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Title: In the Scheme of Things: Alternative Thinking on the Practice of Architecture by Thomas R. Fisher, Thomas R. Fisher ISBN: 0-8166-3653-2 Publisher: Univ of Minnesota Pr (Trd) Pub. Date: 21 January, 2000 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)
Rating: 5
Summary: The Good Life and Architecture
Comment: This book is essential reading for anyone who cares about the future of architectural education and practice. The author, Thomas R. Fisher, now Dean of University of Minnesota's College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, goes right to the point of what is wrong with architecture today, and offers both questions for debate and answers he can support.
Always an original thinker about architecture, and well-known for his bold opinions as editor of what was the field's most important professional magazine, the now defunct Progressive Architecture, Fisher is very clear on the discipline's one big idea: "...all good architecture puts forward a proposition, whether the designer is aware of it or not, about the good life, about how we should live and what we should live for." As he would be the first to admit, many architects lose sight of this proposition, and from the general public's perspective, if architecture is supposed to be about making life better, most architects have a funny way of showing it.
Fisher is clear on what has to be done. Architecture, in its education, internships, and practice has to reconnect to what he calls a comprehensible "public fiction" of what design can do for buildings, places, and cities. He recognizes architects Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, as well as ur-designers Charles and Ray Eames, and architectural historian Vincent Scully, as cogent, forceful advocates of strong "fictions" of how design could make life better, whether by integrating technology, by connecting to the earth and place, or by unprecedented seeing patterns and connections, can shape a world where people can live, work, and play in environments that are both functional and meaningful. Fisher calls the organizing principles of these designers' work "fictions" because declarations that "the house is a machine to live in," for example, is by no means an absolute truth, but it is a vision that yielded decades of extraordinary environments. To me, the term "narrative" or "vision," as tired as those words are, might better make the point, since "fiction" can hold the stigma of deliberate deception.
In the Scheme of Things outlines the philosophical and historical basis for past "fictions," as well as ones to come, leaning heavily on the Pragmatist work of John Dewey, and as with the recent "Pragmatist Imagination" conference at the Museum of Modern Art, he implies that this kind of enlightened utilitarianism remains the firmest ground for a discipline that has lost its way. To Fisher, if it is to find its way back, architecture will have to take communicating with the general public much more seriously, make clear that design is about solving problems, not an application of taste from a historical or avant-garde catalogue, and have to reconnect education and practice.
He is too cavalier in his dismissal of formalism-no matter how many times you say architecture is research and problem-solving, it is also about the way things look, and image and form are essential to its "problems." But his point is vital - architects need to be involved in the full life cycle of the built environment, at the beginning stage (not pushed aside while the developers and planners cut the deal), and even after construction into post-occupancy studies. In addition, he calls for an education that recognizes a macro sense of "design" that transcends the specific work of building design, and which would enable an architect to attack a problem from the most conceptual - much as Rem Koolhaas is now doing for Prada and other companies, re-conceptualizing (or at least appearing to), their entire approach. He may be right, it is certainly exciting for educators or practitioners to retool themselves as this kind of consultant. On the other hand, he may be playing into the egregious business school myth that all management and consulting skills (in this case design skills) can be applied to all businesses - which sometimes works for a company selling off its assets, but very rarely results in a better product or anything associated with an advanced notion of the good life.
In short, Fisher looks at the ecology of architecture, and without belaboring the metaphor, finds in it an unhealthy set of monocultures, not even in productive juxtaposition with one another. For some, his answers may not have enough "friction" (or enough pictures - there are none in this volume, a daring but risky choice for a book on this topic). Indeed, if there is any criticism to be made of Fisher and his editors (Engine Books, Inc., and the publisher, University of Minnesota Press), it is that he is such a clear writer, and so smoothly edited, that the reader can't always get a grip on just how challenging are his points of view, and how radical they really are for the academy and the profession.
In addition, the book may ultimately be too abstract to fully connect to the students, architects, and public that it needs to. Fisher strives to be admirably independent architecture's celebrity culture, which he sees as a bad hangover from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts tradition, yet at the same time it is "stars" who are the greatest advocates, today, of sustaining a "public fiction" for architecture - with Andres Duany and his New Urbanism movement calling for stability and order and safe streets in one corner and Rem Koolhaas and his acolytes calling for "metropolitan" excitement, change, and opportunity in the other. Perhaps Fisher believes that neither one has a fiction that is good enough to report on at length, or that they are so over-reported as personalities that it is time to focus on the real content of the debate (he does cite Duany briefly). Fine, he is intellectually right, but in the battle for the hearts and minds of architecture, the star system will be with us well into the new century - dealing with it is, yet again, a design problem, and Fisher may well find a way.
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Title: How Firms Succeed: A Field Guide to Design Management by James P. Cramer, Scott Simpson, Richard Swett Faia ISBN: 096754775X Publisher: National Book Network Pub. Date: April, 2002 List Price(USD): $39.00 |
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Title: Design Plus Enterprise: Seeking a New Reality in Architecture & Design by James P. Cramer ISBN: 0967547733 Publisher: National Book Network Pub. Date: April, 2002 List Price(USD): $29.00 |
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