Chapter 1 of 24
Lucien Kroll
I will not speak about the circumstances, the 'motifs' why architects are archi—
tecturing in odd circumstances, in what philosophical or political context. Pro-
bably the first tool, the first domain, is the domain of geometry; two kinds:
the mechanic you perfectly know which is made of certainties, a limited number of
arguments, and it calls itself rational. It is object—oriented. The other is
organic made of uncertainties. It's unlimited, it's open-ended, it leads to evo—
lution, it creates complexity and hears all the arguments, it is more reasonable
than rational. It leads to a process. For 50 years we have lived that object-
oriented architecture, for 50 years we have tried to express that technique and
evacuate all the past, all the history, with models that had been created in '35
by the Bauhaus, let us say. We know that it is a failure, it's bankrupt. For
instance, mass housing is exactly impossible to solve with an object-oriented
technique attitude. Industry is impossible and can't answer cultural needs, we
know that, we live it, and now we try to invent another direction.
In France, within 20 years, they have built eight million apartments and houses,
social houses. And the most courageous responsible people avow now that certainly
half of it should not have beerlkepm and should be destroyed, which is a national
loss and a scandal at the same time. To answer to that, architects did not invent
Post Modernism but they tried to escape from that technical fatality. It's a
negative position and at the same time it's a freedom, it's a conquest of liberty
which is fantastic. You have, right now, being Post Modernism, to imitate the
past, toadream, to make poetry, you are free to propose any kind of silliness,
foolishness or reasonable things without being criticised. That's a break-through,
through that slavery of Protestant Modernism movement of late times. They try to
diSquise the buildings because they may control the skin of it, the appearance, the
shape of forms, they may not control the inside. They try to get still more mathe—
matical than the Modern Movement itself or childish — any kind of possibility.
Except one, which is changing the relations between the inhabitants and the con-
ception, changing the way of decision—making, and trying to live an organic archi-
tecture, an organic town-planning, what I try to explain as a homeopathic town
planning that leads to a process that involves the people in their own dimension.
We don't ask them to do heroic actions towards building, but to be there, to ex-
plain something and to continue afterwards, and to maintain the thing, not to let
it as a derelict object. An idea of that kind needs probably between 10 or 20
years to be understood, to reconcile the method of centralised decision as it was,
but as a tool, not as a main. And that methodology, these weapons of creating,
organising military things are necessary at the moment that they help something
which is not themselves and that they express a culture and not a technique, not a
way of producing building within factories without knowing who is working on the
chains of industry.
I'm optimistic for the future but I don't know when the future will begin. The
future will not be technique. It will use technique for something which is out—
side. It will be cultural or racist or human or sentimental or dreaming or any
kind of human complexity and not that harsh system. High tech is a sort of hijack-
ing architecture towards a sort of a naughty image of comic strips.