Creative Users

ACTIONS OF ARCHITECTURE
Architects and Creative Users
Jonathan Hill
Routledge
ISBN 0-415-29043-0 (pbk)

If you are one to be drawn to innovative and alternative strains of architectural thought, this book will whet your intellect with its multi-disciplinary approach to understanding architectural design. Drawing on the text ‘The Death of the Author’ by French literary critic Roland Barthes, Actions of Architecture is inspired by Barthes’s argument for a writer who is aware of the creativity of the reader. This approach compares the relations between the author and reader and the artist and viewer, thus informing us on the relations between the architect and user.
Hill’s passion for the subject of the role of the creative user in architecture is evident through the inclusion of a wide range of works, by architects, artists and writers. This book presents a critique on the traditional mode of architectural production, that is, one which idealises the authorial Architect figure as the sole author of architecture. It states that “the creative user either produces a new space or gives an existing one meanings and uses contrary to established behaviour”.

ctions of Architecture is meant to be read like a user’s guide into the topic of the creativity of use as a central issue of architectural design. It begins with a critique of strategies that define the user as passive and predictable, such as contemplation and functionalism, and establishes the definition of a “creative user”. This simultaneously challenges the privileged title of ‘Architect’, that “to acquire social status and financial security, architects need a defined area of knowledge, with precise contents and limits, in which they can prove expertise”. Such exclusivity precludes the involvement of the user as having a part in the creation of architecture. Extrapolating this idea, it is akin to saying that the finished product of Art is an end in itself, and that the Art viewer is irrelevant, as he or she does not generate or contribute new knowledge to the field. This archaic exaction of architecture no longer stands, and it is crucial for readers, viewers and users alike, to be aware of their creative role.

Conversely, it is up to the progressive and informed architect to harness this awareness and extraneous creativity in his conception of architecture. The author identifies actions of DIY, montage, polyvalence and collaboration in avant-gardist art which recognise user creativity. These concepts which are familiar to artistic production, are discussed on a contemporaneous platform with architecture – citing works by Marcel Duchamp, Krzysztof Wodiczko and John Baldessari, alongside Sverre Fehn’s Pavilion of the Nordic Nations, Diller + Scofidio’s Blur Building, Steven Holl and Vito Acconci’s Storefront for Art and Architecture.
The creative user should be the central concern of architectural design, states the book. Consequently, how would the architect as user, conceive spaces which gives voice to the everyday user who contributes to the architecture, as opposed to merely inhabiting it? How does this shift in thought alter our approach to the mass production of generic spaces in a city that needs to grow (too) fast?

-Debbie Loo, FFW

[Book cover source: Google Books]

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JJ is co-founder of 5ft Creatives and is currently based in New York.