Chapter 1 of 24
Lucien Kroll
I will not speak about the circumstances, the 'motifs' why architects are 'architecturing' in odd circumstances, in what philosophical or political context. Probably 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 evolution, it creates complexity and hears all the arguments, it is more reasonable than rational. It leads to a process. For fifty years we have lived that object oriented architecture, for fifty 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 twenty 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 been kept 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, to dream, 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 disguise 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 mathematical than the Modern Movement itself or childish - any kind of possibility. Except one, which is changing the relations between the inhabitants and the conception, changing the way of decision-making, and trying to live an organic architecture, 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 explain 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 ten or twenty 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 outside. 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 hijacking architecture towards a sort of a naughty image of comic strips.