'British' High Tech

Waiting for a train, I recently bumped into a chap I once worked with. We had a chat, and of course when you speak to an architect these days you invariably have to talk about the recession. Based upon his experiences of the early 90s, he suggested that the British architecture scene would come out of this particular trough in a stronger condition. He also mentioned that, in the early 90s, the only two acceptable styles that one could build in were either Pomo, or High-Tech.


Since ‘Pomo’ declined as the dominant force of corporate architecture, High-Tech has been the architecture of choice for business. If there was a block of offices built near you in the last twenty years, then it was probably constructed in this style, the UK’s main contribution to architectural culture of the last generation, always to be associated with the names of Norman Foster and Richard Rogers. I’ve been thinking about these two a lot since I visited the ‘First Works’ show at the Architectural Association recently. ‘First Works’ was an excellent survey of ‘critical’ or ‘experimental’ practice from the period 1960-80, although somewhat spoiled by the AA’s incessant self-aggrandisement. In amongst all the usual suspects of ‘radical’ architecture (Hadid, Libeskind, Koolhaas etc…) was a little project by Foster and Rogers, as half of Team 4, the practice they set up with their respective spouses after studying at Yale. If now it seems strange, considering the ubiquity of the style with which they are associated, that these two architects would ever be included in a list of ‘experimentalists’, it wasn’t always thus; the successes their style has achieved have to a certain extent masked the strangeness of their work when its smothering influence wasn’t quite so pervasive.


But oh! How pervasive it has become! Not only the rise of the airport, but the decline of the factory, the all-conquering supermarket and the vast swathes of shimmering glass that house the only people who make any money any more… These typologies and social changes have all been draped in the garb of British High-Tech. I’ve been trying to get my head around this success for a while now – any regular readers will know about my notion of Architectural Failure, and in this instance there’s an almost perfect example of the concept. To briefly explain: the prototypes of modernism in architecture, the iron-and-glass buildings, were primarily built for a number of functions; department stores, exhibitions, glass houses and railway stations. It’s no secret that the British High-Tech architects were deeply influenced by the Victorian ‘engineer-geniuses’ who constructed these proto-modernist edifices, and a strong claim for a direct lineage from Brunel (stood as ever in front of that massive chain) is often made. But this inheritance is problematic, for a number of reasons, not least of which is the utter banality of the contemporary spaces created by our current architects. Just one example; any of you living in London might have experienced Foster’s refurbishment of Spitalfields Market in East London. A more terrifyingly blank, spiritless and depressing space I have yet to experience; this is a version of the city fit only for the smiling ghosts of computer visualisations, a purgatory of Giraffe restaurants and Walkabout bars, ‘media walls’ and used-book stalls that only sell new books by Alain de Botton, all cast in the gloomy shadow of some of the most generic commercial offices you’ve ever seen. When you think that this is the best that humanity can offer itself after a million years of gasping struggle and agonisingly slow cultural development, well…

But that’s enough hyperbole. The only question I’m really grasping at is this – if, despite superficial appearances, British High-Tech is not the unproblematic cultural successor to the Iron-and-Glass buildings of the 19th century, then where does it come from? A couple of texts I read recently have greatly helped to frame this problem.


One of these texts is Architecture and the Special Relationship, by Murray Fraser and Joe Kerr, which makes a very convincing case that, far from being the unproblematic re-enactment of Victorian engineering, British Hi-Tech is born of a naïve dream of an America which never existed. The case hinges around the fact that Rogers and Foster met each other doing their post-grad studies at Yale in the early 1960s, becoming friends and then colleagues. Feeling liberated from the stifling economic, cultural and historical environment of Europe, they studied under Paul Rudolph and John Johansen, travelled around the USA visiting buildings (something they apparently never did while in Europe) and paid particularly close attention to the educational buildings of Ehrenkrantz, early examples of ‘system building’. The lightweight architecture and simplistic rhetoric of this American scene is in marked contrast to the agony, mysticism and weight that you can see developing in European modernism at the time.

Transplanted into the confident environment of the USA, it was here that functionalism began to gradually become solutionism – just take this quote from Rogers;

Returning to Britain to set up our first architectural practice (Team 4, comprising Norman and Wendy Foster, Su Rogers and myself) we realised the importance of the American experience where the architect is a genuine problem-solver rather than a mere stylist. We understood that the traditional European approach, constrained by cultural and formal conventions, could never meet the needs of a changing society that we were going to try to serve.

Basically, in a statement like this you have a complete and utter denial of the ideological aspect of architecture. I mean; if this attitude hadn’t been so damaging in the long term you could find it endearing, this ludicrously naïve faith in the benign nature of technology, this abdication of responsibility… One of the most pernicious things about the Solutionist narrative is the idea that by declaring something insignificant, it will just go away; but time and time again in architecture we see that the cheerfully optimistic dismissal of mere trifles such as ‘style’ or ‘culture’ or ‘form’ leads to vulgarity and re-appropriation. In a mission statement like that above, one can read all kinds of premonitions; not least the impending post-modern concern with meaning and communication.


But of course one cannot merely dismiss culture and form; there has never been an insignificant building. I’ve pointed out a few times before how postmodernist architects are equally capable of working with languages of technology, and in a very Benjaminian way I think it’s vital that if architecture is to improve at all as we move further into this horrible century, the architect will have to negotiate a new cultural relationship to building technology (but that argument is for a manifesto, not these shabby notes). Architecture and the Special Relationship locates the ‘fall’ of British High Tech in one of Team 4’s very first buildings; the Reliance Controls factory:

What was most distinctive – and novel – about Reliance Controls was the fact that the structural forces acting on the building were expressed by a series of slender (and soon widely imitated) steel diagonal cross-braces between the external columns on the two main facades […] The idea of diagonal tie bracing had its first outing over a century before, in Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace of 1851 […] In fact, only one bay on each of the long facades needed to be braced to stabilise the frame against lateral collapse, but Team 4 deliberately opted to have every bay braced, for aesthetic effect […] Tony Hunt was again the engineer, and he pointed out this structural anomaly – as well as others – but visual styling won the day. Hence the Reliance Controls scheme also marked the point at which the structural rationality proclaimed by High Tech architects lapsed into exaggeration and expressionism – i.e. at its very birth.

A number of things are going on here: Tony Hunt is mentioned - he represents a further aspect of British High Tech – the proliferation of excellent engineers in the UK in the 1960s. This is where British High Tech most resembles its 19th antecedents; almost purely in terms of the skill of the engineers involved. However, as I’ve argued before, from at least 1889 (the Eiffel Tower, the Galerie des Machines) engineers had effectively solved the problem of creating any space that human activity could possibly ever require. Although Arup, Hunt and others would definitely push the boundaries of their discipline, it would be mainly in terms of the integration of building systems rather than the limits of scale; a technological revolution half way towards the most recent digital one; revolutions that are less impressive architecturally with every recurrence. The fact that High-Tech could never induce the awe of the original large engineering projects is perhaps one of the reasons that it had to aestheticise itself from the beginning; in place of transcendent size it had to focus on elegance and rationality, both of which are firmly aesthetic considerations.

However, the British High Tech aesthetic is as much born of a melancholy sense that post-war Britain had been left behind by the USA, economically, technologically & culturally, as it is by anything else. Its ludicrous optimism is at least partially performative, born of rationing and the end of empire, as well as being an all-too-gullible internalisation of American innocence. In fact, one can easily see some early High-Tech as just another form of postmodernism, born of just as much internal conflict between stories of progress and crippling doubt as anything Pomo would throw up - Architecture and the Special Relationship certainly allows for this reading, although it doesn’t go as far as I do:

High Tech was at root a vision of what US post-war architecture could have become, indeed should have become, if only American architects hadn’t lost their nerve and succumbed to pessimism and post-modernism.

The focus on a language of efficiency is something that has worked both for and against Hi-Tech. Inasmuch as it was never really genuinely about efficiency, as previously argued, Hi-Tech was vulnerable to being undermined by the very principles it championed, applied faithfully this time. Architecture and the Special Relationship states that one of the reasons that Hi-Tech failed to get much built initially in America was because it was too bespoke and expensive. The very same American ‘can-do’ attitude that influenced ‘High Tech’ so much actually manifested itself in the speedier and cheaper working methods that would come to Britain (in pomo clothes) with the architects of the Canary Wharf development (SOM & KPF etc), and would eventually morph into Design & Build contracts and PFI. These streamlined and efficient legal structures have accelerated the descent of architects from their previous standing as socially-valued ‘Professional’ persons, towards a job that we might call ‘exterior designer’. This is not necessarily a negative development, but the contract revolution has also led to some of the most worthless buildings we’ve seen, mean bastard architecture, not even fit for the render-ghosts.

In Patrick Keiller’s film ‘The Dilapidated Dwelling’, he frequently compares the architecture of housing, reliant as it is on ‘wet trades’ (bricks & mortar, concrete), with the standardised, rapidly assembled architecture of retail, especially car-accessed retail. Keiller is very much a product of the time he was educated (mid-1960s), when a radical ‘lightweight’ attitude to architecture was in the air, all tension cables and neoprene gaskets. Foster and Rogers are of course the heroes of this, but there’s also Bucky Fuller and various others. But Keiller’s frequent lingering shots on Tesco stores really hit home; these generic, banal and (if you’re anything like me) depressing structures are like those characters from a Zizek anecdote; they obey the law far more strictly what the Big Other requires of them. A Tesco superstore, with its boring white structure, its boring white spaces and its boring bottom-line materials; this is the pre-fabricated High-Tech future. I’m deeply ambivalent about this situation – a superstore is genuinely the truth of the High-Tech rhetoric, one could even picture it as a socialist’s dream come true, but of course, it might well have been what was demanded, but it certainly wasn’t what was wanted. So, for the umpteenth time, we get to that old mantra of Dr. Lacan: “Don’t give me what I ask for, because that’s not it”.

To be continued…

He's come about the reaping..?

I’m reading Christopher Belshaw’s Annihilation at the moment, a hearty jaunt through the philosophies of death. It seems that most (or at least a lot of) contemporary thanatology seems to come from that strange section of Anglo Saxon philosophy that deals in no-nonsense, common sense language, useful perhaps in ethics and for lawmakers, dealing with cases of comas, persistent vegetative states and so on, but often infuriatingly complacent with norms and full of assumptions and simplifications about what makes a subject.

In works like this, or the more entertaining Better Never to Have Been by David Benatar, the writers often struggle with words like ‘harm’ or ‘asymmetry’, attempting to cram subjectivity into charming little logic tables with columns and rows entitled ‘Unsatisfied (bad)’, ‘Absence of pain (good)’, or ‘Presence of sickness (bad)’, and other laughably inadequate descriptions of states of being.

When Belshaw discusses the possibility of ‘defining’ death, a definition being necessarily true in all cases, he (rather charmingly, and not entirely ignorantly) blunders across the field of aesthetics in an attempt to stress the inadequacy of absolute definitions; a passage which includes the following sublime nugget:

“We know that the Mona Lisa is a work of art, that bombing Fallujah is not, and we know these things even while being uncertain what to say about a number of problem works. Perhaps if we discovered certain further facts – Leonardo copied, Fallujah was planned by the Chapman brothers – then these judgements would need to be revised.”

At which point I nearly spat out my coffee.

Clumsy rhetoric notwithstanding, Belshaw is quite right when he points out that death cannot be reduced to a definition based on organisms, functioning and irreversibility, although his dealing with each of these cases lacks thoroughness: his difficulty with defining ‘organism’ (how much can you remove from an organism to change its identity? Can there be organisms within organisms?) puts me in mind of DeLanda’s New Philosophy of Society (not a great work by any means, but it does at least present an attempt at working through this problem), his definition of functioning – a thing doing what is supposed to – is inadequate, leading to him making statements such as;

“you and I are functioning organisms; Tutankhamen and Lenin are not”

when we could just as easily say that Lenin is the most functional out of the four of us, in terms of how much the organism effects other organisms or networks of organisms. But of course that is a bit too meta... Eventually Belshaw admits;

“it is beginning to look as if we cannot define anything unless we can define everything”

which sounds a bit like a desperate cry for phenomenology.

Perhaps it’s just the angle of approach I’m making towards this branch of thought, perhaps I’m too used to psychoanalytical or ‘Continental’ (ewww…) philosophy to really feel comfortable with the style, but one often feels that a bigger scope would be better for this kind of subject. Here’s some early Lacan, in a rare discussion of death, basically hitting the nail on the head – the problem of death is not death, the problem is life. Everything is dead, apart from these heaps of matter that somehow decide that they are selves.

“That is what life is – a detour, a dogged detour, in itself transitory and precarious, and deprived of any significance. Why, in that of its manifestations called man, does something happen, which insists throughout this life, which is called a meaning? […] A meaning is an order that suddenly emerges. A life insists on entering into it, but it expresses something which is completely beyond this life, since when we get to the root of this life, behind the drama of the passage into existence, we find nothing besides life conjoined to death.”

Of course, this is part of a discussion of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and comes at an early point before Lacan fully developed his concept of drive, but it thinks in the same direction that (oh here we go again) Derrida thinks spectrality: life and death are not opposites – there is death in everything, and if we are to deal with extinction as truth, the misrecognition of being, the concatenation of life-meanings as generated and perpetuated by the Symbolic (Lacan) or traces, archives, writing (Derrida) is already dead also. All being is haunted matter.

Anyway, I’ve got a little more Belshaw to read, perhaps the last chapters are on Meillasoux, Brassier and Metzinger, although I reckon that’s distinctly unlikely.

Dr. Lacan's Being of Shame (II)

Well, what I meant to say, is...


Posted below we a have a homophonic french pun on ontologie, about 20 odd years prior to the popular one that we've all been discussing to the point of exhaustion. This is only really significant as a curio, but it does open out into issues with Lacan that I have...

What is it exactly that Lacan did? It is facile to state that Lacan analysed those who attended his seminaire or who read his écrits, but what he certainly was not doing was teaching them. An object like Dylan Evans' Lacanian Dictionary is not necessarily oxymoronic, but utterly misguided, for to treat Lacanian Psychoanalysis as if it was a curriculum, with credits that can be earned by memorising information is surely so far from the point as to be obscene. But then, the opposite is not the case, as Lacan wasn't merely sharpening the minds of his audience with difficulty for difficulty's sake. His work is not an example of itself, an argument I've sometimes resorted to when trying to explain his (and Derrida's) worth to laypeople (as contrasted with inept autodidacts like myself), but then of course, everyones an autodidact when it comes to Lacan.

The seminars I quoted from below are the most interesting Lacanian work I've read, with the diagrams of the four discourses, Master's, Analyst's, Hysteric's and then also the discourse of the University, the discussion of which makes for some of the most illuminating of Lacan's texts. He seems to have really believed that analysis provided something really other to the different discourses, which he talks of in terms of desire, but can also be thought of as power structures. Against the revolutionaries and agitators of his time, who it would seem were, in Lacan's eyes, accepting all to readily an already existing framework of power and knowledge, he insisted that psychoanalysis provided a glimpse of something truly radical. But then what would the glimpse be of, precisely? Perhaps it has something to do with analysis itself, not necessarily of the psyche. Uncovering a blind, godless knowledge known as science, that nevertheless cannot function without a leap of faith (and what is Meillassoux but the attempted renunciation of said faith in materialism?), Lacan sees knowledge as in the service of the University, in fact, as the University's desire, endlessly reproducing this knowledge and the mastery that is its truth.

But then, Lacan is strangely static and dynamic at the same time. If his idea of analysis as radicality, as the only radicality, holds, then it is obvious that radicality, in this system, can only ever be marginal, peripheral, and in a preemptive echo of bad deconstruction; always already at work. But the possibility of analysis emerges from a contingent historical process, the structures of intersubjectivity that do not exist for most animals, and did not exist for us in the same way until recently, in fact, may not even exist in the same way now. For does the University as we know it still conform to the University that Lacan speaks of (A University that was exemplary of the University discourse)? I'm not sure. But I wager that in Lacan one can find a lot that is fundamental to the structures of thinking that is perhaps not particularly useful as medicinal doctrine (the cry of 'where are his case studies?' - Lacan is not medicine, but neither is it homeopathy), or even education, but that helps to illuminate the desires behind thinking, understood as a practice.

Ubuweb have a fascinating collection of recordings of Lacan's Seminars. I had never really understood exactly how they were delivered- slowly, deliberately, and more than a little pompously.

Dr. Lacan's Being of Shame

It does have to be said that it is unusual to die of shame.

This visiting card never arrives at the right destination, the reason being that for it to bear the address of death, the card has to be torn up. “It’s a shame [une honte],” as they say, which should produce a (h)ontology [hontologie] spelled properly at last.

Being ashamed of not dying from this would perhaps introduce another tone to it, that with which the real is concerned. I said the real and not the truth for, as I already explained to you last time, it’s a temptation to suck the milk of truth, but it’s toxic. It will put you to sleep, and that’s all that’s expected of you.

for if you want your remarks to be subversive, you must take great care that they don’t get too bogged down on the path to truth.

The S1, the master signifier which holds the secret to knowledge in the university situation, is very tempting to stick to. You remain caught up in it.

Today I have brought you the dimension of shame. It is not a comfortable thing to put forward. It is not one of the easiest things to speak about. This is perhaps what it really is, the hole from which the master signifier arises. If it were, it might perhaps not be useless for measuring how close one has to get to it if one wants to have anything to do with the subversion, or even just the rotation, of the master’s discourse.

Lacan's Seminars, Book XVII, 17th June 1970

Don't give me what I want, because that's not it...

IT is fantastic on the contemporary abuse of language, and the happy role that the art-world plays in it. It is a sad world indeed when you can pick up Sokal’s latest book, with its attacks on the utilisation of ‘postmodern’ tropes by scumbags in order to defend the indefensible, and find an urge to agree with him.

I’ve been re-reading Anti-Oedipus recently, and not only is there a real patina growing upon D&G’s work now, but there’s a certain melancholy feeling, knowing how totally and absolutely their line of flight has been reterritorialised. In my opinion the age of deleuzoguattarian politics, or at least the age of the possibility of them, died with the 9/11 (November ninth?) attacks. What looked almost, for a second, with Seattle and Genoa etc… as if there was a growing resistance now seems a world away. Their work is still outstanding, but IT is right to point out that there is a strong smell of naivety that lingers around D&G now.

Regarding aphasia, I’m often brought back to Lacan’s retort to the agitators:

But outside what? Because when you leave here you become aphasic? When you leave here you continue to speak, consequently you continue to be inside.

Can we understand aphasia to have a power ascribed to it here? Aphasia as failure of communication? Where Lacan posits aphasia as an impossible ideal limit, the impossible outside of communication, the Virno quote suggests a residue of communication, something that always remains unclear, a remainder even when communication is ‘successful’. This is not a new idea, and there are many words for it, but does it follow that this must be defended, that this is the grain of authenticity within a degraded and depthless language? Is it the case that our society demands a logic based upon success? Is there anything critical in failure?

Perhaps aphasia can be related to a term that is of significance for my work: ruination. If aphasia, understood in this context, is the radical inability to speak, the productive failure of language, I would like to stress a particular concept of a ruin, the archival object whose signifying link has been short circuited, referring now only to its own materiality. The perfect example of this is the gravestone from which the names have been effaced, leading to a specific leap from the particular to the universal. In a way, part of the power of a ruin-object is its obscene presence; when its link to immaterial information has been severed it becomes radically useless. Perhaps the ruin is the aphasic condition of an archive, a sort of Bartleby object, but I remain unconvinced of (or unable to work out the details of) the true radical qualities of these terms.

What are the possible responses to this condition, when you can buy revolutionary literature in Borders, does that necessarily negate its power? It is absolutely correct that the language of the ‘creative industries’ (and has there ever been a more sure way of knowing that someone has not a creative spark in their entire brain than hearing them use the phrase ‘creative industries’ without killing themselves?) performs a self perpetuating fog of obfuscation that is almost identical to that of contemporary politics, but does this mean that all critical communication is worthless? There may not be an outside, but does that mean that all attempts at true creativity are failures? What if failure is what is attempted?

sorry...