ARCHITECTURAL ANTHROPO-LOGICS
THE URGENT NEED FOR A MORE ANTHROPOLOGICAL
APPROACH TO ARCHITECTURE
by Marc Gossé, architect and urban planner,
professor at Cambre-architecture, Brussels
<marc.gosse@lacambre-archi.be>
"Culture is entitled to demand that experimenters leave it in
peace."
(Adolf Loos)1
Anthropology arose from a historical paradox: as a social science,
cousin of ethnology and sociology, borne out of the western
world's view of the Other, it was often accused of colluding with
colonisation and remaining a neo-colonial discipline. Its recent
developments, along with its application to contemporary
industrial and urban societies, demonstrate that on the contrary,
its vocation is to explain all societies and their cultures, through
the comparative description of "collective histories"2.
In this age of a new and undoubtedly definitive globalisation, such
a vision now appears as a vital necessity for understanding and
action. It forces us to reassess our conceptual models, the
instruments not only of our analysis, but also our methods and
projects, in the field of architecture and urban planning, as well as
in all fields of culture, including scientific or technical domains, of
the contemporary world.
If colonisation of the world by the Europeans in the 16th century
willingly saw in other cultures the mark of a certain inferiority (it
took the famous "Valladolid controversy" to acknowledge the
human nature of the American Indians), the arrival of modernity
largely favoured an abstract, universalising view of THE culture,
which was in fact European-centric, which by its very definition
denied the legitimacy of cultural diversity in the world and thus the
usefulness of the anthropological approach, which was often
accused of being exotic.
This arrogant position which turns a particular conception of the
western mental structure into a universal truth was undoubtedly
the cause of many failures of a certain modernity. This was notably
the case among architects with the Modern Movement in the world
(in spite of the precautions taken by the more lucid of its
representatives), as it remains the cause of the futility of numerous
post and neo-modern contemporary productions in architecture,
including in its cultural area of origin.
In this western-centric vision, culture is envisaged as a sector –
mainly that of the arts – separated from daily, popular culture,
precisely the kind studied by anthropologists, that of ways of life,
behaviour, rites and traditions, ways of thinking, inventing and
creating societies and their members, including those in the
present time and space which are closest to us and seem to be the
most "modern".
However, from the outset, eminent protagonists of architectural
modernity – notably Adof Loos – have emphasised the
anthropological nature of architecture and people's right to live
according to how they wish: "With regard to your home you are
always right. You alone and no one else (…). Your home will be
created at the same time as you and you will create yourself along
with it."3
They draw attention to the non-subdivisible, holistic nature of
culture, that of everydayness, the importance of crafted production
in contrast to the "artistic" individualistic production of
architecture – especially in the area of the habitat – and the
importance of an intelligible relationship with the resulting
architectural form.
During the Renaissance, the founders of the discipline of
architecture and the person of the architect, Scamozzi, Alberti and
Palladio, built up their treaties from an approach which places the
production of artefacts – i.e. cultural assets – at the heart of the
human condition.
Without explicitly acknowledging the diversity of designs which
were no doubt inspired in him by colonial adventures, Alberti went
as far as making architecture the founding activity of humanity, an
intuition which was to be confirmed five centuries later by the
great palaeontologist, André Leroi-Gourhan4.
The precursor of "appropriate technologies" (favouring local
materials and know-how), Scamozzi (in "L'idea dell'architettura
universale", 1615) broke with the unity of place and time which
until then had characterised the Albertian system, by
demonstrating that materials and the way they are used change
with their uses. Likewise, in terms of convenience, Scamozzi noted
that people built "in other ways" in the various regions of Europe
and developed "prior to letter-writing, a veritable cultural
anthropology of the city and the house".5
In Palladio's work6, beyond the fascination for geometry,
architectural syntax and typological variations, the status and
usages of the principal – i.e. their place in a socio-cultural system
– are central to the Palladian project and confer on it its specific
character.
But in spite of these benchmarks for an anthropological vision of
architecture, the post-Albertian architect-hero, the architect of
world modernity, soon renounced any contextualisation of his
Promethean production and laid claim to the absolute,
disincarnate production of the architectural form.
Emblematic of the "universalist", uniformising vision of modernity,
Le Corbusier went as far as proposing "a single house for all
countries
and
all
climates"7,
thereby
refusing
any
"anthropologising" or contextualisation of the home.
With "La poétique de l’espace"8, Gaston Bachelard was one of the
first people to undermine modernist certitudes, notably by
demonstrating that houses, with their significant and poetic
organisation "from the cellar to the attic", are vertical structures,
whereas
apartments
piled
into
high-rise
blocks
are
horizontal structures: our cultural myopia blinds us to such
paradoxes.
The house again reveals to us the anthropological dimension of
architecture, in the influential work by Amos Rappoport "Plaidoyer
pour une anthropologie de la maison" published in 1972.
Since this first anthropological essay on inhabiting, which had a
certain resonance in architectural circles, the anthropological
dimension has now been whisked off the professional star-system
scene and remains virtually absent from the teaching of the
discipline. Thirty years after the Rapopport plea, architects – as
well as most lecturers and students of architecture – have
forgotten their anthropology lesson, which is nevertheless
brilliantly and regularly repeated by a range of authors (in highly
accessible publications)9.
At the same time, in 1971, Edward Hall published his famous
"Dimension cache"10. Moving away from an anthropo-geographic
tradition which considered that the "environment" was decisive in
the architectural and urbanistic form, he showed that on the
contrary, it was culture that imposed its order on the
"environment" – a lesson that current promoters of the "ecological
habitat" and sustainable development would do well to bear in
mind.
It was also Hall, on the subject of anthropology, who pointed out
that the cultural experience of the space reveals that individuals
from different cultures live in different worlds, and thus in different
"architectures" and, precursor of partisans of participation, noted
that "no aspect of culture can be interpreted without the
participation of the members of that culture." 11
Georges Balandier12 in turn advocated instead the cultural
"detour" not only as a legitimate position from which to study
"other" societies13, but also for the understanding of one's own
culture and for the discovery of the unknown, the "exoticism" to be
found in each one of us, as an integral part of our imagination and
modernity. Like Segalen before him, Balandier emphasised that
"during the course of western cultural history, the exotic theme
appears as a means of social critique and an instigator of new
creations, it is an instrument of breakdown and often a factor of
modernity."14
Far from being exhaustive, this plea and brief overview of authors
would not be relevant without citing authors such as Serge
Gruzinski15 or the writers Patrick Chamoiseau16 and Amin
Maalouf17, who have all drawn our attention to the eminently
"hybrid", "creolised", cosmopolitan or multi-identity nature of all
culture, as opposed to any excluding, "purifying" conception of
the legitimate but complex cultural identity required by all
societies and individuals.
Cultural hybridisation indeed appears to be a fundamental
phenomenon of contemporary, metropolitan, urban societies18,
after having been the dominant feature (often one of resistance)
during all periods of migration (voluntary or forced), colonisations,
invasions or simply exchanges (even unequal) of universal history.
The mechanisms of this hybridisation, which is self-evident
culturally speaking in a whole range of domains, including
architecture and urban planning, are little understood. Old
nineteenth or even twentieth century conceptions, their
instruments of analysis and perception or action are extremely
poor, and appropriate for an already bygone world. Faced with the
threat of creative suicide, the architect and urban planner of the
future will have to consider diversity and hybridisation in all their
complexity, in spite of the universal, standardised shadow which
contradictorily seems to hang over them all: "A new humanity will
increasingly emerge with the characteristics of our Creole
humanity: all the complexity of Creolity"19.
More than ever before, in the face of this new complexity, we have
to emphasise the importance of the anthropological approach, in
order to understand and act in contemporary societies and their
living spaces. The least "statistical" and the more qualitative of
human sciences is certainly positioned, before its time, in the
mainstream of this cultural "new alliance" between sciences and
arts which Prigogine longed for.
A few architects, too few, have based their work on or simply been
attentive to or curious about the anthropological aspects of their
discipline: Aldo Van Eyck, Hassan Fathi, Luis Barragan, André
Ravereau, Alvaro Siza, Glenn Murcutt, and others were among
those who focused their ideas and practice on the "habitus", the
ways of living and inhabiting of the people for whom they
exercised their art.
But the enclosure of most of the architects in their professional or
academic corporatisms, their specialist reviews, their exclusively
"visual" or aesthetic ways of thinking (recently amplified once
again by the mediatisation phenomenon of computer images), their
hexagonal vocabulary of representation, codified but unintelligible
for the uninitiated or any educated but non-specialist person, have
proved to be major handicaps for understanding demand as well
as providing
architecture.
an
anthropologically meaningful
response
in
The frequent incapacity of architects and other professionals to
formulate criteria for quality architecture, along with the all too
frequent failures of architecture, urban planning and related
disciplines whose space constitutes a field for research and
intervention, the inappropriateness of their propositions in relation
to the practices of their inhabitants, the technicalisation or
aestheticisation of approaches to the detriment of cultural
conditions of production, their absence from the major issues of
the contemporary world, notably urbanisation and poverty in the
world, have made it urgent to return to an anthropological
approach, in order to provide a firmer foundation for the
architectural decision and creation of its forms.
Have you noticed how the photographs of architectures proposed
in magazines and architecture books are often uninhabited,
characterised by an absence of people, their bodies and traces of
life, aseptic and rigidly presented? In such scenography, everyday
architecture often doesn't find its place, except when its
dramatisation in the phenomena of the "informal" urbanisation of
Third World metropolises allows for a fascinating scenography of
neo-liberal chaos, as in the recent "Mutations" exhibition managed
by Rem Koolhaas.
Beyond the relative disinterest of European architects for any
anthropological approach of their own cultural reality, we should
not hastily draw the reassuring conclusion for our western
societies that anthropology remains an "exotic science" which is
only of use for "Others". Quite the reverse.
The work of anthropologists in "advanced, capitalist", urban, postindustrial societies are numerous, indispensable and fascinating,
especially since one of the fundamental characteristics of
contemporary societies is multiculturalism or cosmopolitanism. In
this age of globalisation, culture lies at the heart of the
development issues, where the question of identity is inevitable,
even if this theme can generate fear through its extremist and
fundamentalist spin-offs, and reminiscent of the "cultural
democracy" so dear to belgian Marcel Hichter20.
The complexity of the issue can not under any circumstances
constitute an alibi for architects, which would exempt them from
their anthropologic responsibility and any consideration of their
own creative jurisdiction, anthropo-logically founded under the
apparent rationality of their arguments.
A SHORT anthropo-logiCAL manifestO FOR architecture
Architecture is undoubtedly the most social art; it enables us to
inhabit the world, to transform it and to shape the land and space
of our lives.
As a practice, it is thus primarily there to serve its inhabitants, the
users and producers-constructors – sometimes one and the same
– rather than to serve as a claim to fame or personal therapy for
architects in a consumer market for their art.
Nowadays, architects as a professional body which is often
responsible for defining the quality of the constructed
environment, have a particular anthropological responsibility with
regard to the relevance of their propositions, owing to the crisis of
architecture as a criterion for humanity, faced with the virtual
dematerialisation of the world economy of information and its
short-lived urban forms.
In this new century of neo-liberal globalisation, the question of
cultural diversity is central – as shown by the debate on the
"cultural exception" – and constitutes an issue which is not only
economic, but also about civilisation.
It is about knowing, as we have already been enjoined by Senghor,
whether we are moving towards a universal civilisation – i.e. the
domination of the world by a particular civilisation – or towards a
civilisation of the universal, which acknowledges both the
universal value of all cultures, in their diversity, and the sharing of
universal values such as equity, freedom or respect for nature, to
mention only those in line with contemporary sensitivities.
As neo-liberal globalisation, in its current forms, leads to the
destruction of cultural diversity, the environment and social links,
we assert the act of architectural design as being a crucial moment
of political, ethical and cultural responsibility.
Of course, the architect is not authorised to establish the needs or
aspirations of society and its members on his own; his role and
responsibility, along with the participation of social actors,
consists in proposing necessary spatial transformations, the most
significant, coherent and appropriate ones, by confronting them
with the project's intrinsic rationality and "sustainability" (with a
view to sustainable development).
But before then, in addition to the necessary participative process,
for both construction and design, we have to remember the
anthropological processes which are at work over the long term.
Architecture is a fundamentally anthropological discipline; it
brings into play the corporal as well as spiritual relationship with
our spatialities and the cultural design and construction process
which they physically express.
Cultures are not "handed down" by the histories of societies, but
instead are the very process of their histories. They are
permanently in a battle for identity that is expressed not only by
references to the past, but above all by the recurrent processes of
self-determination and projection into the future, from the present
time, of a "contemporaneousness" in which traces of the past and
potential plans for modernity coexist.
We know that the history of architecture, just like history in
general, has not been "decolonised". A two-fold decolonisation is
thus required: that of the exterior – of dependency and
globalisation – and that of the interior – of independence and
proximity. It is one of the final universal tasks, before the arrival of
the diverse, like a single, alternative universality to the western
attempt at world uniformisation.
We also know that the humanist, universalist discourse, arising
out of conflicting social and political reports, supposedly capable
of generating an "architecture for Mankind" is a generous but
deceptive ideological mirage. Our aim is to escape from it and
discover, in the increasingly broadening gaps of its contradictions
and the expression of its diversity, the path for a professional
alternative grappling with the harsh realities of the environment, at
the heart of the rural village and the urban district which are underintegrated, under-equipped, marked by inequality, oppression and
poverty. For many professionals, this is an unknown, marginal,
ignored or even despised world. Architecture – and the teaching
of it – has everything to gain from a "cultural detour", in order to
become aware of its responsibility.
Architecture implies a
commitment.
As a cultural reality, architecture is first and foremost a
materialised rite, a common culture, before being about a personal
adventure, a possibility for breaking with or transgressing what
has been established, or creative innovation.
Rites and types are fields of resistance of a commercial order,
within the metonymic system of objects, which attempts to replace
the symbolic order of cultures and their forms. Whilst something
remains of the symbolisms of dwelling, of sexuality, of noncommercial alliances and exchanges, it will be impossible for the
commercial order to triumph totally, as power is also and above all
a symbolic order and the commercial order needs a deserted,
infinite market.
Architecture as a cultural practice can constitute a vehicle for
resistance to the domination of unilateral, neo-liberal thinking.
Architects have a responsibility to propose spatial havens of
resistance to communities which are propitious for their
endogenous development.
Under- or non-development is more often than not primarily the
result of cultural hegemony, a cultural impoverishment whose
causes can be identified in oppression and resignation. No
development is possible under the grips of cultural hegemony,
except if it is at the service of this dominant culture and its
masters. Architecture has to choose in favour of cultural
democracy, in which dominated minorities (who sometimes
numerically form a majority) are respected and diversity is
cultivated as a guaranty of humanity.
"La culture a le droit d’exiger des expérimentateurs qu’ils la laissent en paix." In " Wohnungsmoden", Frankfurter
Zeintung N°340, 8th December 1907
1
2
Pierre Bourdieu in "Raisons pratiques" Seuil, Paris 1994
"Pour votre logis vous avez toujours raison. Vous seul et personne d’autre (…). Votre logis se formera en même
temps que vous et vous vous formerez en même temps que lui." In "Das heim", cited in "Adolf Loos" by R. Bukhart,
Mardaga, 1982, p.87
3
4
"Le Geste et la Parole, la Mémoire et les Rythmes", Albin Michel, Paris 1977
5
6
F.Choay in "La règle et le modèle" Le Seuil 1980
"Les quatre livres d’architecture" 1650 reedited by Arthaud, 1980
7
8
in "Précisions", 1930
"La poétique de l’espace", G. Bachelard, PUF, Paris, 1957.
E.g the excellent example "Anthropologie de l'espace" by F. Levy and M. Segaud – CCI, Centre Beaubourg, Paris,
1983, or "A travers le mur" by Jean-Charles Depaule, CCI 1985
9
10
" La dimension cache" E. Hall, Seuil 1977
11
In "Au-delà de la culture" Seuil 1979
12
"Le détour, pouvoir et modernité" Fayard 1985
13
Specialist of Africa, he proposed symmetrical anthropological work by Africans on western society.
14
"au cours de l'histoire culturelle occidentale, le thème exotique apparaît comme un moyen de la critique sociale et
un provocateur de créations nouvelles, il est un instrument de rupture et souvent un facteur de modernité".
15
In "La pensée métisse" Fayard, 1999
16
"Eloge de la créolité" Gallimard, Paris, 1989
17
"Les identités meurtrières" Grasset, 1998
18
See our article "Villes intermédiaires et périphéries urbaines, développement et métissages, défis du XXIème
siècle" in Revue du Crédit Communal de Belgique n°210 – 1999/4
19
20
Patrick Chamoiseau in "Eloge de la créolité" Gallimard, Paris, 1989
"Pour une démocratie culturelle", Ed. Ministère de la Communauté Française, Brussels, 1980