Just Finished Reading: The Architecture of Failure by Douglas Murphy (FP: 2012)

This was rather an odd one. I don’t just mean that it was the edge of my comfort zone but odd in another way. Despite understanding about 80% of the book – the rest being, as far as I could tell, rather esoteric architecture speak with a dollop of post-modern French philosophy thrown in for good measure – I’m still not exactly sure what it was actually about.

The first half of the book was very straight forward and related the rather strange, if now largely forgotten, ‘craze’ in the mid-19th to early 20th century of building huge enclosed spaces for various exhibitions and expositions around the world the earliest (and arguably most famous) being the Great Exhibition of 1851 in the Crystal Palace (interestingly a phrase first used as a rather disparaging joke). Although very successful in its own right it was always designed to be a purely temporary affair and was dismantled before it fell out of fashion or favour with the general public. Future ‘crystal palaces’ generally faired far worse as they lost money, sought in vain for a reason to exist and finally collapsed into 3rd rate ruin. The only survivors of this early craze for cast-iron and glass are (rather bizarrely) the classic red British telephone box and, more well known for this sort of thing, the Eiffel Tower which was incredibly scheduled to be demolished after the Paris Exhibition but saved by a public outcry.

OK, that was the easy part – basically 76 pages of architectural and engineering history with a few references to capitalism and the emergence of consumerism (as well as the widespread fear of working class revolution). So far so good. The second part befuddled me somewhat. In it, the author used various architectural philosophical viewpoints to analyse what he had already presented as well as more modern examples of architecture ‘gone wrong’. This is where he lost me. Talk of the ‘cult of the engineer’ I could cope with. Arguments about the meaning of modernity I could follow. When he started debating the differences, strengths and weaknesses of Solutionism, Iconism and Virtualism he left me standing a bit looking like I’d just been slapped in the face with a wet fish. I think I got the gist but I may have missed his point completely. I think what he was saying that much of modern architecture (from the mid-19th century onwards) can be seen as a failure because the human scale had been forgotten. That buildings are designed to ‘solve’ problems that don’t really exist, that often buildings are designed and finally built as prestige projects rather than fulfilling an actual human need. That the wow factor is far more important for the client (or actually the client’s shareholders) than whether the toilets or the lifts work. After all that’s the engineers problem. Added to this is the fact that with Computer Aided Design, not only can a lot of the drudge be taken out of design work it allows the architect to design buildings at the very edge of engineering and materials technology capability – just because he can.

Whilst interesting in many ways – which it was – I can’t say that I enjoyed this short book. It certainly hasn’t put me off reading more art, design or architecture books but I think this may have been too early for me and too theory heavy to really be much of a page turner.