And finally, the last and most important taboo — the question of progress — came up after all the points I have referred to above had been raised. If we were to assume that the works had more or less equally fulfilled their primary obligations, we had to ask what indicator remained on the basis of which we could evaluate one work as superior to another. Naturally, the only ground that lay outside the intrinsic values of a work concerned the questions that the architect, with regard to their professional outlook and to the general principles of architecture, had set themselves and had attempted to answer through the work. I mean the role the architect has played in the advance of architectural culture. If that is not so — if no transformation has taken place — the differences remain at the level of variety, and the works cannot be ranked in terms of value.
In this writer's view, the question of progress as a value is one of the most important and at the same time most distorted questions in architecture, and it is for that reason that I take it up in the body of the essay below.
Progress in Science and in Architecture
In the sciences, progress is clearer than in architecture. It is enough that a new problem be posed and that someone find an answer to that problem. The validity of that answer or solution holds only until the question is posed in a new way or a more correct answer to the problem is found. Today many avant-garde tendencies try to extend this principle to architecture and consider the mere finding of a new solution to a new problem as progress. The architect, in this case, has set themselves a goal in advance and is also determining the way to reach it. In the field of pseudo-scientific methods Eisenman has been more active than other architects. Eisenman has used linguistics, mathematics, biology and other sciences in his work. Of course this use has often been formal and superficial, aimed only at attaining new and unexpected architectural shapes, and a deep, conceptual relation between these works and the related sciences has never been established. On the other hand, in the sciences, studies generally proceed from the world of reality toward the world of abstraction (with the exception of sciences such as mathematics that lie wholly within the realm of abstraction). The scientific laws drafted to explain the problems of the world are abstract and hold true in a parallel world that reflects the real world. Architecture, conversely, proceeds from abstraction — from drawing and diagram — toward the world of reality, which is the building and life within it; and its laws too must necessarily find their match in the world of reality.
The experience of architecture in the second half of the twentieth century has proved that even famous architects make errors in this regard. For example, works claiming to be functional — though, by virtue of having won the propaganda war, they have come to be known as a kind of architecture called Functional — are in fact not functional by many indicators. That is, the abstract laws that were supposed to guarantee their meeting their use-needs have not, in practice, worked.
The relation of the sciences to life is a different and, in many cases, indirect one. In the early seventeenth century, mathematicians were occupied with the discovery of the methods of integral and logarithmic calculation. They were unaware at the time of the wide possibilities of putting those calculations to use, which were discovered later. Through the Middle Ages, and then in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, the scholars of mechanics paid attention to the problems of the stability of building structures purely out of their own scientific curiosity, and until the middle of the eighteenth century no practical use was made of these advances.
It is natural that, were it otherwise, science would not advance. If all physicians were to attend only to medical practice, new methods of treating disease would not be discovered. In any case, architecture in some respects resembles medicine; and since by its nature it deals with everyday life, it cannot devote itself to problems whose practical benefit will appear only several centuries later. Even if such work is undertaken, it is better confined to theory, exhibition, computer reconstruction, and similar modes of presentation. One cannot easily use human beings, like laboratory guinea pigs, for abstract experiments aimed at a very distant future. Because such works, aimed purely at progress, need a specialist audience, there is no necessity for them to be built. Architectural visual documents are sufficient. It is for that reason that the architects of the Archigram group consciously designed works that were not only never built but never even claimed to be buildable. The domain of the Archigram group was the magazine and the exhibition. The cultural value of their work is, in any case, undeniable. The trouble began when, for tourist reasons, such laboratory works were actually built in various corners of the world.
The Obsession with Progress
Today, attention to progress in architecture has turned into an obsession. Architects, more than the goal set before them, are thinking of expanding the dimensions of aesthetics and architectural concepts. The building has lost its totality as a work and is now presented only as a stage in an architectural search; the evaluation of buildings, too, is possible only within this process of search. The reduction of a work to a document (a stage in a research process) — long an issue in painting — is not easily justifiable in architecture. In painting, a person like Hans Hartung can spend his entire life examining the effect of brush-strokes on canvas and through that display the values of improvisation, the crystallisation of the energy of the moving hand, and the beauty arising from the unconscious. Architecture is not like that. In this craft, every building, however much it arises from a long enquiry and even articulates a new problem, is in itself a finished work, and one cannot delegate the use of all its formal and aesthetic values to the knowledge of prior or later works, or even to the design process of the work itself.
Today, presenting the design process of a project as a sequence of pictorial diagrams has itself become a value that plays an important role in whether a work is accepted. There are some misunderstandings here. First: the bulk of human memory is visual, and especially thoughts expressed through diagram and abbreviated geometric drawing — however wrong — are accepted far more readily than complex ideas. Second: the design process is, for the person who must live in the finished building, of no consequence. Architects who attach great value to process as a value, or those like Zaha Hadid who, from her stage-by-stage drawings, produce an independent, unreal art-work more beautiful than her built works, have in truth propagated a kind of conjuring and sophistry in architecture. It is enough to look at the computer studies of Greg Lynn and McInturff at the Hydrogen House near Vienna. One of the reasons for the success of such architects is the simplicity of their ideas. These works, though they claim complexity, are in fact very simple. The illusion created by publicity prevails over reality.
The architects who fly the flag of progress and complexity have in many cases reduced architecture to a mere geometric problem. In these works the geometry is complex, but the architectural work, emptied of its thousands of indicators, is very simple and primitive. It is natural that designing a spectacular and eye-catching project, under conditions where only a limited number of the factors influencing architecture have been considered, is a relatively easy task. On the other hand, this is also understandable: no architect is capable of devising a new and original answer to hundreds of architectural parameters within a single work. Only historical works have had the capability of answering, in their own period, the entire set of economic, social, psychological, climatic, technical and other concerns. In such architectures, space and the elements of architecture come out of a process of gradual transformation lasting several thousand years and carry within themselves a knowledge of several thousand years.
Today, on the pretext of progress, spaces and elements of architecture are invented all at once and there is no control over their social and psychological consequences — as if a drug were released to the market without examination of side effects and without repeated trials. Today even architects themselves in some cases admit that they had only the process of creating space under their control and from the start had no definite conception of the building's final form. In such invented spaces very little knowledge may have been brought to bear. For example, I refer to the windows of the Arab World Institute in Paris by Jean Nouvel. The inventive sun-screens of the main façade, drawn from Islamic motifs but using several thousand light-sensitive diaphragms, were supposed in theory to regulate the amount of natural light in relation to changes in the ambient light. In practice, the simultaneous opening and closing of several thousand diaphragms produced such a noise that the building's managers were forced to disable this automatic system.
A traditional window, having behind it an experience of several thousand years, never runs into such problems. Today, after a century and a half of high-rise buildings, it has been proved that many disease-causing factors exist in office and residential towers that only today's technology can partially control. Today SBS (Sick Building Syndrome) and BRI (Building Related Illness) have alarmed everyone.
What Is Meant by Progress?
In light of the points just made, these questions arise for me: What is meant by progress? Is progress the only value? Does progress have one meaning everywhere in the world? As I said, progress in the sciences and in technology has clear meanings. In the past, progress in architecture too had a clear meaning. The discovery of perspective, whose principles painters and architects used for centuries — even those who in the modern era took up the negation of perspective did so consciously and with a complete familiarity with its principles. Structure as adornment and the sole ornament of a building, raised in the eighteenth century, was likewise a form of progress that influenced the entire development of architecture for two centuries. Fundamentally, progress is when a new achievement is offered to humanity and that achievement then spreads and is taken up in general use; just like an invention, like electric light or the vacuum cleaner. As knowledge advances, culture grows richer day by day. Progress, then, must enrich humanity and civilisation, not the reverse.
Today the obsession with progress has reached such a point that whenever any group makes progress in some area — for example creating a style or using a particular geometry — immediately others' use of that achievement becomes forbidden, and a kind of self-censorship sets in. Other architects feel obliged to move on to a new subject and no longer to step into territory that has been searched, lest they be condemned as imitators and followers. Originality has turned into a calamity. Under such conditions, every new search not only fails to enrich and broaden the field of creativity but, by reducing the possible grounds of creativity, contributes to the impoverishment of architecture. Today most usable geometries — from fold and fractal and Möbius to topology and anamorphic forms — have already been used. The course of architectural history has shown that when styles reach their perfection and artists, drawn only by the temptation of being original, fall into exaggerated and complex stylistic mannerisms, the period of decline arrives. It is for this reason that in the eighteenth century Winckelmann and a number of other thinkers were opposed to the principle of progress.
Progress as Obsession
What is certain is that searching, finding, and dropping is not progress. A work as a research document is not architecture either. The theory of the architectural project as the project's only goal, of which the Coop Himmelb(l)au group are advocates, is also doubtful. An idea that does not spread and does not continue in the work of subsequent generations is not considered progress. How is it that the Postmodern style, for all its claim that it was going to change the architecture of the world and of subsequent generations, packed up and left the world within a few years, and that Deconstructivism endures only as long as a new fashion in clothing? One reason is that in these works progress has become the principle. Phenomena are no longer studied for their internal value; everything is studied within a chain of evolution. Self-referential, intellectualist architectures flee any measurement against general, external criteria.
In the modern period many styles, with claims to expand the dimensions of aesthetics, have constrained the field of creativity. Freedom of thought, creativity grounded in sensory perception, and artistic rule-breaking have given way to pseudo-scientific and mechanical processes. Unity and coherence of style — a small matter — has, in many cases, led to the corruption of the basic principles of architecture, which is a general matter. Things have come to such a pass that attention to people's needs and the principle of usefulness sometimes seems shameful. Great architects, with the licence of theory and art, grant themselves the right not to take into account the simple and basic needs of the user. Many famous architects are subject to criticism and even formal complaints from their own clients. The cinema complex UFA 385, by Coop Himmelb(l)au in Dresden, is among the prominent works that has run into thousands of functional problems. This complex has even, on grounds of incoherence in its principles and its outcomes, been severely criticised by a group of critics.
Conclusion
In any case, the question of progress is one of the most important questions in architecture. Progress means the anticipation of future developments and the finding of an architectural expression for them, and likewise the building of the future through the formulation of new needs and new fields of search and creativity. Without progress, architecture descends to the level of fashion or, at best, of style. The point is that we must prevent the question of progress from turning into an obsession or an inescapable need and the sole aim of architecture. Fundamental transformations need their proper time, particular conditions, and their own ground for crystallisation, and one cannot expect architecture to be wholly re-examined every year or two. Likewise, absolutising the value of progress and invention may, in many cases, place architects in a position where they unwittingly work in the direction of impoverishing and constraining architectural culture.
