Two perspectives on Truth and Lies in Architecture

In a collection of essays by Richard Francis-Jones, the architect critically excoriates contemporary architecture and examines the tracks of its diminishment. Chris Barton and Lawrence Nield provide two different perspectives on this provocative tome.

Chris Barton finds Truth and Lies in Architecture a tour de force of big architectural issues: truth, lies, theory, image, intuition and consciousness, to name a few.

Melancholy wouldn’t be most people’s pick for the driving emotion of the architect. Egotistical self-belief might more likely come to mind. But, in his collection of essays, Truth and Lies in Architecture, acclaimed Australian architect Richard Francis-Jones sets off from this shore of profound sadness.

And who can blame him, when the practice of architecture “has been progressively desiccated, undermined and commodified through the instrumental processes of the contemporary development industry and professional practice”? Francis-Jones lays some of the blame on the “predominance of the negative critique” in our schools of architecture, in which the student is expected to present and then ‘defend’ their proposition. The process, he says, is “needlessly negative and combative, more suited to the courtroom setting and trial of an accused.”

It’s paradoxical, then, that in Truth and Lies, Francis-Jones is in full combat mode, leaving no stone unturned as he critically excoriates contemporary architecture and examines the tracks of its diminishment. As he points out, architecture has never been more challenged than it is today. “Addressing the sheer scale of the triple challenges of environmental sustainability, in the form of climate change; the social, in the form of class, gender and racial inequality; and the cultural, in terms of identity, exclusion and prejudice in particular against First Nations People, is a seemingly overwhelmingly task for architecture.”

The cover of Truth and Lies in Architecture by Richard Francis-Jones.

The cover of Truth and Lies in Architecture by Richard Francis-Jones.

Image: Publisher: Actar D

Hence, the melancholy. But Truth and Lies is a tour de force of big architectural issues: truth, lies, theory, image, intuition and consciousness, to name a few. On intuition, for example, Francis-Jones pronounces: “It is rooted in a deeper connection to the world we inhabit; it is our feeling, rather than our knowledge. It is a manifestation of the interconnectedness of all things. Remarkably, it is the means for a holistic response to the vastly complex nature of our human condition.”

In his essay headings, Francis-Jones presents a constant dichotomy between what architecture is and what the architect does. Hence: “The Truth of Architecture and the Lies of the Architect,” “The Slowness of Architecture and the Speed of the Architect,” “The Face of Architecture and the Mask of the Architect,” and “The Nature of Architecture and the Extinction of the Architect.”

As one might expect, modernism gets a pasting: “The singular truth of modernism and the march of ‘Progress’ became intolerant, with cultural and ethnic diversity, inclusion and equity trampled underfoot. Enabled through scientific and technological advancements, the twentieth century witnessed an unleashing of human suffering and environmental degradation on a breath-taking scale.” Progress that almost killed us all.

Francis-Jones’ writing is a delightful mix of philosophical portent – “Is architecture silent to questions of truth?” – mixed with manifesto slogans: “Architecture tells its truth through lies, distortions of construction for formal purpose. Lies that may help us glimpse truth about the world and our place in it.” The latter refers to the ways in which architecture can explain how it’s made and assembled into a tectonic composition and then bend that representation for poetic intent. “Weight can be made weightless, enclosure made open, solidity made transparent.” Truth and lies.

Truth and Lies is unashamedly anti-neoliberal: “The ideology of our time with its emphasis on efficiency, change, the free market, and speed, is in many ways the antithesis of the necessary conditions for making architecture.” And anti-tower block cities: “The tragic ubiquitous mechanically-serviced glass office boxes of the twentieth-century are not architecture. Any building that damages and undermines our symbiosis with the natural world is not architecture. Building, development and construction perhaps, but not architecture.”

Other times, it veers off into the plain weird. In “The Fall of the Architect”, we learn approximately half of us “suffer or experience the ‘call of the void’ or ‘l’appel du vide’” – an impulse to step off into the nothing below. Somehow, Francis-Jones sees this as a rejection of high-rise and a “reminder to look down and understand that the architect’s mission is to connect us more deeply with the nature of the ground from which we all belong, and long to return”. Possibly a step too far.

Truth and Lies is both confronting and inspiring in its scope, capturing perfectly the enormity and terror of the architect’s task – “perhaps paradoxically, the less chance of success the greater the poetic force and the more important it is to persist.”

– Chris Barton is the current editor of Architecture New Zealand. He has been a respected architecture critic for Metro and multi-award winning journalist for many of the nation’s leading print media publications; he also holds a Master of Architecture from the University of Auckland.

Chris Barton’s review of Truth and Lies in Architecture was first published on ArchitectureNow.co.nz. Read the original article here.

Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia I, 1514.

Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia I, 1514.

Image: Metropolitan Museum of Art collection

Truth and Lies in Architecture is a profound and often poetic investigation of the architect/architecture symbiosis and its discontents, reviews Lawrence Nield.

We live under the comfortable oppression of consumerism, Richard Francis-Jones rightly observes. Architects have just become shapeshifters in the perfect storm of commodification.

Truth and Lies in Architecture is 15 essays by a distinguished practitioner with a profound understanding of the contemporary architectural condition. It is not a history (distinguishing fact from fiction and myth from propaganda). It is not a critical account, though it is very critical. It is not a vanity publication boosting the author’s buildings. It is not a manifesto like Vers une Architecture. It is a profound and often poetic investigation of the architect/architecture symbiosis and its discontents. There are none of the platitudes hiding real meaning so common in our architectural and urban discussions. The only other similar investigation by a practitioner I know of is Colin St John Wilson’s Architectural Reflections, published in 1992.

The words and language make his argument brutally clear. He has great skill with metaphor, particularly metaphors of water and floatation. He uses antonyms, inversions and particularly paradoxes. “One must not think ill of paradox,” Kierkegaard wrote, “for paradox is the passion of thought and the thinker without the paradox is like a love without passion.” Using these devices, Francis-Jones’s words become arrows rather than feathers (to borrow Colm Tóibín’s words1).

In his search for an authentic and critical architecture, he starts with “Melancholia.” I would add mourning, using Freud’s 1917 understanding of these processes.2 Mourning is about grieving for the loss of a love object. In melancholia, a person grieves for a loss they are unable to fully comprehend or identify. Architects are suffering both mourning and melancholia: actual loss and loss they are not able to fully comprehend or identify. The 15 essays are insights and proposals about lifting both our mourning and our melancholia.

Four essays particularly resonated with me: “The Face of Architecture and the Mask of the Architect,” “The Fall of the Architect,” “The Consciousness of the Architect” and “Bridges of Lebab.” The face and facades can represent the nature of the building and our collective values and ideas. This is an excellent discourse. In the facade of Alberti’s Palazzo Rucellai, a fictive structure is applied over the actual tectonic reality of assembly and construction. This allowed the facade to be “dislocated” from the making or form. My view is that the dislocation has to do with the more generally anthropomorphic associations of architecture and the-miracle-of-the-child-standing-up: architecture is a body in remote transposition. The fictive structure is needed to tell us how the building could stand up – it introduces a subjunctive mood. But, of course, today, as Francis-Jones says, this dislocation has led to perverse shapeshifting rather than embodiment.

The Fall of the Architect” is, I think, the most dramatic essay – a film noir with a plot about l’appel du vide or “high space phenomenon” in/on our glass and steel cages. The view from “synthetic mountains” can bring us back to ground – the “beckoning of the neglected earth.” This theme – the problem of skyscrapers – is repeated in several essays.

The Consciousness of the Architect” is an investigation of the inner life of buildings. It is one of the most difficult and rewarding passages in the collection. This essay begins with Louis Kahn’s famous quotation: “You say to brick, ‘What do you want, brick?’ Brick says to you, “I like an arch.’” We honour the material. This essay juxtaposes the material with the concept of “consciousness.” Consciousness is not exclusively human. The philosopher David Chalmers calls consciousness the mystery of awareness that seems to underpin our experience of the world. The idea that our materials have lives seems to me very important; a beautiful piece of woodworking tells us about the forest, the cutting, the timber, the joinery and the craft of making – about its life. The completed object has associations and significant meaning. Meanings can be gathered from most building materials that are honoured and properly used. Francis-Jones puts this succinctly: “The immeasurable is overwhelmed by the measurable and we seem to know the price of everything and the value of nothing. Where we once saw life we now see only use.”

Lebab means “heart” in Hebrew. In “Bridges of Lebab” – one of the book’s richest and most suggestive essays – a new heart is proposed for cities and architecture. Again, the difficulties of the tower are reiterated: our lack of connection to the earth – the taper to nothing. Pieter Bruegel’s remarkable Tower of Babel painting series of 1563, joining the clouds and heaven, is used as a powerful symbol. The very reach towards the heavens through the uncompromising form of the tower away from the earth was flawed and misdirected. This not the way to heaven we seek. Towers, he argues, should try to join the earth, not the sky – bridges as connecting nodes, not highrise silos. Reassembling the fragments of the tower of Babel could, in a different way, make a new heart – a new propinquity.

I do not have space to reflect on all the essays but suffice to say that logical or poetic bridges connect them all. The epilogue brings together the underlying themes of the essays – “identity” manipulated by hyper consumption and unhelpful technology. In our recent worldwide lockdown, isolated people entertained themselves with consumption facilitated by the uncontrollable internet like an oppressive virus. The essays, and their “arrows,” give a way forward in our sea of advertising and consumption. They are together a road map to an authentic and critical architecture. We urgently need to start the journey.

— Lawrence Nield was previously a professor of architecture at the University of Sydney and the University of Newcastle. One of the founders of BVN Architecture, he was the Australian Institute of Architects’ Gold Medallist in 2012.

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