Mark Chalmers

It can be difficult to represent someone in words, if you try to balance truth to your subject with a racy narrative.  If the subject is still around, they may well take offence at their portrayal.  As Thomas Carlyle roared at a portrait painter - "You have turned me into a devious-looking mountebank, full of violence, awkwardness, atrocity and stupidity, without recognisable likeness.”

Two possible solutions are to write only about dead folk, as they can’t object to your libels, or to work on authorised biographies and ghosted autobiographies.  That way you avoid causing offence, but also run the risk of missing the colour which makes for a better tale.  At the moment I’m researching an article about a Scots architect who was once well known but appears to have been forgotten by subsequent generations.  The trick here seems to be to reveal the man through his work, or other aspects of his life, yet the successful architectural biography is a rare bird. 

The only full, satisfying biography of a modern architect which I’ve read in the past few years is “Big Jim” by Mark Girouard.  Piece by piece, the author builds up Stirling’s character through episodes and asides, until you feel you understand something about how he ticked as a man, as much as an architect.  The doorstop which Miles Glendinning wrote about Robert Matthew is a feat of scholarship rather than a ripping yarn, which is a shame, but a book one third the length might have illuminated Matthew’s character more brightly.  Deyan Sudjic’s recent book about Norman Foster is overpoweringly un-critical, which suggests that it tells one side of an interesting story.  I’m struggling to think of others, so perhaps we should take a step back and ask what the architectural biography is for.

“He wanted the world to see what he did, not who he was,” said Don Warrington in tribute to Leonard Rossiter, the actor who played Rigsby in Rising Damp.  Put simply, you can split people into two types – the people who “are”, and the people who “do”.  The former are extroverts who rely on personality and charisma – or their face may be their fortune, as folk used to say.  Many books about architects are really just a catalogue of their work, with very little consideration of its creator – they are people who “do”.  In fact, many are keen to let nothing obscure the work and for them, ego is manifested in what they create.  As a result, they are happy to talk about their work, but have little to say about themselves.  In this era of celebrity culture, that may be a blessing.

Others are so strangely driven about their vocation that there is little to say about them – husbands, wives, children and hobbies have been ignored, to the extent they aren’t complete people, and a proper biography would only show up that lack.  The most impressive people in any sphere, though, are keen to learn about all aspects of the world, and to satisfy their own curiosity through experience.  They have many facets, and arguably make better biographical subjects because they have lived life more fully.  That’s why Frank Lloyd Wright has proved to be a popular subject within an unpopular genre.  Guns, dames and the genius of the self-proclaimed greatest architect who ever lived.

Beyond that, there’s a vain hope that you may stamble across a meta-biography, or in simple terms a book which tells us about architects as a type, or even reveals the fountainhead where ideas come from.  Vain, because when you consider it, much of what we do stems from personal experience, and it’s mostly subjective.  A fascination with wing-shaped canopies, structural trees, or porthole windows is easy to explain: chances are the subject of the biography spotted one elsewhere and decided they liked the look of it.  Yet archetypal forms come from far deeper in the psyche.  You are unlikely ever to discover where unconscious doodles, which eventually develop into sketch plans, magic gizmos, or screenprint patterns, actually come from.

So that leaves us with raw description, interpretation and critique when it comes to someone’s work, rather than any true insight into how their mind worked.  Similarly, assessment of the subject’s character may come directly from a long and close friendship, but more likely sources are interviews with friends and family, phone conversations about them, and long rambling emails or letters full of anecdotes.  From experience, these often tell you more about memory’s power of retention for trivia than the person in question.  You need a good cicerone to guide you through the difficult land that lies between recollection and fact.

After all, forming a critical opinion of a person is far removed from writing about a building.  The quicksilver personality of some creative people makes them elusive; others compartmentalise their lives and seem to keep separate, unrelated groups of friends in different spheres.  Those people, who knew him in different contexts, will take away very different impressions of who their friend was.  Not only can the biography give a wrong impression, but sometimes the person portrayed is violent, awkward, atrocious, or stupid – and with luck you may find someone who combines these traits.  A barely fictionalised account of one of Dundee’s gangster property developers springs to mind…

The architectural biog. has one advantage over other examples of the form: in getting anything built, there are guaranteed to be fights, fallings out and bitter criticism, as well as more positive emotions.  Provided the biographer can tap into the nervous energy, and set it into the context of how it serves the building, then it should help us to understand something about architecture’s means.  In that respect, the story of the Sydney Opera House has only been partly told, and the Scottish Parliament was barely uncovered, despite all the newspaper and TV coverage.  Maybe one day we’ll be able to read Enric Miralles’ memoirs, or Brian Stewart’s biography?

So, what’s the architectural biography for?  A marker for posterity, a valediction, a piece of entertainment … or is it as Carlyle himself thought – “All that mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books”.

My next piece for Urban Realm is a review of a new building in Dundee which is 100 years old, and the following one lined up for the blog will toy with the facts…