ON PAPER
By Alex Selenitsch
If you were inspired by our "In the Fold" story in issue 105, read what poet, architect and Melbourne Uni lecturer Alex Selenitsch has to say about paper architecture...
Paper records of architecture, both built and unbuilt, provide a rich history of creative effort and architectural exploration of refinement, craft, measurement – and imagination.
Sooner or later, an architectural commission goes from being paper architecture to brick architecture. At the start of designing, where ‘what if?’ is the main question, it is all paper architecture. As soon as a design comes into focus, the priorities shift to its physical realisation. Paper architecture shuts down and the project moves on. Yet sometimes the creative ambience of ‘paper’ is kept open, encouraged and exploited.
To be admitted into professional ranks, an architectural graduate will have spent five or more years working on paper projects. New practices will sometimes continue this design exploration as a means of positioning themselves among their peers and attracting potential clients. The paper project continues to flap through the very rare open architectural competition, the more frequent limited competitions and the ubiquitous design-based tenders for institutional projects. And despite the best intentions, not all designs are built. Projects stall and die, with their paper state being the only record of a creative effort. These situations are only partially paper in that the documents and objects were, when done, intended to be neutral carriers of data describing something which would have been, if built, the actual focus of attention.
But even in contexts where architecture is seen as a servant art controlled by non-architectural forces, periodic attempts erupt to establish its paper autonomy. Over the last 400 years, European architecture has been studded with influential written and drawn images of architecture. The Italians Andrea Palladio and Sebastiano Serlio come to mind, also the English architects Robert Morris and John Soane, and the French rationalists Étienne-Louis Boullée and Nicolas Ledoux. All of these architects wrote and drew imaginary architectures, to explore what architecture might be. The pattern books of the late 18th century onwards popularised this activity. Such investigations have rarely been pure. Palladio’s four books, for example, are a mixture of fantasy, practical advice, high-minded seriousness and self-retrospection, in which pragmatists and dreamers can both be at home. Nevertheless, in these kinds of works, the architect’s gaze is equally directed to the conditions out of which architecture emerges, as well as its financial or political benefit, or its buildability.
Unbuildablity is sometimes thought of as a defining quality of paper architecture, but what is unbuildable? For instance, can a building be suspended in air? Buckminster Fuller has designed and calculated a sphere so large that its total mass is less than the mass of air it displaces, so it will float. Time is on the paper architect’s side: what is fanciful today will by tomorrow’s tomorrow be easy to build. And strictly speaking, buildablity is in architecture’s bloodstream. Even where it is mist, as in Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s Blur Building of 2002, architects must consider gravity, extraction and refinement of matter, craft and measurement. Far from being nuisances, these values are a rich playground. It would be difficult to conceive of any kind of architecture which has no connection to them.
Looking for architecture’s origins is a varied thing. One way of doing so is to examine the discipline’s axioms, codes and compositional strategies. This can be a matter of archaeology as in the case of Palladio’s study of Roman ruins, or it could be the exploration of new relationships between representation and spatial order. Jean-Nicholas-Louis Durand’s rationalist grids come to mind as a historical example, but so do the various graphic researches of Peter Eisenman and Greg Lynn. In Eisenman’s case, one even suspects that his built works have been designed so that they will become great books, that is, great paper architecture.
But one can also look past the professional concerns of the architect, and use architecture to examine subjects that normal commissions don’t allow. Here, paper architecture comes in to its own, because architecture can then say something about issues outside of itself, and hence connect with a wider audience. This is where that eternal project, the City of the Future, belongs, from Antonio Sant’Elia’s drawings to Archigram’s comics and pop-ups, to say nothing of recent projects which attempt to visualise a post-apocalyptic world. These are a kind of architectural science fiction, with that genre’s blend of fantasy and mundane detail. But one can also look at the present, with its much wider field of subject matter that asks to be given form so that it can be assimilated and understood. There are political issues. Michael Sorkin’s projects are examples, particularly his Tracked Houses of 1990, a project for the homeless on New York’s rail yards. There are issues of data and globalism. Lebbeus Woods’ drawings and constructions, which make virtual networks visible, come to mind. There are existential issues, and here the fictional world of John Hejduk can serve as an exemplary blockbuster. These are American examples, but there are many issues which are primary for us. Fire, water, native title, immigration, nomadism, egalitarianism, mining are all subjects with substantial spatial content waiting to be given form.
The problem, in fact, is not in finding a subject, or even how to make it into architecture, but how this kind of work can be made known and not be destined ‘for the drawer’, as dissident music and literature of the Cold War was. While built architecture is fixed and stationary on a site, paper architecture is data and image, and the venue for this is ambiguous in a changing data ecology. What in the 1980s obviously belonged in a gallery-type space, as drawings on a wall, can still be presented as such. But new opportunities have come with e-data through discs, memory sticks and websites of all sorts. These new venues emphasise that paper architecture is not a matter of ink and flat sheets, but is an architecture where the drive is provided by the imagination, with a necessary duty to make that imagination attractive, meaningful and inspirational for others.