On Empathy

Architecture from the very beginning has been a combination of the theoretical and the empirical. In reconstituting the Vitruvian canon, Alberti adapted it to buildings that did not exist in the time of Vitruvius, most notably churches. Part of his intention in doing so was to civilise what he saw as the unavoidable ‘bestiality of man’ as builder, the consequent despoiler and exploiter of nature’s resources.

It wasn’t long however before Alberti’s restraint was turned on its head by those who followed him as caution was increasingly thrown to the wind in the name of Protagoras’s ancient maxim of ‘man..the measure of all things’.

The steadily gathering hubris reached it’s height in the wake of the Industrial Revolution and in the effective founding of Modernism by Le Corbusier who declared in 1923, ‘we must create the mass production spirit’.

Ten years after Corbusier’s pronouncement this spirit was codified in the form of the International Style by Russell-Hitchcock and Johnson. Positivist where Alberti had been cautious and pessimistic and inspired by the latest technological developments, the International Style became the new orthodoxy.

It soon became apparent however that technological advancement did not constitute architectural advancement with the father of Modernism himself being the first to turn apostate.

Working in Marseilles in 1946 Corbusier was to reconnect with the poetry of lived experience, his accidental discovery of ‘Beton-Brut’ and the way it seemed to evoke something particular to the location being the catalyst. Mass production spirit gave way to the ‘spirit of place’.

The new direction gave license to others. In Italy, Modernism was supplanted by a ‘Neo Liberty’. Ignazio Gardella was soon to build the Casa Zattere in Venice and BBPR the Torre Velasca in Milan (1952 & 1955 respectively) both of which evoked the distinctive architectural culture of their respective cities and in so doing, essentially ‘humanised’ modern architecture just as Corbusier had done a decade earlier in Marseilles.

But not everyone was happy. The British Avant Garde led by theorist Reyner Banham and architects the Smithsons viewed such works as a betrayal of modernist principles, an unforgivable compromise with obsolescence.

In his seminal essay ‘The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic’ (1955), Banham decried this new direction as ‘infantile regression in full swing’ and in 1959 the Smithson’s bitterly criticised BBPR’s design for the Torre Velasca. Banham declared that the only real heir to Modernism was the Smithsons’ recently completed Hunstanton School, praising its ‘bloody mindedness’ and the fact that it cut all ties with history, embracing instead an aesthetic of pure industrial production.

The Smithsons -channelling early Corbusier- became increasingly convinced that the development of an advanced culture of industrial production was a ‘moral’ imperative for modern life. It was an ideology that was soon to dominate the British architectural scene and yet even in Britain the bloody-minded approach championed at Hunstanton met with resistance. In 1960, Denys Lasdun, an architect who would have seen ‘eye to eye’ with Banham, was ‘pushed’ by his clients, the Royal College of Physicians, to create a building which communed with both the historic institution’s culture and the site’s historic context. The consistent challenge mounted by the college to Lasdun’s default ‘Banham-ist’ ideology led him to come up with what is widely considered his best building and a ‘modernist’ masterpiece.

When faced with confident questioning clients, Banham’s technophilic certainties faltered and ironically it was only the voiceless and powerless poor –desperate for housing and schools- who had his ideas imposed upon them, to mostly disastrous effect. Hunstanton School -described as a tragedy in 2003 by a former teacher- continues to overheat in summer and freeze in the winter. The extreme sense of alienation engendered by Sheffield’s seminal Park Hill flats (1957) has led to them being redeveloped as expensive ‘retro-chic’ apartments for hip young professionals, having utterly failed as social housing, as had the Smithsons’ own Robin Hood Gardens in east London, completed in 1972 and very much based on the ‘Brutalist ethic’ and ‘mass production spirit’ Hunstanton exemplified.

Currently scheduled for demolition, Robin Hood Gardens remains the subject of repeated campaigns for it’s preservation, from within and around the ranks of architects, demonstrating the continuing inability of the profession to align it’s interests with those of wider society. Banham’s Brutalism has gone but his bloody-mindedness persists. In the name of ‘creativity’, architects continue to be in-thrall to their own ‘private mythologies’3 over and above the effectiveness of their creations as lived reality, something particularly in evidence at our top architecture schools and arguably, almost entirely responsible for the architect’s now near total marginalisation in the UK building industry.

The erstwhile ‘heresies’ of BBPR, Gardella and others are now gaining new recognition through the work and teaching of a new generation of UK architect-scholars who have understood that viable architecture needs to empathise with the plethora of things that affect people’s lives; history, climate, landscape and culture. Yet even outside this ‘Johnny-come-lately’ court of expert opinion, buildings like the Torre Velasca and Casa Zattere have long since quietly taken their place as part of the life of the cities in which they are situated, in a way that Hunstanton , Park Hill and Robin Hood Gardens never did. It’s high time architects ‘caught up’.

As Alberti understood five centuries ago, architecture is a uniquely ‘traumatic’ art as well as an imperfect science. That we will err as architects is certain, so surely it’s better to do so on the side of empathy?