v-2.org

Image by Nurri Kim.

One of the more obvious features of the world around us is that things move and change at different rates. It's something we're all aware of from early childhood - from the time we first gauge the exasperating latency of our grasping hands against the effortlessness with which butterflies escape them, or the speed of our toddling feet against that of the pigeons which ever outrun us in the park.

Every child soon realizes that a night lasts longer than a goodnight kiss, and a season still longer than a single night. Speed, its close relative duration: it's so very useful, not to mention frequently critical to our survival, to be able to recognize and discern fine differences of intensity in these qualities that we develop strong senses for them early on in life.

But for whatever reason, we frequently enough make decisions in the world as if this were not so. We make choices, from the trivial to the globally consequential, in blithe disregard of these things we evidently understand so early and so well.

Every tattooist knows the risks inherent in inking a lover's name, or the logo of a favorite band, into the skin of a bicep or a calf, and yet their clients continue to request just that. At the distal end of the seriousness scale, nations choose to permit the development of entire metropolitan complexes, home to tens of millions of people, in regions whose climate is changing out from under them and which may well be underwater in twenty years' time.

The lesson could not be clearer: we ignore the different rates at which things change at our peril.

shear complexity

Drawing on the earlier work of architect Frank Duffy, Brand introduces something he calls the "shearing layer diagram," which identifies six layers - from the site, which may evolve only over geological stretches of time, to stuff, which changes at the whim and ability of the inhabitants.

A bricks-and-mortar building can easily last fifty, a hundred, three hundred years. By contrast, the social and cultural conventions that go a long way toward shaping the lives lived in that building - understandings regarding the division of labor, gender roles, the place of leisure, the very definition of a family - may undergo titanic changes in a fraction of that time.

Families themselves expand and contract over the course of decades. Styles in furniture and the technologies underpinning the communications devices and other appliances daily life depends on probably change significantly at least once or twice a decade. Windows need cleaning and rain gutters need clearing at yearly intervals. Lightbulbs burn out and lawns need mowing still more often than that.

Brand argues, therefore, that architecture that hardwires a given fashion or social arrangement or deployment of technology into its deeper, slower layers is architecture that is ultimately bound to fail its users.

The insight contained in the diagram, startlingly novel as it was at first appearance, is at root commonsensical. It accords perfectly with those early perceptions of the world: the diverse aspects of the phenomenal world change at different rates, and the differences matter.

in with the in crowd

Of course, one can barely thumb through the leading architecture journals of late without stumbling across an article detailing one or another of these high-profile developments: Prada's experiments with Rem Koolhaas and Herzog & de Meuron; archminimalist John Pawson's projects for Calvin Klein in New York, Seoul and Paris; the collaboration of Claudio Silvestrin and Massimiliano and Doriana Fuksas on Giorgio Armani's Hong Kong flagship Chater House.

Such alliances are all over, these days; one might even say they've become fashionable. They seek to capture the essence of a fashion house in bricks and mortar, to communicate the ineffable value proposition that is designer style in real-world arrangements of space and substance.

Brand's implicit challenge to them is simply stated: fashion is fast, concrete is slooooow.

ahead warp speed

The fastest subcultures I know - the peacock kids who gather to see and be seen in the narrow streets and plazas around Harajuku Station, the hip-hop aficionados who surge out of the high school up the street from me come three o'clock every afternoon - work to a still tighter schedule. These scenes telescope the bleeding-edge/mass-adoption/social-suicide cycle into a few days or weeks, effectively caricaturing the way it works elsewhere.

This mirrors neatly the headlong pace of the seasonal haute couture collections, which over the last decade have taken as text an inexhaustible, onrushing stream of inspirations: refugees, prisoners, Hasidic Jews, porn stars, heroin addicts, fighter pilots, the Amish, 1970's porn stars, amputees, the guerrillas of the Sierra Maestra, Catholic nuns, brownshirts, surgeons, Dickensian street urchins, fictional 1970's porn stars, and so forth.

Even in the relatively turgid waters of fashion's mainstream, things evolve at a rate that would seem startling in most other contexts. Take The Gap's upmarket brand, Banana Republic. In the space of fifteen years, the chain mutated from an expedition-style outfitter selling safari gear in netting-strewn emporia festooned with pith helmets and defunct Jeeps, to a crisply modernist vendor of sleek information-age "business casual," to a retailer of dewy-eyed neoclassicism, all safe and nostalgic.

Some fashion houses seem to want it both ways. Comme des Garçons has experimented with guerrilla storefronts, mayfly spaces that arise and disappear in the space of a few weeks or months. The experiments speak not merely to an understanding of the velocity of culture, but to how that understanding itself can be packaged and deployed as a badge of cool. ("Provisional retailing" is the catchphrase.) Hedging its bets, though, the brand also offers architectural statements in the traditional mode in Paris, Tokyo and New York City.

speed of stone

The reasons why architecture moves so slowly relative to other areas of human endeavor are manifold, overdetermined, their roots lost in a centuries-old interplay of culture and matter. The way in which architects are educated and accredited for practice, the inherent expense of building (and attendant conservatism of builders), the relationship between architecture and engineering, the nature of the materials and technologies involved: all function as brakes on the discipline's forward momentum.

Consider: a dropped stitch is easier to repair than a misplaced wall, quicker and cheaper to remedy by several orders of magnitude. A jacket gone out of fashion may be altered or discarded; a similarly outmoded showroom must likely be lived with until the wherewithal exists to reimagine it.

Put another way, the gulf between fashion and architecture is that between biology and geology: a human practice ultimately founded on the rhythms of seasons, harvests, and shearings versus the speed of stone.

flight risk

We're left to wonder, as customers and spectators of these spaces, what will happen to them when fashion moves on, as it does and will, invariably and by definition.

We're compelled to recognize the degree to which these spaces increasingly function as privatized commons, frankly subsuming the functions earlier generations understood as properly belonging to the public, civic realm - and to ask whether branded space will or even could in principle be nurturant of robust, vibrant human community.

Not least, we're provoked to point out that in its rush to wrap itself in the mantle of High Architecture, fashion risks sawing off its antennae for the street and the moment, and in so doing losing the frivolity and audacity and agility that make it what it is.

Fashion is a dream of the world, but the world is made of matter, and we know that dreams and matter evolve for different purposes, at different speeds, in different ways. Perhaps we should let them.