A Finnish news article recently talked about the Estonian architect Allan Strus known for his traditionalistic design. Whilst much of today’s Tallinn, like other Northern European cities, is mainly fashioned in a modernist style, Strus designs his buildings to lie in harmony with their local history. This he accomplishes so successfully that many are led to the false belief that the buildings have always stood there. “Why is it more important to create contrasts in a neighborhood than build harmony with what already exists?”, Strus asks. Further look at some of Strus’ architecture reveals modesty, tradition, and harmony. Unsurprisingly in some, particularly modernist, architectural circles, Strus’ work is not much appreciated. One critic, with a derogative tone, described his work as pseudo-historical.
Many Finns, though not architects, can confidently distinguish between ‘Jugendstil’, functionalism and neoclassicism. It should not take an art critic to be able to criticize architecture. Beauty lies in the domain of experience, not expertise. Why is it that our everyday urban environments—the environments which structure our everyday lives and social interactions—should be judged merely by the opinion of “experts”? Think of any beautiful historical town you have visited, and what basics underlie this beauty. For instance, consider Bologna, with its beautiful porticoes and meandering alleys. How did these porticoes come to existence? Not through an intentional top-down design by architects, but through the trickery of local merchants and craftspeople who gradually expanded their houses and attics towards the outside.
The renowned architect and polymath Christopher Alexander has documented in detail this process of the emergence of beauty. In one of his finest books, The Timeless Way of Building, Alexander studies how buildings and towns emerge from bottom-up and decentralized processes of social and material interaction, and how these interactions pave way for the emergence of patterns that define the character of a particular building or place. This is systems-thinking for architects: instead of building flashy artwork that stands out, respect the system the building is embedded in and emerges from.
The Timeless Way of Building was published in 1979. Yet here we are, 40 years later, doing the exact opposite. Architecture competitions are organized by cities to pick winners from select candidates. Often it is the flashiest who win, and the jury consists of the usual-suspect modernist elite. Meanwhile, international construction companies make multi-million-dollar deals with renowned architecture companies to design the fate of our cities. Urban activist Jane Jacobs once wrote that cities “have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” It seems like modern cities are indeed capable of providing nothing more than “same but different” centers for mindless mass-consumption.
The process has led to the dire situation where cities are no longer centers of self-organizing social life and public space, which arguably is a prerequisite for a working democracy. Moreover, citizens no longer have control over the future of their neighborhoods. Whether or not this destruction of emergent social space is an intentional policy of “divide and conquer” is up for debate, but this certainly seems to be the end-result.
What can we do about this? We might look towards Sweden for inspiration. The Architecture Uprising (Arkitekturupproret), a social movement and non-profit association, has gathered the support of tens of thousands of similarly concerned citizens within a few years. This social movement claims to stand against the “blatant disregard from both developers, architects and government for what people want” and the “continued destruction of our cultural heritage”. It is about time we reclaimed the public voice in architecture.
