Photograph extracted from the book City of Darkness: Life in Kowloon Walled City by Greg Girard and Iam Lambot, Watermark, 1999.
Thanks to Ethel and César, I got to re-read the fantastic book City of Darkness: Life in Kowloon Walled City by Greg Girard and Iam Lambot (my own copy is in France!) and it got me wanting to wonder about this question, why do architects dream of a world without them? Few decades after the 1964 exhibition Architecture Without Architects curated by Bernard Rudofsky at New York MoMA, there is a clear interest from many architects – in which I most certainly belong – for architectures that did not necessitated the intervention of the architect as an expert. We can thus see a multitude of projects set-up around the various slums/favelas of the world. Some of them are interesting, some others are incredibly inconsiderate, but this does not explain this sort of professional “death drive” that makes architects fascinated by the production of their absence.
This fascination’s reasons are maybe to be looked for with another one, also specific to this current period of time, that makes us, architects, willing to integrate the appropriation of architecture by its users as part of its protocol of creation. Once again, I am fully including my own work within this influence – one might want to say “trend” – but it is important to interrogate our obsessions. Is the notion of appropriation a way for the architect to dismiss his own responsibility and his power? Is it a philanthropic pulse that allows us to offer generously our work to the collectivity? As always, the answer probably comprises both of this extreme propositions.
In the case of slums, vernacular architectures, and other immanently constructed buildings and towns, the appropriation is total as it is concomitant of the construction of architecture itself. The latter is in continuous evolution and cannot ever be defined as achieved as it does not follow any transcendental plan that would have clearly states what its finish state should correspond to. The modernist dream of architecture thought as a “living machine” which can adapt to any need of its users could not be achieved through the limited understanding for life of an architect. On the contrary, these immanent architectures, freed from the architects and the urban legal framework, can attempt to negotiate such an adaptation. As Peter Popham writes in his introduction for G.Girard and I.Lambot’s book,
