Nicolai Bo Andersen (NBA): In your book Architecture Oriented Otherwise, you argue in favour of an alternative to architecture as visual appearance or technical performance calling for “[…] a new understanding of the ways [buildings] can, indeed must, communicate with one another and the unbuilt environment.” What is the problem in contemporary architecture as you see it?

David Leatherbarrow(DL): Though I might be accused of committing what John Ruskin called the pathetic fallacy, I’d say many contemporary buildings are rather selfish.Or perhaps it is better to say (geometrically) they are unhesitatingly self-centred. Two problems are immediately apparent: 1) selfishness neglects the opportunities, perhaps responsibility, to contribute to spaces and settings that are shared by others, broadly speaking the public realm, and 2) self-centeredness shows itself to be illusory when one recalls the several dimensions of any building’s necessary involvement with conditions outside the work. No building can supply the fresh air, daylight, and orientation all its users will enjoy. I have no objection to a work’s self-sameness, composure, and equanimity. In fact I praise it. My criticism concerns the illusion or conceit of a work’s ability to accomplish its purposes with only its own resources.

Perhaps monuments can and should express their disinclination to acknowledge others. But even this type receives necessary light and air from elsewhere, shared by all around, to say nothing about its spatial attributes, such as frontality or elevation, which are granted by topographical conditions that exceed the proper remit of the single work.

The alternative I would advance can be called engaged autonomy. I introduce and explain this term in a forthcoming book called Projecting Urbanity: architecture for and against the city. A corresponding term that I’ve recently come to use is whole part, by which I mean a building that has been designed and built to be internally coherent, but whose make-up anticipates interaction with external conditions that never asked for and remain indifferent to its reach despite their roles as its necessary counterparts. My whole part thesis intends a restatement of architecture’s limited authority and responsibility together with its corresponding need for lateral involvement and wide awareness, not as a matter of choice but of the project’s interdependent independence.

NBA:You refer to the architectural historian and theorist Dalibor Vesely and his notion of communicative space. To Vesely, the division between the instrumental and the communicative understanding of architecture is the main source of confusion in contemporary culture. How can we understand buildings as communicating in a culture where digital communication seems to prevail?

DL: One (newer) kind of communication does not foreclose other (older) kinds. Architecture, like other manifestations of culture, communicates at different levels or in different ways. Some are more dominant in one period, others at another time. Vesely also referred to these levels of communication as modes of articulation. The modalities are familiar. Most obvious is writing on walls, useful for those who do not or cannot apprehend other, less literal modes. Slightly less immediate is communication through figurative art. Up until fairly recently, in the long history of architecture from remote antiquity to the modern period, buildings provided places for sculptural works which were communicative through stance, gesture, expression, and recognizable attributes. Visible and graspable, but not exactly legible are the communications that result from the selection and finishing of construction materials, which communicate temperature, for example, and by implication degrees of domesticity or formality. A library’s entry hall and reading room are alternately a little cooler and warmer in expression, even if the difference can’t be detected with a thermometer. More spatial than material are the communications that result from a building’s orientation, which is to say its various facings toward or away from public or private situations (communicating openness, separation, and so on). And finally, communication in architecture also results from a work’s geometry.It's simple volume and mass, its aggregate or assembled make-up, and so on. Digital communications can be added to this list without cancelling the others.

Architecture’s communications are silent, of course, but not for that reason unintelligible. One way to think about this is by comparison with gestures which are similarly embodied, directional, and sometimes figurative. While human gestures often articulate movements (of the hand, head, eyes, and so on), postures are also expressive. Works of architecture, too, have their bearing, or inclination.

None of these modes of communication have disappeared in our culture despite the pervasive prominence of other modes of expression, such as the digital.

NBA: Inspired by Vesely, you highlight human praxis as central for architectural configuration and representation. As I understand it, to you, architecture is not simply related to the material or tectonic reality but rather the performances that people and buildings enact together. Is it fair to say that aesthetics has a social dimension?

DL: We find it surprising that the words cosmetics and cosmos are siblings. The first seems entirely trivial, superficial, and adventitious, the second unparalleled in importance, no less weighty than world-defining. Yet, if the order or wholeness of the second is to be apprehended it must make itself or be made apparent – and not just to you or me but to all of us who want to participate in that order. Why, if the two (cosmetics and cosmos) pertain to entirely distinct domains, do we feel it is so very wrong to dress casually for important events, funerals, weddings, or court cases for example? In preparation for events of this kind each of us takes great care to properly prepare ourselves, carefully crafting our appearance, face and hair especially but also clothing, so that our participation is seen to have recognized and respected the style or decorum of the event. An unexpected appearance also results from (similarly socially minded) preparation. Recurring human situations have their own style, configuration, and structure (within one or another culture) in which our behaviours find their place (or refuse their place). In short, works, like individuals, always play out their lives within worlds; worlds that are no less social than environmental.

The ancient writer Xenophon argued in his book on Home Economics – a very good read for anyone interested in ecology these days – that a tidy arrangement of jars in a cupboard or the separate and orderly storage of boots and blankets in a closet was unmistakably beautiful. Fearing, I suppose, his readers would find the proposition laughable – beauty is a big word – he alluded to a line of soldiers or troupe of dancers whose collective beauty resulted from their orderly arrangement. The same could be observed in the standing of columns on a stylobate. A person gifted with refined sensibility wasn’t required for an aesthetic judgement of this kind.Nor would it be only my assessment or just yours. Aesthetic content in architecture seems to have been linked to both purpose and social sense. Although the argument has an ancient source, the premise survives today in everyday expressions like ‘straightening my room,’ even if its lines aren’t straight or others might initially find the arrangement discordant.

NBA: In your lecture at The Royal Danish Academy (November 10, 2022) you argued that traditionally, architecture was meant to accommodate social assembly. Not being an abstract exercise, geometry was a way of sustaining a society through gathering and sharing. It seems to me that this dimension has been totally lost in contemporary architecture. Is there any chance it can be revitalised?

DL: Maybe what seems to be lost still exists beneath the surface of everyday experience and thought. Maybe cultural memory is stratified with some forms readily apparent on the dusty surface of cultural geology, and others, levels of richer soil, rather more hidden, fallow for a while, waiting to be exposed or cultivated, which is to say recalled, reawakened, or rearticulated. To a rather considerable degree, the Italian Renaissance was the result of this sort of recollection. Many modern architects felt they could only go forward by going backward (Kahn, Sert, Le Corbusier, Loos, and so on). Loos, for example, famously said that he was a modern architect who built in the manner of the ancient Viennese. Of course, his buildings didn’t look like those of Fischer von Erlach or Johan Lucas Hildebrandt, but something about the ways they were built and the ways of living they accommodated reinterpreted the methods and purposes of the antecedents – despite their improbability in Fin-de-Siecle Vienna.

Sub-surface continuities don’t make a show of themselves. Nor are the really significant dimensions of cultural sense those that are most obvious. Yet, under certain conditions – often disarming or disturbing – these structures of sense or behaviour with their architectural accommodations and expressions reappear, ready to articulate desired experiences. I have in mind the ways communities spontaneously form themselves in response to violence or destruction of one kind or another.

NBA: Your lecture had the somewhat provocative title Culture Sustaining Nature? You argued that we as culture(s) are part of the natural world. Also, in your book Three Cultural Ecologies you argue that architecture is in fact deeply connected to its environment. Has contemporary architecture lost the sense of mutuality of culture and nature?

DL: The polarity is deeply embedded in the Western tradition. Recent anthropology, the work of figures like Philippe Descola, Tim Ingold, or Marshall Sahlins for example, has shown that despite our sense of its obvious truth and inevitability, the two world thesis, as I call it, has only been dominant in limited parts of the world for limited periods of time – it wouldn’t have made sense in ancient Greece, among native American peoples, nor in most of Asia until recently. It seems to me that today we are witnessing the end of a style of thought that has exhausted itself and is of little use when confronting today’s realities – global warming, thinning of the ozone, stem cell research, and so on – contemporary developments in which the distinction between nature and culture is not only meaningless but an impediment to creative thought and action.

Jean Nouvel speaks of putting nature to work, recognizing that effects intended in design require undesigned conditions (of nature) to make themselves apparent and achieve their end. Wang Shu speaks repeatedly about architecture learning from the natural world, though he often uses landscape painting and poetry to mediate mountains and rivers. For Glenn Murcutt, there is no sense in beginning a design or work of construction without carefully studying and discerning what potentials and limitations exist in the natural context of project making. Much of his work makes a show of how the built work participates in the patterns and structures of the natural world. Of course, if you take a broken wooden table and plant it half in the ground any miraculous growth that might arise will not take the form of another table. These and other examples show that there is a sense of mutuality that not only allows but requires different agencies of production.

NBA: In your writings and teaching you often refer to classic modernist architects such as Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, and others. Some would argue that in light of the accelerating ecological crisis Modernism is a part of the problem, not the solution. Personally, I have become hesitant to use these references. Is the problem that we have in fact misunderstood the modern project?

DL: Both suggestions are true: modernism presented us with big problems, but at the same time I feel we have underestimated its potential relevance. I have always appreciated the three-part distinction offered by figures like Marshall Berman and Jürgen Habermas: modernism as an art historical category, modernization as a socio-economic development, and modernity as a philosophical or spiritual vision. My concern is less with the style, though I have to admit to liking it and do recognize its widespread familiarity, than with both modernity as a condition and modernization as a process that continues to unfold in new ways, thanks in a large part to innovation and progress in modern technology and the still-dominate prestige of methods developed in the natural sciences but applied to other domains of reality. We cannot wish away dimensions of our tradition that have shaped our understanding of what constitutes the nature of the architectural project. For much of his life Kahn asked out loud: how am I doing, Le Corbusier? Of course, he also asked: how am I doing, ancient Rome? I believe disciplines exist as sequential responses to questions that are pertinent to domains of human activity. Picasso pursued themes opened by Cezanne, Merleau-Ponty developed topics that remained unthought in Husserl. The questions Le Corbusier and Kahn asked are what should interest us, not their answers, for those questions have not disappeared. We can refine our understanding and orient our work by discovering the unthought aspects of theirs, roads not taken that may allow us to make some headway today. In other words, I’d rather not make the same mistake made by historians or apologists of modernism who suggested it had freed itself from its historical inheritance. An architecture that seeks to emancipate itself from its inheritance never knows if its efforts are really architectural, for only by comparison with antecedents can creative difference be discerned.

NBA: In the beginning of your book On Weathering you write that “finishing ends construction, weathering constructs finishes.” As such, a building is never finished but part of an ever-changing metamorphosis. Maybe this is a leading question, but would you agree that transformation and conservation should have a more central role in contemporary architecture?

DL: Works that are built are always built somewhere. Construction always modifies existing conditions, sometimes thoroughly, sometimes slightly, but always to some degree. Transformation, modification, alteration, addition/subtraction, etc… these always unfold in conditions that pre-date the project. But once the builders have left the site and inhabitants have moved in, the modifications continue as later chapters in that long history of additions and alterations: a repolished floor, refurnished room, added sunroom, or cladding panel replacement. And the modifications continue without end, or until the building falls to ruin. But even then, during its afterlife, the alterations continue in private and public memory. Insofar as design and construction are projective, they are also transformative. In short, buildings are condemned to time.

How, then, do buildings spend their time? Well, it seems to me they’re never idle; instead, they work for a living, resisting or yielding to ambient forces, making themselves accommodation to foreseen and unforeseen uses, bearing their own and superimposed loads, and so on. Again, their work has no end except in ruin. The labours of architecture are unending, perpetual performance is required: neither pause, nor prominence, nor end. Some parts can and will change but not all. I suppose it is ok to say that care for what must remain can be called conservation, but I would see that as a practice closer to janitorial maintenance than professional museology. And the best way to conserve/preserve a work of architecture is to live in it, allowing it and the patterns of life it accommodates to join step with the problems and prospects of the contemporary world.

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David Leatherbarrow was in Copenhagen on 9-10 November 2022 in connection with the research project 'Where We Live' which is carried out with support from the Velux Foundation in a collaboration between the Open Air Museum, the Department of Communication and Arts at Roskilde University, and the Royal Academy – Center for Sustainable Building Culture. The lecture was held as part of the third module of the Master in Building Culture – Sustainability, Strategy and Transformation.

David Leatherbarrow is an architect, writer and professor emeritus at University of Pennsylvania. He has taught theory and design at UPenn since 1984 and before that at Cambridge University and the University of Westminster in England. He is one of the most productive and influential theoreticians within the academic field of architecture today. Through studies of cultural aspects linked to technological issues and questions of context his ideas and writings are rooted in a strong ethical tradition in terms of thinking and teaching architecture.

Nicolai Bo Andersen is an architect and professor working in the field between research, teaching and practice. A critical question is how embodied first-person experience may inspire ecological awareness and protection of the environment in respect of the planetary boundaries. He studied at the Cooper Union, New York and graduated from the Royal Danish Academy in 1998. Nicolai Bo Andersen is head of the Master in Building Culture and the Center for Sustainable Building Culture at the Royal Danish Academy – Institute of Architecture and Culture.