27 March 2009Like you, I always enjoyed making things. Clay animals. Plasticine armies. Airfix kits. Mechanical toys. Go-karts. A fully working miniature express passenger steam locomotive. And since then, old Jags and aero engines, play houses, furniture, toys and all the many things I imagine we all like crafting when we’re away from the tyranny of computer screens and their ill-mannered software.
Somewhere out there in a world slightly beyond my comprehension is an ever-growing legion of people involved in architecture and urban design who seem to have spent more time in front of computer screens than at work benches, quarries, sewing machines or with beginners’ toolboxes. Why? Because the lack of craft around us is becoming not just heart-breaking, but jaw-dropping.
Design-and-build and PFI are the villains here, of course, along with all the hours spent by too many people behind computer screens. Yet the simple fact that countries like Britain, which have wilfully abandoned manufacturing, don’t make things means that many of our new buildings and streetscapes feel increasingly digital rather than real.
How many new or newly restored buildings are there in which craft is paramount? In recent months, works by Alvaro Siza, David Chipperfield’s renovation of the Neues Museum in Berlin, and 6a’s Raven Row gallery in Spitalfields commissioned by Alex Sainsbury have been happy exceptions to the rule. Peter Zumthor, Imre Makovecz and a small band of those who believe in “slow” architecture — rather like the “slow food” movement founded by Carlo Petrini in the mid-1980s — continue to see architecture as a craft, as well as an art, science and commercial necessity, although such architects are as rare as a half-decent pomo building.
It’s commonplace to say that all too many new buildings look and feel like computer drawings, and yet it’s true. I can’t help feeling that our buildings and townscapes would benefit immensely if we could have a new type of architectural education, one in which the latest whizzy computer skills, theories, materials and technologies were matched to craft skills, an appreciation of materials, of how things are put together, of how they endure (or not), of how weather affects buildings, and of how architecture is as much a sensual and tactile art and discipline as it is a way of designing buildings and ordering the world we inhabit.
Such thoughts might seem a luxury when the global economy is in recession. Yet one of the reasons why the global economy is in recession and that architects are hard-pressed is that we have shaped a world that has been increasingly the stuff of make-believe, PFI, PPP, clever-clogs jargon and digital la-di-dah rather than substance, craft and joy. The odd thing is that as children, we knew how to make things while using our imagination. How on earth did we begin to forget?
Kommen wir also wieder zurück zu Art & Crafts? Ich mochte Rhino ja noch nie :P
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