At the Auckland Writers Festival, artist Gretchen Albrecht was interviewed on the occasion of the publication of Luke Smythe’s excellent monograph on her work. Albrecht gave typically warm, gracious and modest answers to interviewer Julia Waite. What struck me, though, was the clarity with which Albrecht described her work. I am sure you are familiar with her work, be it the luscious stacked sweeps of colour in the West Coast works, the semicircular lunettes or the more recent ovals.

These are abstract works, full of life, colour and occasional geometric elements. There are no figurative subjects, no immediately recognisable elements suggesting a singular meaning. Albrecht acknowledged the possibility, even probability, of personal reaction to the work; indeed, she was generous in her appreciation of the commitment by the viewer implied in the sharing of a personal view. For all that, she spoke eloquently and fulsomely of the work’s place in her oeuvre, the ideas implicit in the work and even, on occasion, the techniques employed.

Her responses seemed at odds with the way we architects speak of our work and I wondered again why it is that a discipline so suffused with rich content is so rarely described in anything other than the most general of phrases or indecipherable jargon. While musing on this, I read Simon Wilson’s New Zealand Herald article on judging the Auckland branch awards in which he recounts his experience of: “a bleak and empty monstrosity, designed by a major firm”, its master bedroom a “blank space larger than many houses, with a bed crouched against one wall and a couple of sticks of furniture stranded on the far side of the room. No other adornments or comforts or signs of life.” 

Though Wilson’s rhetoric of critique is some distance from Albrecht’s more gentle self-reflection, his description of the bed crouching against one wall and of stranded sticks of furniture is a too-rare description of architectural space. Though we are not given a very comprehensive description of the space, Wilson’s laudable economy of words communicates the austere quality of the space with great effect. 

On those few occasions where architects speak of their own work, invariably competition and award entries, the texts fall into the common standards of “the client brief called for…” or effusive descriptions of the project’s relationship with the site. The former gains vestiges of legitimacy through a combination of its appeal to 20th-century functionalism and architecture as a service industry, as if that were enough. Andrew Barrie has described the latter as a particularly New Zealand affliction: one that suggests that such a response to landscape has hobbled our investigation of more abstract considerations.

We might account for this apparent reticence by noting that architects in the country have little opportunity to reflect on their own work. Monographs, invariably being self-funded are, perforce, required to double as promotional works. The local magazines are jaded by the repetitive nature of those common tropes that the client, or the site, made me do it. Indeed, a former editor of this very magazine banned architects’ descriptions of their buildings for this very reason.

Formal critique of projects is sparse, too; perhaps it is a victim of a too-small community where one is likely to run afoul of a former classmate or partner’s ex-neighbour. Perhaps, too, the long shadow of a legal case brought against the institute by an offended practitioner still sends a shudder down a publisher’s spine.

It is not unsurprising in a country and industry known for blunt pragmatism that architects are somewhat shy about suggesting their work is anything more than an assembly of requested rooms but we, and our culture, is the worse for our reticence. I wonder, too, if the rarity of articulated description is a result of the pervasive impact of digital photography: a technology that ruthlessly exploits the sense that, as Simon Devitt identifies, is “always on”.

So potent is the relationship between shutter click and social posting that the compression of depicted space into two-dimensional image renders the original subject as little more than fodder for the arranging of seductive pixels. In doing so, the two-dimensional image has become the default medium of description and, in being so, precludes a description of other senses in play.

I think such reticence, or inability, to talk openly and simply about one’s work sells architecture short and reinforces the rather uncomfortable notion that architects invariably have recourse to opaque jargon that confuses rather than clarifies the subject, leaving the glowing pixels to do the talking. I understand the difficulties that talking about architecture entails. Our stock in trade is space yet, for almost all our listeners, this is black stuff into which we send rockets, not the malleable ether we shape with our constructions.

Perhaps, to counter this confusion, we might start with empirical examination and ask ourselves “how big is it, how wide, how long, how high?” and so forth. Donald Judd describes just such a process in his essay ‘Some Aspects of Color in General and Red and Black in Particular’ when he launches an enquiry: “After a few thousand years, space is so unknown that a discussion of it would have to begin with a rock. How large is it? Is it on a level surface? Does it rest on the surface or does it perch?”

The essay goes on to talk about the complexity of the subject: that even a simple arrangement of elements on a plane begets a multitude of spaces and interactions and, by implication, the description of even the simplest of architectural spaces is a challenging affair.

We are not helped by a paucity of descriptive spatial language in the public arena, yet, as I listened to Albrecht in that interview, I mused over how much more difficult a discussion of the meaning of the abstract arrangement of pigment must be than describing the ideas implicit in our ordering of Corbusier’s “masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light”. As with Judd, we can start with simple descriptors: height, width, depth, texture, colour, smell, sound and so on.

We can also add more abstract criteria to describe space, using those ideas of physiological and psychological response to the shape of space. These latter ideas will take a little explanation when first run out in public but recourse to simple exemplars, the comfort of having one’s back against a wall, for example, may assist understanding. Many of us intuitively employ these tools as we work, asking ourselves whether or not this is wide enough, long enough and so forth, though Wilson’s Herald piece suggests that such self-editing is not universally employed.

Can I urge you never again to write “the brief called for…”? In all but the most exceptional cases, meeting the brief is the least that you should achieve – it is architecture that fires up the imagination and that attracts clients to our trade. They invariably have expectations of something more than the pragmatic ordering of things. Those few clients who make it to the microphone during award ceremonies are invariably smart and articulate, and, above all, know the value of what it is they have achieved with us.

Let us honour those clients, our culture and the many clients to come by busting open the mumbled arcane, jargon-filled language of a secret society and rejoice in sharing the mechanisms of our manipulations of space – our craft will be the richer and more successful for it. 

This article first appeared in Architecture New Zealand magazine.

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