Thinking toward Architecture

The following is a condensed and abbreviated version of a lecture that Michael Benedikt delivered to the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Manitoba on 21 October 2001. How, at the beginning of a new century, might architecture progress from the fashion- and economics-driven art form that it is to something else, something better? What resources ought we to be using? Should architects learn from other disciplines--even join with other fields, such as psychology or geography? Or should architects remain within architecture, reaching out to other disciplines only now and again? What I've found over the years is that you cannot simply search out results from research in other disciplines and then apply them to the problems and aims of architectural design. Economists can't design, nor can sociologists, ecologists, or most engineers, since they do not have the same mindsets, skills, questions, or agendas that architects do. And the data they produce is not easily incorporated. If, on the other hand, you completely enter one of the other disciplines yourself--which takes a good few years--or if you come from one of the other disciplines to architecture, the very learning of the second discipline tends to eclipse the first. There's so much to know. In the late modern age it's rare to find the functional amalgamation of two or more distinct disciplines in a single person. The approach I think we should be using is this: an architect should start in architecture and end in architecture, and remain at heart an architect, but make one or more extended journeys into other disciplines, journeys that might last a period of years. These journeys into art, or ecology, or engineering, say, are less like tours from which one brings back interesting souvenirs, and more like living with the natives for a while, speaking their language, getting excited about what they get excited about, and coming home before it's too late. This modus operandi, it seems to me, is the best way of keeping our questioning distinctly architectural while at the same time learning other ways of seeing and acting in the world. Not everyone can or should embark on this course; it ought to be reserved for only those who think there could be more to architecture than what meets the eye (and more to it, too, than constructional ingenuity), only those who have the time and institutional support this course requires. L et me relay to you some of the enthusiasms I have picked up from just such extended intellectual visits. Each, I think, could contribute to the task of thinking about architecture in new ways and thus taking it forward. Only time will tell if I am right. I will touch on four topics. The man who inspired me on the first topic--complexity theory and evolution--is Louis Kahn. He loved science more than fairy tales; and, although he did beautiful buildings, he thought architecture's deepest impulses were ethical, not aesthetic. At the chalkboard, with both hands at the same time, he drew beautiful sequences, starting with something simple and filling it in with life, lapping the borders. When Louis Kahn drew that kind of pattern, he was expressing something very deep about how life evolves and elaborates itself, not only in nature but through man. Indeed, if you look at any of Kahn's many metaphysical diagrams, you see him trying to say where architecture comes from. It comes, he said, from turning silence into life, darkness into light, potential into joy. What a life-affirming way to think of architecture, and indeed about any creative endeavour involving conscious design! Life affirmation is an ethical principle, as is the idea that life is intrinsically complex and becoming more so as it fills itself in. This is an idea that I have tried to work out in my own way by voyaging into complexity theory. The claim this theory makes is that the right combination of higher complexity and a higher organization is what life wants, and that right combination is characterizable by a variable dependent on complexity and organization, called omega. …

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