How have I managed to understand the distinctions and similarities?
photo of the back of my car, by Sean McGadden
There are two main camps in architecture that I have found create complication and polarization but must coexist for architecture to function: That of the builder and that of the designer. I have worked on a body of design projects never to see the swiveling sun or weathering of snow and rain. I have also worked in frigid cold and sweltering heat to erect structures and fasten mechanical systems in order to fabricate a machine that will be a functioning building. In these endeavors I have encountered the ways that both lack but also the methods in which each find a powerful stride that make up the wonder of architecture.
A builder is not concerned with large ideas. His purpose is to achieve efficiency and to effectively install the building system that he has mastered. He walks the job site and sees clearly, between girders and wall systems, the exact dimensions his work will occupy in a space. He sees the best line to travel which will function the best as well as which will cost the least material and take the least time to accomplish the puzzle with which he is tasked to solve. The builder shows up to work, with a concept of grit and violence which must occur to break through a concrete wall, or lift ten foot lengths of steel pipe fifty feet into the air and then be filled with hundreds of pounds of pressurized water. There is real danger in his work. He accepts this danger with gusto and with pride, it is in this difficulty that the builder becomes well respected for his efforts.
The designer does not concern himself with the intricacies of such problems. The details of the work of builder are often left to the very last moment they can be adequately completed. The designer questions the larger esoteric questions of the project, the macro urban quality of a facade, how the construction will affect adjacent inhabitants, the duty of the site for generations after its completion. The designer exists in a place of finesse and tenderness. The designer is coddled in his studio desk, removed from the site, existing in a place between dreams and realities. The womb of a computer screen or a scratch of paper is warm and familiar. This space is exhilarating. Ideas fly wildly through the simple strokes in pen or curve and the representation of the final product arise (but the physical building). The designer is a person who understands all systems well enough to adeptly combine them. The designer must be a dreamer who enjoys the potential energy that a building problem suspends. The nature of the designers work necessarily expose the fact that merely erecting a building is not enough. The physical artifact must be more than its composed parts and it takes on a metaphorical quality, a delusion, a reverie of the thing that eventually stands before its users. The building must be designed, arranged, sold, and explained. In a contemporary understanding of architecture, these terms ensure that the designer will only be concerned with something ephemeral about building. The building becomes less than what it is intended to be because it must be photographed in a light that always wanes compared to its renderings which had won the bid.
In the simplicity of being a builder who can engage with smaller problems one at a time, the builder shares an intimate kind of relationship with a spaces he works in. Like the designer, this rapport with space is temporary and fleeting until a space is fully imagined and installed when new spaces must be realized. The designer considers all spaces at once and individually, skipping across the plan of a floor system and questioning back and forth the relevance and effectiveness of each arrangement in an emotional and expressive sort of way. The builder engages a space, establishes the most fluent response and constructs a solution within the bounds he is presented.
It must be said, sadly, the architect is no longer a builder. Both camps are distinct and different. Long past are the days of Brunelleschi, laying the bricks of the Duomo and directing its logistical problems and magnificent spans. The architect is really only required to occupy the actual site of the building when there are major obstacles stopping the completion of a building. Often times, these obstacles began, in the office of the architect himself. The builders can work solving problems with one another that submit to code and that will allow the elements of its systems to function fluidly and safely. The architect concerns himself with a many great set of issues. Without question, the architect understands each idea, behind his requirements, until he is satisfied. In my moments as a spectator, the architect asks questions of taste as a building approaches completion (a cover plate slight askew, a splotch of paint needing second coat, a fixture not polished, or a new floor not dusted). The builder is worried about functionality (loss of pressure in a system, lack of air flow in a room, a sagging ceiling tile, a faulty alarm panel). This is all not to say that the architect is not fully concerned with the entirety of the building and its functional components. The melancholy of the disruptions that exist between architect and builder is with the architect to carry.
What I have noticed is that the architect on the job site does not ask deep questions about the systems they have specified to be installed. The contracted job supervisors ask these questions of their foremen because liability sits with the builder. The architect strolls through their creation with a smile and flicks their pencil at small blemishes. The builders hurry around the job tying in water mains being soaked and then frozen, testing ear shattering alarms, vying for the the inches of space they have been allocated. There is a battle the ensues toward the end of a project. A dog fight, at times between the men who will take the space and the men who will use the space given to them by the men who had worked more quickly and lost the least men along the way. The architect distances himself from this fight, with his licensure and his degrees; he says simply, this must change, and it is so. The fact of the matter is that in our modern age, the architect must be distanced and is allowed to high nose because of the complexity of systems, technology and uses that he has been tasked to compose. The builder reacts, when he must be involved more deeply. The architect must take up arms against the ideal of building to become a general of war and not so much a warmongering spectator.
"Building as a science and a craft allows it to be depoliticized. " -Reinier de Graaf in Four Walls and a Roof
Very often, the builder and the architect do not agree. The architect understands the system he has designed but does not know it intimately. The builder is married to his trade and relies on his fellow tradesmen to be able to build their own systems with speed and trust.
"The idea that architecture belongs in once place and technology in another is comparatively new in history, and its effect on architecture, which should be the most complete of the arts of mankind, has been crippling. In the eighteenth century, at the least as late as Isaac Ware's Complete Body of Architecture (1756), that body had indeed been complete, and the technology then available had found a comfortable place within its compendious pages. Thereafter, however, the art of architecture became increasingly divorced from the practice and making and operating buildings." -Reyner Banham in The Architecture of the Well Tempered Environment 1969
Even by 1909, in the time of Frank Lloyd Wright at the turn of the 20th century when indoor plumbing and heating had developed to a point of relative ease and efficiency, the Robie house leveraged these new technologies as a crucial point of creating comfort and enabling further design decisions to be achieved. However, the complete set of drawings prepared by the Historic American Building Survey had not even shown any of the environmental provisions of the house despite their critical role in the realization and use of the home.
Images borrowed from: Heating and Cooling Robie House Author(s): Justin Estoque Source: APT Bulletin, Vol. 19, No. 2 (1987), pp. 38-51 Published by: Association for Preservation Technology International (APT) Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1494160
"Because of this failure of the architectural profession to - almost literally - keep its house in order, it fell to another body of men to assume responsibility for the maintenance of decent environmental conditions: everybody from plumbers to consulting engineers. They represented 'another culture' so alien that most architects held it beneath contempt, and still do. The works and opinions of this other culture have been allowed to impinge as little as possible on the teaching of architecture schools, where the preoccupation still continues to be with the production of elegant graphic compositions rendering the merely structural aspects of the plan, elevation, and sometimes section. ('Never mind with that environmental rubbish get on with your architecture')." -Reyner Banham (p11)
"The fact that in his professional posture, [the architect] could prefer the niceties of bricklaying to the necessities of hygiene show the professions professional embarrassments over services nakedly exposed, its preference for unassisted structure frankly apparent. The traditions of the training by which architects are socialized into their profession makes such attitudes almost inevitable" -Reyner Banham
"a vast range of historical topics extremely relevant to the development of architecture is neither taught nor mentioned in many schools of architecture and departments of architectural history. Some are external to the building (patronage, legislation, professional organization, etc.) others are internal (changes in use, changes in users' expectations, changes in the methods of servicing the users' needs)."-Reyner Banham
"By the 1860's ... considerable skill had accumulated in the design of the installations, both on paper and at the level of the field decisions that had to be made by foremen and pip-fitters. This was one of the great reservoirs of skills on which much of the environmental revolution was founded, though there is some evidence that the persistence of drawing habits and fitters' folkways may have ballasted down the aspirations of innovators on occasions - Willis Carrier on one occasion had to correct the operating habits of an engine-man before the cooling plant of one of his early air-conditioning installations would operate properly." -Reyner Banham 46
This last quote perhaps perfectly sums up my attitudes toward the relationship that architects and foremen on a job have with one another. The foreman has many deep libraries of experience from which he draws his expertise. This cannot be diluted or understated. There is not enough importance drawn in schools of architecture on this library. It is often undiscussed but pointed out in design critiques. However, it is still true that the architect must be able to direct an apprentice on the proper ways to manage or operate the systems he will eventually be the caretaker for. There is a back and forth that is far too weak. The magnetism between architect and contractor is weak. The day when it is strong and impenetrable, architecture will experience a renaissance unlike any other in time. The fluid conversation between users, operators, designers and communities will prove to be a time when all of society coalesce together to function beautifully without harm or discord among any individual group.
In reading the Architecture of the Well Tempered Environment, I find solace in the relationship between Reyner Banham as a prolific thinker and his unfaltering commitment to the undesirable or unspoken aspects of architecture that need more attention. Of course he is well known for his wildly imaginative conceptual drawings and emphasis on comfort control and environmentalism. However his insistence upon changes in the field of architecture are admirable in the way that he references many other kinds of professionals who hold important skillsets that architects must begin to understand more deeply.
I don't mean to sound harsh against architecture. I only believe deeply in its power to be a great solution for many problems. Design thinking is a necessary aspect to life that yields many bountiful kinds of fruits of labor. The artful and refined hand of an architect can propel an idea from concept to reality in a way that few professions have the ability. My only quarrel is with the rigidity of architectural teaching which seems to contradict itself too often. If architecture is accepted as something that can hardly be defined, perhaps the upper levels of architectural teaching must begin to direct its students toward less flashy aspects of architecture concerned with aesthetics or flippant ideals of design. For example this basement plan has a quality of expressive mechanistic beauty that is exposed three dimensionally. I can say with certainty this kind of craft is not even remotely pursued but its rigor and artfulness goes without saying.
Additionally when we consider the importance of such mechanical systems as plumbing, ventilation and electrical conduits, there is a clear relationship with the overall quality and operation of a building. With the advent of electric lighting and the obsolescence of gas powered lighting the concluding statement of his paper "Recent Progress in the Electric Lighting of Buildings" 1882, John Slater, a Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, makes clear the importance of adapting to changing technologies,
"the day is not far distant when we shall find a certain acquaintance with the subject of electric science a necessity for us architects in our everyday work, unless we wish to be entirely in the hand of the men we employ... let us beware that we do not attempt to deal with this new servant ignorantly."
This quote can very quickly be reinterpreted to exaggerate a foreshadowing of the relationship that architecture has with technology in general. It is obvious how architecture has already fallen behind this warning as more and more outside experts must be consulted in order to effectively design a building. The exasperation I feel as an eager personality in this field grows with each technology I no longer have any training or understanding of. Collaboration becomes a necessity. The role of the architect is one of concepteur but what is the role of the architect if he must ask every concerned party for permission before making decisions? The architect is diluted, to a sniveling peon who no longer holds any agency over the work he remains entirely liable for.
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