Image provided to Manner of Man Magazine/Welldressed by Dr Nikos Salingaros. All rights reserved.
This exclusive interview with Dr. Nikos Salingaros, Professor of Mathematics, Urbanist & Architectural Theorist, was conducted by Nicola Linza and Cristoffer Neljesjö in San Antonio, Texas during November 2011
Interview with Dr. Nikos Salingaros
What encouraged you to pursue your architectural theories?
It
was plain to me that the vast majority of new buildings being erected failed to
nourish human emotions and this was leading to -- and had already produced --
an increasingly inhumane or deadening environment. I saw that from quite early
on. And that most built urban fabric since the Second World War failed to
sustain human life, not only in a practical but especially in a spiritual sense.
When I discovered Christopher Alexander’s writings, and later became friends
with him, I realized that my original intuitions were correct. Yes, indeed, the
world had become obsessed with building a sterile, severely fractured
environment, a materialized dead world. I was shocked that all this was being
promoted in the name of “progress”. Someone had to explain this contradiction to
people so numbed they could not see it. At first I avoided getting involved
because I had other scientific interests to keep me busy, but eventually the
importance of the task overwhelmed me into doing something about it.
How
do you view architecture today after years of your work?
My
view of architecture itself has not changed. I would say that I’m less tolerant
today of “hybrid” typologies that mix in lifeless and anxiety-inducing forms
with detached pieces of life-generating architecture. It simply doesn’t work. And
now I can tell the difference between the two instantly! That’s because I have
finely-tuned my analysis of living architectural form, and Christopher in the
meantime completed his monumental The
Nature of Order (four volumes) in which I was involved, and from which,
incidentally, I learned much of what I know about architecture.
As
far as the architectural discipline is concerned, it’s going on its merry way
generating vast expanses of products ranging from dull to psychologically poisonous.
Architects for the most part still reside in a separate fantastical universe of
their own making, detached from human sensibilities. They simply cannot see
reality in front of their eyes. They are suffering from the pathology that
Michael Mehaffy and I term “Architectural Myopia”. This all began when society
in the 1920s promoted clever architectural impostors, caricatures of
architects, because industry found them useful to sell their products -- but
after a century, people forgot that this was play-acting, that it is not
architecture for human beings, and for quite some time, we have forgotten that
it’s all a pretense so we continue to build this useless stuff. It has become a
tragedy of our times: improvisation follows improvisation without ever
returning to architectural reality.
What
do you feel is still the most dangerous aspect impacting the future of
architecture and the built environment?
It
would have to be the intimate connection between vast financial powers, the
construction industry, and a century of nihilistic design ideologies. This
grouping has profited from an insensitive and basically unsustainable model of
profit generation -- even though industry could just as well make the same
profits from constructing human-scale, life-enhancing environments -- and it is
driven by the system’s own inertia. Strictly from financial reasoning, the
driver for most of these building projects is unlikely to change its economic
model of relying on starchitects and the modernist industrial design paradigm.
Particular industries, and the building industry is no exception, usually have
to face self-destruction before they can accept a change in direction.
For
several decades, marketing was employed to promote an industrial architectural
style. Now we have reached a dangerous reversal: that visually striking style
has assumed an absolute, unquestioned authority, and is being used to sell
other industrial products. That is, consumer products that are not very well
adapted to human use are promoted by associating them psychologically with the
sleek look of dysfunctional and non-sustainable buildings, towers, bridges, etc.
How
do you view architecture programmes? And have you witnessed a shift since you
started your work?
I
assume you mean architectural education. Here we have a problem because what I
consider to be architecture, and what the schools consider to be architecture,
are very different -- even opposite -- things. I feel a tremendous sadness at
the enormous number of young people who are indoctrinated into a way of thinking
-- a defining worldview -- that ignores fundamental human and even sacred
qualities. And all of this because there exists an entrenched philosophical/pseudo-religious
tradition of modernism that has to be perpetuated at all costs. Students have a
meme implanted into their thinking, and for the rest of their life, they are
servants to the stylistic dictates of “modernism”. Only a few of them ever wake
up from this condition spontaneously. It’s extremely difficult to do so once
indoctrinated, and that’s a great tragedy for our civilization.
As
to any shift -- I see none really: only entrenchment to protect the status quo and perpetuate what has
apparently worked in the past. Given that schools are made up of architectural
academics and architects who have had a modernist formation, not surprisingly,
they see no need for revision. And if you are the Dean or Chair of an
architecture school, you don’t want to risk losing NAAB accreditation by suggesting
radical changes. There’s no motivation to look closely at any underlying
problems, and my criticisms -- or those of anyone else, if they are serious
enough -- are definitely unwelcome. Genuine innovations threaten the modernist
paradigm, which has functioned well for as long as anyone can remember.
Criticize as long as it’s “in-house”, but don’t rock the boat because it might
sink, as they say.
There
is one positive exception to this dismal situation. I continually encounter students
awakening: a mature (i.e. graduate) student realizes that he/she has been given
a misleading understanding of design and finds that genuinely nourishing
architectural and urban form resembles the (rigorously condemned!) traditional
typologies. Many of those students then contact me, asking me to direct their
theses because they have nobody at their home institution that understands what
they are looking for -- the human dimensions of architecture. Thus, I find
myself supervising and directing a dozen students from all over the world, most
of whom I have not met personally. This at least represents a vast improvement from
ten years ago. In those darker times, a student had no other choice than to
submit to the ideology or change fields altogether, which unfortunately is
still true in most of our institutions today.
In
your view, what does tomorrow hold in terms of the built environment?
If things continue the way
they are going now, we are already headed for a societal collapse, and I don’t
mean only as far as energy and resource depletion. Far more serious is the
catastrophic replacement of culture and learning by a shortsighted approach to
the environment, which is promoted by a global industrial complex that exploits
nature without replenishing resources. Architecture has always been a small but
key part of this larger problem. And it’s a huge problem -- the decay of
cultural processes and human values breeds a mindless architecture of spectacle.
It’s of course tied into
consumerism and industrialization; that’s why it’s so difficult to combat
openly. The media constantly barrage the public with images of the latest
designs of the starchitects. All prize winners, of course! And my friends and
I, a fairly large group that includes those of us who apply the latest science
and technology to create human environments, to members of the Congress for the
New Urbanism, to traditional architects and planners worldwide, simply don’t
exist! Solutions that we developed decades ago, and built many of them for all
to see, have been ignored. But when some half-baked project is plagiarized from
us and is built by a member of the establishment, the entire world media is
mobilized to showcase it in glorious color. Once again, we don’t exist, only
the fashionable members of the “in-group” invented it all!
There is really no
indication that our world is close to waking up from this nightmare of
industrial consumption. When the media are exclusively promoting ridiculous and
insensitive construction, how can you expect any change? Our detailed proposal
for an “Intelligence-based Architecture” is published and is freely available
for all interested parties to implement. But we cannot fight the established
way of doing things. The best we can do is to keep working at the margins and
try to stay alive in the face of hostility and fierce opposition.
The only hope would seem to
reside with the public, yet the public is fed a steady diet of propaganda and
doesn’t know what to believe. In Europe, the stifling state bureaucracy is sold
on the modernist ideology. Mayors compete for the latest architectural horror,
and think it will guarantee them re-election. Still, there is hope in the
United States, precisely because of the entrepreneurial spirit. After all, it’s
here that the New Urbanism movement started, an initiative of small private
firms, although heavily influenced by European ideas. We could regenerate our
cities by implementing a humanly sustainable and nourishing architecture and
urbanism, working from the ground up. So far, our lower-cost emergent design
process has a tough time competing against cookie-cutter development. But
things are changing, though very slowly.
Small-scale thinking will
survive in the economic downturn, driven by an older humanistic tradition and
respect for the individual. It’s time for our rich urban culture to flourish
again after a century. I’m sure that the market can play the crucial role --
the small towns, smaller design and planning firms, and individual traditional
architects -- could, in principle, counter the trend of the vast monolithic
power of the globalized engineering firms tied to starchitects who work for
third-world regimes.
