In the book “What’s the Question?”, Tor Inge Hjemdal and Nora Aursand Iversen asked 16 Nowegian architects to phrase questions or issues considering the current and future state of architecture. Bart Lootsma wrote a critical introduction. Image Lars Ringdal, Vy Architects.
More Questions
Just the other day, Timothy Moore from Architecture Australia interviewed me. He told me, among others, that Australia had been experiencing a Golden Age lately, perhaps similar to the second modernity or golden age of Dutch society that I commented upon in SuperDutch at the turn of the millennium. It began in Australia with liberalization of the market towards an open economy in the 80s and was cemented with the growing population and resources boom from the early 2000s. Timothy asked me, having gone through a “second modernity” myself, what should we expect on the other side?
These days, that is a very difficult question to answer. The architectural success of the nineties very soon turned into its reverse. Behind the scenes, the ground on which it could flower Privatizations and deregulations realized under a “purple” government with the Dutch social democrats as strongholders in it paved the way for the new post-modern form of right-wing liberal-individualist politics Pim Fortuyn marketed. From the beginning to the end, these developments were related to architecture and urbanism. The privatisations of the Dutch public housing estate and the deregulations of the planning system were related to the reduction of the national debt to meet the demands of the Euro –already in the early nineties. Pim Fortuyn was financed by a group of real-estate brokers that became rich in the period that followed and was able to broadcast his ideas in a television show on a commercial network that was financed and moderated by a real estate broker. An animal rights activist killed Fortuyn.
Today, I told Timothy Moore, we are in an enormous crisis beyond economics and the environment. A crisis that is extremely fundamental in where it is hard to predict to where we are going. What I do expect for the next period, on the one hand, what we started with individualization and liberalization of the housing market will also come to being with property laws – they will slowly evaporate as we can already see in the growing part of the world where informal urbanism becomes dominant. All these factors will force us to take greater risks. This risk-taking is actively promoted in a culture of adventure, like here in the mountains around Innsbruck where I am currently located. Here risk-taking sports can be absolutely breath-taking. Just as in a Hollywood action movie, we seem to forget about the casualties and collateral damage though. Victims are eerily quiet. But maybe they will stand up some day. They seem to be practising in England, France and maybe elsewhere in the mean time.
In 2009, within the framework of Linz ’09 Cultural Capital of Europe, Katharina Weinberger and I invited three European architectural critics to write a critical essay on Linz’ architecture and urbanism. Linz is the third-largest city in Austria: prosperous since Hitler initiated a major industrialization with among others the Hermann Goering Werke –now Voest Alpine- before and during the Second World War. Since the Second World War, Linz is a social democratic city, shamefully capitalizing on this heritage. Shumon Basar was one of the critics. He desperately looked for problems in Linz because, as he wrote: “Optimism can flourish most vividly when facing problematic situations. They form a dialectic of hope. I think it was Jean-Luc Godard who used to insist that the major moments of intellectual history were formulated, rather than what we tend to fetishize, epistemologically: that is, answers and solutions. A problem poses the question, it opens the discursive field. A solution closes the circuit of inquiry.” Whatever Shumon asked, in comparison with the problems large parts of the world are facing, the “problem” Linz seemed to be facing was that it actually didn’t have major, mortally threatening problems. “I don’t mean to demean any grievances felt by its citizens and those that are in charge of running the city—it’s just that comparing it to the plights of other cities-on-the-brink, Linz is faring pretty well. To adopt a cod-Freudian stance: is the problem that there is no problem? Or, in the style of American Dream mythology, without the Fall, there cannot be Redemption. This is the peculiar anxiety of anyone or anything at the ‘top’ for a long period of time. Just ask Madonna.”
The anxiety we live in the West today is an anxiety for something that has not happened yet, even if the signs seem to be there to read, and for a redemption that we could not even envisage at all. This is almost like the disturbing purgatory that is painted in the BBC series “Ashes to Ashes”, in which police officers that have been shot on duty quasi return to strange police office decades earlier. They do not know whether it is real, whether they have lost their mind, if they are in a coma or just dreaming. Doing their job as professional as they can under the primitive circumstances, they just know they want to get back to normal but in the end most of them disappear hopefully in a pub with a beautiful light shining out.
These thoughts came to me when I went through the essays in this book. The overall picture corresponds to the state the Western Welfare States find themselves in today. Just as the cases of Linz, Australia or the Netherlands, Norway goes through a Golden Age that produces an indefinable unease. A Dutch, an Australian or an Austrian architect could with some minor changes, just as well have presented all of the issues put up here –including the night mare of a massacre of all leading civil servants responsible for the architecture and urbanism in Oslo. (For months, the official home page of the Netherlands Architecture Institute featured an entry titled “SuperDutch and the beginning of all misery, Part 1”. The second part, in which it would be explained what this misery is, never came out. The author is obviously still waiting for the catastrophe to happen. I am sure it will.)
The issues in this book seem valid for architects in a large part of the Western world: rules and regulations, greedy investors and developers, social justice, immigration, sustainability, landscapes and nature in general under threat. And not to forget: the finding of the right materials, colours and other ingredients in the right context to produce a poetic effect on an architectural or urban scale. There are issues, solutions and even proposals for policies. This is good. It means that, by all the differences, there is still a widespread consensus in the Western world about what architects should do.
It is all there and still something is missing. There are all these ideas, plans, policies and dreams but somehow they do not come together, not even those that clamp to the remainders of the traditional welfare state. Somehow we are not able to formulate a larger perspective in which all of this could be sustained beyond the now fragile concept of the nation state. Professionalism, yes, but to achieve what? For whom? The spreading of risk, yes, but can we still control the risks on a national scale? What if other countries are not so successful in that or cannot afford it any longer? How would that fold back upon us? Is it than still equally spread?
Here I have to come back to Shumon and ask you to ask with him: “What are the difficult questions that remain unasked?”
Bart Lootsma
Bart Lootsma, SuperDutch Afterthoughts, in: Crimson, Pedro Gadanho, Bart Lootsma, Roemer van Toorn (ed.), POST.ROTTERDAM, Architecture and City after the tabula rasa, 010 Publishers, Rotterdam 2001.
Shumon Basar, The Problem is “What is the Problem?”, in: Angelika Fitz, Martin Heller (ed.), Linz Texas, A City relates, Springer, Wien/New York, 2008. http://www.architecturaltheory.eu/?archive_id=142&PHPSESSID=9117562eae51aee8db788fedc849a49b