Rem’s Junk’s in the Trunk, That’s why De Carlo

Arctic City, a complicated imaginary place rendered by --guess who-- Ralf Erskine.  A fave.

With Koolhaas in the rearview and De Carlo on the brain it’s hard not to crack open a few old chestnuts about egalitarianism in design: how are we supposed to satisfy such a diverse, sometimes contradictory, set of requirements and expectations, let alone our expectations of ourselves and our own work? Don’t worry: I’m not going to talk about Junkspace anymore except to use it to frame this question of how we can try to contribute, meaningfully, to the critical discourse of architecture while attempting to satisfy programmatic demands that may exhibit many of the hallmark symptoms that might suggest a junkspace diagnosis following a haascall by Dr. Rem. 

Let’s be real: this all feels impossible, right? It often does to me, but it’s not a problem that’s unique to architecture. It’s a PR problem, and everybody who’s anybody’s got ‘em. Architecture’s dirty laundry, though, is a Villa Savoye-sized pair of tighty whities flown from a Michael Graves-designed flagpole: it’s the size of buildings and it’s aired very, very publicly. 

Elon Musk, who you may know as the guy who did PayPal, or the guy who does SpaceX and the Boring tunnel/flamethrower company and who is also Grimes’s boyfriend (!!!) did an interview (https://youtu.be/YAtLTLiqNwg?t=1036) last week with Tesla (his other thing) build quality critic Sandy Munro. I mention it because I think it’s a pretty good example of a couple of things that need to happen in order for anything of significant substance and scale to get done. 

When responding to Munro’s criticism that the Tesla Model 3 uses way too many pieces and fastening methods to assemble the wheelhouse portion of the Model 3’s body, Musk responds by saying

 

    “The organizational structure errors, they manifest themselves in the product. […] We’ve got probably the best material science team in the world at Tesla […] Engineers would ask what’s the best material for this purpose...and they got like 50 different answers. And they’re all true individually, but they were not true collectively, and when you try to join all these dissimilar alloys […] you’ve got gaps that you’ve got to seal, and you’ve got to join these things, and some of them need to be joined with rivets, some of them need to be joined with spot welds, some of them need to be joined with resin or resin and spot welds […], and frankly, it looks like a bit of a Frankenstein situation when you look at it all together.”

https://jalopnik.com/in-epically-nerdy-interview-elon-musk-discusses-build-1846181756

 

There’s a dialog here that’s happening in two directions: there’s a critique and a response, and they’re both constructive; there’s engagement between the producer and the consumer. More importantly, though, the producer is sufficiently informed so as to be capable of addressing the concerns of the critic, or at least having the conversation. Furthermore, the articulation of the difficulties of managing the problem is essential to the establishment of mutual empathy. 

There’s not a more important skill set, in any context, than the ability to contextualize and communicate information. This reads as a basic truism because what I’m describing is knowledge, but it seems like we often neglect one for the other, style for substance or vice versa, or that we retreat into specialization to the point where we can’t contextualize or recommunicate anything that means much to anybody outside of our own orbit, which for something like architecture isn’t really helpful if you want to make something real. 

“Want to make something real” is something I mean in the context of the desire for authenticity. There’s a line in LCD Soundsystem’s (about whom I have mixed feelings) Losing My Edge that goes “I hear you're buying a synthesizer and an arpeggiator and are throwing your computer out the window because you want to make something real. You want to make a Yaz record.” 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUjDMdSwefk 

So that’s the attitude. But like I wrote last week, architecture is humanistic and humans are a hot mess. Real life is complicated, and people want/need different things. All of the junk that comes along with being alive isn’t necessarily architecture compatible, particularly with certain design languages. But it’s what makes real life livable, and it’s something that we should plan for. 

So, if it’s all just going to fall down in the end then the least we can do is to make sure that the things that we build mean something to someone, that can do the jobs that need to be done. Maybe the job requires that it looks beautiful, maybe the job requires that it just looks okay with a satellite dish stuck to the front of it. Either way, it’s unlikely that we’ll arrive at a good solution if we don’t understand what the problem is. We have to at least ask.