Architecture of Failure, The

This book proposes a theory of architectural failure; a radical way to approach memory and history in the city.


 


Against those who consider architecture to be a wholly optimistic activity, this book shows how the history of modern architecture is inextricably tied to ideas of failure and ruin.

By means of an original reading of the earliest origins of modernism, The Architecture of Failure exposes the ways in which failure has been suppressed, ignored and denied in the way we design our cities. It examines the 19th century fantasy architecture of the iron and glass exhibition palaces, strange, unprecedented, dream-like structures, almost all now lost, existing only as melancholy archive fragments; it traces the cultural legacy of these buildings through the heroics of the early 20th century, post-war radicals and recent developments, discussing related themes in art, literature, politics and philosophy.

Critiquing the capitalist symbolism of the self-styled contemporary avant-garde, the book outlines a new history of contemporary architecture, and attempts to recover a radical approach to understanding what we build. Douglas Murphy blogs at  http://www.youyouidiot.blogspot.com/
REVIEWS & ENDORSEMENTS
  • "This book convincingly addresses architecture’s recurring weakness for the brave new world   This book marks a generational shift. At last, here is someone who can write dispassionately about Buckminster Fuller and Cedric Price and their hilarious assertions about the future because he’s never met them and never been swayed by their charisma. Murphy’s view of them is that they were “solutionists” who carried on the modernist trust in newness and progress so naively, so bereft of political depth, that nothing could possibly come of their ideas. Murphy’s verdict on the future demonstrated by the InterAction Centre: fantastically dreary. It reminds me of when the helicopters left Vietnam in 1973 and the cold war started to shut down and we all started to talk about what buildings looked like again. Except that here it’s the reverse. Now, we all need to talk about politics again. When you get onto the next chapters, Iconism and Virtualism, the dispassion cranks up a notch. Now it is the concern of a philosopher who sees philosophy being treated as deep litter in architecture’s battery farm. All that work put into getting past structure done by Derrida thrown away on the deconstructivists’ smug political disengagement, and all the energetic detail of Deleuze and Guattari’s emergency squandered on parametric banalities. Murphy knows his material well and gives a detailed account of the terms icon and virtual that puts most architectural meanderings in this area to shame. He quotes the philosophers themselves on architects’ clumsy misuse of their concepts, presumably watching with disgust as speculative realism and object oriented ontology take their turn as explanation fodder. But since both philosophy and art have borrowed from science for the last hundred years and science is resolutely materialist even when examining things that are materially impossible, should it be a surprise that things have gone this way? Yes. Music and literature, suggests Murphy, have been able to be modern without architecture’s traumas not because of immateriality but because of their freedom from heavy investment. That’s architecture’s real problem — only capitalists or governments can afford to do it. And that’s why it can’t be apolitical. Which leaves politics wide open. In all Murphy’s talk of the elusiveness of a radical architecture, something sticks. Riots may be made of despair but revolutions are made of hope; the revolutionary impulse is itself stuck in the future. It’s a picture of a new world set down into an empty space, bound to end in tears when the actual future arrives. So what’s the radical alternative to revolution? There could be another chapter here, and one that Murphy could deal with very well. It would be an assessment of those architectures that don’t use borrowed ideas to fill themselves up but remain concerned with architectural matters. The space agents, for example. Contextualists. Primitivists. The question would be: what happens when you try to situate architecture in the present? Are the explanations any less nonsensical? The examination might demonstrate that rhetoric gets in just about everywhere and spoils just about everything. Or, it might show that the world is whole and good and that you shouldn’t believe everything you read in the spiels. The best thing about this book is that it steps out of the partisan mudslinging we’re used to. This is not sloganeering, there’s no axe being ground here. Nor is it anti-theory. It contextualises the furore of contemporary architectural debate with a detailed consideration of the great iron and glass buildings of the 19th century. Murphy concludes that their blank, utilitarian technologies lent themselves to an optimism about the future that continues with architects to this day; whose products, like the iron and glass of Victorian times, are but fragments of the drive towards a better world that did not and will not come to pass. That’s the “failure” of the title. The subject is so complicated, so emotional, so ironic and so melancholic altogether that it really does take a writer of some skill to explain. And it gets it with this book." Review is currently on the website but will be published in print this week. Paul Shepheard is a well respected architectural writer ~ Paul Shepheard, Building Design (bdonline.co.uk)
  • In the latest Architecture Today magazine: 'Against those who consider architecture to be a wholly optimistic activity, this book shows how the history of modern architecture is inextricably tied to ideas of failure and ruin.' Douglas Murphy's short, trenchant book comes in two parts. First is a reading of Victorian iron and glass exhibition halls that attempts to draw out their melancholy character - the ways in which socially and materially the buildings embodied a presentiment of their own ruin. Second is an assault on recent movements in architecture - high-tech, deconstruction, 'iconism', parametricism - whose naive faith in novelty and technology, divorced from broader political concerns, has failed to learn the right lessons from the crystal palaces. Murphy's dissections of the heirs to the Vicotrian engineer-genius, of the fashionable adoption of critical theory for formal inspiration rather than critique, and of the empty promises of the prophets of digital architecture, are both acute and entertaining. The link between the failures of today and Victorian ferro-vitreous architecture remains debatable, but Murphy's polemic is both informed and persuasive. ~ Unknown, Architecture Today
  • Review in RIBA Journal April 2012 edition - 'Editors' selection': "The failure in designing what was once called ‘a better tomorrow’. The mismatch between what architects say and the built work that survives is vast: illustrated by the Victorian obsession with iron and glass structures." ~ Hugh Pearman, RIBA Journal
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