Books
a frightfully funny, addictive read – and
Four Walls
and a Roof
Reinier de Graaf’s candid and witty
dissection of the architectural
professional incorporates ideas
that must be challenged, says
Patrik Schumacher
‘Four Walls and a Roof –
the complex nature of a simple profession’
Reinier de Graaf
Harvard University Press, 514pp, £28
Right
Reinier de Graaf is a partner at the
Office for Metropolitan Architecture
where he is responsible for buildings
and masterplanning projects in Europe,
Russia, and the Middle East, including
Holland Green in London (2016), the
new Timmerhuis in Rotterdam (2015),
and De Rotterdam (2013).
8  283 Forum
Reinier de Graaf’s ‘Four Walls and a Roof’ is Four essays set out to debunk ‘authority’.
The first addresses the schism between the
probably not only for architects, for whom
it is also a profoundly annoying account of
our profession, debunking its pretensions
and revelling in its ironies and paradoxes.
I predict that it will be a bestseller, and this
anticipation motivates my review, because
despite its playful inconclusiveness,
de Graaf’s analyses carry undercurrent
messages that are problematic. His book is
seductively well written, with a deceptively
blasé air, disseminating its biases with such
irony and charm that they are hard to pin
down and rebut. But it must be done.
The preface promises to “debunk the myths”
of our field and the 44 essays tackle seven of
them: authority, inspiration, good causes,
independence, control, mastery and progress.
De Graaf admits that the book is marked by
a “profound incoherence”, which he claims
is a reflection of the world it describes. I see
it as the theorist’s task to construct coherent
descriptions and explanations of a complex
world, but de Graaf proclaims himself a
“lousy theorist” and ridicules the explanatory
pretensions of theorists like myself. I will
continue to systematise everything
architectural, however, including de Graaf’s
writings, which I would classify as ‘critique
of ideology’, operating without positing any
explicit ideolog ical foundations of its own.
In a public conversation with De Graaf at
his London book launch, I asked: “Do you
have any ideology, utopia or positive
programme for architecture?” His answer
was an unapologetic “No”. But he admitted
that there might be an implicit ideology at
work, which he invites his readers to tease
out. That’s what I would like to start here.
philosophical, “near-megalomaniacal” ideas
about architecture that de Graaf was taught,
and the mundane triviality of his first job.
The second essay ridicules the way figures
like Richard Rogers, the ‘Urban Man’, are
rolled out to make meaning where there is
none. In the third, academia is debunked:
“The ivory tower has become a theatre of
the absurd, self-obsessed... and largely
oblivious to real forces that determine the
general state of the built environment”.
Scepticism towards architectural theory
continues in the essay that lent the book its
title, which debunks “a century of mission
statements, earnest treatises and urgent
manifestos” as futile vanities. Architects
“should simply get on with their job of
designing buildings which, if they are any
good, should speak for themselves.”
I think it’s a mistake to say that architects
should speak to the public at large rather
than amongst themselves. To the public it is
indeed only the buildings that matter,
but to deliver the best built environment,
architects need to evolve an expert discourse
that stimulates continuous innovation.
Architecture’s contribution to humanity is
not shelter, but the ordering of social
relations, and this merits all that studying
and theoretical discourse. Many will share
de Graaf’s suspicion that a lot of what is
being offered as architectural theory is “hype”,
and functions as “decoys that allow us to
shed any notion of collective responsibility”.
But the question how to articulate this
responsibility and how to identify the
specific resources our discipline can bring to
bear to meet it remains unanswered here.
Right
Centro de Operações, Prefeitura do Rio
(ph: Reinier de Graaf). The essay ‘Smart
Cities of the Future’ asks whether
anybody really knows what is meant by
that much-bruited term.
Below
Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House
(ph: RdG). The essay ‘Mies en Scène’
questions the claims to honesty made
by Mies’ minimal architecture.
In the book, de Graaf recalls an earlier public
discussion in which we both took part, an
“absurd ivory tower debate” in Chicago, to
which he tried to add realism by discussing
Thomas Piketty’s ‘Capital’. The architectural
implications of Piketty’s pessimistic analysis
recur in de Graaf’s essay ‘The Century that
Never Happened’. It appears in the ‘progress’
section, which ends with images of the
demolition of twentieth-century social
housing. For de Graaf, the ‘progress’ of the
last few decades has been largely destructive
and regressive. He is nostalg ic for the era of
monotonous, egalitarian suburban estates
(a nostalg ia I sympathise with – without
g iving in to it – as we are both children of
1970s suburbia). Indeed, his least cynical
and most meticulously researched essay is
an account of the GDR’s socialist building
programme. Despite the seeming irony of its
title, ‘Architektur ohne Eigenschaften’, or
‘Architecture without Characteristics’, here
we perhaps find something like de Graaf’s
hidden positive manifesto for architecture.
The same call for an ultra-prag matic,
egalitarian and generic renunciation of all
design comes through in the essay ‘The
Inevitable Box’, which is written very much
in the anti-art spirit of the most austere
1920s functionalism. Radical functionalism
is also my premise, but I don’t accept that
the box is inevitable, because we are no
longer technolog ically locked into the
constraints of mechanical mass production,
and should recognise that architecture’s
social function involves the communicative
capacity of the built environment.
So where I see progress, de Graaf sees
‘progress’, to be debunked. Rather than
speaking about post-Fordism, he speaks
about the “conservative revolution”. He
emphasises, with Piketty, that with the full
reinstatement of capitalism’s inescapable
log ic, income inequalities are on the rise
again. The relatively short-lived egalitarian-
progressive interlude, owed to the political
pressure brought to bear by the communist
alternative, seems to remain his model,
including the architecture it spawned. With
the “conservative” return of capitalism, he
sees the reduction of architecture to mere
marketing, and architectural discourse
coming to a standstill. There is undoubtedly
a kernel of truth in this view, but this bleak
account of the last 40 years is too one-sided,
and oblivious to the huge, general (if not
fully generalised), prosperity gains of our
era. It reveals an emotionally charged,
nostalg ic, ahistorical, ideolog ical bias rather
than a prag matic perspective. According ly,
this was also an era of fertile architectural
debate and radical architectural innovations
which cannot be dismissed as marketing.
Finally, I found something else that even
the relentless myth-buster and iconoclast
de Graaf treats like a holy cow: public space.
To be sure, the essay “Public Space” contains
as much sarcastic critique of ideology as all
the others, but this is not directed against
the idea of public space as such. Instead, it’s
the “g lut of good intentions” that serve to
kill its essence.
De Graaf unequivocally upholds the value
of public space as “space accessible to all”.
For me this idea belongs to a bygone era – a
myth to be debunked. All-inclusiveness is an
unattainable chimera in our plural societies.
Bland, one-size-fits-all spaces cater for a
perceived average or majority. Everybody
else is excluded – not literally, of course:
they can sit on the same benches, next to
the same shrubs, and enjoy the same
generic level of law and order, but specific
needs and desires remain unmet.
De Graaf seems equally frustrated with
existing public space and suspicious of good
intentions (he ridicules the mushrooming
leg islation of public space in Holland).
I have suggested to de Graaf that private
provision of public spaces might create the
same vibrant diversity and distributed
inclusiveness as has occured in the media,
and he was not as immediately appalled as
many colleagues have been. But in the book
this possibility is not considered. Instead he
tries to propose openness to a diversity of
uses within the confines of the all-inclusive
public space – and is therefore forced into
a corner, calling for spaces that must be free
from all obligation to fulfil any specifiable
purpose. De Graaf has the right intuitions
about public space’s potentials and the right
emotive revulsions about its current state,
but his ideolog ical blind spot leads him to
call for a blank sheet neutrality that would
not only preclude architecture, but would
also imply that in the attempt to cater for
all idiosyncrasies at once, nobody would
really be catered for at all. 