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Stephen Walker 1 on fictions
Fictitious architecture: the ambiguity of the adjective, vacillating between the positive work of the imagination and the deliberate lie, can lead to several different architectures. An initial distinction might be drawn between architecture as it appears in Myth (the Tower of Babel, Daedalus' Labyrinth, the Temple of Solomon), and Architectural myths, those fiction-lies that perpetuate the discipline of Architecture (the assertion that the architectural object is in an unchanging relationship with the human subject, and that the human mind, or more precisely the mind of the architect, can break free of this stasis in order to gain an outside viewpoint from which such an object can be comprehended as 'whole'). It will be suggested below that positive, productive notions of fictitious architecture can challenge this traditional conception. We will begin, though, with another Architectural fiction; namely, that it defines space. In fact, as the architects Diller+Scofidio point out, space is prescribed in advance of architecture…it is coded legally, politically, morally and socially before architecture gets there. Importantly, though, none of these prior codings can be taken as unchanging, despite their own fictitious claims to the contrary. At particular moments in history, changes occur that have widespread repercussions on all such disciplines (what Foucault terms paradigm shifts); particular instances of such shifts, where the relationships between spatial representation and architecture are shaken, will be explored further in the next section. Here, we can remain with the social dimension of Diller+Scofidio's observation, in order to illustrate some recent ways in which architects are working to highlight, acknowledge or contest the official fiction.
The work of many of the artists published in the present collection is relevant in this context, as they too explore this relationship between social institutions and their architectural manifestations. Casebere refers to his models as metaphors for solid social structures, and many are quick to link his work on prisons with Foucault's well-known observations regarding Bentham's Panoptican (a link he tries to play down, pointing to the currency of his work in the context of the USA's prison building programme of the 1980s and 90s). Gordon Matta-Clark's work frequently highlighted the inequality maintained between rich and poor: for example, Window Blow-Out (1976) juxtaposed photographs of the neglected architecture of the poor in the Bronx with the pristine Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in Manhattan. AES Group's photocollages juxtapose institutional architecture from different cultures and religions, foregrounding the oppression of certain groups in any particular society (the Riechstag with an onion dome pointing to the large Turkish underclass in Berlin). Voicing the existence of such an underclass, with its related architectural issues, the work of Rural Studio, instigated by Sam Mockbee, contests the social inequalities existing between rich and poor in Alabama, empowering those usually excluded from the design or construction process. However much architecture might claim to the contrary, architects work predominantly for and in the interests of wealthy individuals or big business.
A different strategy, which worked to highlight aspects of the designed environment that didn't have a place in architecture's official cannon, can be identified in the work of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown's Learning From Las Vegas. This ground-breaking study was deemed radical on its release, though it has subsequently been somewhat domesticated by its official acceptance. However, the fictitious architecture that was its subject -fictitious here in the sense that the buildings of Las Vegas would not measure up as 'Architecture' against the official criteria of the discipline- is perhaps, along with the architecture of theme parks such as Disneyland, exemplary of an architecture that the discipline has attempted to explain away as being 'simply' fictitious. Las Vegas and Disneyland can be 'accounted for' because they are apparently isolated exceptions to 'real life.' However, such apparent separation is only superficial: many have demonstrated the intimate relationships that exist between isolated, contained spaces for aberrant behaviour (Casino and Theme Park can be added to Prison, Clinic, Mental Asylum…) What is perhaps more interesting in the present context is that the architecture of Las Vegas and Disneyland, in different ways, belong to very different times to those which architecture has traditionally been associated with; the attractions of Vegas, colossally expensive though they are, have very short life expectancy; those of Disneyland belong to a different age altogether, a time of fiction unrelated to traditional, linear history. In terms of their clients and users, Las Vegas and Disneyland are diametrically opposite to work such as that undertaken by Rural Studio; however, both are instances where architecture exceeds its traditional position or definition by acknowledging the pre-existence of social conditions before its arrival. (…)
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