127 lines
6.9 KiB
Plaintext
127 lines
6.9 KiB
Plaintext
Review: "On Common Ground", Francis Reed
|
|
Working Press, London 1991, 89 pages. 5.80 Pounds Sterling.
|
|
|
|
The "Common Ground" of the title of this book is a reference to a
|
|
principle of diversity and interdependence which Francis Reed
|
|
identifies as running through nature and, ideally, human life. The
|
|
subject of the book is, almost tangentially, architecture. A survey of
|
|
the history of Common Land takes up a third of the book; a critique of
|
|
the alienation of industrial, Capitalist life and building from nature
|
|
and the land takes up another third, and the final third is a wide
|
|
ranging exploration of cosmological ideas as they might manifest
|
|
themselves in a future architecture.
|
|
|
|
Francis Reed is not short of his own ideas - in many ways this book is
|
|
a very personal statement - but he is very often happy for his sources
|
|
to speak for themselves. It is illustrated with many well-reproduced
|
|
sketches from his notebook and a similar number of original
|
|
photographs, some of which reproduce less well but which nevertheless
|
|
help to tell the story. It might sometimes appear that the book does
|
|
not know what it is about, but this is because the author is linking
|
|
several ideas with one of his own.
|
|
|
|
Common Rights ...were the residue of rights that in all probability
|
|
antedate the idea of private property in land and are therefore of vast
|
|
antiquity (p.7, quoting W.G.Hoskins). These lands were by no means
|
|
chaotically managed, but were regulated by complicated local rules &
|
|
organised at formal meetings of Commoners. They constituted a
|
|
productive resource which was inherent in the community, largely
|
|
outside the control of the Manor, and has been systematically eroded.
|
|
|
|
Common Land represents a link to an ancient way of life which was less
|
|
alienated from nature. In its complex local rules it reflected the
|
|
minute adaptation of nature to specific conditions. "Through the
|
|
process of development and the synergy of inter-relationships, things
|
|
at once become themselves and achieve a transcendent dimension; in
|
|
places we call this Common Ground "genius loci", perception the
|
|
"saturated complex", and in people the process of individuation" (p.
|
|
37). If I understand this and the thrust of the book correctly, it
|
|
means that the network of relationships between living things
|
|
constitutes a common ground which they all share, but also
|
|
individuates them. The local and specific nature of the interlocking
|
|
rules governing the processes of life means a variety and diversity
|
|
which is both evolutionarily beneficial and a source of delight.
|
|
|
|
"To some [Classical Architecture] may have had connotations of free
|
|
thought independent of medieval theocracy, but it has always been used
|
|
to conceal enormous brutality" (p. 52). Reed respects the Beaux-Arts
|
|
trained Mackintosh and Corbusier, but "to be really alive, architecture
|
|
will always have to go beyond the Classical framework" (p.54).
|
|
|
|
For Francis Reed there is in the Gothic style a pre-dualistic
|
|
"paraphrase of nature".The Rennaissance was a "winter", and today there
|
|
is "a diseased architecture of monumental banality" (p. 36).Reed has
|
|
sympathy for what Colin Ward called the Moral Left, who work
|
|
collaboratively with materials; an undercurrent on the margins, from
|
|
the Arts and Crafts to the pioneers of the Modern Movement. The
|
|
post-modernists, however, have created a cardboard pastiche without a
|
|
"genuine inner force" (quoting Christopher Alexander, p. 41).
|
|
"Deconstructivist" architects produce "...a devious architecture, a
|
|
slippery architecture thats slides uncontrollably...towards an uncanny
|
|
realisation of its own other nature...The architect expresses nothing
|
|
here. What is being dissolved is a set of deeply entrenched cultural
|
|
assumptions..about order, harmony, stability and unity (quoting Mark
|
|
Wigley, p. 59).
|
|
|
|
"Even the marginality of the dispossessed can be appropriated...with
|
|
the arrival of the new Yuppie Internationalism with corporate post
|
|
modernism as its aesthetic, we have the perfect expression of a culture
|
|
which...displays a passivity towards the totalising forces, systems of
|
|
exploitation, administration and control, and at the same time
|
|
continually simulates signs of "individuality" to produce a totally
|
|
colonised but "irresponsible" subject - the free individual" (quoting
|
|
Hannah Vowles and Glyn Banks, Art in Ruins exhibition 1988, p. 59).
|
|
|
|
"If so much of our predicament is rooted in an eclipse and negation in
|
|
the relation between things, a way forward may lie in the idea of
|
|
dynamic balance - embodied, for instance, in traditional Celtic
|
|
metaphysics or the wheel of the Four Elements, or in much of the "New
|
|
Science"" (p.63). A localised "mythos", such as the "Matter of
|
|
Britain" or "Albion", can be thought of as a part of the consciousness
|
|
or memory of the planet itself which is concerned with the relation
|
|
between people and a particular part of the Earth (p.63).
|
|
|
|
Reed says that there are "archetypal symbolic themes which form a
|
|
common ground of the human imagination" (quoting Kathleen Raine,
|
|
p.66), which also have a bearing on architecture. These are such as the
|
|
meeting of inner and outer forms, water, and the flow of space. Celtic
|
|
tradition "introduces a feeling of transparency and interpenetration of
|
|
one element with another, of transposition and metamorphosis" (quoting
|
|
Kathleen Raine, p.68).
|
|
|
|
The Four Elements can be seen reflected in the traditional house as
|
|
well as in renewable energy sources. Earth represents walls and Air
|
|
space, forming a polarity of shelter; Water in the well outside and
|
|
Fire in the hearth inside form a polarity around which life is
|
|
lived. Earth also represents geothermal power, whilst the others have
|
|
obvious connotations with renewable energy
|
|
|
|
John Betjamin is brought in: 'Architecture can only be made alive again
|
|
by a new order and a new Christendom... it is unlikely that this will
|
|
be capitalism' (p.82) Reed draws in many ideas which could come
|
|
together to inform a new metaphysics; and he sees Architecture as
|
|
playing a mediating role in groping towards a new consciousness for
|
|
the continent. This is not an argument for an indiscriminate
|
|
appropriation of new age fads, and Reed is fully aware of the dangers
|
|
of submerging the self in the cosmos, but he argues that rational
|
|
materialism is sterile without vision; that, in fact, much of what
|
|
passes for materialism is little more than abstract technological
|
|
romanticism.
|
|
|
|
There is a general consensus that Architecture as a discrete profession
|
|
is in crisis. Reed's book can be seen as an attempt to redeem the
|
|
profession by opening its economistic ideological framework to a
|
|
plurality of other influences, including Japanese ecomancy, Lovelock's
|
|
Gaia hypothesis and Sheldrake's Morphic Resonance theory. There is
|
|
certainly a worthwhile idea behind this book, concerned with restoring
|
|
severed connections, which may indicate a direction in which our
|
|
civilisation and its architects could look for that all too necessary
|
|
rebirth. Whether such a rebirth will destroy or preserve Architecture as
|
|
a profession remains to be seen.
|
|
|
|
Malcolm Stroud
|
|
|
|
From Here & Now 13, Glasgow, Autumn 1992
|
|
|
|
|