Mark Chalmers

It’s the battle at the heart of every social science going: the individual against the mass.  The distance between “me” and the rest of the world lies at the very core of the human condition.  Despite the fact that we are social animals, biologically and psychically we're separate and apart from other creatures.  Each of us is essentially alone.  We can’t know what another person feels or thinks, nor can they experience our feelings and thoughts.

This separation has powered several of the great novels, like Hunger by Knut Hamsun, Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, and The Outsider by Albert Camus.  We can change, we can renounce the things we believed in, but we can never leave the human race – at best, we set ourselves apart from other people and try to live outside their society.

Many of us go through a phase of teenage rebellion, but the truest sense of splitting apart from the mass of humanity only comes later in your 20’s or 30’s, once you have experienced many years’ worth of what Anthony Burgess described as the formicating crowds of big cities.  You begin to feel dissociated from the milling strangers, and grow tired of the social codes we live by.  You become disenfranchised by them, and wish for something else. 

Some people – artists, poets, novelists – are able to use this experience to feed their work; others disengage completely and withdraw from the world.  What the French call anomie, the feeling of being tired with and unsatisfied by life, may either cause you to chuck it all in … or grow more determined to find your own way in the world.  Architects try to serve society, so they aim for the latter.

Respect and big props are due to those who plough their own furrow – in this context, the architects who neither teach, lecture or write articles.  Reading the story of the Barbican development in London, I was struck by the fact that Chamberlin, Powell & Bon kept their own counsel – not through lack of self-confidence in their approach or opinions, but perhaps through a recognition of the ugly truth, that a good deal of architectural journalism is blatantly self-promotional, yet pretends to critical objectivity. 

If you take articles written by “big name” designers, they invariably flesh out their thesis using their own work  I guess that it takes a large measure of humility not to do that.  There is also the suspicion that the “big names” seek a column in a journal, or a publishing deal, as an outlet for their ego.  Given that, you could argue that Outside is the safest place to be, since you are forced to think for yourself and evaluate places and situations. 

This piece isn’t intended to be didactic or preaching, but I think this lesson is widely applicable – it ranges from the need to question critical theories in architecture books, to the screaming necessity of avoiding trouble in life.  Why does anyone study architecture?  Not because they foresee that one day they’ll work for Practice X, producing window schedules by rote.  Instead, they have their own hopes and aspirations to pursue.  They want to fulfil their own destiny.  In that, architects differ from most other walks of professional life. 

Setting up your own practice is not only about making more money, or having your name above the door – it’s the ability to build your own designs rather than someone else’s.  The Outsiders are just a more extreme version of this imperative.

I’ve talked in previous pieces about practices such as Shearer and Annand, and Bowen Dann Davies, who didn’t court publicity – but the second type of outsiders are those whose work falls entirely outwith the canon, rather than those who simply adopt a low key approach to practice.  Designers such as Rudolph Steiner (Goetheaneum); Constant (New Babylon), and Frederick Kiesler (Endless House) produced work which falls outwith any critical category.  These are rare examples of architecture which is “ab initio” – thought out from first principles, and without reference to anything else. 

Some of these designers were propagandists, who put forward their own manifestoes – Constant was part of the Situationist International for a time, and his designs were part of a greater scheme to reshape the whole world, changing the way we’re governed, as well as the way we build.  Rudolph Steiner developed educational theories into which he tied in an approach to architecture.  You could call this move to the outside a manifesto in itself, or perhaps an escape from manifesto-waving activists.

Regardless of the “position” they choose to take, it’s a pleasure to be offered a fresh view of the world by these designers – and it contrasts with the conventional histories of modern architecture, where you read about the same buildings and the same architects time and time again.  Those books are really just the products of an intellectual conspiracy, since their authors are academic rivals, who compete with each other, yet quote each others’ work in their own footnotes. 

They are the true insiders, and they work a little like a mutual back-scratching society.  If someone comes along with a completely different set of reference points, then that threatens the world view of their academic gang … and they don’t like it up them, as the saying goes.  For the outsiders, these petty intrigues are irrelevant, because they choose not to play the game.

As Dieter Rams wrote, “A designer … does not need to give impressive lectures about it.  He does not need to formulate explicit theories.  After all, he is a designer and not a sociologist, psychologist, historian or philosopher.”  Alvar Aalto backs him up, “The Creator created paper for drawing on.  Everything else is, at least for my part, to misuse paper.”  Perhaps that has something to do with Aalto’s early life – just before starting his architectural studies, Aalto was a trainee in Toivo Salervo’s office.  Said Salervo to Aalto – “You’ll never be an architect, but aim for a career in journalism”.  Maybe that created a lifelong aversion to written communication …

Chamberlin, Powell & Bon neither lectured, tutored nor wrote articles in the specialist press: that made them appear enigmatic, perhaps, but they were interested in practice and saw that the best way to win work was to get on with it.  New commissions arose from existing ones, and they were able to largely side-step the critical debate about the Barbican which ran in magazines of the time. 

Of course, the flip-side of keeping your own counsel is that others may talk on your behalf – but a waspish review in a magazine will be forgotten within the year, whereas the building will stand for a couple of generations.  In these media-obsessed times, that’s worth remembering.