of our participation in, and understanding of, the world. Traditionally, this representation--in language, art and architecture but also in perception itself--is symbolic, a chain of meanings linking the most trivial everyday experience to the most all-embracing cosmological myth. Culture and tradition mediate at every level. But modern science, the origins of which, according to Vesely, can be traced back to the development of perspective representation in the fifteenth century, sees things differently. Science replaces the spontaneity of experience with the illusion of autonomy and objectivity. It is, by definition, inhuman and alienating. We therefore live in the age of 'divided representation'. Vesely's aim is nothing less than to recover the wholeness of human existence.

What does this have to do with architecture? Everything. For Vesely, architecture is the most important form of representation--the embodiment and articulation of the most fundamental human experience, the experience of space. What text is to literature, architecture is to the whole of culture. The fact that architecture is now seen merely as a feeble appendage of science and technology is a symptom of the deep wound in Western (now global) culture. And architecture offers the best hope of healing the wound.

This is not an easy book to read, partly because of the simple-but-difficult subject matter and partly because of Vesely's fondness for words like 'reciprocity', 'specificity' and even 'metaphoricity'. But there is none of the deliberate obfuscation characteristic of so much architectural theory. Difficult ideas are illustrated by vivid instances--the true nature of perception revealed by its breakdown in cases of apraxia or aphasia, for example, or identity's ultimate reliance on a cosmic frame of reference demonstrated simply in the traditional orientation of a church. Vesely taught architecture, first at the AA and then at Cambridge, for more than thirty years, not as a history and theory tutor as one might expect, but as master of a design studio--a much braver undertaking. This is his first book. For once the 'long-awaited' and 'eagerly anticipated' cliches are apt. At last it has arrived, and it does not disappoint.