SEEING
ESSAY / VISIONS & POSITIONS / HUGH CAMPBELL
Life in Space
In this brief essay I want to begin by presenting two
very simple, broad principles and look firstly how
they might be manifest within architecture, then look
a little more at how they might inform research and
education in architecture. The two ideas are really
two readings of the title of the essay: Life in Space.
So, in the first instance I want simply to point to the
fact that our lives are unavoidably led in space –
that we are spatial beings in a spatial society. And
secondly I want to suggest that there is life in space –
that the spaces we use and inhabit are alive in many
senses, at least some of which I will elaborate.
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One of the things I’ve been investigating and writing
about over the past few years is the notion of
the spatial self. This way of thinking, as recently
elaborated by Ciarán Benson among others, sees
the self as something formed by means of our
continuous and ongoing encounter with space.
Space is the medium through and against which
we measure our selves. Who we are is a product of
where we are.
As a result, we begin to consider our own
consciousness in spatial terms. We feel,
instinctively it seems, that there is a space inside
our heads from which we relate to other spaces
which expand outwards in scale and extent. Caspar
David Friedrich’s pair of paintings of the windows
in his studio make explicit the kind of literal and
metaphoric correlations that start to happen
between the space inside our heads and the
spaces we inhabit. The studio is an analogue of his
conscious self, its windows his eyes upon the world.
Architecture becomes critical to the process of
self-formation, helping us to mediate and measure
relations between one realm and another, between
private and public, between domestic and civic,
between the self and the world. One might think for
example of Kahn’s Escherick House, in which the
windows deliberately modulate the occupation of
the spaces they serve.
It is no great leap to extend this reciprocal
relationship of self and space to the scale of society.
Here too, space can serve variously as the container,
the reflection or the progenitor of a society’s
UCD ARCHITECTURE YEARBOOK 2009
collective understanding of itself. This might seem
an obvious thing to claim, and yet it seems to me
that space – understood as something consciously
shaped and experienced – has been relatively
sidelined in recent architectural discourse.
On the one hand, there are the undeniably
powerful readings of space as a social process
coming from theorists like Lefebvre, which
nonetheless tend to ignore its concrete aspects.
On the other hand, there are the phenomenological
readings of architecture which tend to dwell
more on material and tectonics than on spatial
experience. And yet to my mind, architecture’s
primary purpose remains the organisation of
human activity and human relationships in space.
If we look for instance at Hans Scharoun’s Berlin
Philharmonie, we see an architecture with clear
aspirations to give form to a nascent democratic
society. Rather than being merely a symbol of
the new democracy, at the time of its opening in
1963 Scharoun’s building was seen as its physical
embodiment. Furthermore, its spaces could help
people discover that equilibrium between the
individual and the collective which characterised
democracy. The Philharmonie was no mere
backdrop, but an active participant in the creation
of democracy, which also made its inhabitants into
active participants. Scharoun himself, was equally
clear about how the space might support and
shape human behaviour. ‘Music at the centre’, the
simple mantra from which the auditorium design
derived, remained palpably evident in the finished
space. There is a disarming directness about the
translation of intention into form and subsequently
into experience.
In the way in which it gathers and distributes
people through its spaces, the Philharmonie goes
beyond merely containing or staging performance.
The building itself performs. In an early review,
Ulrich Conrads drew attention to this characteristic
of the building – that rather than feeling static and
fixed, it seemed always to be in the act of becoming.
Scharoun derived the idea of architecture as
something living and in large part from his
friend and mentor Hugo Häring, whose theory
of ‘Performance Fulfilment’ drew equally on the
lessons of nature and of technology in insisting that
‘[w]e must call on things and let them unfold their
own forms. It goes against our nature to impose
forms on them from without, to force upon them
laws of any kind, to dictate to them.’
This kind of thinking, in which form acquired
lifelike properties, was common in Germany in
the twenties. Drawing on Gestalt psychology, Paul
Klee had expressed similar ideas in his Bauhaus
teaching: ‘Form as movement, as action, is a good
thing, active form is good. Form as rest, as end, is
bad. Passive, finished form is bad. Formation is
good. Form is bad; form is the end, death. Formation
is movement, act. Formation is life.’
Form – and by extension architecture – was seen
as being a matter of verbs and adverbs rather than
nouns and adjectives. Increasingly I find myself
thinking of architecture in this way – as something
acting rather than simply being. Thus architecture
becomes aligned more closely with the world of
bodies and organisms – of living things. Buildings,
after all, are full of the life of air, of sound, of light,
of movement, of moisture. And seen at a molecular
level, they are, like every thing else, mostly empty
space strewn with moving particles.
At another scale, conceiving architecture as active
also allows time to play a greater role in our thinking.
This includes both everyday lived time – the pace
at which a building is moved through and occupied
from day to day – and historic time – the changing
ways in which a buildings acts within a location and
a culture over years, decades, centuries.
Now, before turning more specifically to the
issues of education and research, let’s briefly
recap on the two simple claims I am making
for architecture: firstly, that it plays a central
role in shaping and framing our selves and, by
extension, our society; secondly, that it may itself be
considered as something living, active in a variety of
ways in a number of registers.
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SEEING
ESSAY / VISIONS & POSITIONS / HUGH CAMPBELL
And so to another building in Berlin – the Free
University, which opened five years after the
Philharmonie in 1968 and which was equally
concerned to give form to a social model. The
architects, Candilis, Josic and Woods explained the
project’s motivating idea:
In fact, the notion that creativity and research
could actually be fundamentally compatible
is reflected in one of the most commonly cited
definitions of research, taken from the OECD
Frascati Manual of 2002, which describes research
as ‘creative work undertaken on a systematic
basis in order to increase the stock of knowledge,
including knowledge of man, culture and society,
and the use of this stock of knowledge to devise
new applications.’
Clearly almost every aspect of architecture
– from historical scholarship to technological
experiment – falls within this rubric. But reframing
our understanding of research so that it can
incorporate more of our activities is not sufficient
in itself. There still remains a potential conflict
between the demands of the university for the
production of high-quality research achieved
through high postgraduate numbers in wellstructured programmes attracting high research
funding, and the demands of the discipline and the
culture for high-quality graduates achieved through
a good programme staffed by good, committed
teachers. These two sets of demands – familiar to
anyone working in universities – often seem to be
pulling in opposite directions.
In trying to resolve this tension, I find myself
turning to a comment by Roger Scruton – not a man
with whom I find myself very often in agreement –
who recently countered the prevailing view of the
university as a place to which you go to acquire
knowledge with his own assertion that it was,
rather, a place to which you go to look after and
attend to knowledge.
To me, this view of the university as the home
where knowledge lives and hopefully flourishes and
prospers is both humbling and liberating. It invites
those at every level of the institution – from first year
student to incoming professor – to participate in this
collective endeavour of care. Rather than seeming
fixed or static, the culture of the school becomes a
The university is considered as a place and a
tool. Many of its functions are known, others are
not. We suppose that its principal function is to
encourage exchange between people in different
disciplines with a view to enlarging the field of
human knowledge. Our intention then is to provide
within one organisation the maximum possibilities
for contact and interchange...whilst ensuring privacy
for each specific function.
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I like to think that a school of architecture
would operate very much in this spirit, aspiring to
the condition of an open weave rather than a rigid
structure. But while the discipline of architecture
seems capable of achieving this easy flow and
exchange, accommodating it within the institutional
framework of the university has often seemed more
difficult. The Oxford conference of 1958, which
sought to cement architecture’s status within the
university system, did so largely by enshrining
research methods which subscribed to existing
paradigms within the social and physical sciences
and, to a lesser extent, the humanities. In order to
be recognised as such, research had to conform to
a set template.
A gap began to open between, on the one
hand, architecture courses which, in serving the
discipline as practiced, sought to be wide-ranging,
creative, open-ended, speculative and on the other
hand, architectural research which, in meeting the
demands of the university, tended to be narrowly
defined, precise and verifiable. Architecture schools
responded in various ways to this tension, with
some going so far as to deliberately divide research
efforts from the day-to-day running of taught
programmes. More recently however, schools have
sought to bridge the divide, trying to let the methods
and the outcomes of design practice become more
fully incorporated into research, and vice versa.
Venetian canal
Photo by Jennifer O’Donnell, Year 3
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SEEING
ESSAY / VISIONS & POSITIONS / HUGH CAMPBELL
kind of all-accommodating, ever moving flow – what
the artist Robert Morris would call a ‘Continuous
Project Altered Daily’. I have illustrated this section of
my talk with selections from Still Water, Roni Horn’s
series of photographs of the Thames, because the
broad, changeful river seemed an appropriate image.
We are all in the swim together.
How then, might the school help architecture
flourish and grow? Firstly, by looking after it – by
attending to it, we might say. This paying of close
attention to architecture’s histories and theories,
its methods and processes, this making of new
connections across and new paths through this
material, this making things make sense would
usually be simply termed scholarship.
Secondly there is the kind of work that looks
out beyond the current edges of the discipline,
that seeks to incorporate new material, to examine
new phenomena, extends understanding and is
generally concerned with making discoveries about
things. This we would call operative research.
Finally, and crucially, there is the creative activity
of design, through which new ideas and artefacts are
produced, new concepts and languages forged. This
making of new things can be classified as innovation.
This triad of terms – scholarship, research and
innovation – is used very deliberately, because they
are usually seen as forming the core of the modern
university’s mission. One can see too how the same
modes of operation and thinking can also inform
every aspect of the teaching programme, so that
everything, from staff research to first year studios,
feels is part of a coherent continuum of activity.
And the word activity is used deliberately too.
The design projects which lies at the heart of
architectural education is premised on creative
action – on active engagement with problems and
situations of all natures, scales and degrees of
complexity. If, as I suggested, earlier, architecture
should be seen as living and performative, then so
too must the schools in which it is taught. There
must be life in the space of education and research.
It is my ambition that UCD Architecture will reassert
its place at the centre of architecture in Ireland
accommodating teaching and critical enquiry, debate
and reflection, and creative life in all its forms.
CODA
Las Meninas, Velasquez
In conceiving this essay, I had always intended to
start with Velasquez’s great painting, but now I find
myself, rather hurriedly, ending with it. I was going
to use it to explain my notion of the spatial self, and
more broadly to represent the idea of Life in Space.
Firstly, because, besides everything that has been
written and said about the complex interplay of
visual stratagems in this painting, what struck me
most forcibly when I saw it in Madrid some years
ago was the absolute presence of the space which
contains everything. Given that it is Velasquez’s own
studio within the Escorial Palace, it’s no surprise
I suppose that it is rendered with such clarity and
economy. But I love the fact that these relatively
bare, simple walls (if we discount the barely visible
Rubens paintings), softly lit by tall windows, are
given to the King as the container of his view,
holding in front of him his family and his entourage.
And I love too that, at its heart, what the picture
amounts to is an incredibly intimate portrait of
the king. Rather than the view from outside in that
is the norm of portraiture – the kind of image we
glimpse in the mirror at the back of the room, the
kind that Velasquez is presumably painting on the
canvas we cannot see – what we get instead is the
view from inside out. We sit behind the king’s eyes,
seeing what he sees: his life in space.
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This essay is an edited version of the
first address given by Dr. Hugh Campbell,
Professor of Architecture, to the students and
staff assembly at the beginning of term on 8th
September 2008.
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Waterside
Photo by Jennifer O’Donnell, Year 3