We have allowed an essentially beautiful little city
to develop into a squalid, violent horror.
To say that architecture reflects the
values and ideas of a given culture is to misunderstand the functioning of an
art. To reflect implies in unequivocal terms that it presents in some way a
causal mirage. Architecture is an organ of culture, and organic part of it. If
one puts a culture in front of a mirror one sees a reflection of its skin, its
surface in a place where it isn’t. Therefore, if we repeat the first sentence.
That architecture reflects the values of a given cultural cell it goes some way
to indicate that a culture's skin is its architecture, or at least its clothes.
But then it is not necessary to reflect the image; we can look directly at a
culture with our own eyes, see its skin, admire its clothes. Architecture does
not reflect, it is; it is the skin, or the clothes. The implications of this
are as follows. Rather than being a reflection, it becomes more in the nature
of a mask, an expression of intention on the one hand, and a revelation of its
degree of failure to achieve that intention on the other. In partaking of a society
it is part of its organic structure. If one sees it as the skin of a society it
serves to protect and to hold together its internal organs; if as clothes it
performs, charms and hides, or other endless possibilities. But in some sense,
architecture is more than just the skin, it is that which remains, the
skeleton.
Another implication of the denial of the
reflective power of architecture and seeing it instead as a form of clothing,
or skin or supporting structure of a cultural cell or political ideology, is
that it is put in its proper place as a language. It thus becomes a supportive
language completely dependent on its ideology and cultural context for its significance.
One cannot reconstruct the President’s politics from his suit, and yet his suit and
his politics are in many ways similar.