VOLUME: Architecture is dying! So it must take over the world (in disguise!)
James Westcott
An early rendering of issue one of VOLUME. Courtesy of 2×4
Architecture must go beyond itself.
Schools must go beyond themselves.
Magazines must go beyond themselves.
No one uses underlining in typography anymore, so these three demands, projected onto a screen during a press conference at Columbia University to announce the launch of the new magazine VOLUME, seemed particularly emphatic and unashamedly earnest. There was an excitement unfamiliar at academic architectural events as Rem Koolhaas, together with Archis magazine editor Ole Bouman and Mark Wigley, of the Columbia Laboratory for Architecture and Broadcasting (CLAB) explained their motivation for starting VOLUME.
Architecture is dying, they said. As a profession and a practice, it’s just too slow. It can’t keep up with the frenetic free-market ¥¤$ world. Monstrous amounts of knowledge and labor is accumulated and expended for projects that can collapse with the slightest fluctuation of the stock market. And the publicly-funded building projects that used to sustain architecture firms don’t exist anymore. The figure of the architect is "pathetic," Koolhaas said with derision. The crisis pervades architectural magazines too, which produce "massive amounts of irrelevance," Ole Bouman said; and Mark Wigley noted that there are a million students of architecture in the world who aren’t sharing their knowledge with each other. Something needs to be done, and VOLUME would be a forum to do it, or at least a place to start talking about what to do.
VOLUME will be a bimonthly magazine–or perhaps "thing" is a better description. It could be a film, a performance, an exhibition, a meeting. The first issue is shaped like a sushi bento box, its transparent compartments empty for the moment.
Rem Koolhaas’s think- and do- tank AMO–the mirror image of his practice, OMA–has already made a start for pushing architecture beyond itself: nosing around where it shouldn’t, and rearranging things. Architecture has always been, secretly, an attempt not just to design a building for the client, but to redesign the client themselves. AMO has started making this process more explicit. Prada was re-branded –or de-branded–by AMO’s research: No signs on store fronts, a website with zero content, and no signature style for the stores that Koolhaas would build for them in New York and Los Angeles. AMO is also helping to curate an exhibition about Prada skirts.
AMO has made similarly radical proposals for the European Union. Instead of the drab (and now out-of-date) EU flag of 12 gold stars in a circle on a blue background, AMO designed a barcode–or deck chair–of all the member states’ flags crushed together and stretched vertically. In September last year, AMO created an exhibition for the EU in a circular circus tent in Brussels to try to suggest that the EU can be something more than an edifice of laws and directives: it could be the first major international bloc not based primarily on the force of its armies.
During his lecture, Koolhaas showed a picture of himself delivering a speech at another exhibition AMO put on last year, this one about themselves, in Berlin. The photograph showed Koolhaas from behind, standing on a platform overlooking hundreds of members of the media at the exhibition’s opening party. Pointing at the photograph, Koolhaas said: "Never has the figure of the architect received so much attention, but never has he been taken less seriously." Koolhaas continued: "If I had remained a scriptwriter" –he was a journalist and scriptwriter before he studied architecture– "I would now be worth tens of millions." The profession itself is also suffering from diminishing returns in terms of budgets: Koolhaas demonstrated how dollars allocated per square foot for new buildings is less now than it was 40 or 50 years ago. "We have to do masterpieces with lower means," he said.
It wasn’t exactly clear how VOLUME would address the (exaggerated?) crisis in architecture, or what it would contribute to this new (?) idea of applying architectural thinking to disciplines outside architecture: branding, publishing, curating, politics (Koolhaas has even considered standing for election as a member of the European parliament). All the panelists were almost embarrassingly honest about the uncertain nature and content of VOLUME thus far, even though the first issue was due out in a matter of weeks, and subscriptions were being offered on the night for $99.
Still, Wigley, the Dean of Columbia’s architecture program, spoke with breathless and contagious excitement: "Don’t underestimate the potential of this project." Schools should set up outside "trading posts" to communicate without the outside world, he said; they also need to defend their status as "spaces of doubt" since the "gift of architecture is not [just] to provide shelter but to reflect on it"–slowness has its uses.
During his presentation, Bouman began tearing pages out of an old issue of Archis magazine to demonstrate his impatience with the conventions of the medium. As a response, in the last year or so Archis has organized a series of events in cities around the world: roving architectural mystery tours, each one based on a theme. For instance, in Ramallah, students of architecture met at an Israeli checkpoint to discuss all the time they lost waiting to go back and forth. What does this have to do with architecture? Not much, and that’s the point.
In the ¥E$ world, Bouman said, philosophers are becoming managament consultants, airports are become shopping malls, shops museums and vice versa. "Everything invades everything; sticking to your role is suicidal."
A threesome between architectural practice, magazine publishing and universities is VOLUME’s tantalizing response. With an irresistable combination of self-flagellation and self-aggrandizement, and a puzzling mixture of absolute weakness and supreme power, they seemed to be saying: "Architecture is dying! So it must take over the world (in disguise!)"
But something Wigley said gives some pause. Survival–and Darwinian terms did seem necessary in the crisis atmosphere of the press conference, where architects were made to seem like an endangered species — survival requires "stubbornness as well as agility." What if the singularity of architects’ expertise could be just as important in "saving" them as their new skills in branding, curating, and publishing? If architects aren’t taken seriously, as Koolhaas said, and their projects are not funded seriously, perhaps it could precisely be a result of the rockstar-ization of architects and their exuberant forays into other fields. In a corporate climate where everybody diversifies, and everyone does everything, maybe the person who sticks to what they do best will–albeit slowly–accrue the most value and importance. Overwhelmed by the rhetoric of the press conference, I was reminded of a suggestion someone I know made for a T-shirt: "Architects: just build a house!" Still, I can’t wait to see the first installment of VOLUME.
