Analysis: Buildings are intangible culture, enabling social and spatial exchange with other people and places near and far. However, recent political, economic and cultural policy in Ireland has framed them primarily as commodities.
By Emmett Scanlon, University College Dublin
In March, Ann Lacaton and Philippe Vassal were announced as Pritzker Laureates for 2021, an award in architecture comparable to the Nobel Prize. A popular choice, the architects are becoming confirmed leaders of a very contemporary kind of architectural resistance.
In 1996, invited by the city of Bordeaux to revitalise an urban Square, the architects paused and proposed that nothing at all needed to be done. Instead, they prepared a plan to take care of the trees. Seeing the role of an architect as "building relationships and situations for living", they prefer to work with a building and not without.
In 2011 they used their architectural intelligence and rigour, to enhance and extend the lives of 1950's housing blocks at Tour Bois-le-Prêtre, Paris, destined for demolition. Residents never moved out and came home from work to find their homes transformed with new balconies and rooms added in a single day.
Recently, Irish architect Shelley McNamara, 2020 Pritzker Laureate with Yvonne Farrell, contributed to a discussion on the New European Bauhaus.
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On 2FM's Dave Fanning Show Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara became the recipients of this year's Pritzker Prize, the award that’s known internationally as architecture’s highest honour. Dave caught up with Yvonne to chat all about it
Launched by Ursula von der Leyen and anchored in Ireland by architect Orla Murphy, the New European Bauhaus appears to be significant political recognition that culture, architecture, design, economics, heritage, justice, ecology, housing and climate are inextricably and dynamically linked.
In her contribution McNamara argued for architecture to be central to addressing the impact of building on the planet, citing both Lacaton Vassal and Baukultur. Baukultur, from the Davos Agreement published in 2018, argues that all buildings are processes - design, construction, craft, occupation - and buildings both emerge from and reflect these processes.
Existing buildings, as references for and benchmarks of our shared social future, must not casually be removed or destroyed. Buildings are explicit, essential parts of a more complex system human endeavours and environmental relationships, using space and material as tools to shape our built world. Put simply, buildings are culture.
A complex topic, buildings might be considered culture in two ways. First, they are tangible culture because they are objects of human endeavour and technical achievement, specific to time, place and local practices and priorities.
The spatial, material or social significance of a finished building, made at a specific moment in time, may merit a building being revered as something of cultural importance. This is not about monuments or old things as railings, parks, streets, houses, and airports may all have cultural significance.
The second way is not only are buildings produced by people, they are also encountered and used over time by people. Every day, people are appropriating rooms and spaces inside and out.
No less than design, these are material and social practices in which people form new relationships with the building and the world outside and the people that reside in both. Such relationships are essential to our sense of health, wellbeing, and our individual and collective identities.
Thus, buildings are intangible culture, enabling social and spatial exchange with other people and places near and far. They are the rooms and site of stories, histories, futures, enabling identity, belonging, inclusion, opportunity and activism.
In 2016, Apollo House in Dublin adopted a new place in our building culture, not by design but because the building itself emerged as a logical site of direct housing action.
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From Radio 1's Drivetime in 2017, The Apollo House protest is almost at an end this evening though one homeless person remains inside the building and is refusing to leave. John Cooke looked back at what has been achieved. And Terry McMahon spoke of what next.
However, for some time now in Ireland, political, economic and cultural policy has framed buildings primarily as commodities – static, empty, things to be bought and sold, stripping them of material and social value. Buildings are demolished for many reasons but often because the land will yield more profit if a new building is built.
Cities are hollowed out or abandoned, significant works of cultural importance have been lost or destroyed, residents relocated, removed, and communities crushed. The former Bord Fáilte office building was demolished to make way for another office building.
In Cork, UCC is considering demolishing the modernist former Cork Distillers bottling plant. In Dublin, the City Council still intends to demolish housing blocks that remain full of potential and people.
In framing buildings as culture, it is the material – the very stuff they are built of – that is at the heart of the matter.
Buildings are a significant polluter and while new buildings can be built to meet contemporary energy standards and guidelines, the energy produced in making any new building may not necessarily offset what's needed to demolish one that already exists. Nor will it compensate the loss of the embodied carbon when buildings are torn apart and sent to landfill.
To cite buildings as culture is not a sentimental refrain, a desire to ossify buildings, or to never build new things again. Nor is it a question of taste or an aesthetic judgement. To cite buildings as culture is to purposely implicate buildings in the Government's Climate Action ambition to "transition to a climate resilient, biodiversity-rich, environmentally-sustainable and climate-neutral economy".
To achieve this transition requires buildings to be torn from the discourse of development instead of torn down. It means an end to buildings decaying as dust in a state of neglect while being neglected by State. Certainly, speed is of the essence, but when it comes to demolition, it has never been more urgent to take time to resist.
Emmett Scanlon is an architect and assistant professor of Architecture at University College Dublin.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
