Mark Chalmers

The architectural manifesto falls out of fashion from time to time, and one of those times is now. At the moment, everything seems more important than developing architectural ideas using an architectural language. It may come back into fashion once folk tire of campaigning about things they don’t like, arguing on social media about small differences – or when architects have the intellectual courage to break their thrall to social philosophy.

The architectural manifesto has a long pedigree and its time will come around again. The prototype for everything that followed was Vitruvius’s De Architectura, published as Ten Books on Architecture. De Architectura is the source of the idiom “firmitas, utilitas, venustas” which we were told translates as firmness, commodity and delight; however, the phrase apparently derives from an 18th century mis-translation of the Latin for beauty (venustas) as delight. My schoolboy Latin wasn’t good enough to pick that up.

Vitruvius was followed by a seven-volume treatise by the Italian Renaissance theorist Sebastiano Serlio, Seven Books of Architecture, which cover everything from housing to the classical orders – followed by an excellently named bonus volume, “The Extraordinary Book of Doors”! On its heels came Serlio’s The Five Books of Architecture, first published in an English Edition of 1611. You can see that there are diminishing returns in multi-volume manifestos, as we’ve gone from ten to seven to five, and no doubt a good editor would press for them to be boiled down further into a single book.

The Victorian Style Wars were rife with manifestos, and William Morris is one of the guiltiest parties, writing The Ideal Book (1883), The Manifesto of The Socialist League (1885), The Arts and Crafts of Today (1889) and with Philip Webb, The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings Manifesto (1877). Similarly, the early days of the Modern Movement were a fertile time for manifesto writers, including Adolf Loos, Le Corbusier, and Mies van der Rohe, who first came to notice for their manifestos published in newspapers, journals, and little magazines – years before they built anything.

Ornament and Crime is Adolf Loos’s best-known manifesto, written in 1908 and intended to shock the Establishment into rejecting decorative patterns and ornaments. His aesthetic purism was a reaction to Art Nouveau and the Deutsche Werkbund, which he viewed as anathema in the struggle to develop a new style fit for the 20th century. Loos was a zealot, and that’s borne out by the closing paragraph of Ornament and Crime, “Freedom from ornament is a sign of spiritual strength.” From that you can deduce that he believed ornamentation is a sign of degeneracy.

When it was completed in 1904, Charles Rennie Mackintosh handed over the Hill House in Helensburgh to his client Walter Blackie with the words: “Here is the house. It is not an Italian Villa, an English Mansion House, a Swiss Chalet, or a Scotch Castle. It is a Dwelling house.” In a way, that articulates the six page manifesto of Adolf Loos in a couple of lines.

Le Corbusier's Vers une Architecture of 1923 had a lasting effect on the profession, after it had been translated into English in 1927 as Towards a New Architecture. It became the New Testament for a generation of architects, and a focus for the hatred for others. As the dustwrap’s blurb says: “Le Corbusier brought great passion and intelligence to these essays, which present his ideas in a concise, pithy style studded with epigrammatic, often provocative, observations.”

Walter Gropius's Scope of Total Architecture was published in 1956, and it covers the nature and archaeology of architecture, its historical context, and its role in the industrial society of the time during which the book was written. “Since my early youth I have been acutely aware of the chaotic ugliness of our modem man-made environment when compared to the unity and beauty of old, preindustrial towns. In the course of my life I became more and more convinced that the usual practice of architects to relieve the dominating disjointed pattern here and there by a beautiful building is most inadequate and that we must find, instead, a new set of values….”

As the 1950’s progressed, architectural history gradually shifted from objective writing which analysed the form of buildings and cities – to studying the social context of architectural production, which relates more to culture, philosophy and the history of ideas. One example was Steen Eiler Rasmussen's 1959 book Experiencing Architecture, which was more concise and poetic than what came before, and took more heed of the findings of phenomenology, a field which was in its infancy when Rasmussen was writing.

Whether Rasmussen is to blame for architectural ideas being infiltrated by social philosophy, or whether he just recognised which was the tide was flowing, writing about the history of architectural ideas can sometime become like the academic game called Humiliation in David Lodge’s novel Changing Places in which you score points if you haven’t read a canonical text. The more famous the book you haven’t read, such as Moby Dick or Hamlet, the higher the score.

All the famous architectural manifestos win high scores, and one or two count as a bullseye. For example, Ricardo Bofill wrote an rhetorical manifesto in the early 1970’s:

Architecture no longer exists.
Only impersonal cities, without description and without style which nobody has ever dreamed of, or desired.
Against these clear and facile modern towns, we launch monuments which single out space, destroying it and investing it.

Plan the Revolt
Against the thousands of identically repeated, stupid, lined-up houses.
Against the rational and schematic ordination of territory.
Against the importation of prefabricated, Nordic cities.
Against architecture…

Architecture no longer exists? Although Bofill had built some grandiose post-Modern housing schemes based on giant Classical orders by that point, as Geoffrey Broadbent noted in the Architectural Review of November 1973, manifestos of this sort usually come from people who have thought a lot about what is going wrong with architecture, but have not built anything much themselves to reverse the process.

My favourite manifesto was written by Dieter Rams, the architecturally-trained designer of Braun gadgets and Vitsoe shelving:

1. Good design is innovative
2. Good design makes a product useful
3. Good design is aesthetic
4. Good design makes a product understandable
5. Good design is unobtrusive
6. Good design is honest
7. Good design is long-lasting
8. Good design is thorough down to the last detail
9. Good design is environmentally-friendly
10. Good design is as little design as possible.

Rams’s sign-off line, “Back to purity, back to simplicity” is immeasurably better, more rigorous and principled than the anti-boring manifesto contained in Thomas Heatherwick’s banal book, “The Seven Characteristics of a Boring Building”. Boring, like nice or pretty, is a non-word with no place in a manifesto – but Heatherwick didn’t train as an architect, and his practice has long been a masquerade since he can’t call himself one.

Today, contemporary architects express their personal philosophy using small, well-crafted books which are well regarded within the profession, but ignored by those outside it. That’s mainly because they’re written by architects for other architects, and published by small presses which typically carry out little promotion beyond the circle of people at the architecture school where the authors teach.

Some fairly recent manifestos (along with their reception) include Architecture, Craft and Culture by John Tuomey. “All in all a great little book jammed with culture, life, and on-the-job experiences,” said the reviewer on Amazon. Published by Gandon Editions, a terrific but low-key Irish publisher with a good architecture and design list. But no website, only a homepage which is perennially under construction.

Peter Zumthor is seen as the architect’s architect, and his manifesto Thinking Architecture is now on its third edition. But not everyone enjoyed it. Another reviewer on Amazon found it was, “A rambling, totally unsatisfying jumble of thoughts with no obvious outcome.” Och, surely no! Perhaps in his efforts to maintain his persona, Thinking Architecture is 65 pages thin, and full of epigrams such as, “The sense that I try to instil into materials is beyond all rules of composition and their tangibility, smell and acoustic qualities are merely elements of the language that we are obliged to use.”

Similarly, John Pawson is the minimalist’s minimalist. Published 25 years ago, “Minimum is an extended visual essay exploring the idea of simplicity in architecture, art and design across a variety of historical and cultural contexts.” I won’t quote the Amazon reviewers again, because Mr Bezos is rich enough already and doesn’t need my encouragement to make any more money.

Yet these architectural architecture books are still a rarity. Many writers who consider themselves serious and intellectual feel the need to bolster their architectural arguments by leaning on the writing of Continental philosophers. During the 1980’s and 90’s, the favourites were the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst and activist Félix Guattari, who together framed some of the key concepts behind Post-Modernism. Masters dissertations of a certain era are littered with references to Deleuze & Guattari, with the occasional reference to Lacan.

Today, the political theorist Hannah Arendt is in fashion. She was interned by the Vichy regime in France during the early stages of WW2, and later coined the phrase “the banality of evil” following the war crimes trial of Adolf Eichmann. While her political writings about totalitarianism strike a chord today considering what’s happening in Ukraine and Palestine, they speak about the human condition rather than about architecture. It goes without saying that people – whether architects or not – should reject authoritarianism and totalitarianism if they see it, and shouldn’t work for brutal regimes, plutocrats or dictators.

A smart diploma student could do worse than draw up a proposal for encouraging the production of new architectural manifestos; a meta-manifesto, if you like. Hopefully this piece is a good starting point; you can measure your success by counting how many tutors have their bluff called if you write a serious study on the history of architectural ideas, rather than a work of pseudo-philosophy.

Of course, depending on your professor, that may prove to be academic suicide – but perhaps better to die a martyr than to drink the Kool-Aid…