Spaces of Complexity. On Not-Kowing, Un-Learning and ‘Panoramas of Possibilities’

The media, politics and the public have accused architects of many things in the recent past. They design ‘inhuman’ environments. They ignore the conditions and consequences of construction. They create social and economic segregation. They add cost without adding value – economic, cultural or otherwise. Given this hostility, many within the profession feel underappreciated, which was further exacerbated after the financial crisis of 2008. Adding to the critique is an increasing number of ‘bottom-up’ initiatives frustrated by housing designs that are neither affordable nor conducive to non-traditional ideas of cohabitation. Once more, architectural theorists are declaring the death of architecture: it seems like Manfredo Tafuri’s 1976 prediction that architecture as a discipline was fated to “sublime uselessness” has finally become fact.

This state of affairs has spurred a variety of responses. One was to try to document with greater precision exactly how architectural expertise adds value to the built environment. Studies that made this claim focused on the long-term financial savings (in maintenance, for example) that accrued by employing architectural expertise. Others stressed the added cultural capital that architectural service can provide. A third response was disaffiliation. Some architectural practices insisted that they had always been different, more socially concerned – thereby reinventing themselves as the-guys-on-the-right-side-of-the-fence. Whilst the overall situation seemed dire, in all of these responses the traditional notion of architectural expertise and the role of the architect as expert designer proved resilient.

Instead of aggressively reasserting or disavowing the architect’s authority, the time is apt re-consider the idea of architects as experts. What are experts? How are they created? Where and how do they operate? And, given the enormous collapse of what we tend to refer to as expertise, are experts necessary at all when their specialized knowledge and accumulated experience over years of studying or working in a particular discipline yields little more than a limited and even myopic view of their very field?

The story that follows here is about the architect as expert. I take as my place of departure the idea that specialised and fragmented knowledge is the constructed hallmark of architectural expertise. This idea derives from the sociology of Zygmunt Bauman, who argues that modernity, as itself, is a product of the application of expertise. Expertise, whether architectural or otherwise, identifies problems by fragmenting them in such a way that larger social frameworks and contexts are lost. “Expert ‘solutions’ are just what the local politician or private entrepreneur is after,” Lucius Burckhardt writes. “He needs simple issues, and he wants implementation to proceed in specific, distinct phases that end before a new one begins. Strategic planning and a process-based approach are impossible when policy is oriented to the race to get things finished, rather than a discussion of potential alternative targets.” The system of professional licensing and accreditation that has been established to regulate the architecture profession further impinges on the architect’s ability to produce spaces that counteract modernity’s processes of fragmentation.

In focusing on the work of two practices, that of Will Alsop and Reversible Destiny, I present two alternate means of working. They are attempts to challenge modernity’s fragmentation, which results in the loss of multiplicity, contradiction and other possibilities. They make a case for the necessary re-complexification of architecture’s field of work by rethinking how our understanding of expertise emerges from within the production of space.

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