Architecture

OPENING. Perhaps the most well known line from Adolf Loos’s famous essay “Ornament and Crime” is the claim that, “As ornament is no longer organically related to our culture, it is also no longer the expression of our culture”. This move, which separates ornament and culture, links Modernist architecture to the culture of modernity. Reading this now two things emerge. The first is a statement of intent – Modernist architecture clearly defines itself in relation to culture. The second is a question – how today can the relation between architecture and culture to be understood? Despite the clarity of the Loos’s definition, this contemporary question has a persistent quality that is usually noticed in its occlusion. In other words, the extent to which the link is denied – and architecture is seen as no more than building and thus thought in terms of a differentiation of the economic from the cultural – suggests that the possibility of architecture’s relation to culture is a question whose acuity cannot be readily escaped. What then is architecture’s relation to culture?
In purely strategic terms, the question is relevant, since policy – usually in terms of government policy and even architectural criticism – often uses straightforwardly economic criteria to make decisions or draw conclusions. Approaching architecture as an industry, while apposite in certain instances, fails to allow for the role of the architectural in forming part of a nation’s, or a community’s, culture. Yet, it is clear that the presence of architecture in the daily lives of citizens underscores its ineliminable cultural presence.
The task in this essay is to address this presence and to draw conclusions that might have relevance for policy directed decisions, as well as evaluative ones. This essay was prompted by the refusal of public money to the Australian pavilion at the recent Venice Biennale, but more importantly, by the need to engage with the issues that such a refusal raises. For the