To understand the proposition that there can be an un-volumetric architecture, it is necessary to believe that architecture may be divided away from a simple limiting congruency with the necessarily spatial, that is, with buildings. This possibility may be noticed today for two reasons: first, because technology has leapfrogged beyond the limits that traditionally bound architecture (to buildings), gaining a vantage from which to see those limits as provisional rather than absolute. And second: because enough generations of architects have come of age since modernism’s “break with the past” that this “break’s” metaphorical intention has been forgotten. The contemporary diet of digital soma encourages a viewpoint “outside every discipline,” fostering a climate indifferent at best to the idea of a continuing tradition. Now that technology is capable of producing a virtual reality that deserves the name, and that reality has in turn been granted a value surpassing the “real” by this generation of computer-suckled youth (now that reality has become “so called,” in other words), aspects of architecture once assumed to be fundamental, like shelter or volume, or even presence, may not be taken for granted.
The present “liberation” of architecture from old technology is fundamentally different from the evolutionary progress of the past. It has recast that earlier progress as more like stylistic misalignments (between successive technologies and their architectural assimilation) than substantive changes. The history from which the common sense of architecture has been built, and from which it draws its confidence, holds no lessons for the application of a technology that can ignore gravity and presence. The canon will not hold when contemporary practice is torn from an exclusive relation to building by virtual reality, and when it is taken out of the hands of the professional by nanotechnology.
While the answer to what this next wave of technology will liberate architecture from is all around, it is not clear there is any possible answer to the question of what it will liberate architecture to. This confusion is more than the reasonable hesitation before an uncertain future. It is a tremor before the possibility of no future. The anachronisms of the nineteenth century’s classical Roman ordination of steel or Rome’s own earlier appliqué of trabiation to arcuated concrete were duly adjusted as the tectonic character of the new technology became apparent, but in the present case the advances come without the possibility of tectonic guidance. In fact, the current threshold marks the end of such assimilation, as it marks a complete liberation from the physical limitations that the succession of technologies addressed.
What passes today for the “avant-garde” has reacted to this new technology as if it were a liberation from an overly constraining necessity. Things once considered sacred about architecture are subject to new scrutiny — and not with an eye to preservation or increase, but with an indifference to their fate. To those who look at it this way architecture must seem like a game with no actual consequences, like Quake or Doom, from which they themselves might escape once all the characters have been blown away, or the play can no longer sustain conviction. The signs of this are everywhere, from the post-critical relinquishment of responsibility to the formalism that takes such relinquishment as a license to be silly, from the obsession with “branding” and consumer culture (in a bid for easy relevance), to the retreat from building altogether in a defensive haze of academic obscurity and formal slackness.
What actually is at stake in this freedom, though? It is not buildings that are threatened by the coming technology, since shelter will always be necessary. Nor is it space, per se, since there will at least always be a human presence to fill it. And not even the profession, since a litigious society will always require licensed responsibility to blame. What is at risk is the glue that binds these together into a discipline, with a coherent sense of the architectural to guide it. Not shelter, but the architectural sense that it matters enough to be ennobled; not space, but the architectural affect to which it may aspire; not the profession, but the architectural spirit that occasionally makes it a vocation instead of a business.
It is this coherent sense of the architectural that is precisely what is preserved in unvolumetric architecture — as what indeed allows the term to have meaning, and thus what must remain even after everything else is lost. If architecture is traditionally “located” at the convergence of space, building and art — as the intersection, union or difference of the three, it could be shown that the many faces of architecture through history can be explained in terms of the different proportions of this mix, and it is this proportionate mix, rather than any of its constituents, that carries the gene of the architectural.
When space and a definitive relation to shelter or building are eliminated from an accounting of the necessary in architecture, and with them a sense of public/civic responsibility, what is left? The consideration of architecture from an unvolumetric perspective might be an important first step toward strategizing architecture’s survival in a future where these traditional underpinnings are missing or uncertain. Where is the architectural in (the experience of) architecture? This question could of course have always been asked, and often was, but always from the inside — with the presumption that there would be an answer that made the question worth asking.
If it is not to be found in the object itself or in the space enclosed, as a quality of affect, or in the relation between these, is it then an artifact of the frame that identifies the experience, or is it merely a conventional product of labor, legislated into particularity by licensing and practice? Is architecture an effect of the social or power relations that meet on any site, the history that has been effaced by the newer construction or the potential it suggests? It is architecture’s secret that it is conventional, and a relatively simple matter to consider each of these — the building as physical construction, the space as enclosed volume, the experience, practice, the social dimension — in different contexts without invoking architecture.
The term “the architectural” (rather than simply “architecture”) might be advanced to refer positively to a general case of architecture-ness, one not fettered to specific, isolated products — like buildings — but to an experience that might be prompted by a greater variety of object-stimuli, or variety of stimuli within a single object. Thus, not specific instances of architecture, invariably buildings, but a broad, and exportable, sense of the architectural, that could be applied to or explain a wider range of experience — of things, like clothes, diagrams, objects, as well as buildings. (1)
As a metaphor already in use, architecture evokes useful qualities of fixity, structure, organizational character, stateliness, order. These characteristics of the architectural are exportable because they make sense in translation and can be understood apart from a relation to space or shelter. Architecture’s assumed permanence or physicality may lend such borrowings an unintended irony, as when Fashion uses “architecture” to describe a particularly structured design, for example, or computer scientists take it to label the fundamental organization of a virtual system. It is a sign of how commonplace this has already become that this irony is unrecognized, and of how established as well when such irony is denied if it is pointed out. But, since an assay of the architectural-outside-architecture identifies those aspects not exclusively related to building or space, then maybe their circumstances in new surroundings might be instructive in understanding an architecture less dependent on space or building. This external appreciation is an immediate precursor of the more violently shifted perspective the new technology will bring; the reflection of this external appreciation back into the field is already influencing the value system of the field today, and in some quarters superceding it. Old-school critics within the field welcome this as a breaking down of conventional, disciplinary barriers, while old-school practitioners fear it as the same thing; the youngest, accustomed to such openness from Playstation™ , may not notice any of this. If it is in fact the architectural behind all this, the diffusion of the architectural is shown in a different light, as perhaps a natural release from its imprisonment within space or building. When advances in technology threaten the security of its traditional prison cell, this here-to-fore dormant protean possibility becomes a means of self-preservation. (2)
This protean character is both architecture’s strength — what has caused it to stand for permanence despite its own continual redefinition, and allowed it to enrich itself by borrowings — and its weakness, in that it seems to leave architecture without any incontrovertible core about which to circle its wagons when it is threatened. Indeed, it is what makes the circling of the wagons itself the architectural, and what makes the architectural slip any implications of space in that circling.
Architecture can be fractionated to the relationship among five characteristics, of which three are necessary and two conventional. The architectural emerges as a residue in this cracking of architecture: what remains when the necessary aspects of architecture are considered separately from the conventional. The five are: intentionality, importance, adherence to limits, relation to space, or volume, and a relation to shelter, or building. The other attributes commonly associated with architecture can be seen as specific cases of these. Order and ideas about rules, for example, are really a response to the issue of limits that foregrounds intentionality, while fixity or endurance can be seen as a result of importance, as can the traditional sense of expression or establishment of ideals. The technological trends referred to above are forcing a reappraisal of this array, with the result that the two that are historically conventional, volume and building, may fade away as irrelevant, leaving a precipitate of intentionality, importance and limits as the architectural. The terms, as well as the qualities they name, have a long history together, and the language itself has evolved during and as part of that history, so that they may not be as cleanly separable as this discussion might suggest. Nevertheless, it is useful to consider them at least for their particular contribution to the whole.
What can be distilled from the customary relation to buildings and shelter is the quality of intentionality. The conventional support of program or function may be understood in a more refined and exact way as an embrace of the intentionality or purposefulness they codify and categorize. Intentionality beyond the necessary, that is beyond shelter, is what conventionally elevates building into architecture. Because of this transcendence of necessity, this intentionality is raised in architecture to a level beyond that enjoyed by any other built object. Though by their mere presence any constructed object gives evidence of intention, other objects do not wear that fact in the (self-conscious) way that architecture does. As Le Corbusier explains in When the Cathedrals Were White, distinguishing between the engineered object and architecture, architecture is always more than its simple presence, more than just a statement of physical law: ”Intention is what moves us most deeply: the quality of mind brought to the creation of a work.” (3) The difference between art and architecture, recast along this axis, also clarifies architecture’s uniqueness. Art is consumed in its intentionality, but with no purpose beyond the signification and celebration of itself, whereas the intentionality of architecture is always transitive: architecture may be art, but it is never just that. Only bad art is programmed or functional in the way that architecture cannot escape. Even as it leaves space or building/shelter behind, “function” will leave a residue that distinguishes architecture from art and from building in the character of its intentionality
The character of that intentionality also owes something no doubt to the original, Vitruvian sense of importance (beyond simply the intention to build) underlying the well known triad of commoditas, firmitas, venustas. It was this that caused him to single out the arche-tecton’s work as architecture. This importance is not necessarily derived from program but from the attention paid during design. Thus stuff deemed unimportant by virtue of its program or function may be invested with the stateliness or nobility that signals architecture by the expenditure of greater design intention. The judgment of importance is different from that of good design, though, since things deemed important as architecture may in fact be poor designs, while some good designs may not necessarily be understood as architecture. The ability to stand in judgment is dependent on a connection to what is judged, which is possible because of the transitive nature of architecture’s intentionality, but it is the judgment that makes it matter.
Importance and intention do not complete the picture, though. Missing is that quality of organization/discipline that stems from a conscious, willed appreciation of limits. If intentionality gets it going, and its perceived importance sustains it, then limits keep it on track. It is the specific limits that make intentions and importance into architectural intentions and architectural importance. These limits are often interpreted as an overt structuring or perhaps a restriction to a class of professional practice. Such limits are easily seen in operation as the historical interest in symmetry, regularity, hierarchical balance, for example, or as a continuing fact of professional licensure. The original association of architecture with building is itself a limitation of course. Further, Architecture is a superlative of building because it is limited to certain examples. “Limit” also has another side, though.
A more complex understanding of the two sides of the role of the limit was introduced by deconstruction, which sees architecture on the one hand as “no more than the strategic effect of the suppression of internal contradiction. It is not simply a mechanism that represses certain things. Rather, it is the very mark of repression” (4), and then on the other claims that “The institution of architecture is not concerned the construction of buildings, but with the maintenance of the idea of building” (5). Both sides of the limit are represented: the negative side of it as circumscribing possibility, and the positive or “constructive” side of it as providing the possibility (in that circumscription) for meaning or significance. These rehearse the view from the inside and outside — the limit as restricting openness and the limit as providing identity.
The obverse side of imposed limit-as-constraint is self-imposed restraint. Indeed, architectural design could be considered the alchemical conversion of constraint into restraint. Architecture is not usually thought to be subject to limits in this way today: the envelope is generally assumed to be pushed, rarely is it seen positively as an effect of restraint. Yet, when the propriety of a particular effort is questioned it is often in terms of its “overstepping the bounds”; here such restraint is highlighted, and the conventional nature of the limit is revealed. When a new material like steel suddenly expands the range of physical possibility, form holds back from exploiting this new territory until it can be disciplined tectonically. It is only with the hindsight of history that the actual location of the limit comes to be known, since the sense of propriety itself changes with the limits it protects. This puts the design effort at the fuzzy edge where conviction and uncertainty trade influence, where genius is suspect and lunacy given a chance.
On the other hand, as the deconstructivist would point out, the label “architecture” is itself a limit — as a frame identifying certain experiences (usually in relation to certain objects) it excludes all the others. Limits locate the object, within the universe of possibility. Not only as possible, but as particular. This and not that. As de Saussure shows for language, a world is implied by this particularity, suggesting the range of potential relationships it may make with others. In this sense, such limits bring a sort of security with them, and with that a quality of importance.
The complex supplemental relationship this describes between the frame and its contents permits architecture’s simultaneous openness-to-change and confidence-in-continuity — which seems to encourage episodic reconsideration of the specifics of architecture’s identity: the variety that has found a home inside that frame through time. Such reconsideration does not exclude the possibility that there might be a thread connecting these experiences across time and exigency, though. In anticipation as much of the loss of this thread, as in demonstration of the openness of this frame, architecture is already being bled off into other areas like product design and interface design, unintentionally from within (branding, blobs) and opportunistically from without (fashion, computer design, policy). It is exquisitely ironic that this recalls the broader sense of architecture that Vitruvius originally described, when the term encompassed many things unrelated to buildings. For him, what fit inside the frame was not just buildings but (as the de-constructeurs repeat) building itself — all the most important constructed stuff that ennobled the feat of construction.
These limits were established over time, as physical boundaries of the possible, and this made them seem unchosen and incontrovertible. Which made them important — much of architecture’s brilliance could be explained as the effect of straining against those limits. The avant-garde is celebrated for “pushing the envelope,” but not for technical innovation. The choice always resident in design, that, as Alain Colquhoun points out, prevents form from following function strictly, is what distinguishes design from engineering, and the avant-garde from technical inventors. Rather, the avant-garde’s celebrity shows these limits for what they really are: not a physical constraint, but a cultural effect of restraint that prompts the avant-garde’s critical efforts and is in the end repaid with their new, but ultimately subscriptive, form. As the avant-garde explores the territory opened up by technology their actions in the unmapped terrain start to lay down the new limits.
None of these characteristics of the architectural entails either space or building necessarily. Of course, they include both as possibilities. In this sense, then, the modifier “un-volumetric” is becoming unnecessary, even as a critical challenge to convention, because the architectural is, already, losing its relationship to volume. But it is useful still if the purpose is to facilitate the liberation of the architectural from architecture without losing its disciplinary value.