Transition Culture

Archilab’s Earth Buildings - Brayer and Simonot (2003)

**Archilab’s Earth Buildings – radical experiments in land architecture.
Marie-Ange Brayer and Beatrice Simonot. Thames and Hudson 2003**.

Seldom do we get sent a book for review that I find so abhorrent that I am unable to finish reading it. Initially attracted by the title, ‘Earth Buildings’, I imagined a collection of beautiful cob and rammed earth houses. Oh dear. Although the book itself barely deserves a review in my opinion, it raises for me a number of interesting questions about modern architecture.

Despite being hailed as “projects by thirty of the most innovative practices working today…(who) confront and offer proposals and solutions to such issues as dwindling resources, land engineering, the city as ecosystem and the sensitive development of brown sites�, and “breathtaking ideas for the future�. Well if this book is in any way a vision of the future then please, stop the world and let me off.

For me in encapsulates so much that is wrong in modern architecture. These are young designers struggling to make a name for themselves by being “an inspiration for a generation of designers� and being “breathtaking�, yet they seem to have totally forgotten that people will actually have to live and work in these buildings, conduct their daily lives in them, wash up in them, bring up children in them, make love in them, recover from the flu in them.

I would challenge anyone to find anything beautiful in this book. Is it some kind of a luxury of living in an energy rich future that we can neglect beauty, that beauty is a dispensable thing, that function and ‘innovation’ are more important than beauty? In a recently published book, ‘Timeless Beauty’ by John Lane (reviewed next month), the author quotes John Armstrong, Director of the Aesthetics Programme at the School of Advanced Study in the University of London, “it has, for a long time, been somehow improper to like, of love, a work of art for its beauty…contemporary works of art…are mostly praised for their capacity to disturb or challenge the viewer, almost never for their beauty�. As in art, so in architecture.

The structures here give very little consideration to materials, apart from a few that do interesting things with bamboo and wood, most are glass, steel and aluminium. These materials are not “breathtaking ideas for the future�, they are materials which will become unaffordable luxuries in 10-15 years, as the reality of energy descent kicks in. For a book called ‘Earth Buildings’ there is not a single actual earth building in the whole book.

The book also contains some of the most totally incomprehensible architect-babble I have ever read. Take this paragraph for instance. The first person who can let me know what the architect is saying here you will win my copy of this book.

“A decoupling mechanism has long inhabited the space of architectural discourse, and this group of architects affords us with its programme and enunciations an opportunity that we may now seize. We may pose questions about the lines of division that create two remarkable exteriorities within architectural production. Each has its moment, represented by unique arraignments in discourse over time and its operational modalities; each couples architecture according to its own specificities; the questions represented by this work will follow two entirely different movements�.

Hmmm. Now I have read many books on green building, and the best ones encapsulate something where you say, “he put that so well, that’s what I was thinking but was unable to put into words…�. Nothing in this book made make me think that.

The future of architecture in an energy descent future is one of smaller buildings, more energy efficient materials, using predominantly local materials, solar design, and the creation of local markets in building materials. It necessitates the integration of building and landscape in such a way as to be productive, functional, diverse and attractive. The focus becomes the bioregional, the styles climatically and culturally appropriate, the structures designed around their occupants and their lifestyles. The emphasis becomes building buildings to last, for centuries, rather than disposable buildings designed to last 20-30 years. And, arguably most importantly, the reintroduction of the beautiful into buildings; building houses, as the Cob Cottage Company in the US say “so beautiful they make grown men cry�. The buildings in this book would certainly make grown men cry, but not because of their beauty.