The End of Technic as Proxy in the Praxis for Presencing Architecture
7. The un-made choice in the Machine Ages.
| The architect who proposes to run with technology knows now that he will be in fast company, and that, in order to keep up, he may have to emulate the Futurists and discard his whole cultural load, including the professional garments by which he is recognized as an architect. If, on the other hand, he decides not to do this, he may find that a technological culture has decided to go on without him. It is a choice that the masters of the 20s failed to observe until they had made it by accident, but it is the kind of accident that Architecture may not survive a second time - we may believe that the architects of the First Machine Age were wrong, but we in the Second Machine Age have no reason yet to be superior about them.7 |
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choice, although not preformed as a policy, was nevertheless made
through events that were not external to the culture and architecture
and which would form the course of action in the face of an
architectural unknown and in the face of a technological juggernaut
which could not be challenged so far. Technology can not outrun
architecture. By its very nature, choice and duty, or their negative
forms of criticism and doubt, never let architecture out of sight,
because the two are the substance of which each is caused. Architecture
exists. For it, only human extinction can threaten it. But the
profession as we know it may fail. I propose that the architects of the early 20thC could not make such a choice, for to do so would be like cutting the baby in two. Instead they went into hiding. Yet, choice is really all we have. Where Banham writes ‘architecture’ could fail in facing the problem, he means the profession of architecture, which maybe already has. Architects will arise in an other way, perhaps unrecognizable to our present idea of architecture.
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