We have a tendency to keep history
at arms length. Perhaps we are preoccupied, certainly easily distracted, and
possibly distrustful. We may even be nervous. Today’s most capable critics,
those adept on television (take Jonathan Meades or Matthew Collings) have
developed quirky, edgy, personas as they swoop down on the historically tasty.
This makes them entertaining and this makes good television; the media is the
message, and no doubt tomorrow’s critics will pod cast at will and shift the
message some more. We should certainly acknowledge that they are not talking
about history in the way EH Gombrich, AJP Taylor, or Kenneth Clark would have
half a century ago, people who did not necessarily understand television at
all, and who were still doggedly transferring the book, the lecture theatre, or
the radio to the new format. That the medium was the message did not occur to
them, it took Elvis to understand that, and shake his hips. So history today is
at once massively available to us, and murkily distant, it has being made
personal, we pick and choose. Never has the word ‘like’ assumed so much
importance, even if we don’t necessarily know why.
Books remain, but scholarship has
assumed an ever-weightier mantle. Even the dedicated Marxist scholars have
found themselves shoved to the end of the sock, locked in ever closer scrutiny
of cause and effect, contemplating more and more about what seems less and
less. The superstructure of knowledge demands they do just that, but in doing
so, it is not so much ivory towers they isolate themselves within, but more
giant cruise ships, great academic edifices like MIT or Yale, with their
curious lack of destination and intractable handling.
But even within the pseudo idyll of
the academic cruise liner, sometimes the shudder, that congruence of vibrations
that periodically racks top to bottom, bow to stern, reminds us that we are in,
after all, a delicate (ne creaky) man made structure. Dons, much envied in
privilege and lifestyle perhaps, sense something afoot. On smaller vessels such
as my own we have felt the tack and turn almost incessantly.
It is a sense that although the
essential elements of architecture might not have changed for three thousand
years (it remains the provision of physical and mythical accommodations) that
everybody is suddenly obsessed with change, even admitting that change might
actually not be for the better, that inspires. As a response, each
course I now teach on the history and theory of architecture has become an
elaborate road map as to where we are now, because that is precisely what is
missing when you pick and mix, when you dive about willy-nilly. Understanding
the road map should lead to a better understanding of your next step.
Not so long ago, this enterprise, history such as this, might have been titled ‘A History of Architecture from
Ancient Greece to the Present-Day’, with a silent emphasis on the present-day,
and it would have invariably tripped up on certain parts for want of enthusiasm
or expertise. Certain parts (say, the Normans) happened a long time ago, and
were a bit dull, and so on. Authors came over a
little patronising in their energy to get to the exciting bit at the end. My
apologies to Sigfried Giedion but the cry seemed to go: ‘Look! And here we are
now! The climax of it all! A load of tubular steel furniture!’ Imagine that
with a thick Swiss accent.
There was, or is (for it
necessarily prevails) often an unfortunate sense that modern man is somehow
superior. If we didn’t think this the history of the western world might seem a
terrible waste of effort. We should understand that there has been progress,
but it is not exactly Darwinian, things may have got better, but we are not
superior. It has been a struggle not an accident, and our development (such as
it is) has to be appreciated to be sustained, or be sustainable.
There is also the equal and
opposite tendency to state the opposite; that the men and women of today (and
especially it’s youth) are interested in nothing but base-jumping dogs and
posting pictures of their lunch-box on Facebook; that this generation will
never appreciate DH Lawrence, let alone Le Corbusier, and all we get now, in
architecture at least, is funny shaped buildings backed up with fairy tales of
justification. This is also a recurrent historical theme. Older generations
pour scorn on ‘youth of today’, on the current situation, just as armies are
only equipped to fight the last type of war. However, as I discovered myself-
when I posted my first dog picture on Facebook, I was no better. When I crossed
that Rubicon, I realised the Normans would have loved nothing better than
posting their rampart jumping dogs on Facebook too, if only they’d had the
apparatus to do so.
So both the silent patronization of
the past, and the comfortable contempt for the present, are to be avoided, because history has the capacity to
continually amaze us with just how smart people have been whenever and whatever
the circumstances over the last three thousand or so years, no-matter that the
tools to hand might have been ‘primitive’, or their social order ‘monstrous’.
For instance even the Roman poet Lucretius understood that the lowest particle
size was atomic, and beyond that there was nothing (that there was something,
and then there was nothing) and furthermore that two nothings couldn’t make a
something. By understanding this he demolished the supernatural. He said even
if you believe in god, magic, or whatever, it simply didn’t exist, it was,
indeed, a question of belief. He was the first materialist, and he was Roman,
and even he got much of his material
from Epicurus.
Meanwhile I can watch one of the
worst films currently on rotation on TCM, a truly rotten film called Escape to
Athena (1979). It is a most bemusing film in many ways, not least for it’s
casting of Roger Moore as a Nazi commandant (personally I cannot imagine
anybody less suited to playing a Nazi commandant in 1979 than Roger Moore,
unless I consider John Le Mesurier). In the film David Niven plays a prisoner
who happens to be an archaeologist and he discovers the ancient remains of the
house of an archaeologist! At least somebody in Lew Grade’s rather curious
pantheon had his or her historical wits about them. They had realised that it
was not just us doing it, they did it too.
In narratives of the type I present, there is always the question of what to include and what not. My response
is that the world of things I do not know about should act as a complement to
those I do. I’m thinking of a colleague who understands reggae music, ‘it’s
just as important what you don’t play’ he says. To use this analogy, my
absences, be them Chinese dynasties, Indian civilizations, Babylonian Empires
or the architectures of higher beings from outer space; are gaps, not nothings.
I believe in them, but they are not there. Keith Richards used open tuning to
make those fabulous big one finger major cords come alive for Street Fighting
Man, Brown Sugar, Jumping Jack Flash, Start Me Up and so on, and he employed
lots of delicious gaps. He remains an inspiration.
Above: Woods and Trees (geddit?) Pushkin Strss, Berlin.
