Jonathan Tuckey: Building Around

Talk by Jonathan Tuckey

Jonathan Tuckey gave this talk in June 2019 at an event entitled “Raze it down or build around?”, part of the “Knock Nothing Down” events programme held at the Royal Academy of Arts.

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” 

George Orwell, 1984

The city, the street, the house, the room, the table, these are containers for collective memory. The structures that make up those places are made by, made for and hold the memory of a collective. They are culture.

These places and spaces are handed from generation to generation and in the process adapt to accommodate their changing needs, built over, built under, expanding, contracting.

…the fabric of the city evolves, a wall conceived as a marking a boundary, becomes a meeting place, becomes a theatre, becomes a house…

The question is about how we should build today. We are not talking about what we should have done in the past.  This is important because today we have the technology and engineering knowledge to 'build around' in ways that were not possible in the past.

Today ‘build around’ means, on site printing of extensions under and over our cities, it means transforming the environmental performance of the city. ‘Build around’ means prefabricated constructions silently installed to an area with no construction noise, it means restructuring buildings to allow building above and below them.

With this technology do we raze it down or do we build around? Do we erase our culture or allow it to innovate.

‘Raze it down' is a form of violence, destruction, and social engineering, whether the scale of a single building or a street or a district. Raze it down displaces people, breaks up neighbourhoods, erases memories. It results in a chronologically and culturally flattened city.

The logic for raze it down lies in a denial of the past. The new way is always superior to the old way. It is arrogance and hubris.

The Neophiliacs quest for utopia, tabula rasa, the ideal, is inhumane. Hoardings wrapped with photorealistic images of perfect buildings lining streets with perfect people, conceal a displaced group, a lost culture, and an erasure and a loss for the city.

Raze it down is the familiar calling card of the dictator, emperor or demagogue. It ignores the constraints and particularities of the site to create maximum gain. It is a tool for economic and social manipulation.

London’s Robinhood Gardens, Beijing’s Huntong, Haussmann’s Paris. It is lazy it is binary, it is singular it is mono cultural.

The alternative is to ‘build around’ – the more challenging option. ‘Build around' speaks of collaboration, collage; suburbs become cities, roads become rivers, banks become bars. It embraces the eccentric. It imbibes a place or space with the story of the individual.

'Build around' adds layers to the city adding to and enriching its collective memory. It makes the future by adapting/improving the past. It allows existing neighbourhoods to adapt and mature. It acknowledges the past and is happy not to hide its faults. It is a philosophy of acceptance.

‘Build around’ can be made by the populace, it requires negotiation and conversation. It empowers society to determine its ideal and accepts there is not one singular solution. What better responsibility to place on a culture. ‘Build around’ juxtaposes, collides, appropriates and reuses.  It innovates, it is unpredictable, it fosters chance.

The debate is not New vs Old but rather Destruction vs Creation, repurposing the city or the house in an new organic approach to development.  This isn’t a call to make our city a museum, quite the opposite. Preventing buildings from change is equally restrictive. This is a call to use the new technological era to build around to reinvent and continually enrich the places we inhabit.

Notes

Published 31st October 2019