Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
The argument in the book is simply that modernity in its will to order and reason had waged a war on ambivalence, on the other, on outsiders and on contingency. I likewise think that architects are waging a war on contingency. They can’t stand dirt for example. All those classic shots of architects’ houses, where everything is neatly lined up, are a symptom of this war on ambivalence. This architectural control is what Bauman puts into the context of a wider trend in society.
Next book, Modernity and Ambivalence. This looks at contemporary context from a more philosophical perspective. Tell us about it.
Bauman is actually the mentor for my own book. He is so important to me because I had come up with this way of thinking about architecture, and was quite happy with it and beginning to write. Then I discovered Bauman – what he was saying about society, about the way it had evolved into modernity, was similar to what I was clumsily trying to do in my own book. It gave me a sort of intellectual confidence that what I was talking about was real.
What is Bauman saying in the book about society and modernity?
The argument in the book is simply that modernity, in its will to order and reason, had waged a war on ambivalence, on the other, on outsiders and on contingency. I likewise think that architects are waging a war on contingency. They can’t stand dirt for example. All those classic shots of architects’ houses, where everything is neatly lined up, are a symptom of this war on ambivalence. This architectural control is what Bauman puts into the context of a wider trend in society.
Of the many issues we could be paying attention to, what is the most important one today?
The obvious thing to say is climate change. But with climate change, architects tend to see it as a technical issue and try to deal with it through technical fixes. However, I think climate change is bigger than this. It’s very much bound up with social justice, particularly social justice in relation to the developing world. I think the biggest challenges today are about social justice, and how, therefore, architects might respond to these challenges in an ethically responsible and politically aware manner.
Read full interview
Current Dean of the School of the Built Environment at Westminster University since 2008 and partner at Sarah Wigglesworth Architects, Jeremy Till both practises and teaches architecture. He was Britain’s representative in 2006 at the Venice Architecture Biennale. In 2004, 9 Stock Orchard Street, which he designed with Sarah Wigglesworth and is perhaps their most famous building, won the prestigious RIBA Sustainability Prize. In his latest book, Architecture Depends, he argues that architecture is a dependent discipline and offers a critique of the architectural establishment which he believes tries to escape this dependency.
