AT FIRST THESE WERE JUST WORD-GAMES. BUT THEN AS CRITICS BEGAN, and then continued, to write strange things about our work I became convinced that if its ambitions were to stand any chance of success, I had to give it a 'proper name'. So it seemed inevitable that it must bear my own.
The Architecture titled "Outramoderne" does, in fact REVERSE, and deliberately so, the generally prevailing Architecture of the Modernism practised since WW2. It is the only Architecture which, while deliberately instituting this "reversal", already exists in a ready-made and" proven" state. For Outramoderne Architecture has already been built for many User-Clients in many countries.
The Outramoderne is not, however PostModern. The PostModern plays around with references to the many global Architectures prior to 20C Modernism. This is certainly the mark of an humane, well read and sophisticated Architectural culture. It should be applauded whenever it succeeds.
Sadly this is not as often as it could be.
Architects have been taught, and certainly since the horrors of WW2, that “the past” is best buried and forgotten. They have been taught that “Architecture is no longer a literary subject”. In short subliteracy is the ticket to Professional fame and fortune. This is, one may surmise why 'POMO' is, as often as not, I something of a failure.
A weil known Architect is on record as remarking:" My Grandmother likes Post-modernism". He then proposed:" It's not difficult to do." Sadly his addition was
inaccurate - Playing intuitively with formal architectural languages that have never been rationally translated into the tongue of one's own time is not easy AT ALL!
Looking around today who can doubt that John Walkden, my Dean of Architecture, was not right, back in September 1955 when he gave us this prescient advice on literacy. The “e” on the end of OutraModerne signals that it descends from the earlier version of the the Modern, the inter-war "Moderne” that was more at home in 1925 Paris and Texas' Fort Worth.
For you cannot even aspire to a ‘ decorated’ Architecture without a decent amount of. "learning"- that is unless you want to inherit the role of the “fool”, that Frank Gehry has so successfully adopted. Nevertheless, and in spite of all the idiocies built since ww2, the Outramoderne remains to offer a proven escape route to an intellectually luscious onticity.
Yet it is neither this wealth of cognition nor its sensuous pleasures that the Outramoderne
precisely offers. It is something more modest. The "Outramoderne" is a way of building that deliberately buries out of sight the ontologically trivial "truths to construction and materials" (aka the concrete and steel "nuts and bolts), that are used to surfacethis putatively "Modern” Architecture.
It may surprise some avant-garde Architects, naive in their understanding of their Engineer colleagues, that these Professionals, secure inside their various specialisms, prefer that their equipments do NOT become the pretext for some sort of ontologically trivial Architectural Decoration. They are more than satisfied with the invisibility of the ample "service ducts" provided by the column and beam distribution system of the Outramoderne's various sorts of "Ordine" (Architectural Orders).
The nadir of such sorts of Decorative employments, which was christened Hi-Tech, is the famed Lloyds of London Building. This is a super flexible structure that now cannot be adapted to any contemporary utility. Its extraordinarily expensive elevators (@ £250,000 each in the 1970s), have been advised by their maintenance engineers, to sometimes fail to travel down to the Entrance
lobby. The Architect's Liability Insurance had to pay our £M10 for technically negligent failings. Somehow it seems appropriate that its face to the world, known technically as its " facade". is composed of big, shiny toilet-"pods".)
The Outramoderne buries out of sight the amiable mechanisms that physically advantages of our own life-space. This has the foreseen effect of releasing, for decorative employment, the "cubic theatre" of ample ceilings, floors and walls ...not excluding the columns and beams of the "Ordine" used to ontically steady our cubic "Camera Lucida", into its six picture planes. For it is precisely these "windows into the mind" that can bear, once more, the "metaphysical" ornaments and figures which as Rowan Moore wrote on the 6th May 2018, "Architecture has always used."
Yet it is a sad and profound error to believe, as Le Corbusier and all of the 20 C Modernists did, that an Architecture stripped of its heavy and powerful Orders could install the mysterious metaphysics of an epiphanic reification of Being into an ordinary quotidian space. The substantial (machine-filled), primary members of the diverse Architectural Orders (ordine),
of an Outramoderne building bear a diversity of Narratives, or "istorias". But they are no more than a "modernisation" of those that the main and primary members of any "historical" Architectural Ordine with its columns and entablatures has cried, down the centuries, to the horizons of Being.
It is important, therefore. to assuage here , the kind and genial doubts expressed by my late Tutor Bob Maxwell the Dean Emeritus of Cornell. He was concerned that the "fictions of the past had lost their power " . But the Outramoderne has proved that the "Hypostylar Forest of Infinitude" works as well as ever in Rice University's Duncan Hall, or the Grade One New House at Wadhurst Park. The extended narrative of the conjunction of the Raft of Reason with the Heap of History triggered by the Time of Advent works as well if not better than ever in Marit Rausing's Millenium Balcony. Other narratives, such as the River of Somatic Time/ Valley of the Republic, have been found to work quite well, wherever there has been the opportunity to inscribe them.
For the merely" Architectural" physiology of the "Outramoderne" does NOT prescribe precisely WHAT these "metaphysical" figures and polychromies need to be. Nor does an Outramoderne Architecture prescribe what are the manifold and polysemic "Ontological
Cargoes" that are the individual Users and Institutions "Truths of Being".
These, all enveloping, so-called decorative, surfaces are what can now be used to adumbrate the conceptual landscape of an Institution. This shared cognitive territory can be used to give an Institution (any Institution at all), a means to resist unwelcome influences from the exterior. One thinks in particular of such agencies as false news and the many attempts from er does one have to gaze upon brick and concrete walls while ontological jumk is unloaded into one's lifespace from some cretinous quarter of cyberspace.
In this way the essentially "domestic" apparatus of an Outramoderne Architecture offers a ready-made and tested means to reinforce the local, real and positive culture of any Institution, from the room of a solitary teenager to a City-Quarter for 35,000 people.
This name of the 'Outramoderne", is not to deny the part of all those, Clients, Colleagues, Consultants and Contractors who helped create it. Architecture does not create itself. A huge organisation of individuals together create the human lifespace, the "paradigmatic medium", as J.B. Alberti put it, "of Civilisation". But one must give their works a name. So, faute de mieux, I adopted their works to the name of the "Outramoderne", not only to give them, for I believe in denomination, a moniker, but also because, from the remarks of the Critics these collective efforts were denoted to be STRIKINGLY UNIQUE. What then could I do but name them after myself? I would entirely prefer that they should find some other generic. But as all such appear to me sadly kitsch and as I must soon die, for I am in my 88th year, I feel time running out.
The problem seems to be that although I and my collabrators have built the 'Outramoderne', for all sorts and qualities of project, in all sorts of places in Britain, Continental Europe and the USA, my Profession dislikes it extremely. My Architectural Peers never say why. They just do their best to deny it and promote its demolition and erasure, as occurred in the extension to the (Grade Two-star listed) "JIMS": (Judge Institute of Management Studies) by the "Judge Business School".
But then Cambridge University. which used to be a Client all Architects wanted to work for, sporting more decent-to-good 'Modernist' new buildings than any city in Britain, has enrirely though the strange stupidity, pusillanimity and ignorance of the Architects, fallen under the control of the "Professions of the Land", aka. the profession of "Surveyors" that have now re-invented themselves as 'Project Managers' and entirely displaced the Architect as the "Lead Consultant". Architects are no longer chosen by their Architecturally-cultured Clients. They are hired by the "Project Manager".
There is a huge "Fair" built in the "Giardini" of Venice every other year. JOA were in the British Pavilion in 1991, with James Stirling, Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, Nicholas Grimshaw and Michael Hopkins. Every building we showed had ducted services transformed into a diversity of "Architectural Orders", complete (inter alia), with hypostylar columns, capitals. entablatures and richly symbolic Decoration. The Critics bracketed the two older High-Tech boys with the two younger High Tech boys. That left me with James. He was, at this time, and so close to his unforseen early death, universally admired as the world's greatest living Architeect.
We had known each other for 35 years, since he had been my hung-over tutor at the Regent St. Polytechnic while he and James Gown, who became my Tutor at the AA, were building their radically Corbusian Ham Common. He was inarticulate and tired. After extricating myself, in 1966, from four years in the LCC-GLC and a year in the City firm of Fitzroy Robinson I had finally found a firm, in Louis des Soissons, with a glorious Library of 'old' Architectural books. Louis himself had died, but his library filled the piano nobile of his cream-painted Nash house overlooking Park Square West. I had to be thrown out of it after office hours. But I could eat my sandwiches in it for lunch and spend time in it as part of my official labours, which, for two years, were to restore to Classical Correctness the hasty repairs carried-out during WW2, to the mansions of Gloucester Gate. This site of my project, being just across Regent's Park, was easily accesed by the bicycle on which I travelled to work from my home at Marble Arch. I spent four years at Louis de Soissons. It was better than any Phd. Especially was this so as, being so close to the West End, I could methodically excavate all of its second-hand bookshops to build my own book collection. It was on a site inspection at Gloucester Gate that I was shown a hasty repair that the workman called "Dutch Concrete". It later re-appeared as "Blitzcrete" to clad the House, recently listed as "Grade One", of Marit and Hans Rausing.
So, bumping into Stirling on a street corner in Marylebone, he offered me, in the Autumn of 1965, a post in his Bureau. I had in fact sent him some photographs in 1963, of what I was designing in the GLC when I was trying to escape from Public Service Employment into the Private Sector - which I found very difficult. I replied to Stirling's offer that I was happy where I was. I knew that he would just appropriate my ideas and make them his own as he had done with mine in the Polytechnic and with Edward Reynolds' at the AA. 'New' ideas in the 9,000 years of our medium are rather rare. Yet they are, unlike the Family Silver, easily stolen. It helps if one has a private income to protect them during the periods when the design bureau is financially weak.
So Stirling cut me dead when I approached him on the first day of the Biennale. Of the other four: Foster refused to converse at all, while Rogers passed the time of day. Grimshaw and Hopkins were polite. None of them had anything interesting to say. Stirling, especially, attracted swarms of 'groupies' while we attracted none. His Electa bookshop was exquisite. he deserved it all. Rogers seemed to contrive an "Entrance Event" whever he progressed his entourage. JOA had been shoehorned into the 1991 Biennale (by Colin Amery, the Establishment Eminence Grise), as the statutory "black single mother", aka PoMo (Post-Modern), Bureau.
Not even the social occasion of the Biennale, the Phyllis Lambert Lunch, to which all of us were invited, could produce any interesting conversation. The American Architect next to me remarked on the chaste design of my watch. I informed it cost £30.00 in Oxford St. So he examined it it more carefully and seemed disturbed that it was, as he said: "A Casio". His coversation remained averse to our mutual profession. But this was typical of the whole Biennale. The Italian Architcts behaved impolitely - as if the whole shindig was arranged to promote them and their work. Being Italy, locus of by far the best Architecture in Europe, if not the globe has not been easy for them. Modern Italian Architecture suffers by comparison. They have turned to a "holier than thou" version of "Arte Povera". They referred to their most famus Architect of that time, Aldo Rossi, as "the Peasant".
Rima and I retreated to the apartment our Tudy Sammartini and her collection of the engravings of Athansius Kircher 17C polymath and inveterate visualiser. They stimulated the parts the Biennale could not reach. Which was distinctly more fun..
But all of this was merely personal. I was not familiar with these international jamborees. Being unpopular with all my peers but of interest to Fulvio Irace, a very clever Italian Critic, merely served to confirm my Bureau's isolation and my confidence in its ambitions.
What disturbed me much, much more was the Venice Biennale of 2018. I don't go to these Architecture-Fests any more. They irritate me with their confidence in the undying 'Modernista' confidence that technical cuteness allied to a cultivated ignorance of Architecture's long history will continue to deliver (in spite of its century of failures), a better and brighter future.
So I write from reports and pictures only..
To be continued....I have been busy watching my clever architect-daughter Iliona Outram-Khalili supervising the work of the brilliant team of roofers lead by Luke McGeary of Exclusive Roofing, Lingfield, Croydon...just the most marvellously quick, honest and technically-capable roofing firm in town. I call his work a lead roof decorated in slate because Luke is such a sculptor with lead! And after all our house is 200 years old this year and his roof is good for another 200. The gutter is 'Code 8', for G**d's sake!
Read the below if you like, I will be re-writing it shortly. Its all a bit disjointed right now and no clicks to take one to illustrations. Best to hit on "Unfinished Business" at the top of the dark blue column to the Right. Its my very recent ZOOM talk to the Architectural apprentices of Cambridge. I am getting broody...A plot is hatching!!!
The "Outramoderne" is a genuinely new way of doing Architecture.
Many 'Other' Architectures put their mechanical and electrical services into vertical and horizontal tubes called "Ducts". The Outramoderne is the ONLY one to make these ducts into the "Forbidden" Architectural system of an "ORDINE".
Well, you may ask, "why has that clever Mr. Outram gone to all this trouble and put his Clients to all this expense? Well lets answer the latter first. It's much cheaper to hide services from sight (in nice waterproof internal ducts), than to use THEM as decoration by hanging them outside - as the High-Tech Architectural style requires. The Insurers for the Architects nd Engineers of Lloyds had to pay out £10,000,000 when the claims for corrosion to the 'externalised' services came it. The £250,000 (per!), external lifts cannot today, be "guaranteed", according Mr. Ward, Lloyds C.E.O. "to reach the Ground Floor" It is an irony that what was billed as the "ultimate of flexibility" is unsure of what use it can be if Lloyds leave, as they seem to want to, quoting skyrocketing maintenance bills.
Now to the Positive Reason to make ducts into an "Ordine": Its to make ideas concrete, solid, breathing things. Yes it is to make one FEEL ideas because the columns and beames of an "Ordine" create a stage-set onto which when one walks, The power and drama of the forms, and the saturation of the Ceiling, floor, columns and walls in coloured, symbolic decoration, makes you aware that you are in a place which represents ideas of all and many sorts. If you already know something of these ideas you will be able to respond to them, as will the others around you. If you do not, well, you can learn about them and then respond. Of course if you prefer to live as a ghost in places that mean nothing to you, if you prefer, like some terrified teenager,, to live in places that fail totally to empower you, than ok. stay in your fluorescent-batten-lit magnolia-cream distemper-painted desert. But do not support the present policy which is to DENY EVERYONE and ANYONE a Well-Scripted Lifespace.
Its newness is that it uses the "new" technologies of the last two centuries to an entirely novel purpose. The Outramoderne does NOT use the radical steel, steam and glass techniques of the 19C (which one could have observed in the 1851 Great Exhibition in Hyde Park), to reproduce Architectures older than itself. The iron-foundries of late 19C Glasgow exported richly-ornamented cast- iron buildings to South Africa and India that even had a second- hand value in that they could be unbolted and shipped-on to new customers.
Nor does the Outramoderne employ these new 19C and then the even newer techniques of the 20C to inspire and promote (as did the 20C), an Architecture which entirely rejected the "styles" of the past. The 20C did not
use these New Technologies to achieve some ambition in the art of building. The technicities themselves, such as flying, sailing, submarining, tunnelling, rocketry and automobiles were the phenomenological states on which new buildings were required
to model. Anything and everything except the tabooed "Historic Architectures" were the grist to this 20C "Modern Architecture" mill.
There was the "Heroic" White Modernism, there was De Stijl, there was, Beton Brut "Brutalism", there was " Kasbah Krumble" , there was "High-Tech", there was "Organic" from Aalto to Bruce Goff. The list, as charted by the indefatigable Charles Jenks, under the ever-elastic rubric of "Post-Modernism" (Po-Mo), was infinitely nominable to the extent that each Architect had his own "Architecture".
It finally degenerated, aided-by some little-understood circumstances, into "Deconstruction" (Decon). Towards the end of the 20C, Architecture, in its 'as-found' state, continued, even after a whole century of experimentation, to be "taboo". So, in a sort of desperation named "Deconstruction", it became credible that if a "Building" was almost un-buildable, demonstrably ugly and virtually unusable (the Holocaust Museum in Berlin comes to mind), then it was almost certainly 'Fine Art". This signalled the final collapse of the Medium as well as the "Learned Profession" which has exercised it for the last few thousand years, under which the Public suffers today.
I must slightly divert now to describe these "LITTLE UNDERSTOOD CIRCUMSTANCES" ,. for they are IMPORTANT.
The first "Little Understood Circumstance" (LUC one), was the recent (1980s?), loss of the Architects' very own special manual skill of "Technical Drawing". I began to study Architecture in 1955. We were taught how to draw fine lines, using Chinese Ink, with " duck bill" drawing pens that had been used by Architects for the last 500 years. They were tricky things which would ruin your work with an accidental blob of indelible black ink. I think it was to make us appreciate how
much easier it was to work with the German-made Rapidograph pen which we were permitted to employ ONLY in our second year.
My point is that the whole first year of the five year course was spent obtaining the skills needed to make the technical drawings on which millions of pounds sterling of Building Contracts were signed. I soon discovered, especially when I launched my own Bureau, that provided all the technical, legal and fiscal targets were met, this Architect's Monopoly meant that almost anything I DREW would be actually BUILT. This and this ALONE (for I hardly UNDERSTOOD, "metaphysically" what I was doing), allowed my Bureau to achieve the position of "Breaking the Taboos of Modernism," (Maxwell) and "The only British Architect who wants his buildings to be Metaphysical"; (Rowan Moore).
Today this conveniently silent and wholly intuitive monopoly is lost and gone for ever. Anyone who can handle a computer can download the programmes that allow him to produce mechanically- designed contract drawings... AND issue them to a Builder
far faster than any Architect could hand-draw them... AND in all sorts of styles. This ancient and exclusive power of the Architect is no more! Our monopoly is GONE!
The only way that Architects can survive, and the Profession with along with its Medium is a theorisation of Architecture as its WHOLLY metaphysical self. The Profession is advised to effect the COMPLETE abandonment of the pseudo-populist fiction that Architecture is just "Baukunst" , just Miesian der Rohe "Art-of-Building'' or De Stijl juggling with "space". All that is OVER now! For the Public especially HAVE ALWAYS KNOWN that Architecture is "More", and much much more at that!
The second of these Little Understood Circumstances (LUC two), is the fact that even the escape from the confines of the City has not IN ANY WAY allowed-the Citizen to escape from the age-old fact that the Built- world is not, and was never intended to be merely some neutral space-to-let. The" Built-World", even when-it is just freeways, parking lots and strand-board bungalows, is an act of subtle and permanent violence that cements a culture into the form it has. These are, as the general medium of the human lifespace, a way of governing. For example in "City of Quartz" Mike Davis advises that the freeways in Los Angeles were traced onto its West Coast territories so as to make it difficult for the lower income customers living in the Latino residential areas to access the new urban central areas.
Jane Jacobs observed, on the USA's East Coast, that Robert Moses, the Commissioner for New Yorks' Parks, built the freeway bridges with insufficient head room to accommodate the busses that would bring customers too poor to own an automobile to his new outdoor Public Parks and swimming pools.
Closer to home, and immediately after winning the unexpected landslide election victory of 1945, the Labour Administration, with a Parliamentary MAJORITY larger than the total of all the opposition parties, chose to dismantle and destroy the entire urban culture of Britain. This extraordinary act of Architectural violence has yet to be historically examined. Yet the evidence is plain in the HMSO publication, launched (note the poetic language) in "Summer 1947", titled "The Redevelopment of Central Areas". Its beautifully produced, profusely illustrated kaolin-coated Art-paper pages became the handbook of the Planning Officers of every town and city in Post-WW2 Britain. It showed, in colour-coded diagrammatic detail that both "housing" as well as "industry" were to be evacuated from "urban areas" into
"housing estates" and "industrial estates".
All that would remain of the by-now badly blitzed (1947), towns of Britain would be a "ring-road", umbilically attached to
"parking garages" around a central area in which were located only shops, schools and
"offices".
I suppose it was a sort of compromise between the hard-nosed" Capitalist"
commercialism of the soon, to-be-departed Empire, and a deep apprehension of the barbarities and ferocious enmity between the Red and Black varieties of Continental European Socialism.
Whatever the cause, the effect was to direct Britain very firmly into a miniaturised version the Thorstein Veblen suburban "conspicuous consumption" lifespace of the USA- Britain's giant overseas invention that had, it seemed
"won the war" as well as all future conflicts by
exploding, two years earlier, the" Gadget" , as the first atom bomb was titled.
There have been mainly futile attempts to invent an antidote . But the only one, so far,
to prove effective was the entirely negative
"preservation movement" of the 1960's that has, until the present at least, prevented, but only in the very largest cities, the Victor Gruen/ Robert Moses conversion of the whole island into a mini-rustic USA of life lived-out not so much "with coffee spoons" as "in Parking-lots".
The "Outramoderne" can be understood as a third sort of relationship. The Outramoderne employs the new technologies of the past 200 years not to reproduce as did the 19C, the Architectural language of the past . Nor, as did the 20C, does it taboo Architecture's History and throw both Medium and Profession onto the mercy of these "new'" technologies while hoping to persuade buildings to be aeroplanes and cities to be ocean liners or fungal growths.
The" Outramoderne" merely uses these technical powers to study Architecture "as found" over the past 10,000 years so as to INVENT A VERSION OF IT "for our own time".
It enjoys the fact that its "geison" moulding is a cyma-recta moulding (for the "Kymata" are the waves of the "far horizon"), of 3mm, brake- pressed, very dark blue powder-coated aluminium that is built both Cambridge, London and Texas. The Cambridge one has stainless steel washers that shine like the stars in the night sky. Both are big enough to walk down while cleaning it out.
The Outramodeme prefers that its huge surface-scripted ceiling graphics are NOT hand-painted fresco (as required by Simon
Sainsbury), but are, as accepted by Texas,
Scanachrone acrylic pigment digital prints on fireproof acoustically transparent canvas.
The Outramoderne also prefers that our giant 1.5 M and 1.8 M" diameter columns are equally NOT inscribed in freshly frescoed plaster rendered onto cut river needs but are composed by eye with the aid of Photoshop using an aleatory model and monoprinted by liquid acrylic paper-solvent transfers . This is described in Appendices: 20, 21 & 23. In short the Outramoderne rejects most of the hand-crafted inscriptional techniques of (the pathetically named by Burlington House), "Historic" Architecture because although they may remain practical in the context of a Walter Benjamin-esque" Fine Art" private- Gallery antics they have become " inauthentic" at the huge scale of Architecture. Such ‘revivals’ and ‘restorations’ are, today, merely “fakes” and “frauds”.
"To restore", as Bob Matthew, Emeritus Dean of Cornell , described when he wrote: "Architecture to its historic role of conveying meaning is, of course, immensely ambitious and, many would say, impossible..."
Yet , the joke is that whereas it took (for the sake of discussing the technology ONLY!), Michael Angelo four years to hand-fresco the Sistine Ceiling it took a mere two days to erect the 356 No. 2ft×8ft computer-printed panels, so they join exactly to create a single design that is 75 ft long by 55 ft. wide and mounted 50 ft. above the floor for the Faculty of Computational Engineering of Rice University, Houston, Texas.
It took longer for me (nine months), to 'cook' the design to the point at which one could give the data on a disc to Scanachrome, up in Skelmersdale, to print these panels. Most of that was spent inventing the iconographic text, then drawing it and mechanically transferring my hand-drawn A1 tracing-paper pen outline on to hand pressed watercolor paper. The longest time was spent by my
colouring in, with water colour, each one of the 627 individual panels. I was right to use water colour because its freshly-applied and unevenly drying variegations were faithfully drum-scanned and then digitally reproduced at a ✗32 enlargement by Scanachrome's wide-body Israeli-built acrylic jet printers. The whole ceiling looks as fresh and hand-made as in fact , it really was (quite a lot in my Marriott Medical Hotel room overlooking Rice Campus), but just at 1/32 its final size!
What I am saying here is that the "Outramoderne" merely uses, in an "impure" and merely practical wary, the marvellous medium of Architecture to do EVERYTHING that it has ALWAYS done. It is nothing but technical incompetence and ontological cowardice to repress the fabulous and rewarding metaphysical capabilities of this medium as we have done during thre last seventy years.