Confessions of a Heretic Read online

  That is the vision that Krier has tried to put into effect in Poundbury, where he has worked alongside neo-classical architects like Liam O’Connor and Quinlan Terry to realise his master plan. The town, which is still being built, is conceived as a single and continuous public space, organised around a town hall, each building contributing to the public vistas of which it is a part. It is a small settlement, which will grow in time to 10,000 inhabitants – Krier arguing that beyond that size the need is not for further development around an existing centre, but for another centre. And Poundbury is now a thriving community, in which people live, work and shop, and where residents can walk to everything that they need. It has the feel of a medieval town, though with spaces more suited to our busy age, and a grocery store dealing in the kinds of environmentally friendly product for which the Prince of Wales is a tireless advocate. Poundbury also contains factories and warehouses, as well as offices and civic buildings. The one thing it lacks – though this is indicative of an underlying difficulty in the Krier plan for urban regeneration – is a church. It is not for the architect to provide such a thing, says Krier, but for the residents to demand it. But of course, we should not ignore the fact that the traditional settlements that Krier most admires began from the marking out of a sacred space, and from the building of a temple as a home for the gods. Where God is at home, so too are we; the real meaning of the modernist forms is that there is no God, that meaning has fled from the world, and that Big Brother is now in charge. Krier is inclined to agree; but the problem, he says, is to find ways of building that will enable people to rediscover such truths for themselves. To try to impose a comprehensive vision against the instincts and the plans of ordinary people is simply to repeat the error of the modernists. The true plan for a city is a side-constraint and not a goal.

  It is characteristic of our times that Krier’s project for urban renewal has been widely dismissed as impractical, despite the evident success of Poundbury. Undeterred by the hostility of the profession Krier continues to expound his vision in lectures, articles and drawings, reminding his audience and his readers that that is what he is doing – reminding them. Deep within everyone’s psyche, forming the measure of expectations and the image of settlement, is an idea of home, of the somewhere that is not just yours or mine but ours. That is the archetype that needs to be reawakened, and which the diseducational policies of the modernists have encouraged us to put out of mind. And, like the laws of logic or the principles of morality, we cannot encounter this idea without being at once persuaded of its obviousness. I have seen Krier lecture to a room full of sceptical left-wingers, who had agreed only reluctantly to listen to this quaint apologist for a vanished age. And with the unassuming, self-questioning manner of a true teacher, he persuaded his audience that the ideas that he laid before them were not his but theirs. They left the room in a condition of stunned self-discovery, understanding their socialist utopias as ‘news from nowhere’, and committed to somewhere instead. Such is the effect of Krier, I have discovered, on everyone he meets.

  Nothing is more striking about him, however, than the feature that distinguishes him among architects – namely, his modesty. He quietly unfolds his schemes for the city of the future, seeking your agreement and appealing for suggestions. His large face and twinkling eyes radiate enthusiasm, and his hands as they unroll his drawings of the imaginary polis are the hands of a father gently lifting his new-born baby from the cradle. Although he abhors the modernist vandalism that has torn the hearts out of our cities, he never utters an uncharitable word about those responsible. His whole being is directed towards consensus, towards a democratic pooling of our collective energies, to create the urban environment where we will all be at home. And in his large but placid form you feel the presence of an indefatigable energy, expressing an undaunted love of ordinary humanity.

  There are those who say – not of Krier only, but of the whole New Urbanist movement – that it is all very well, but that it comes too late. The centrifugal tendency of the city is now irreversible, and the steel frame and curtain wall are here to stay. Such critics, it seems to me, need to be reminded that sprawl is unsustainable, and will inevitably produce a situation in which centripetal movement is the only alternative to social collapse. And as Quinlan Terry has repeatedly demonstrated, building with steel frame and curtain wall is also unsustainable: structures built in this way quickly become derelict or too costly to maintain, and leave in their wake a quantity of poison that it is now all but impossible to bury. Moreover, they are unadaptable, and can rarely change use as the world around them changes. What the New Urbanists are proposing is not a utopia, but the only viable alternative to continuing urban decline. Of course, as the 20th century – the century of the modernists – teaches us, people have an astonishing ability to march towards catastrophe shouting slogans and waving flags. But why should we endorse that behaviour, when we still retain our critical faculties? Better to ponder Krier’s words:

  By creating cities, we create ourselves. When we despoil our cities, we despoil ourselves. Our most cherished memories will henceforth generate the poison of regret, of irretrievable loss, even of hatred of what we prized most. We then flee from the world and from ourselves. A beautiful village, a beautiful house, a beautiful city can become a home for all, a universal home. But if we lose this aim we build our own exile here on earth.

  Exile is what the collectivist utopias promised; home lies in the opposite direction. Yet it is a direction that our planners and public commissioners still refuse to take. Public projects in our cities are routinely assigned to one of a tiny band of ‘starchitects’, chosen in order to design structures that will reliably call attention to themselves, and stand out from their surroundings. Most of these starchitects – Daniel Libeskind, Frank Gehry, Richard Rogers, Norman Foster, Zaha Hadid, Peter Eisenman, Rem Koolhaas – have equipped themselves with a store of pretentious gobbledegook, with which to explain their genius to those who are otherwise unable to perceive it. And when people are spending money that belongs to voters or shareholders, they will be easily influenced by gobbledegook that flatters them into believing that they are spending it on some original and world-changing masterpiece. The victim of this process is the city, and all those who have cherished the city as a home.

  There have been architects who are geniuses – Michelangelo, Palladio, Frank Lloyd Wright. But, as Krier has shown, a living city is not the work of geniuses. It is the work of humble craftsmen and also the by-product of its own on-going conversation with itself. A city is a constantly evolving fabric, patched and repaired for our changing uses, in which order emerges by an ‘invisible hand’ from the desire of people to get on with their neighbours. That is what produces a city like Venice or Paris, where even the great monuments – St Mark’s, Nôtre Dame, the Place Vendôme, the Scuola San Rocco – soothe the eye and radiate a sense of belonging. In the past geniuses did their best to harmonise with street, sky and public space – like Bernini at the piazza San Pietro – or to create a vocabulary, as Palladio did, that could become the shared lingua franca of a city in which all could be at home.

  In contrast, the new architecture, typified by Gehry’s costly Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, by Norman Foster’s lopsided City Hall in London, by Richard Rogers’s kitchen-utensil Lloyds Building, or by the shiny gadgets of Zaha Hadid, is designed to challenge the surrounding order, and to stand out as the work of some inspired artist, who does not build for people but sculpts space for his own expressive ends. This approach to architecture is encouraged by the professional bodies and the schools, such as the remorselessly trendy Architectural Association and the RIBA. We should not be surprised, therefore, if the ‘works of genius’ which our city planners are constantly permitting or commissioning have the appearance of things other than architecture: of vegetables, vehicles, hairdryers, washing machines or backyard junk. That which makes a building into architecture, which is the ability to embellish a location, and to enhance it as a h
ome, is the aspect of building that architects no longer learn.

  It is often argued that the modern constraints make it all but impossible for architects to behave as their predecessors did, veneering buildings with some eclectic reminiscence of the classical or Gothic styles, placing dressed stone over iron frames, or crowning the street façade with a Vignolesque cornice in tin. What were once cheap solutions to a shared public demand for ornament and order, have become forbidding costs. Space is limited, skilled labour rare and gargantuan engineering well understood and relatively inexpensive: and that is why we look to the starchitects, since they authorise what would otherwise look like vandalism on a massive scale.

  The typical starchitect building is without a façade or an orientation that it shares with its neighbours. It often seems to be modelled like a domestic utensil, as though to be held in some giant hand. It does not fit into a street or stand happily next to other buildings. In fact it is designed as waste – throw-away architecture involving vast quantities of energy-intensive materials, which will be demolished within 20 years. Townscapes built from such architecture resemble land-fill sites – scattered heaps of plastic junk from which the eye turns away in dejection. Gadget architecture is dropped in the townscape like litter, and neither faces the passerby nor includes him. It may offer shelter, but it cannot make a home. And by becoming habituated to it we lose one fundamental component in our respect for the earth. For that, in the end, is what the true city is: a consecration of the earth beneath it.

  6

  – Effing the Ineffable –

  Aquinas, who devoted some two million words to spelling out, in the Summa Theologica, the nature of the world, God’s purpose in creating it and our fate in traversing it, ended his short life (short by our standards, at least) in a state of ecstasy, declaring that all that he had written was of no significance beside the beatific vision that he had been granted, and in the face of which words fail. His was perhaps the most striking example of a philosopher who comes to believe that the real meaning of the world is ineffable. Having got to this point, Aquinas obeyed the injunction of Wittgenstein, whose Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus concludes with the proposition: ‘that whereof we cannot speak we must consign to silence’. But Aquinas was exceptional. The history of philosophy abounds in thinkers who, having concluded that the truth is ineffable, have gone on to write page upon page about it. One of the worst offenders is Kierkegaard, who argues in a hundred ways that the ultimate is inexpressible, that truth is ‘subjectivity’, that the meaning of life can be given by no formula, no proposition, no abstraction, but only by the concrete experience of surrender whose content can never be given in words.

  The same idea occurs in Schopenhauer, for whom the truth of the world is Will, which cannot be represented in concepts. Schopenhauer devoted roughly 500,000 words to this thing that no words can capture. And he set a fashion that continues to this day. For example, there is a mercifully short book by Vladimir Jankélévitch, Music and the Ineffable, in which the argument is stated on the first page – namely, that since music works through melodies, rhythms and harmonies and not through concepts, it contains no messages that can be translated into words. There follows 50,000 words devoted to the messages of music – often suggestive, poetic and atmospheric words, but words nevertheless, devoted to a subject that no words can capture.

  The temptation to take refuge in the ineffable is not confined to philosophers. Every enquiry into first principles, original causes and fundamental laws, will at some stage come up against an unanswerable question: what makes those first principles true or those fundamental laws valid? What explains those original causes or initial conditions? And the answer is that there is no answer – or no answer that can be expressed in terms of the science for which those laws, principles and causes are bedrock. And yet we want an answer. So how should we proceed?

  There is nothing wrong with referring at this point to the ineffable. The mistake is to describe it. Jankélévitch is right about music. He is right that something can be meaningful, even though its meaning eludes all attempts to put it into words. Fauré’s F sharp Ballade is an example: so is the smile on the face of the Mona Lisa; so is the evening sunlight on the hill behind my house. Wordsworth would describe such experiences as ‘intimations’, which is fair enough, provided you don’t add (as he did) further and better particulars. Anybody who goes through life with open mind and open heart will encounter these moments of revelation, moments that are saturated with meaning, but whose meaning cannot be put into words. These moments are precious to us. When they occur it is as though, on the winding ill-lit stairway of our life, we suddenly come across a window, through which we catch sight of another and brighter world – a world to which we belong but which we cannot enter.

  I too am tempted to eff the ineffable. Like my philosophical predecessors, I want to describe that world beyond the window, even though I know that it cannot be described but only revealed. I am not alone in thinking that world to be real and important. But there are many who dismiss it as an unscientific fiction. And people of this scientistic cast of mind are disagreeable to me. Their nerdish conviction that facts alone can signify, and that the ‘transcendental’ and the eternal are nothing but words, mark them out as incomplete. There is an aspect of the human condition that is denied to them. Moreover, this aspect is of the first importance. Our loves and hopes in some way hinge on it. We love each other as angels love, reaching for the unknowable ‘I’; we hope as angels hope: with our thoughts fixed on the moment when the things of this world fall away and we are enfolded in ‘the peace which passes understanding’. Putting the point that way I have already said too much. For my words make it look as though the world beyond the window is actually here, like a picture on the stairs. But it is not here; it is there, beyond the window that can never be opened.

  But a question troubles me as I am sure it troubles you. What do our moments of revelation have to do with the ultimate questions? When science comes to a halt, at those principles and conditions from which explanation begins, does the view from that window supply what science lacks? Do our moments of revelation point to the cause of the world? When I don’t think about it, the answer seems clear. Yes, there is more to the world than the system of causes, for the world has a meaning and that meaning is revealed. But no, there is no path, not even this one, to the cause of the world: for that whereof we cannot speak, we must consign to silence – as Aquinas did.

  7

  – Hiding behind the Screen –

  Many observers would say that social networking sites like Facebook provide a psychological benefit, helping those who are too shy to present themselves directly to the world nevertheless to have a public place and an identity within it. These sites also enable people to keep in touch with a wide circle of friends and colleagues, so multiplying the range of their affections, and filling the world with good will and positive feelings. In so far as any research has been conducted into the opinions of those who use friendship and networking sites, the verdict has been largely positive, with the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Center for the Digital Future (admittedly, not an unbiased source) declaring, in its sixth annual report, that the Internet is now showing its potential, as a personal and social tool.

  Yet something new is entering the world of human relations with these innocent-seeming sites. There is the ease with which people can make contact with each other through the screen. No more need to get up from your desk and make the journey to your friend’s house. No more need for the weekly meetings, or the circle of friends in the downtown bar or restaurant. All those effort-filled ways of making contact can be dispensed with: a touch of the keyboard, and you are there, where you wanted to be, on the site that defines your friend. Can this be real friendship, when it is pursued and developed in such facile and costless ways? The Annenberg Center’s report tells us happily that a full twenty per cent of those who participate in on-line communities also participate i
n off-line activities related to those communities at least once a year. Think of that, at least once a year! Or think of it in another way. A full eighty per cent of those who participate in on-line communities have no face-to-face dealings at all, not even once a year, with those whom they count among their friends.

  You can take the evidence either way. Of course real friendship shows itself in action and affection. The real friend is the one who comes to the rescue in your hour of need; who is there with comfort in adversity and who shares with you his own success. This is hard to do on the screen – the screen, after all, is a source of information, not action. No hand reaches from it to comfort the sufferer, to offer financial assistance or to ward off an enemy’s blows, though one user of the blogging site Profy informs us that someone with whom he had played Internet games for a couple of years sent him $1,500 when he was in a bind. This kind of spontaneous gesture is possible in any kind of relationship, of course. But it is arguable that the more people satisfy their need for companionship through relationships established on the screen, the less will they develop friendships of that other kind, the kind that offers help and comfort in the real trials of human life. Friendships that exist on the screen cannot easily be lifted off it, and when they are so lifted, there is no guarantee that they will take any strain. Indeed, it is precisely their cost-free, screen-friendly character that attracts many people to them – so much so, that Facebook becomes an addiction, and people often have to forbid themselves to go to their Facebook page for days on end, in order to get on with their real lives and their real relationships.