Words and Buildings: a Vocabulary of Modern Architecture
Adrian Forty
Thames & Hudson
Buy it at BOL
Adrian Forty's first book tried to tell us why refrigerators are white. Apparently, it's to make us use more electricity. He took a similar line on the Underground map: it is the result of a plot by London Transport to persuade commuters to travel further by making the city look smaller than it actually is.
By titling his book Objects of Desire and putting one of those oh so ironical, oh so mid-Eighties recycled images of a housewife in a cocktail dress gazing in wonder at her new, all-electric kitchen on the cover, Forty managed to make all this look of the moment (circa 1986). Unwittingly, he also launched a thousand glossy magazine features about matt-black calculators, rubber fountain pens and those strange kettles with a whistle like a steam locomotive, endlessly recycling his title to increasingly irritating effect.
Words and Buildings misses out on the snappy title, but it does play a lot of the contemporary graphic tricks that clued-up publishers use to make slabs of heavy-duty academic prose look as if they have escaped from the narrow confines of the research assessment exercise compound and out into the wider world of culture and can be read as literature. Instead of deconstructing objects, Forty is now trying to analyse the uses that architectural critics make of language, not, it has to be said, a subject of exactly mainstream interest. But the jacket design does its best to imply thoughtful reflectiveness with a wider currency. A duotone, four-colour black-and-sepia image implies quality, learning, and insight.
The subject matter of the photograph is more significant still. A balding man, shooting a cuff, Havana in hand, in dark jacket and immaculately tailored trousers, remains impassive as an older, silver-haired man with a black tie, his arm in blurred motion, attempts to engage him in conversation. The old man is Mies van der Rohe, the most formidable modernist architect of them all, nearing the end of his career. On the table between the two you notice a half empty bottle of bourbon. Is this a Proustian moment in some Left-Bank café? And who is the young man looking on in the background?
Yet this photograph is not what it seems. Bizarrely, it reappears on page 12 with a very different crop, and de-aestheticised by being rendered in plain black and white. It is revealed to be something very different, not photographic art at all, but a fleeting unfocused snap shot. What is Forty trying to tell us by using the same image twice, but in such different ways?
The bald, and as far as we can tell utterly unknown figure on the cover is not the centre of attention at all. The image it is meant to be a representation of an architectural conversation, a demonstration of Forty's thesis that architecture can be as much shaped by words as by drawings. It is Mies himself, also with cigar, shaking his hand for emphasis who is the point of the picture. And it is not a dialogue, but a monologue. The young man is Mies's grandson. A woman appears in the background and sees Mies's presence as important enough to merit taking a photograph. This is Berlin in 1967, and Mies is here for the unveiling of his design for Germany's new national gallery.
For Mies, a tutorial with one of his students at the Illinois Institute of Technology could take the form of half an hour of silence while the master smoked a Havana. He is a paradoxical choice for the cover of a book about language. As Forty acknowledges, Mies was always suspicious of words, and indeed famously pronounced that architects should 'build, not talk'.
Reading Forty's book, it is hard not to agree. The first half is a canter through the subject to establish the way that architects and critics use words, and are used by them. It is rarely with much grace or elegance. The second part provides a dictionary of the words that have formed the core vocabulary of modernist architectural critics. There are, however, just 18 of them, implying a silence that would have impressed even Mies. Some of these words are clearly far more significant as far as Forty is concerned than others. 'Form' for example, gets 24 pages which lead us through the nuances of the two German words for form, and the gradual evolution of the meaning of the word in English from its older sense of shape or mass to its avant-garde modernist suggestion of 'essence'.
'Formal', on the other hand, gets a perfunctory single page, while the section on 'user' is scarcely less skimpy. The list includes 'history', 'structure', and 'truth', all words which certainly form part of the Chinese whispers that pass for architectural debate. And Forty elucidates the fascinating twists and turns in the evolving meaning of language as spoken in the world of architecture. But in the end, he poses more questions than he answers.
Why attempt to deal with these words, but not, for example, 'rational', 'iconic', 'hierarchy', 'articulation' or, most significant of all, 'modern', to name just a few words that could be seen as being just as central to the language of architecture. Why does Forty limit himself so arbitrarily to a vocabulary of just 18 words. Is architecture really such a monosyllabic tongue?
