During our student years in the faculty, we used to leaf through foreign books and magazines of architecture in order to look at images of works by famous masters, or of striking and prominent buildings that had earned the right to be published, so that — as the saying goes — we might model our own course projects on them. Some of our elders, the upperclass students, would say in an admonishing tone: “These people only look at the pictures!” They meant that because we could not read the accompanying texts — usually in English, French, Italian or German — what we grasped from the pictures alone lacked depth, and we failed to understand what these architectures were about. In other words, architecture cannot be grasped from pictures alone; one must also know things about it that can be transmitted only through the instrument of the word. Put differently, architecture is not only a matter of the eye; it is, more than that, a matter of comprehension and of knowledge.
The truth is that the current “knowledge” of architecture — the knowledge taught in the universities, which are the centres where knowledge is produced and transmitted — has gradually become a knowledge about a comprehensible architecture. The aim of that comprehension is not to ask what sort of values architecture possesses, how those values are established, or how they come to be realised. Such a gaze has not served architecture; it has served something that must be called “the comprehension of architecture.” And because the logic of that gaze is that architecture is itself the product of comprehension, “the comprehension of architecture” has turned into “the comprehension of how to comprehend architecture.” Losing oneself in this critical comprehension of architecture has led only to going round in a circle or being swept into a whirlpool.
It may be that comprehending architecture is a kind of virtue and a cultural value. But granting that we treat a mental activity called the comprehension of architecture as a cultural virtue, there must first be something called architecture in order for people then to set themselves to comprehend it and to wish to spread the values of such comprehension among the public. Before being something to be comprehended, architecture is something to be produced. The scientific-critical outlook, whose aim was to place human knowledge within the domain of scientific or rational cognition, also enclosed art and beauty — which are of course not synonymous — within its own exclusive domain. Within that critical outlook, matters of art and beauty were set apart from matters of pure comprehension and placed in the domain of sensory affairs; and opposite the heading “the discourse of cognition,” which belonged to what could be comprehended, the heading “the discourse of the senses (Aesthetics)” was placed upon them.
But this general tendency of the scientific and academic community — as we see in its fruits today in the books and magazines of architecture — is the building of a conceptual science of architecture. If the scientific-critical work on architecture had been left to science and philosophy alone, and if architects, who produce architecture, and the people, who consume and love it, had been shielded from the neurosis induced by university teaching and the architectural literature printed in books and journals, there would have been no cause for concern. But comprehensible architecture forcefully imposes itself on university teaching and on architectural literature.
A very important question, one not easy to answer, is this: now that, like it or not, the comprehension of architecture has fallen under the attention of science and philosophy, and it is possible that, through the efforts of scholars and philosophers, a body of knowledge about the comprehension of architecture may be built — can such a knowledge itself become a means of producing architecture?
The story of modern architecture is itself the greatest proof that the knowledge of comprehension has not only contributed nothing to the making of new works of architecture, but has emptied the activity of architecture of its creative force. It is a mistake to suppose that the brilliant early works of modern architecture were the product of progress in the comprehension of architecture. The spring that brought those brilliant works into being was the very creative force which, throughout history, had produced brilliant works to match the technical and spiritual requirements of every age. It is true that the likes of Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, Wright and Alvar Aalto — some less, some more — did carry on discussions of the principles and foundations of their own work and of the right path for the architecture to come, and these discussions bore, in general, the tenor of the scientific-critical outlook of their time. But the subsequent course of architecture over the following decades, the rise of scientific-philosophical discussions about architecture, and the role of schools and magazines of architecture in spreading them, show that the more those discussions spread, the more the creativity and power of architecture receded. The clear reason for this recession is that works of architecture have become more and more in need of, and dependent on, criticism, justification and explanation. In other words, they have grown distant from the sphere of sensory-practical relation with the consumer and lover of architecture, and have ended up wrapped in a haze of concepts and interpretations which people do not easily grasp; and if they do grasp them, what they grasp belongs to the realm of “comprehension,” not to a practical relation with architecture.
The great architects at the dawn of modernity were of the lineage and stock of the architects before them, architects who, at the same time and as their contemporaneity with their own age required, answered the call of their era. But this challenger’s cry — “is there anyone to take the field?” — grew louder day by day, and forced architects, before attending to their main task, which is the making and producing of architecture, to first debate what architecture is and what its values are. In this way, the task of judging architecture and its values was transferred outside architecture — outside the intellectual and practical workshop of its production.
The course that architecture is thus taking has turned architecture into something of the nature of literature. This turning-into-literature is not peculiar to architecture; many other intellectual and cultural domains have been affected in the same way. The same condition has also been described as the “medialisation” of every domain. That description accords perfectly with the place which information and information-transmission occupy today. Media and literature are very alike, with the difference that media stands on the side of power and politics, and literature on the side of society and culture. Just as society is subdued by power and culture by politics, so too is literature subdued by the media and placed in their service. By insisting on the importance of “news” and of “informing,” the media try to establish for themselves a popular, public base; but the reality is that they have risen out of power and are in its service. The traditional instrument of the media was literature — that is, the verbal means of communication — but today the media use every means of communication. In the wake of media-technological change, even customary verbal literature is being transmuted, and through that transmutation its literary form is turned into the material of a media form. Media is the form that converts every prior customary form into its own material — because media, like the power it serves, is totalising.
The transmutation of the form of architecture into the material of media can clearly be seen in today’s postmodern architecture. Architecture has stepped out of its historical shell and the customs of its forefathers, has been pressed into the service of media, and has been reduced to components of a media act. What was once called “letters and culture” — what was held to be a scientific-practical understanding of life and the world, and what circulated in the forms of poetry, belles-lettres, proverbs, wisdoms and customs — has today been dissolved into media. Media carries within it a taste of everything that belonged to letters and culture, but since it has entered the service of totalising power and stands under the dominion of technique, it has turned every form into the form of technique. The chief instruments and symbols of the media are the magazine and film — and their more contemporary form, the Internet — and the mark of their legitimacy is circulation: general acceptance and widespread diffusion.
Postmodernism has entered, in the form of a wave, into architecture, art, literature, sociology and politics; and its dominant aspect is the media form. Postmodernism itself has so much of a media quality that even its speaker does not much insist on establishing it. In fact, the postmodern utterance has no identifiable speaker. What needs to be proved is proved of itself, through the flow of the media.
The architecture student who reads such matters has the right to ask, after all, what is the definition of architecture? Whatever view of architecture we adopt, we must be able to define it. But the more fundamental question is: what need do we have of a definition, and what problem does a definition solve? Many things are present in our lives, and for our relation with them we have contented ourselves with merely giving them a name. A definition is what appears on the cover of a book; the extent of a definition depends on the writer’s aim. Books are sometimes written in architecture to teach the reader how to build. But, beyond how to build a building, other questions can be raised — the same historical questions that the Roman Vitruvius answered some two thousand years ago under the headings of strength, utility and beauty, and which in the modern period have been recast as industry–function–form. So long as this new scientific-critical outlook did not exist, the problem of definition was not a scientific or philosophical problem — neither for architects and builders, nor for the public, nor even for the Western authors of architecture books. But when architectural knowledge shifted from the teaching of how to build to the inquiry into how the mind relates to architecture, the vital and existential relation with architecture became an objectual relation. Architecture, like every other affair that has to do with making, belongs to the domain of creativity, and creativity does not submit to definition.
More important than the problem of definition is that, even if someone were to put forward a definition of architecture — as has indeed been done over the last hundred years — there is no longer a listening ear for such talk. The chief strategy of postmodernism is that no utterance should be taken seriously. Postmodernism is opposed to seriousness, to belief, and — in the words of the explainers of the current known as postmodern — to grand narratives. Unlike modernity, which faced the future, postmodernism forbids attention to the future. We remember the clamour over the entry into the third millennium. Despite the media volume of that clamour, it did not contain an atom of the social-political passion and enthusiasm of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. No great personage and no great slogan stood behind the media literature of the millennium’s arrival. Postmodernism has no tolerance for greatness — save for one greatness: the circulation of the media.
