Architecture
Strangely Familiar (RIBA, 66 Portland Place, Wl, till 10 Feb)
Know your city
Alan Powers
The value of architectural exhibitions is often questioned. Nothing can represent a building better than the building itself and drawings, photographs or models are deceptive when not merely inadequate. But is the subject confined to buildings as such? An alternative is offered in the exhi- bition Strangely Familiar — narratives of architecture in the city at the RIBA (with a day symposium on Saturday 27 January), one of a growing genre of exhibitions treat- ing architecture and urbanism in metaphorical or critical terms.
The title Strangely Familiar is meant to suggest that one task for those involved in the administration, interpretation and physical manifestation of cities is to uncov- er different ways of understanding the his- tory and reality of the places we think we know. To take two London examples, the Burlington Arcade, apparently an enclave of propriety enveloped in a heritage haze, is described in its other historical life as a place of high-class prostitution. Those who drive down the Westway may in many cases be too young to remember the battle between politicians and local communities that terminated the 'Motorway Box' and led indirectly to the present national cul- ture of anti-road protest.
Strangely Familiar is the work of a small group of friends sharing an academic back- ground at the Bartlett School of Architec- ture. They have invited individuals from various cities to select a theme and illus- trate it with a single object in a case — a Regency bonnet for the Burlington Arcade, a skateboard for skateboarding and so on. These objects, portentously captioned, are really aides-memoires for long accompany- ing texts so that despite the elegant design of the display it is questionable whether the superiority of the exhibition medium over the corresponding book (Routledge £8) has really been demonstrated. The message is an important one, however, and the authors have done their best to avoid aca- demic jargon. This may not be enough to gain the attention of the architects in suits who can now be seen eating and talking business at the branch of the Patisserie Valerie across the landing in the RIBA headquarters — exhibit: one cream cake or architectural historians of a more con- servative type whose integrity depends on resistance to speculative thought — exhibit: one Pevsner guidebook.
While architectural debate is still some- times presented as a battle of styles, there is equally endemic in architecture a split between 'profession or art' which divided the RIBA 100 years ago. Seen as an anti- materialist critique developed through the imagination, the work of the Strangely Familiar group belongs on the side of art even though it is a form of verbalised con- ceptual art. Their complete severance in this project from the actual production of buildings is a polemic statement of despair at the incapacity of architecture, even in its present diversity, to deal with the issues they raise. Past expectations of architec- `Woke up this morning and the rain was pouring in through the hole in the roof the crops had failed, my dog had died and my wife had taken the kids and gone — and I say to myself "what a wonderful world".' ture's world-changing ability have led to grievous disappointments, but the struggle to rediscover the techniques of making bet- ter places should not for that reason be abandoned.
There appears to be no connection what- ever between Strangely Familiar and the phenomenon of the 1980s described as the New Georgians. Peter York's current res- urrection of the past decade mentions in passing this life-style which was so brilliant- ly described by Alexandra Artley and John Martin Robinson in The New Georgian Handbook (1985) that what was partly a private joke achieved a concrete reality in the minds of the public. One of my Eighties memories is the struggle (c. 1986) to per- suade a World Service producer making a current affairs programme for a German audience that it didn't really exist. In retro- spect, however, the participants in the movement which presented itself as an apolitical aesthetic tendency and never wrote a manifesto achieved some of the goals outlined by Strangely Familiar in relation to the life and physical fabric of cities.
The conservation movement enlarged its scope in the 1970s and filled an architec- tural and cultural vacuum, peopled by many who might in other times have become architects but were deterred by the bleak prospects of modernism. From this developed a post-modern urban pastoral which played with time and history to the extent of dressing up on occasion in period clothes. This, like the similar play-acting of the 1920s, could be seen not as escapism, which would hardly have made itself so vis- ible, but as a lived critique of the present in order to posit a better future — particular- ly in terms of restating the attractions of life in dense urban agglomerations and making historical understanding an active agent of change.
New Georgian houses were 'politicised homes' in the sense described by Lynne Walker in her contribution to Strangely Familiar on the growth of feminism in 19th-century London. It was through par- ties, private meetings and small pressure groups that many changes were wrought in the relationship of architecture and conser- vation. The political and commercial imperatives of the later Eighties put con- servation on the defensive but longer-term outcomes of increasing architectural plural- ism, reconciling conservation and develop- ment and opening architectural debate to outsiders, while still incomplete, have affected the assumptions of current prac- tice.
The most striking difference between the New Georgians and Strangely Familiar is that the former, in their anti-intellectual pragmatism, managed to make their alter- native lives and ambitions seem enjoyable and attractive. This is one of the most pow- erful instruments of subversion against the power structures that Strangely Familiar confronts by different means.
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