The Anatomy of Experimentation

As the approach of the third millennium grows near, architecture finds itself under siege, disenfranchised from a society ever more obsessed by consumerism, spectacle and fragmentation. Like the passenger who frenetically rearranges the deck chairs on the Titanic long after all lifeboats have departed, the architect seeks relevance in almost stereotypical formal acts of desperation, unable/unwilling to compete in the world of the image. As society advances, post-modernity seeks to unbundle all that is whole, while a radicalised modernity seeks to (re)integrate, advancing an incomplete project guided by ideology without guilt (values). It is within this context that we seek to understand architecture [again] as a tool, as the embodiment of coherence, will, and reason, and to examine the role of its antithesis, that is architecture as an object of contemplation.

Architecture is a Tool

All architecture possess both qualities of tool and object. The misguided have sought either to elevate the object quality of architecture [read “the artistic quality”: the impoverished architect that covets a secret desire to come out of his/her artistic closet] over the tool quality, or to simply disregard any notion of function as a determinant of form, probably stemming from the reactionary tendency that implicates the functional with the anti-humanistic. But upon closer examination, one can begin to discern the truth. Tools are conceived in reason, a response to a problem clearly stated: “The idea of the ‘composition of a harbour’ is hilarious!” wrote Hannes Meyer in his essay, Bauen (1928). A tool is defined by virtue of being something which operates on something in order to make something else. As such, they are not ends in themselves. Tools amplify the will of the operator. Tools are the means for producing other tools (other means) or ends, in service of humanity. Although tools can operate other tools (and machines operate other machines), tools are more often designed for interaction with the human body, again as an extension of the will (and as a means) to make something else (think of a hammer). Objects on the other hand are ends in themselves. They are for contemplation, and they don’t seek to make anything beyond themselves in this role. Objects are ends which act as repositories, mirroring back to the consumer an image for contemplation. They do not seek to amplify will beyond this desire for contemplation (think of the objet d’art housed within the confines of the museum, a kind of hermetic theater of contemplation, withdrawn and fully autonomized within its own context, devoid of any notion of utility). It quickly becomes apparent why the tool removed from its context of use, placed within a transposed context (thus made obsolete), can only be understood as an object (think of a scale model of a nuclear submarine or Duchamp’s infamous Fountain).

If architecture possesses both qualities of tool and object, let us examine which of these promotes the principle of humanism. Tools, and by extension machines, are often typecast as anti-humanist, stereotypically portrayed as the horrors of an industrial age unleashed upon a helpless proletariat. The reality is that tools are conceived rationally (they are the epitome of reason) and are an index of the advancement of a civilization. Labeled ‘Instrumental Reason’ and rendered suspect as a nightmare of technology out of control (think of Hiroshima, DDT, or the psychotic super-computer HAL), an entire counterculture of utopian aspiration was born and died only three decades ago, manifest in everything from nomadic tent cities (think of Woodstock) to Fuller’s geodesic domes (ironically one of the highest forms of technology in service of efficiency), and finally eclipsing in the extreme technological paranoia of the Uni-bomber and various survivalist militias. Perhaps as a result of these two extremes, naive optimism and anxious pessimism, we have come to understand technology again as a tool, that is, as being useful when determined by appropriateness. The German philosopher Imannuel Kant considered reason as neither good or evil unto itself, but instead can be used for either of these ends dependent on the nature of the will using it (Plato said, “Great evil springs out of a fullness of nature....weak natures are scarcely capable of very great good or evil.”). Certainly telematics and the computer have again reaffirmed a faith in technology’s ability to promote progress; we have discovered again the naive exhilaration that the internet represents the closest model to date of a totalized democratic freedom without restriction.

If one thinks of architecture as a tool, that it is conceived and realized with the same values and intentions that go into the making of tools (and therefore the same qualities already attributed to tools), then it can be seen as something which works to make something else, a selection according to a standard. Its premise is that function is the single most effective attribute architecture possesses to transform its contents, and that which sets it apart from all other disciplines. It is perhaps a radical notion today to introduce (again) the idea that function, and in turn the architectural program, as the guiding principle of architecture. Instead of the current catalogue of frustration, might we provoke the critical imagination towards an explosion of achievement? Architecture as a tool provides the enabling physical conditions for a way of life, and therefore addresses function at its highest level. The project of a tool-architecture is without determinism (it enables); the ‘machine á habiter’ poses new conditions but no more determines how life will be lived than the ‘machine á écriré‘ determines what will be written. Therefore, if architecture as object is only an end in itself, and architecture as tool is a means to making other means or ends [living, dwelling], then the former works by exclusion and reflection, while the latter enables and is projective, an apparatus for the promotion of humanism.