Origin of Architecture

In the '80s, Wes Jones (Paul Holt, Marc Hinshaw, Peter Pfau) attempted to reconsider the futile search for the origin of architecture. The four men claimed the "concept of the origin is the fulcrum on which architecture teeters." The impossibility of the search frequently returns architecture to the battleground of precedence. Without precedence, which confers the "status of origin," architecture constantly returns to the pursuit of mediocrity. They saw two meanings to their purpose. (1) To elevate the machine and its role as dwelling to the status of architecture (an extension of the modernist project) and (2) to subvert conventional architectural and urban form. In their project The Origins Of Architecture, they simultaneously question the validity of the mythical origins of architecture in the primitive hut and undermine the spatial structure of suburbia. They claimed that:

The beginning of architecture is complicated by architecture's simultaneous existence as abstract institution and physical fact. Both claim the origin for themselves; many stories have been told to promote one over the other. The primitive hut story suggests, for example, that building preceded architecture-that there was a hut which became architecture-but the story betrays a prior sense of architecturality by which the hut is recognized. Which came first: the hut or the idea? We recognize that the story is a myth, retro-figured into the history of architecture to provide an origin from which the present condition could be logically, scientifically derived–Holt Hinshaw Pfau Jones.

Holt Hinshaw Pfau Jones attempted to challenge suburbia by reinterpreting the mythical origins of architecture. They have described this process as akin to "souping-up" a hot rod ('Soup/s up-' in Bill Lacy and Susan de Menil's Angels And Franciscans: Innovative Architecture From Los Angeles And San Francisco, Rizzoli, 1992, and 'Origin Verses Existence And Language' in McCarter's Building Machines, 1987).

The architects suggest that this strategy of "interventive reuse" is "critical" but "carries none of the negative sense that we expect from critique." The architects do not propose to attack suburbia, but instead consider a fresh way to manage the sprawl. An attempt to ‘soup up’ must include foraging the required items form the surrounding area (scavaging) and completely revitalizing the outer body. "In this way, many otherwise forgotten vehicles" and works of architecture "have achieved a classic status." The process of souping-up is only successful if the object is a commonplace commodity"... with expectations encouraged by lowest-common-denominator marketing and realised through the universalisation of mass production." The aim of souping up is to take the essentially meaningless and repetitive and to make a statement about the "importance of the individual in contrast to the anonymous conformity of the assembly line."

In The Origins Of Architecture, Jones Holt Hinshaw Pfau reassessed suburbia and concluded that Adams primitive hut should be removed from paradise. Furthermore the hut should be souped-up to lead architecture out of the fugue state engineered by its association with suburbia. They claimed that the future of architecture is in technology and the machine-the "primitive hut should not be celebrated as a link to nature but as a step to man; as the first building, not the last tree." In their transformation, the primitive hut is no longer the "font of nature but of artifice; it is not a natural spring but an electric water-cooler."

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Bibliography

http://www.architecturemedia.com/aa/aaissue.php?issueid=199703&article=13&typeon=3&highlight=architect

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12/08/11

posted by: Alex Martin