More and more I think architecture has nothing to do with it.

So, here’s my beef with Architecture:

I picked Architecture because I thought it might be a good starting point to finding myself in a place where I could make some kind of impact on, as lame as this sounds, human life.

People. I want to make life better for people. Not just some people, not just a particular constituency. No compromises. Everyone.

Yes, it’s impossible, it’s naïve but that’s what I want. With architecture you change the fabric of an environment and the spaces everyone moves through to go about their daily lives. The theory is you change the surroundings you change the lives of those within them.

Last week Alex Laupunzina, the director of the program I’m in, held a lecture on the grand question “What is Architecture?” Sounds pompous but it’s a really hard question to pin down. In this lecture he asked us what it was to “think architecturally,” to which I thought but did not respond “to think altruistically.” I kept the thought in my head, where it would bother and annoy me, laying in the corner of my mind unfinished, unelaborated on, uncommented on, un-critiqued. But to me that’s what it is; thinking unselfishly towards those who will live portions of their life within the spaces you’ve defined.

Unfortunately, I’m beginning to think that this is not what Architecture is and even if you try to make it that way it doesn’t really matter. There’s a quote by Rem Koolhaas, which is apparently famous enough to be on his Wikipedia page where I found it, that goes something like this:

“People can inhabit anything. And they can be miserable in anything and ecstatic in anything. More and more I think that architecture has nothing to do with it. Of course, that’s both liberating and alarming. But the generic city, the general urban condition, is happening everywhere, and just the fact that it occurs in such enormous quantities must mean that it’s habitable.” (link)

As much as I dislike Koolhaas and his cool-for-the-sake-of-cool, non-rationalist approach I’m really beginning to think he’s right. The more I’ve been around architecture the more I’ve missed literature and politics. The real change that I see happening doesn’t come from those milling the built environment.

I’m playing devil’s advocate a little bit here but I feel that if you want to make solid change it has to happen, not within the built structures people have created for themselves, but within the social structures they’ve created for themselves. If real good and change are going to come from anywhere it will be from the law and governance a society has defined for itself. From a federal senator down to the now oh-so-trendy community organizer, these are the people that can create positive impacts because they’re working with the nuts and bolts of the system collectively defined to be the means of organizing civilization.

This all comes at a time when I’m trudging through pages upon pages of architectural history spanning the Romans to the Baroque and rather than finding the intricacies of gothic architecture I’m finding uncertainty. I don’t care about the progression of gothic ornamentation because I feel like it’s petty. I know this is wrong for a lot of reasons, but first instincts are that it’s petty and analyzing it is only something a pompous clique of white guys do so they can bounce essays back and fourth to one another like they’re inside jokes. I just don’t like reading about how seven hundred years ago architects were doing the same exact thing that they are now: trying to make the biggest, most elaborate, most decorated, proportionally correct, expensive cathedral they could get a commission for. Dubai comes to mind.

I don’t quite remember how but I had it in my head so it all boiled down to this: it’s occurring to me that the least tangible things we have might be the most real. What really matters except what we feel and how we treat those around us?

Comment dit-on “this is awkward?”

This is what I asked my French teacher today. I’m finding that I’m in need of more everyday kinds of phrases and this is one I anticipated coming in useful as the French school year began and us awkward, foreign Americans found ourselves trying to claim our space in studio. She didn’t have an answer.

Claiming studio space, as we’ve been led to believe by our faculty, works in a very feudal way. Those with the most seniority receive the lofted spaces which look out over the rest of the studio space and the plebeians within it. The more highly ranked of the common class receive the window seats which look out onto the chateau, the lowest years get whatever is left. This leaves little for us and forces us to, in the words of Alex our program director, “conquer,” whatever we can. We get the choice of studios 13, 14 and 19. 13 has the reputation for being the partiers, 14 the more laid back and 19 the more studious.

The process of working our way into the student culture, as it turned out, isn’t quite as cutthroat as it might sound. It began tonight with the studio meetings which aren’t so much meetings as they are house parties. The best word I could think of to describe the night was “fratty.” It really turned out to be a good ice breaker. For the first half of the night Americans and French had conversations in broken forms of their respective languages until, in the second half, everyone settled on a common understanding of booze and loud music.

Bullfighters and narcissism.

I’m starting this process a little late and with about half as much enthusiasm.  Not to say that I find having/maintaining a blog a chore but my Idea had been much more grand.

Last year I had it in my head that I would treat it as a year long photographic essay in which I would catalog my surroundings at home, openly ponder their significance, contemplate the impact they have had on my life, people’s lives, life in general and then compare and contrast my past assumptions/experiences/ideas with what I encountered across the globe. That idea died. It died, in part, because I generally reject things like… this. Blogs, journals, diaries (especially public) that I feel exist more in the name of narcissism than anything particularly productive.

But, that said, mine is the narcissistic generation and I’ve already got a facebook I check every twenty minutes so I shall indulge. Every so often you will find here a new post full of MY thoughts, MY ideas, MY experiences, MY etc. My one promise to mostly MYSELF is that I’ll try to make them as productive as possible so as to avoid the cringing feeling of falling back upon this years from now, or my little sister years from now, or my little brother years from now, or anyone for that matter, and thinking “good God, get a grip.”

I’ve been in Versailles now for about a month and a half. I live in the top floor of a house owned by an incredibly hospitable landlady named Veronique with my roommate Brett. Included with the house is a golden retriever named Chingy (sp?) who frequently drops in during the evenings in search of food or a game of tug-of-war. Our school is in the lesser stables of the palace of Versailles. The chateau can be seen fully out the windows of our studio, state-fair-esque gravel parking lot and all. The studios along with a café in the center of the school are legally owned by the students. Due to this fact these spaces are covered in graffiti (much of it dirty), and softcore porn. I’m not sure how old it all is but if I had to guess there are several decades worth.

Life has been… easy. Too easy. But, finally, the hammer is coming down and it’s somewhat of a relief. We are slowly getting things to work at and having to earn our free time.

The staff here is better. The classes are smaller. I feel like I’m going to learn more than back home. There’s more first hand experience available simply due to geography. In a single, short and inexpensive bus ride I can actually go and see the ruins of Jumièges rather than just look at a picture on a power-point slide and because of that I’ll probably actually remember what the ruins of Jumièges are. It makes you care a little more. It’s that narcissism again. You care because it happened to you, because it’s your experience. Maybe it’s not that exactly but in the words of one of my classmates regarding our history course “just tell me what I need to know, and why I care.” I thought that statement was genius. Trim everything else and all you have is the information and the motivation for retaining it. It’s more motivating here. It’s just a better place to be learning about architecture because architecture needs to be seen, the spaces need to be experienced.

This is going to be a year of great experiences. That is a corny statement. That is something that makes me cringe. But, it’s true. I named this blog “all the way up,” after that famous Hemingway quote “Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bull-fighters.” I’m living in Paris, I’m kinda from Oak Park, I like the book, it seemed appropriate. It also might be another one of those things that makes me cringe (mostly because it’s kind of a shallow literary allusion). Those things aside, this year I’m going all in. It’s life all the way up. If I’m lucky it’ll become a habit.