Primitive Original Matters in Architecture

Primitive Original matters in architecture Edited by Jo Odgers, Flora Samuel and Adam Sharr First published 2006 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2006 selection and editorial matter: Jo Odgers, Flora Samuel and Adam Sharr; individual chapters: the contributors This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Primitive : original matters in architecture / edited by Jo Odgers, Flora Samuel and Adam Sharr—1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical reference and index. 1. Architecture—Language. 2. Architecture—Terminology. 3. Language and culture. 4. Architecture—Psychological aspects. I. Odgers, Jo. II. Samuel, Flora. III. Sharr, Adam. NA2543.L34P75 2006 720.1’4—dc22 2006005423 ISBN10: 0-415-38538-5 ISBN13: 978-0-415-38538-1 (hbk) ISBN10: 0-415-38539-3 ISBN13: 978-0-415-38539-8 (pbk) ISBN10: 0-203-96744-5 ISBN13: 978-0-203-96744-7 (ebk) Contents Illustration credits ix Notes on contributors x Acknowledgements xvi Introduction xvii Jo Odgers, Flora Samuel and Adam Sharr Part 1: Original matters 1 1 Primitive: the word and concept 3 Adrian Forty Part 2: Negotiating origins 15 2 The primitive as modern problem: invention and crisis 17 Dalibor Vesely 3 Origins redefined: a tale of pigs and primitive huts 33 Mari Hvattum 4 The primitive hut: fantasies of survival in an all-white world 43 Lorens Holm 5 Gottfried Semper’s primitive hut: duration, construction and self-creation 55 Jonathan A. Hale 6 Mineral matters: formation and transformation 63 Richard Weston Part 3: Questioning colonial constructs 71 7 Post-colonizing the primitive 73 Felipe Hernández and Lea Knudsen Allen 8 Notes for an alternative history of the primitive hut 86 Stephen Cairns 9 Reinventing ‘primitiveness’: Henri Lacoste and the Belgian Congo Pavilion at the 1931 International Colonial Exposition in Paris 96 Johan Lagae 10 The radicalization of the primitive in Brazilian modernism 108 Styliane Philippou 11 The need to be critical 121 Robert Brown Contents Part 4: Urban myths 125 12 Practically primitive 127 David Leatherbarrow 13 Giants and columns 139 Nicholas Temple 14 The emblematic city: John Wood and the re-founding of Bath 150 Jo Odgers 15 Alvar Aalto and the primitive suburb 166 Harry Charrington 16 Metaphorical Manhattan – ‘Paradise Lost’ 176 Lorna McNeur Part 5: Making marks 181 17 The perception of self-negation in the space of emptiness: the primitive in Tadao Ando’s architecture 183 Jin Baek 18 The ‘primitive surface’: carving, modelling, marking and transformation 194 Stephen Kite 19 The modern-day primitive hut? ‘Self-building’ with Jung, Aalto and Le Corbusier 207 Flora Samuel and Sarah Menin 20 The wisdom of the sands 221 Simon Unwin Part 6: Primitive futures? 227 21 Digital commerce and the primitive roots of architectural consumption 229 Richard Coyne 22 Primitive and the everyday: Sergison Bates, Lefebvre and the guilt of architectural expertise 240 Adam Sharr 23 Heart of Darkness: air of comfort 251 Helen Mallinson 24 Primitive: from which construction begins 260 Peter Salter 25 The United Cultures of Britain 267 CJ Lim Select bibliography 273 Index 279 viii Chapter 8 Notes for an alternative history of the primitive hut Stephen Cairns Historically, arts discourse in the West has tended to characterize the ‘primitive’ in two distinctive frames. The first depicts the primitive as an attractive state, holding something the West or modernity has lost. Here the primitive is imag- ined as being in tune with nature and able to serve as a reservoir of essentially unchanging and noble truths; and because these truths are usually caricatured as fragile and under constant threat, they are seen to need protection or conser- vation, an impulse James Clifford has named the ‘salvage paradigm’.1 The second frame depicts the primitive as a repulsive condition. Here the primitive is conceived as a more violent, marauding and threatening state, not so much in need of protecting, conserving or salvaging, as controlling and guarding against. Furthermore, both the attractive and repulsive depictions of the primitive – ‘what we should emulate or, alternately, what we should fear’2 – are often entangled, such that a positive assessment of the primitive cannot help but be coloured by a negative one, and vice versa. The noble savage and the cannibal, that is, are almost always co-present. Theory and the primitive Recent theoretical writing has captured something of this entanglement, and has self-consciously activated the violent and marauding conception of the primitive to alternate ends. Theorists often gathered under the heading of ‘post- structuralism’ – Derrida, Lyotard, Deleuze and Guattari, Kristeva, Barthes and others – have redeployed the critical potential of the primitive as a condition of radical and threatening difference. The primitive in this disparate body of theory 86 Notes for an alternative history of the primitive hut circulates in the guise of terms such as ‘paganism’, ‘nomadism’ or ‘savagery’. The primitive is, in this context, activated as agent of disruption, interruption and potential. With its themes of corporeality, base materiality, irrationality, or alternate rationalities, the idea of the primitive serves as the vehicle by which to question, as Spivak puts it, ‘the millennially cherished excellences of western metaphysics: the sovereignty of the subject’s intention, the power of predica- tion’.3 It acts as a provocation to radical forms of invention. In the context of this redeployment, the long-standing notion of the primitive-as-reservoir has come to seem anachronistic. The primitive, now loosened from its essentialist moor- ings, is reasserted as a generative force. No longer merely a mute resource awaiting reverential interpretation by external (western) agencies, the primitive is affirmed as a principle of newness and potential in its own right. For all of this recent affirmation of the primitive, the cultural-political dimensions of this recognition are, at best, implicit. Reasserting the primitive as a generative force in western theory, seemed to carry with it the possibility that those cultures to whom the term ‘primitive’ was historically attached might now themselves find a place from which to speak, to act and to articulate their own desires and aspirations. Yet, there is nothing in this theoretical work that offered such an explicit or particular politics of representation. Without such particu- larity, the appreciation for a newly radicalized notion of the primitive begins to appear as yet another form of orientalism in which a generalized mode of creativity and potential is extracted from heterogeneous subjects whose only unifying trait would be a relative lack of material resources. Post-colonial critics such as Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha, have, in various ways, commented on this paradox. They have sought to exploit the openings that this animated and threatening primitivism offers to a consideration of a cross- cultural politics of representation, while at the same time critiquing the latent ‘macrological nostalgia’ and ‘primitivistic reverence’ that they say persists in this theoretical work.4 As Spivak points out (in the context of her critique of Kristeva’s book on Chinese peasant women) the interest ‘French theorists’ such as Derrida, Lyotard, Deleuze and others have in ‘reaching out to all that is not the West’ is ultimately a form of self-interest. As she puts it: [i]n spite of their occasional interest in touching the other of the West, of metaphysics, of capitalism, their repeated question is obsessively self-centred: if we are not what official history and philosophy say we are, who then are we (not), how are we (not)?5 Spivak characterizes this theoretical engagement with difference as a kind of crisis management in which the West turns to the primitive only in order to manage its heterogeneity and to confirm and enrich its own identity.6 Homi Bhabha advances a similar argument suggesting that the notion of culture is 87 Stephen Cairns often used to domesticate difference into the project of universal theory- making, citing a number of (mostly contemporary) illustrative exemplars: ‘Montesquieu’s Turkish Despot, Barthes’ Japan, Kristeva’s China, Derrida’s Nambikwara Indians, Lyotard’s Cashinahua pagans’.7 In each instance theory’s proper name is doubled by a culturalist ‘ethnic’ representative, which stands for difference incorporated. In this doubling theory enacts a ‘strategy of contain- ment where the Other text is forever the exegetical horizon of difference, never the active agent of articulation’.8 Indeed, one of the central arguments of Bhabha’s book The Location of Culture is that anthropology’s culture-concept functions repressively in the context of radical difference primarily because of its spatiality. He argues that, in spite of the sophisticated self-reflexivity of contemporary theory, ‘[t]he Other is [still] cited, quoted, framed, illuminated, encased in the shot/reverse-shot strategy of a serial enlightenment’.9 In this sense, the other is spatialized: located, fixed, grounded and thereby known through the culture-concept and so ‘loses its power to signify, to negate, to initiate its historic desire, to establish its own institutional and oppositional discourse’.10 The artistic avant-garde from the turn of the last century is, of course, one of the classic sites of the West’s engagement with the primitive.

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