Threshold to a Constructive Culture:
Architecture to Reinvent the Labor Environment and to elevate the Labor Force
Introduction
The creation of a tool is the reflection of human need in response to their difficulty. The creation of architecture is the reflection of human need in response to their environment. Architecture is essentially a tool to shelter and protect us from harms. Architecture is a tool to prepare us for the difficulties to come. A tool is meant to create solutions rather than problems, as is architecture. Like the invention of dangerous weapons, architecture can be built to promote unethical causes. Architecture built on such a cause will lead to instability between human beings. We need to rethink the purpose of our tools, and we need architecture to protect the noble cause. Modern day tools, the materials that elevate human life, are created in industrial building such as the factory. The architecture of this space, where the tools needed for our modern lives are created, is often overlooked or forgotten. Ultimately, the factory is the threshold to modernize mankind.
In order to create solutions to the issues of the contemporary world, a society needs to trace back the constructive spirit of the visionaries. My research is to explore the role of industry as it relates to human society and architects, because I believe there are hints of industrial influence in the progress in architecture and the vision of architects. To address my viewpoint, I will explore the subject of Reality and Loss of Social Vitality; Revision of Social Order: Revolution; The Role of Industry and The Constructive Culture.
Reality and the Loss of Social Vitality
The consumptive nature of society and the lack of courage in contemporary architects is becoming the norm. This topic will address these issues from some analysis and theory in architectural terms.
In Anesthetics of Architecture, Leach argues that the seduction of imagery has the manipulative power to stimulate unethical behaviors. He uses Las Vegas as the architecture of persuasion. Seduction in Las Vegas can lead human minds to the mechanized and hapless act of gambling, which Walter Benjamin compares to the experience of workers in the factory. The consumer’s leisure and willingness to risk their money in far-fetched hopes of big winnings becomes a business. “Surface-level entertainment comes to compensate for the tedium of surface-level work, as distraction takes on the role of “free time busy-ness.” Distraction becomes a form of business.” Persuasion in architecture is duplicated to the contemporary built environments that distract us from conscience and exhaust the resources from the world. In Visionary Cities, Winy Maas warns readers that cities around the world have stamped out the same inevitable pattern of urban development: get rid of industries such as ports, factories and mills, and bring in more developers to build condos, large scale-housing, boardwalks, and shopping malls. These types of architecture will be more instantly profitable than labor-based industries. We see the decline of the necessities of survival, while cities are pursuing the trivialities of our own leisure-time. Another argument from Winy Maas is that societies respond to the issue of the environment with a superficial solution: “This Green is Preventing the Real Green”. “Green” is no longer a motivating cause, but a law regulating every occupation to obey it. Green has become political correctness rather than a real solution to a very real problem. Winy Maas questions,” When can the individual be librated from the clutches of the green? How can we overcome the absurdity of calculating the impact of each tiny step we make, and move on to discussing collective solutions at the scale of the city, the country and the globe?” To further his view, Winy Maas indicates that commercial marketing is promoting unethical industries through the mask of being “green”. He lists some marketing slogans of “Green” products to prove his argument: 360: The world’s fist eco-friendly vodka. Saving the planet, one glass at a time.
Lead-free bullets for greener war: BAE Systems, one of the world’s largest arms manufacturers, is introducing as new generation of environmentally friendly weapons in the effort to minimize the damage that they can do. There is a pervasive element in marketing to promote unconscious consumption. We have lost faith and momentum in changing the world because the unethical profiteers have used a noble cause as a mask to maintain their profit-driven agenda.
Referring to the argument in Visionary Cities, the talented and famous architects of our day are lacking the courage to make something profound, and instead they pursue the glamour of publicity. Winy Maas points out that “Pritzker Prize-winning architects are designing vodka bottles and necklaces, whereas unknown developer-architects are building entire cities from the ground-up in the Middle East and China.” He criticizes the famous architects for avoiding the big projects and designing something small, which is easy to succeed, in order to maintain their fame. With his statistic indicating that media is more likely to cover smaller square footage projects, Winy Maas criticizes the media for emphasizing the glamour of a small project rather than a meaningful project at a large scale. He jokes in his frustration that “We cannot build a whole new city out of nightclubs and vases.” Architecture can be described as “Applied Philosophy in the Built Environment”. The Philosopher explores man’s reaction to other humans in order to find the right behaviors to elevate him spiritually. The Architect studies man’s reaction to the built environment in order to stimulate certain behaviors and emotions from him. However in reality, the knowledge and observations of the architect are prostituted to please whatever the client’s desire is. An architect becomes powerless to stop the propagation of trivial building due to the income-driven contemporary nature of the profession. The true desires of society (money), rather than the true desires of the architect-as-philosopher/builder (social good), become immortalized through his actions. In a cruel twist of fate, the profit-driven private sector pays off the architect to create what they want – a society driven by the temptations of further profit. According to The Anaesthetics of Architecture, Neil Leach warns the readers that an environment built with only seduction will consume its society until there is no more aesthetic mean but the reproduction of imagery. Architects and designers of all sorts need to recognize the risk of exploiting imagery; otherwise, they will create a world they can no longer see themselves in.
Revision of Social Order: Revolution
To maintain the holistic health of a society, people should aim for building a rational environment. A rational environment is the key to sustain the need of the entire society and the foundation to elevate it. Such an environment requires the fair attention to every occupation that provides for a functional society. Without fair attention, people will naturally gravitate toward the hierarchical occupation - the jobs that provide the highest levels of income. If a society allows such occupational prejudice to continue, the social unbalance will reach the stage where its roles fail to communicate with each other. When there is no dialog between the members of a society, the society is no more. It is a tragedy that any society has brought about it’s own destruction because they underestimated the value of the social and environmental harmony. It is an irony that many technologically advanced societies still haven’t learned the lessons from the mistakes of others.
If architects hold the ability to emphasize human response through the meaning of form and space, why don’t they apply their sensitivity and talent on the labor workers whose work actually demands a better spatial condition and whose work physically and mentally involves stress and precisions? Labor workers can easily appreciate a space that can condition them for better working efficiency. According to Le Corbusier, the architectural plan should be the mechanism that covers the production, distribution, and construction as the social order. People need to organize their behavior through the rational plan. People should be free from the past and be responsible for their present. Once in a while there is an architect recognizing the living condition of the labor workers. Le Corbusier, the pioneer of Modernism explored his vision of an urban utopia in his proposal, The Radiant City. During his visit to the US in 1935, Le Corbusier found much attention directed towards the luxury apartments along New York City’s Central Park, but then added, “My own thinking is directed toward the crowds in the subways who come home at night to dismal dwellings. The millions of beings sacrificed to a life without hope, without rest- without sky, sun, greenery.” He believes his Radiant City is designed for them. The residential district in this project embodied his conviction that the world of freedom must be egalitarian. “If the city were to become a human city,” he proclaimed, “ it would be a city without classes.” Unlike its predecessor (Contemporary City), the Radiant City had no segregation for the classes, because Le Corbusier lost his faith in capitalism. He began a campaign revolutionizing the worker’s rights. He believed in thought for neither of rich or poor but of man. He didn’t want the wasteful consumption of space to become a sign of status, nor the worker housing to be the absolute hygienic minimum. He envisioned both organization and freedom in the society defined by the laborers. Corbusiers efforts show the architect’s attempt to apply his skill to promote the well being of an entire society through redefining the living condition of the labor class. Among all the feature of The Radiant City, Le Corbusier’s biggest emphasis was to maintain a social harmony through the common interest of leisure facilities; the city could give to each family a far grander environmental spectacle than even the richest individual could afford in a single-family house. Many people are aware of the larger issues that tie to their fates. They want the solution to these issues. However the problem is that individuals are unmotivated to engage themselves in the solution, because a person knows his individual effort is too small compared to the massive scale of these collective issues. He thinks his efforts will go in vain, simply because the others don’t care. Therefore, he sees no worth in putting forward an effort that will alienate himself from his society. Such discouragement has occurred to many individuals. They are howling for a revolution over their frustration. We need to confront our issues collectively, rather than expect someone else to save us with a perfect solution. A good solution will never come if we never engage ourselves in its process. In architectural design, an architect makes numerous experiential models to find a better interpretation of his concept before bring it into reality. Many professionals in architecture agree, “A design is never finished”. Architects will always realize that there is more to the design even when it is constructed, yet they are fond of its process afterward. Thom Mayne, the architect of Morphosis whose buildings are made out of tectonic fragments, has a unique belief that human minds respond to unfinished architectural forms with contradictions as well as imaginations. In Visionary Cities, Winy Maas suggests the construction itself can become an architectural expression or a theatrical play on the stage of urbanity to stimulate more optimistic response from individuals. People enjoy a building even when it is only a process of the design. Such process becomes the sign of the social progress. A good architecture will aspire more transformations in the built environment beyond its site. A solution might never be perfect, but it is more crucial for its cause to engage a society in the culture of solution. Through collective will, a solution will evolve into a greater one to solve larger issues. Architects shall be useful in terms of coordinating the relation between a good cause and its audience. In Architecture or Revolution, Le Corbusier wrote: In every field of industry, new problems have presented themselves and new tools have been created capable of resolving them. If this new fact be set against the past, then you have revolution. From the message above, we can see Le Corbusier’s faith in architecture that it is created as the tool that people can use to fix problems, and the optimism that people can revolutionize their society. Architects should see their talents as the opportunity to establish the connection between differences, and capture the beauty of a program or an event that needs social response. We need architects to build the stage for the solutions to reach more audiences. We need to build the church for the solution to spread its mission. We need the architecture that helps us solve our problems. We need the architecture that gives us the courage to overcome our difficulties.
The Role of Industry and the Constructive Culture
People will need a new vision of architecture as the tool to restore a social order. According to Visionary Cities, a vision is the dream that offers long-term, cohesive, seductive, and strong prospects for the future. Winy Maas notes that the ingredients for a vision are curiosity, exploration, fantasy, and real problem solving. I believe a program that fulfills a vision will require the spirit of industrial workers. Industrial workers coordinate their mind and body to operate seamlessly, and are exposed to possible bodily harm in the process. They often need to prepare themselves to apply new methods, which shape their readiness for challenge. Unlike the solider taking lives on the battlefield, they produce tools used for the common good. Through the hands of the industrial workers, we can use the new tools as the threshold to reach a better life. The Tool is the reflection of human need. Tools exist for mankind to solve problems. Tools are also the evidence of human progress. Anthropologists and many scholars believe that the use of a tool is an important step of human evolution. Before the invention of modern digital tools, humans invented mechanical machinery. Before the invention of machinery, humans invented primitive tools out of the basic ingredients of nature that surrounded them. Every technological advancement in human history has been an example of collective need and individual human invention. Human will is the most important factor in shaping a tool, but there also has to be a place for humans to forge their tools.
The Industrial Factory is the current form of the buildings that make tools and the evolution of the workshop/blacksmith. The Factory is the place to shelter the tool-making process, and more profoundly, a place to bring human creativity to reality. The Factory is not just an economic device to humans but more of a place to celebrate the birth of tools and the coming of solutions.
The Factory is facing the duality of social ignorance and reliance. People tend to ignore the activity within the factory, because the atmosphere of mental and physical exhaustion in the workers and the risk of hazard have an unpleasant presence in today’s leisure-based societies. Critics have in fact degraded factories due to their creation of pollution. Yet people base their lives around the products of these factories. A modern society needs the factory and labor workers to do these unglamorous jobs in order to maintain its modernity. The robotic technology at this stage is still very exclusive and technically restrictive after long years of investment. Today, we still rely on an intensive labor force when it comes to the technological production of highly demanded products such as smartphones. If the robotic technology is available why doesn’t the most technologically advanced country use it to solve its economic crisis instead of using robots to create more junk food and carry out air strikes worth billions of dollars while it is still relying on the labor force overseas to make its products?
Many would argue the negative impact industrial infrastructure has had on society, but from the argument of Fumihiko Maki’s Nurturing Dreams the industrial infrastructures are in fact the forces of modernization that create a dynamic urbanscape in Japanese cities. While defending the presence of the industrial infrastructure in the Japanese city, Maki argues that European ideas of urban formations are unable to supply their own demands. He wants people not to define the city only through the classical definition, but to embrace the role of industry as part of the modern city. Fumihiko notes that those industrial infrastructures have been important roles to elevate the living standard and modernize Japanese society from the ashes of WWII, and their presence in the urbanscape ties to some degree of emotion from the Japanese people. Industrialization leads modernization. In fact, the forms of the factory influence Modernism. These forms are generated through the new type of activity: labor workers and machinery. Many architects from the early 20th century were looking at factories as the perfect example of modernism in terms of its building type and its technological innovation, for instance, the curtain wall system of the AEG Turbine Factory by Peter Behrens and Mies van der Rohe. In Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, Reyner Banham captures the optimistic design attitudes toward the industrial building from many architects of the modern era. According to Banham, the Machine Age has influenced economics, morality, and sociology not only with the inventions, but the new formation of industrial activity which architects envision the new type of space for. Banham points out how architects apply the high standard of classical architectural forms such as temples and churches, and push the tectonic expression with the new building materials and construction methods for the design of factories. Le Corbusier in his Toward the New Architecture praises the advancement of engineering with modern tools such as cruise liners, airplanes, and automobiles, claiming that the world had entered a new era and was ready for drastic change in architecture and human behavior. These architects reflect their enthusiasm on their professions through the presence of the progressive industry. It would not be just the products, but also the methods of production. The status of the industry is the reflection of human capability. The constructive spirit is tied to the state of the industry. Therefore we should embrace the role of the industry that inspire visionaries, and bring back the constructive culture.
Conclusion
Today our built environment has been constructed in the interests of capitalism. As a result, architecture becomes a reflection of these interests and leads mass society into a consumptive pattern. People know the world’s resources will be exhausted by their lifestyle. Yet many of them find reasons to walk away from the issue. Why? Because the mass media tells the society that happiness resides in the materialistic means. Therefore architects are hired to build better and bigger shopping malls to manifest the consumer’s society. This society is programmed to believe that more money can make a better life. Therefore people become the believers in the majestic presence of the financial buildings, the temple of the capitalists. Architects have become the master builders of consumerism and capitalism.
Throughout the history, architects and the society have relied on the role of industry. Do we depart from industry, because our life styles demand on the products that leads to the abusive use of factories?
We need to change the perception of society toward the labor workers, by remaking the factory into a dignified environment. People will hold their respect to the people who really produce the useful tools instead of people who base their individual gain on others’ losses or ones who excessively spend on ephemeral fashions. Through an iconic and monumental presence, the factory of my proposal will stimulate the thoughts of people in both positive way and negative way. People will be very aware of what the factory is producing as well as any pollution concerns. Either industry will have to create a solution to treat the pollution, or create new methods of production. As a speculation of my proposal, such manufacturers will be monitored, stimulated, and forced to evolve as its transformation from the negative perception to the positive inspiration. The society will gain the awareness of its issue and the hope in its solution. Therefore, a city needs to use architecture as the threshold to a constructive culture by reinventing the labor environment and redefining the roles of the present industry.
Neil Leach. "The Seduction of Architecture." The Anaesthetics of Architecture. (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1999.) 71-88.
Winy Maas, Alexander Sverdlov, and Emily Waugh. Visionary Cities. (Rotterdam: NAi, 2009) 72 Winy Maas, Alexander Sverdlov, and Emily Waugh. "The Mniature, The Faithful, The Green, Why Be Visionary." Visionary Cities. Rotterdam: NAi, 2009. 72-212.
Robert Fishman. "The Radiant City." Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier. (New York: Basic,) 1977. 226-34. Blythe Alison-Mayne, Penny Herscovitch, and Stephanie Rigolot. Introduction. Morphosis Buildings & Projects, 1999-2008. (New York: Rizzoli, 2009.) 9 Winy Maas, Alexander Sverdlov, and Emily Waugh. Visionary Cities. (Rotterdam: NAi, 2009) 94
Winy Maas, Alexander Sverdlov, and Emily Waugh. Visionary Cities. (Rotterdam: NAi, 2009) 212 Fumihiko Maki, and Mark Mulligan. Nurturing Dreams: Collected Essays on Architecture and the City. (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2008.) 234 Stephen Sennott, R. "Factory." Encyclopedia of 20th Century Architecture. (New York: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2004.) 433. Reyner Banham "The Factory Aesthetic." Theory and Design in the First Machine Age. (New York: Praeger, 1967) 79 -87. Bibliography
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