//excerpts from an (altered) interview with Leon Van Schaik, Mark no. 26
//conducted by Thomas Daniell w/ interruptions by Lennard Ong
Thomas Daniell:: What are you reading now?
Leon Van Schaik: ... it's a bit like Raymond Chandler, who defined the poetic of Los Angeles so well. Novelists such as these describe the physical environment we inhabit more accurately and acutely than any architecture writer ever does...
Lennard Ong: Is literature is less imposing? it is the construction of someones idea of los angeles (e.g. Ed Ruscha's Los Angeles?), which not everyone needs to buy into.
In the introduction of The History of Forgetting by Norman M. Klein, he calls the urban policies that shaped downtown Los Angeles the construction of a Social Imaginary, in the sense that it builds the unremembered: a collective memory of an event or place that never occured, but is built anyway.
The problem is when this version of the collective memory is biased toward the planners and their histories. Afterall, "the best way to lie is with the truth", and isn't that what the social sciences are for? (why is it called white-flight and not black-overrunning?). So, also tying in 'weak' form, and its opposite, 'strong' form, it inhibits alternative social imaginaries from colonizing that same space with its own simulation.
For example, the Business District is distinctly business-like in the image of suits and formality. As is the fashion district. and the Art's district. All these islands are right next to each other, boarded up against each other by imaginary walls. These are ripe for explosion. Berlin was lucky, it had a wall to symbolize change. We don't, its almost as if we need to construct an effigy for this to happen. The downtown art walk is one version, but then, it is increasingly becoming too-defined and self-aware. That is dangerous.
This is also not to say that in opposition to erasure, we want total recall. That would not be useful, because what is history but a useful construction for the future? A future-perfect which delivers the shared memory of an event that has never occured. Perhaps this memory can be something that is empty of politics or history, something that allows us to connect on a more basic level.
TD: Novelistic descriptions of the built environment clearly resonate with your interest in architectural poetics. The other underlying theme in your writing is ethics, a topic that Javier Maria's books address in unsettling ways.
LVS: ... One of our big problems is the belief that architectre can be translated freely from one situation to another, which is not the case. Every time architecture is dragged across a boundary, its success relies on the sophistication of the translation by the archtiects and the clients. There is the potential to cause discomfort, if not physical harm... as Peter Corrigan would say, architecture is fundamentally about the ways in which communities construct meaning out of their lives, and the lives in each of our cities are very different.
LO: the problem with architecture, I feel, a two-step thing: We are now presented with alternative avenues for one to live one's life out. Gilt.com for shopping, facebook for socializing. This has loosened people's critique of our architectural production and allowed us to stray to other avenues. This has been useful, because it has expanded our palette significantly. But if we don't return to an argument for physical space, then we are painting ourselves into irrelevance where architecture could truly matter as a democratic tool.
TD: What was the last explicitly architectural book you read?
LVS: ... far too many [architects] spend their time quoting philosophers and constructing sentences that would take a week to unpack... a review in the RIBA journal.... it was a waste of my time, just a series of cliches and familar tropes that ended by saying, well, time will tell. There's no attempt to engage the building with a wider culture, unlike, say, Li Shiqiao's Power and Virtue: Architecture and Intellectual Challenge Change in England, 1660 - 1730". This book provides tremendous excitement as we discover how the universe of ideas in England - the battle between the realists and the platonists - played out at an ethical, moral, political and architectural level.
Someone else I used to read avidly is the late Igansi de Sola Morales. Everything he wrote was a delight, with a generosity that opened up new vistas [a positive constructivism]. I am famously not fond of Kenneth Frampton, because he's all to often trying to close things down, to point out what's correct and what's not, as opposed to Ignasi, who posed fascinating questions even when he chose the wrong exemplars. he was the first person to write about 'weak' architecture, out of a concern that our cities are so over designed that people have become attached to undesigned abandoned spaces. Once we've recognized the power of these spaces, what do we do? Do we maintain them? is it possible to design such spaces?
LO: That is something I grapple with. These spaces: are they the residue of design, but, in an inversion, also the point of architecture? Its like something out of the corner of your eye, you have to keep it in the periphery, because when you focus on it, it looses its appeal. I've come to believe that architecture is the rational pursuit of irrational ends.
TD: Are there any practising architects whom you consider to be worthwhile writers?
LVS: Aldo Rosse produced a fantastic body of work and writing, if somehwat undermind by what he did later in his career... I admire immensely Steen Eiler Rasmussen. Experiencing Architecture is beautifully written... I used to think it is too simple, but that is now what I aspire to... i can't bring my self to read writing that seeks to validate itself by making obeisance to philosophers of the moment. I'd rather look at Eisenman's drawings than read his essays.
LO: guilty as charged. I will take note.
TD: Rasmussem explicitly wanted his audeince to be wider than just architects. Who is your intended audience?
LVS: ... Architects must become more conscious about their impact and less caught up in their own discipline. Our whole educational system is about defining and regurgitating canons as opposed to understanding this problem of translation. Someone who early on enabled me to think about that is Dalibor Vesely. His writing is notoriously difficult to read, but he's the first person that I know of who identified the way encyclopedists have ripped the world apart by making comparisons between cathedrals rather than embedding buildings in their histories and places. Eventually, you get a situation where everything becomes a style and everything is transferable.
LVS's favourite books:
Steen Eiler Rasmussen: Experiencing Architecture, 1959
Gaston Bachelard: The Poetics of Space, 1958
Guy Underwood: The Pattern of the Past, 1969
William Lethaby: Architecture, Mysticism and Myth, 1891
Beatirz Colomina: Sexuality and Space, 1992
Ignasi de Sola-Morales: Differences: Topographies of Contemporary Architecture, 1996
Manfredo Tafuri: ARchtiecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development, 1973
Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, 1957
Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, 1951
Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay, 1951
Philip Fisher, Wonder, The Rainbow and the Aesthetics of Rare Experience
Reyner Banham, The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment, 1969
Brinckerhoff Jackson, American Space: The Centennial Years
Robert Bruegmann, Sprawl, a Compact History, 2005
Colin Rowe & Fred Koetter, Collage City, 1978
Rem Koolhaas: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan
Nikos Papstergiadis, Spatial Aesthetics: Art, Place and the Everyday, 2006
"Men read books, my son, to find their own truths." A book is a slow conversation with its author.
