"ARCHITECTURE ON PAROLE / ARCHITEKTUR AUF BEWÄHRUNG setzt sich kritisch mit Persönlichkeitskult und quasi-autoritären Strukturen auf einer Architekturfakultät in Texas auseinander, sowie mit deren verheerenden Auswirkungen auf Lehre und Entwurfskultur: Die Universität wird zum Panoptikum im Sinne Foucaults, der sich dagegen auflehnende Student zwangsläufig zum Therapeuten". (Maria Nievoll)ARCHITECTURE ON PAROLE
Roger Connah
I arrived back at Zetaville University in Texas after a week as a fugitive. I always returned to the school of architecture as if all could start over again, as if the history of everything that had gone before could be wiped away. This included the pettiness, the gossip and the flattery that ultimately led to more and more conservatism.
I heard immediately of the shenanigans that had gone on. An assistant of the Great Frank O Gehry had been visiting the school of architecture. By all accounts he had delivered an exciting lecture about the work of this now famous late 20th century master. So much so, he was now called ‘great’ and ‘maestro.’ Even if, as some cruelly suggested, there was a hint of replication about the architecture.
As cloning had not quite reached the debate here, the slight passed and dropped to the polished concrete floor like a dead leaf. So much conversation ended up like this in Zetaville that discussion began to be a novelty. You could catch yourself falling like the dead leaf and just before hitting the ground wondering if conversation might just break out again once more and echo its once-claimed status.
To celebrate the great master, the Professor of Tumbleweed Connections (as he is known) had designed with his students a clever cardboard installation using the face the Maestro with the upper torso of the Maestro’s assistant, Mr Chan. The students had been assembling it when I last left the university and travelled back to Europe for a week. Apparently this act had compelled a response by others to install a large image of their own Master, the Great El Cee.
In the corridors of this Pentonville, the panopticon of Zetaville, this all seeing, all structured school of architecture, the games continued being played out, every minute, every hour, every day. Nothing changed, generosity was slim. The Great Frank O Gehry against the Great and Omniscient Le Corbusier. The pettiness disguised other, less obvious battles, other less obvious but alarming developments. Was it really the work of Frank O (he uses the O for effect, they said, for the Irish effect!) that was about to scupper this school of architecture? Could the fame of one person so easily challenge the schooling of decades of design thinking? Was the code of an unimaginative but normative architecture so lightly held that it had to protect itself from the invasions of those with a fake Irish Zero in the middle of their name? Was Zetaville really teetering?
It wasn’t hard to recognize. The confusion around the prison was paralysing exchange, controlling behaviour and flattening the ideas of a lost century. The world outside was reflected within, reduced to the battle of two competing cardboard effigies. Life became life, thinking was on parole.
After four years in Zetaville I began to look back and consider just why I had come, why and how we learn and teach the things we teach. For this I was nicknamed the therapist. For me, I was never more than a multiple choice question, the visitor, the monk or the fugitive.Roger Connah is a free lance writer and teacher based in Ruthin, North Wales where he runs The Hotel Architecture Retreat and Resistance Centre. His career has included graphic consultancy, exhibition design management and teaching in Finland, India, Pakistan as well as scriptwriting, workshops and visiting lectures in many other countries. Recent projects (with J.P. Maruszczak) include Chromotopia (Unbuilt Architecture Design Award, Boston Society of Architects, 2003); Interface, Animall and Brautigan (Finalist, Dead Malls International Competition, L.A. Forum for Architecture/Urban Design, 2003); Pulping Detroit. He taught Advanced Architecture Studies at The Stockholm Royal School and from 2000 has been Visiting Professor (Graduate Studio) at the University of Texas at Arlington. His forthcoming works include Modernism in Finland (London 2005), Inshallah, Defintely! (Karachi, 2005), The Pulp Architecture Manual (2006) plus a film on Eero Saarinen. He has currently been on an extended research trip to Lahore and Karachi to prepare the collection: State of Art, State of Mind. He runs the Pulp Architecture website with John Maruszczak: www.pulparchitecture.net
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