The Software Of Architecture

I posted last year a picture of the beautiful blank brick wall that adorns my building where I work. Built in, perhaps, 1983, it represented the pinnacle of modernist architecture, where form follows function, where the rejection of ornamentation is embraced. It has all the charm of the Soviet Ministry of Geology. I have a nice photo shopped photo of it where I've hung 45' tapestries of Mao, Lenin and Marx. It would have fit very well in 1964 USSR.

I admit that I like Arts and Crafts furniture, popularized in the first decade of the last century against the superfluous ornamentation of Victorian furniture. Here, as in modern architecture, was an emphasis on vertical and horizontal lines and the creation of ornament by using the structure itself. It is beautiful in and for itself. And practical. It uses the wood itself as it's ornamentation, and is highly regarded.

But damn, there is a vast difference between wood and modern building materials like concrete, glass, and steel, and when presented in a modernist fashion this is what we get:

If you were in eight grade today I'd bet you'd regard this building as a hostile, sterile, lifeless place, making the already difficult years of grade school even more depressing. You wouldn't, however, ever put two and two together -- you wouldn't make the connection between a building not worth a shit and an education not worth a shit.

But they do go hand in hand. It just is never discussed. There is nothing human about this place. By 2065, if it survives that long, as the middle school migrates out to the next suburban tier this building could easily be converted into a Witness Hall for followers of Jehovah. No windows. No appearance of any human activity. No landscaping other than an over-fertilized lawn, limiting maintenance.

Granted, there also aren't any places for 14 year old's to duck under, to smoke dad's weed, to share his beer with friends on a Saturday night. It's sterile.

As we continue to build shit like this, as we allow every "new" subdivision to look like every other subdivision with curbside parking and acres of asphalt, as we allow our consumption depots to occupy multi million square feet instead of a single million square feet, offset from the street 600 feet to accommodate all that required parking, all that high-pressure sodium illumination, as we continue this, we are everyday losing more of our software, the people and the human interactions and the human scaled geometries necessary for vibrant, healthy places to live. We only focus on the hardware of our four-lane expressways, our mega-consumption depots, the blank three-car garage doors of our housal units.

What happened to the art of architecture? How is it that architects today are employed to build shit like this Middle School? Do you think they enjoy this? Models of these buildings could be assembled in an afternoon by three-year olds using colored plastic blocks.

Then, to the opposite side of the architectural spectrum we have our famous modern architects designing stand-alone monstrosities showcasing their "talents," while totally fucking up the integration of their "works" with the rest of the environment:


Places that showcase themselves, and themselves only. Never any concern for the software of an integrated city, only the hardware of galactically stupid buildings build solely as stand alone testaments to their bloated egos.