Unit 12

Autonomy and Translation

In Unit 12, we recognise the history within the discipline of architecture—an internal dialogue of evolving ideas, principles, forms, spaces and tectonics—and we equally acknowledge the history of architecture’s interdependence with wider social, cultural and political developments. Recognising and claiming a degree of artistic autonomy is as necessary to creative speculation as understanding, engaging and exploiting the conditions of a specific time and place. In many eras, the most fruitful architectural innovations have occurred when ideas and forms have migrated from one time and place to another, by a process of translation that has proved to be as stimulating and inventive as the initial conception.

A recurring theme in architectural discourse states that the house is the origin and archetype of architecture, and the manifestation of its autonomy. The most noted example is the primitive hut, the basic shelter described by the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius and later idealised, first by MarcAntoine Laugier as four tree-trunks supporting a pediment of branches in 1753, and then by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe as eight white columns supporting three horizontal planes in the Farnsworth House, 1951.

The concern for autonomy existed more recently within the work of the ‘late avantgarde’, as K. Michael Hays defines the era. Emerging between the late 1960s and early 1980s, its key protagonists included Raimund Abraham, Peter Eisenman, John Hejduk, Aldo Rossi and Bernard Tschumi. Their work sought to assert a direct aesthetic and conceptual relationship to past architectures, whether to the archetypal forms in the fabric of the European city or to the platonic tropes of modernist form. Through this process of appropriation and reference, architects reasserted a degree of autonomy in which architecture was understood as a form of knowledge with its own internal rules and history.

This use of historical architectures was not just a process of copying, but a calculated creative endeavour that aimed to resist certain stylist architectures, particularly those of hyper-capitalist, consumerist postmodernism. But this resistance came at a cost. The selfreferential approach—an architecture about architecture—prioritised drawn and speculative forms of practice to the extent that it side-lined the discipline from direct engagement with certain social realities of the time and, in particular, moved it away from building and the economic, social and political forces that mediate that process.

In Unit 12 we will study architectures—Renaissance, baroque, modernist and late avant-garde—that have claimed a degree of autonomy, focusing in particular on their aesthetic, philosophical and poetic aspirations. But, informing our designs this year, we will also recognise that architectural speculation has often arisen from the creative tension between a claim to autonomy and the social and political realities of a specific time and place.

Ancient and Modern

Critical admiration of the past has often been a creative stimulus in the present. Erwin Panofsky even identifies the start of the Renaissance with the moment when ‘the whole, classical sphere … became an object of nostalgia’. The unnecessary and false opposition between tradition and innovation was a cliché of twentieth-century modernism, and is an uncritical rallying cry for some architects today. But even the most celebrated modernists were more subtle and nuanced in their approach, leading Le Corbusier to admire Platonic forms alongside cars and Mies to conclude: ‘I felt that it must be possible to harmonize the old and the new in our civilisation. Each of my buildings was a statement of this idea’. Vincent Scully concluded that the architect will ‘always be dealing with historical problems—with the past and, a function of the past, with the future. So the architect should be regarded as a kind of physical historian’. The most creative architects have always looked to the past to imagine a future, studying an earlier architecture not to replicate it but to understand and transform it, revealing its relevance to the present. Twenty-first century architects need to appreciate the shock of the old as well as the shock of the new.

Public and Private

A home unfamiliar to us today, the medieval house was public in that it accommodated numerous functions of business and domestic life and numerous people—family, relatives, employees, servants and guests—in shared spaces. Even sleeping was a communal activity, with many people sharing a bed and many beds sharing a room. Later, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Italian Renaissance palazzo was occupied as a permeable matrix of rooms, mostly without specified uses, which offered alternative combinations of rooms and routes. In Andrea Palladio’s design for the Palazzo Antonini, Udine, 1556, even the lavatories have more than one door.

The home of the home, as we understand it today, is seventeenth-century Netherlands, when domestic architecture became private and familial. Adopting this model in the following centuries, the segregation of functions within the home came to mirror the segregation of functions within the city, isolating homes from businesses and industries. Challenging this isolation, Louis Kahn recalled Leon Battista Alberti and Andrea Palladio’s analogy of a house and a city, to characterise the house as the smallest social institution, and an archetype of dwelling and society, concluding that ‘Every building is a house, regardless of whether it is a Senate, or whether it is just a house.’

Questioning the segregation of buildings and cities, our project this year is the design of a house-institution for an international organisation or society, which as a place to live and work will have a public life and a private life. The decision will be made by each student, but possible organisations might include the Cartoonists Rights Network International, European Union Common Agricultural Policy, European Free Trade Association, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, International Trade Union Organisation, International Psychoanalytic Association, International Union of Architects, Pen International, Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization, World Organisation of Systems and Cybernetics, or the World Wildlife Fund. Mediating between the house-institution and the city, our site is London.