architectural dialogue

The remarkable architect and product designer, Eliot Noyes, once wrote: “… details must play their part in relation to the overall concept and character of the building, and are the means by which the architect may underline his main idea, reinforce it, echo it, intensify or dramatize it.” (Arch. Record, 1966)

And then there was, of course, the more succinct Charles Eames, who adopted a more pragmatic and less intrinsically symbolic attitude to the issue:  “The details are not the details. They make the design. The connections, the connections, the connections.” (ECS film, 1961).

Noyes’ comment begs a question: how do details dramatise, underscore, etc.? The reference to ‘relation’ is perhaps the hint. But Eames is suggesting that the ambiguous whole that a part relates to is only defined bythe parts. One is reminded of an old conundrum: is the egg a way to make chickens, or vice versa?

Is a chicken the egg's way to make more eggs?

Any similarity between how Noyes and Eames construed the product has to do with a subtle pragmatism that adopted a tentative (and even surreptitious) approach to a symbolic content of the kind outlined by Heidegger when he discussed the jugness of a jug in terms that gave emphasis to functionality as a ritualistic gifting pertaining to this intersubjective intentionality (The Thing, a lecture of 1950 published in Poetry, Language, Thought (1971)). This is where Eames’ plywood leg splints differ from his later furniture – we slip across a boundary into a sphere where utilitarianism of the kind we we associate with tools becomes the usefulness of a kind more explicitly mired in meaningfulness. Eames knew this when he muttered about the beauty and ‘naturalness’ of an axe handle, and Loos surely had the same unsettling truth in mind when he referred us to the ‘naturalness’ of a peasant’s roof which no architect could imitate. Axe handle, jugs and peasant roofs (and iMacs and the rest) are oriented to ‘a need’ that is ever rooted in impenetrable ambiguity that has some degree of symbolic value at its core.

Axe handle

But to the extent that tools and housings are a significant aspect of a discourse concerning parts and wholes, we must also acknowledge that most ambiguous neo-mythic awareness and neo-magical attitude that recognises no essential differentiation between part and whole: someone’s toe-nail clipping, for example, embodies the whole person. There is here no difference between the essentiality of whole and part. And so the part can be magically employed. The archaeological version of this is the whole animal constructed from a few bone fragments. We witness something similar in recent genetics. And the architectural version is a similar ability to ostensibly read the whole from the Classical part simply because of the presumed harmonics and correspondences one expects to prevail – correspondences founded upon the commensurability of those numbers serving as a common denominator unifying part with whole.

Notions of part and whole, in other words, presume some form of commensurability which informs their unity,  facilitates  organicity and, ultimately, defines a particularity of identity. (Your heart and my heart might be the same, but a transplant is impossible with out the aid of immunosuppressant drugs.) It is a powerful notion, one that can as easily be qualitative as quantitative. The underlying sentiment reveals an outlook on the world – including its architectural housings – that construes all of nature as a more-or-less integrated and harmonised design – except that mankind is ‘fallen’ into delusion and discord. Alberti – for whom a restorative ideal was defined as that unity to which nothing could be added or taken away without detracting from its beauty – would not have been surprised by the remarks of Noyes and Eames, or have been in disagreement with them. On the other hand, one can’t imagine them so easily subscribing to his neo-Platonic cosmology.

Detail at the Great Court of the British Musem.

Noyes again (emphasis added): “[D]etails must play their part in relation to the overall concept and character of the building, and are the means by which the architect may underline his main idea, reinforce it, echo it, intensify or dramatize it. [...] I like details [...] to be simple, practical, efficient, articulate, appropriate, neat, handsome, and contributory to the clarity of all relationships. The converse of this is that the spectator may observe and enjoy details, and find in them an extension of his experience and understanding of the architecture. In them he should be able to read, or at least see reflected, the character and spirit of the entire building – as to see the universe in a grain of sand.” (Architectural Record, Jan., 1966)

There is, of course, a degree of paradox in all this: to identify a ‘detail’ one must already have identified its particularised wholeness, just as one must also have synthesised the whole of which it is a part and to which it contributes. Every detail – simply to be a part or detail – must have a degree of wholeness about it. Either way, there is, in phenomenological terms, a similar gestalt foregrounding of figure (part or whole) against a more or less diffuse background.

It must also be added that, oddly, it is rarely principles – ‘the whole’ – but rather the detail – the particularised application of principal – about which we heatedly disagree. We more easily agree upon the fundamental generality of goods than we do about particularised forms of their realisation. Details, as particulars rather than generals, are intrinsically and symbolically significant – a significance underscored by the daily particularity of the lives we live and experience. Meanwhile, the whole – as diffuse background – is a mystery to us. (An important point that illustrates the difference between a Socratic escape route out of a cave of illusions and Aristotle’s acceptance of a phenomenological world of ‘appearances’.)

But there is something else to consider – something engendered by an outlook that locates satisfaction and finds an acceptable coherence within the heterogeneous framework of Aristotlian realities: that artefacts such as architectural housings can exhibit kinds of ‘detail’ that are peculiarly semi-autonomous in a manner that finds correspondence only in the likes of humans whose prosthetic extensions are fundamental to their everyday thriving and thus constitute a restoration of their organicity (the prosthetic bears a restorative intentionality). Within a neo-Platonic cosmology, all of mankind’s ‘works’ serve such a restorative purpose that has a Garden if Eden as an implicit sacred goal. (Although it is unlikely we shall agree on the content of that Garden!)

In the realm of practical architecture (if not biology, where the underlying teleological issue remains a contentious and obscure issue), details can legitimately enjoy an architectural strength of being that subverts and can even approaches the supervention of the whole in which it participates. (‘Approaches’ because to supervene the whole is to negate and replace it.)

To consider how this might be, it might be useful to refer to Noyes again (the preceding part of the above quotation; notice how he broadens out the notion of ‘detail’): “I think of details in two senses. There are first the details of joints, connections, the attachment of different materials to each other, the turning of corners, the physical relating of parts of the building to each other. But I also think of larger special elements as details — such as stairs and fireplaces — in which there are of course numerous details in the other sense. In each case the architect has a useful and expressive architectural device. In a way, such architectural details are the architecture, but details alone — no matter how thought out or how consistent — cannot make architecture.”

Noyes is less ambiguous than Eames: an architecture is, by definition, a schematic set of relations that is ever other than its particularised details. Eames tells us that the details ‘make’ ‘the design’. But he is also right: the details facilitate and constitute the realisation of a design concept which otherwise floats, less meaningfully, in an intangible fantasy realm.

Rather than ‘details’, perhaps we need to refer think in terms of Noyes’ elemental features. We could also refer to ‘fragments’, but then a fragment is, implicitly, already broken off – as with the prosthetic whose design can reveal much about our conception of the whole it serves. These details / features / fragments, can sometimes tell you more than examination of a whole ever can. They can exhibit more, manifest more, represent more … be more meaningful. Their soul doesn’t have to have to be mortgaged to the whole, but can subsist as detail that yet, strangely, possesses a wholeness that is ‘semi-autonomous’.

Let me offer an example that recently arose out of a conversation with a former student fresh from Vancouver. It was a conversation about the architect’s current predicament, about the apparent emasculation of their power and influence and import that runs in parallel with swelling numbers and the celebratory status of a tiny few (and, incidentally, about thriving midst the Chinese invasion over there and the cultural change this brings into the profession). It wasn’t the most upbeat and optimistic of discussions.

Do you recall, I asked, the old Jim Stirling exercise at the Tate Britain, how he was asked to add a pavilion extension to house the Turner collection, how the job was a proverbial ‘walk across a ploughed field’, how the Gallery curators homed in on detail and squeezed the architect into a delirium of contention and tedium … ? So what was Big Jim’s answer? He metaphorically left the room and literally gave his attentions to the exterior. That was OK wasn’t it? So long as he was respectful and courteous toward what existed, then surely he should be allowed to get on with ‘his thing’ out there? What harm could there be in that? And so Big Jim indulged himself in an exercise of external gamesmanship, particularly on the river-facing facade. It possesses a peculiar quality of being a personal indulgence or game, into which we are invited as welcome spectators. The project enabled this gamesmanship, facilitated it and tolerates it. It has little to do with the interior and it is not slightly forlorn. Even the principal connection of an oriel window that was to be a secretive sitting area, away from the paintings and overlooking the pond has lost its role long ago. And the joke ‘dropped’ stone in the corner (as at Stuttgart) is now meaningless and idiosyncratic to most visitors.

The Clore extension to the Tate Britain (Stirling Wilford, 1979-85), complete with the very English pond later obliterated by Allies & Morrison.

A not untypical criticism of such works is that they are ambiguous toward the inter-relations of whole and major part: denigrated as being of a lessor value than a neo-organic, Albertian kind of integrated and harmonised unity. But should it be? Big Jim didn’t appear to think so (he indulged in this strategy on a number of occasions). Perhaps some aggregations constitute a peculiarity that is simultaneously a valid whole?

One of my favourite examples is Kenwood House, on Hampstead Heath – one of Robert Adams houses from the late C18th. The house is a strange aggregation of body parts: a central ‘trunk’, two ‘leg’ wings, and two additional pavilion extensions (the Orangery and the Library), together with an addition on the eastern flank, discreetly half-hidden from view: the kitchen and former stabling wing (a neo-Kahn served and servant concept, now belonging to the late C18th).

The aerial photo below has the latter wing concealed behind the tree (you can just see its roof, far right). One experiences it as a kind of supplementary ‘prosthetic’ serving the main body of accommodation and, on a day to day basis, it has always possessed a quite independent existence that, nevertheless, is meaningless apart from the main body of Adam’s work.

The overall mix is a commodious one of formality and informality, preciousness and pragmatism to which Modern architecture (which still refers itself to Platonic ideals) is arguably alien. One can imagine altering any part of Kenwood (with sensitivity, of course!) whilst still maintaining an overall coherence – a rationale that, of course, presumes the organic whole which is subsequently prosthetically restored to wholeness – or even has the potentiality of that organicity extended. But the interesting point is that Adam’s original schema has this implicit potentiality and remains tolerantly coherent and commodious within an ambiguous status somewhere between oranicity and aggregation…. Hmmm, this begins to distinctly sound like Transformer country! (But notice that where we’re not: in the sleek and sanitised territory of parametric form and its implicit Platonic idealism.)

Kenwood House, Highgate, London: aerial and view of the partly concealed kitchen wing (once with kitchen garden, etc). The formal entry frontage is on the northern side, i.e., the principal frontage is actually the long garden front, facing south.

A note: Much of the debate about parts and wholes, unity and identity goes back to Aristotle (e.g., Metaphysics), who notes that a whole contains things in a manner that forms a unit, and the unit is a characteristic property of natural things. Some wholes (a pan) are aggregates in which the position of parts is insignificant (as when we metaphorically refer to water as a whole), but the parts of other wholes (a holon) are otherwise significant (e.g. the hand or face). Clearly, the organism is an example of the latter, in which the component parts exist soley for the whole of which they form a functional part.