A flash of light and they're gone
'Books like Sustaining Architecture in the Anti-Machine Age irritate me, and not in a useful way', complained Hugh Pearman in Blueprint, April 2002, page 95.
Start with the title. Sorry? What anti-machine age? What the blue blazes are they talking about? Then there's that punning, nausea-inducing top line, Sustaining Architecture. And the cover: a stupid student project of an orange plastic tower with helicopters and dirigibles drifting around it, a slight reworking of one of the great architectural cliches of the twentieth century.
So what is the book about? Search me. You see, this is the kind of book that emerges from a talking shop, the kind of forum where dozens of academics and a few token practitioners stand up and indulge in mutual massage, airing their often contradictory views around a loose theme.
The forum in question was called Building Audacity (another of those stomach-churning puns), and took place in July 2000. Put all these contributions together, daft and clever alike, and what do you have? A book. The sort of book that exists mostly to provide publication points - so necessary in universities these days - for as many academics as can be fitted between the covers, in very small type.
Which is not to say there isn't interesting, even well-written, stuff in here. There is. James Heartfield puts the case for those who want to build over the countryside, and Martin Pawley talks about 'sand heap urbanism', which is entertaining, although I've already forgotten what his point was.
With others, your eyelids droop. You get people talking about American vernacular suburbs, and hydrogen-fuelled things, and legal niceties, and the planning system, and sustainability. One contributor has even noticed the shift from mechanistic to organic imagery in architecture. Well done. Another laments that houses can't be built as solidly as boats. I rub my eyes. Are we in 1976 again, and are we making houses out of yacht masts? Where are Cedric Price and Archigram when you need them?
There are also case studies of real buildings, mostly of the romantic high-tech variety by Foster and Partners, Wilkinson Eyre, Future Systems or Marks Barfield, but also Cartwright Pickard's modular block for Peabody Estates. These seem unconnected with the rest of the book and with one another.
This is supposedly a contrarian book. The people involved in it like to think they are questioning assumptions. They are brave little folk, who dare to challenge norms.
Talking of which - and since puns are in order here - it's been a long time since Norman Foster was any kind of model for rebellion, yet his stuff is all over this book, with his PR handouts printed verbatim. Why? For a book that claims to go beyond the cult of celebrity architecture, there's a fair bit of this on display.
Opening this book is like turning over a stone in a forest. There's a sudden scurry of activity, as lots of little creatures, briefly exposed to the light, dash about then vanish. That's academia. Best leave them to it. They're comfortable in there. Hugh Pearman
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