ABSTRACT
It takes only the most cursory glance at a batch of international architectural magazines to confirm that what is illustrated between their laminated covers bears only an occasional, glancing resemblance to what most of us experience in the built world around us. Wade into the stream of dreams and schemes that has flowed through Architectural Design during the early 1980s, for instance. How many of those neatly docketed and documented buildings do you personally know; how many encountered, walked through, experienced, lived in? Of course, there are diligent critics and enthusiastic students who will tot up a score of such works of architecture visited, the icon-images of the colour plates being matched against a highly selective reality. New ‘canonical’ buildings are being defined to replace the discarded classics of Modernism coolly appraised by Juan Pablo Bonta (Bonta, 1979). That’s as it should be, one can argue. After all, publications on art or literature do not have to concern themselves with pavement portraits or wire-rack novels – though some of them do. They need only be concerned with what is judged as innovatory or of worth (aesthetic or financial). To say that architecture is different is to state a truism, but for all that it may be banal to repeat it, the fact remains that buildings serve the needs of their users in ways that are far wider in implication than do paintings or fiction, and architecture relates to the adjacent built environment in juxtapositions that have no parallel in other areas of creative endeavour. Lifted out of the pages of the periodical and into the street, buildings are prone to unexpected transformations, sometimes exciting, often disappointing, frequently demanding a perception of the immediate environment that was missing before. Anyone who has ever innocently sought out Rietveld’s Schröder house, that canonical De Stijl building, and discovered that it was stuck like a bookend at one extreme of a suburban terrace and overshadowed by a flyover highway, has experienced a shock. It may be,
in Lautre´amont’s words, ‘beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella’ (Lautre´amont, in Rubin, 1968), but if so, it’s a beautiful encounter that hasn’t hit the pages of most esteemed architectural publications.
