Books: For an Architecture of Reality

My copy from 1989

I first read Michael Benedikt’s book late in my undergraduate years at Penn. My major was a pre-architecture amalgam called Design of the Environment that taught a wide spectrum of design (fine arts, sculpture, landscape architecture, urban studies, art and architectural history, design studios, and philosophy) from which, if you felt the calling, you could re-align intentions and set forth to become an Architect. This book became a bit of a compass for me, showing me a possible true north going forward in my career: it presented four simple notions that, when combined with one’s own heart and intention, I was convinced would surely produce better architecture, better cities, a better man.

The book’s origin story began as a counterpunch to Post Modernism in architecture in the 1980s, which, perhaps owing to Venturi’s books (Complexity and Contradiction and Learning from Las Vegas) became a grab bag of historical references, no longer really concerned with the purity of modernism’s clean functionalism. Post Modernism was referential; it wasn’t about itself. You had to be in on the joke.

Benedikt didn’t want Modernism or any other -ism other than realism. He wanted architecture to remember how to be substantial and present, not thin and immaterial; how to be authentic and real, not throw-away or dishonestly fake. It was perfect timing for me: every undergrad needs a manifesto, and this one spoke of creating presence in architecture, finding/discovering its significance, and filling the zen emptiness of space. It made more sense than Bachelard, even for this poetry-lover; its guiding thoughts were more subjective than Le Corbusier’s Five Points. Benedikt had four: Presence. Significance. Materiality. Emptiness. Four guiding lights for an architecture of reality. It was seventy slim, evocative pages. By graduate school I had parts of it memorized. Like this bit about the finding meaning in life:

“We seem to fear that unless we keep talking and calling upon the world to talk, we will be overcome by the dread muteness of objects and by the heedlessness of nature, that we might awaken to our “true” condition as “strangers in a strange land. But... just being a man or woman and alive is enough to guarantee the world’s meaningfulness, and we need not fear.”

The book’s treatise metamorphosed within me in graduate school, aiding in my design confidence (I have a path forward! I will not be seduced by style! I will not be deflated in my efforts to make beautiful, meaningful spaces!). But that confidence was tempered by failure after failure, for all the reasons students fail. It’s like I saw myself as my own Unified Theory of architecture; of course I failed. My design thesis for a school of music floated away on intangibles. Its elevator pitch:

“Realizing architecture as a confluence of metaphors, as a question of human awareness in landscape: there is a connection between the structure and reason in poetry and architecture.”

What?

A small consolation and an immense truth exhumed from my journals back then: a classmate I was lamenting with told me that trying was not failing. Trying was a win-win. Won’t we forever be trying?

I carried the book with me into my professional life, and a different quote became very important:

“One can see how buildings constructed rapidly by indifferent men with indifferent plans, using remotely made and general parts, are bound to create indifference—at best—in the population at large... These buildings lack significance to anyone, and are the less real for it.”

Indifference as the opposite of love. Do not become indifferent.