Forces at Work: Travels to the Fringes of Architecture and Back

The appeal of architecture viewed by an open-minded historian.

Ask me to identify the most important view regarding the current state of architectural thinking, and I will probably point you a moment in the early twentieth century. This is an affliction, for I write from the point of view of history, and this often means that I am obligated to understand our current condition as one that follows a trajectory rooted many years back. Like other writers and critics, I have inherited a particular way of understanding how architecture operates within various social, political, and cultural contexts.

Readers will notice my use of the word "affliction." This word, usually describing the effects of a sickness or malady, has undergone slight changes in meaning. For example, to be "afflicted" could mean to be humble. "Affliction" also used to be a commonplace term in astrology, describing a planet's influence on mind and body. Far more than a metaphor describing one's physical distance to a planet, the term suggested how the degree of an affliction depended on how close one was to something troubling. Time even lessens the effects of an affliction. This is the point Jane Austen makes in Mansfield Park, when she observes how "the whole world was now so blended together, so harmonized by distance, that every former affliction had its charm." This is perhaps why I talk about my relationship to architecture history as an affliction. It affects me from afar, yet I do not suffer from it. In fact, I cherish it.

Now, about this business concerning "the current state of architectural thinking." I am serious about pointing audiences nearly a century back. In "The Dynamism of Modern Architecture," an essay published in the second volume of the Polish avant-garde journal PRAESENS during the late 1920s, architect and writer Szymon Syrkus remarked that "All ideas about architecture in general, and modern ideas, in particular, are in continuous and rapid motion." Syrkus was a complicated figure, a person tossed about in history's own maelstrom. After founding PRAESENS with his wife Helena, Szymon would be an important figure in the development of architectural modernism before World War II. And shortly after the Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939, he worked on secret plans for rebuilding postwar Warsaw. The Syrkuses were eventually deported to Auschwitz in 1942. They survived and became a frequent presence at the various CIAM congresses until Szymon's death in 1964. His interest in the "direction" and "dynamic evolution of architectural ideas" is therefore poignant, a reminder that despite the global conflagration of war, architecture will move forward, farther and farther away from its afflictions.

However, such descriptions of architecture thinking as "dynamic" and "moving" remind us of an unlikely analogue: planetary motion. Consider, for example, how a planet that orbits the sun is subjected to two opposing, yet complementary forces. On the one hand, there is centrifugal force, the outward-moving force that describes how a planet "tries" to flee away from the center. Then there is also centripetal force—the force that keeps the planet on its curved orbit. In our physical world, then, the pull of resistance counters the desire to flee. This is much more than a description of the laws of nature, however. It is an indication of how we conduct many aspects of our lives through interlocking tension.

Can we describe the writing of architecture history in such terms? I can, in the sense that I have spent most of my academic career writing about topics on the fringes of architecture. This too is an affliction. In those years before I ended up in my current vocation as a student and practitioner of architecture history, I practiced law, attended film school, worked as an executive in the film industry, and even studied urban planning. These experiences are invaluable and inform my current work and research. My reliance on these aspects of my former professional life is as important as my turning away from them. This is because when combined, they create a productive tension. Perhaps Michael Corleone said it best when he declared, "Just when I thought I was out...they pull me back in." As I pull farther and farther away from architecture, it exerts a strong pull on me. These forces at work do not cancel each other out. Instead, they propel me forward.

Enrique Ramirez is a critic and writer based in Princeton, New Jersey. Trained as an attorney and urban planner, he is currently a Ph.D candidate in History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture at Princeton University, where he is writing a dissertation concerning architectural strategies for the visualization of air in France between the Franco-Prussian War and World War I. He is also the author of this is a456.

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