Discussing the necessity, possibility and means of building a new paradigm in the theory of architecture, it is not useless to try to cast a glance into the past and see what paradigms the architecture possessed. First of all, one should consider two stages or two formations in architecture - pre-professional and professional.
The so-called "folk architecture", architectural folklore, should be classified as pre-professional. All kinds of amateur performances, when buildings are designed and built by amateurs, can also be attributed there. There are many of them today, both among the "common people" - the villagers, carpenters, etc., and among the erudites who decided to do without the professional services of an architect.
There are, of course, difficult cases. Where, for example, should Alberti be carried? He did not receive professional architectural training, it is impossible to attribute it to folk architecture, but it is difficult to call it an amateur either, although in the Renaissance amateurism itself was highly valued: “dilettanti” were not despised, but highly respected. Even Le Corbusier himself was largely self-taught and did not graduate from the architectural school as such. At the time of the British enthusiasm for Palladianism, there were many such amateurs among wealthy landowners.
What is typical for folk and amateur architecture? As a rule, in the old days (and often to this day) the non-professional who built the house was at the same time its author - an architect (it doesn't matter if he invented or inherited the building scheme), a builder and a customer - that is, a tenant and an owner. This combination of functions or roles is important from the point of view that in this case interprofessional or inter-role communications converged in one person, in one consciousness and intuition.
Professional architecture, on the contrary, operates in a system of remote communications, where the architect communicates with the builders and with the customer, explaining to them the possibilities and rules for constructing a building and translating their difficulties and requests into their own design or critical-theoretical, but professional language.
When I say “distanced,” I mean by distance, first of all, that it is a distance between different people and minds, and sometimes culture and education. It may be more or less, but it is always present. The very concept of "distance" combines several meanings. This is also a physical distance: an architect, a customer and a builder are different people living in different places. It is also a cultural distance, that is, a difference in the amount of knowledge, skills and abilities. Finally, this is social distance: one of the three occupies higher social positions in relation to others.
But in distances, we must distinguish both individual and socio-cultural moments. Individuals include temperament, giftedness, talent and ingenuity, initiative and much more - and not always, for example, an architect has more intuition than a customer or a builder. It happens in every way.
But there is also a socio-cultural distance in the difference between training, languages, professional knowledge and ideological competence. And this is where professional architecture in the last millennia has been mediated by certain social institutions. The architect fulfilled the will of the religious (church) hierarchy or class hierarchy (aristocracy). And only in the last hundred and a half years, the architect begins to work for customers who have neither ideological nor class superiority, if not transcendence. Moreover, the architect in the new conditions understands himself and his role often as higher in the system of social and cultural institutions than the customer (merchant, banker) or consumer (workers and employees, residents of settlements).
The social position of the designer is now partly independent of religion and class hierarchies, and partly surpasses the institutions of other ranks, which allows the architect to teach his customers how they need to build their buildings and how to organize their life and activities in general.
The architect falls into the supposedly exalted category of teachers of life.
We know all this well from the numerous programs and manifestos of the 1920s. Then, when mass urban construction began, not provided with the experience of urban life, like a drowning man at a straw, the architects themselves began to grasp at sociology. But if sociology does exist (which can be doubted), it is most likely as a science, and a sociologist is a scientist, not a teacher. He examines life, not teaches life.
Prophets and ecumenical councils teach life. In the same place where society threw off the burden of religious prejudices and established new prejudices of the planned party government, which taught how to build a "new life" and a "new world", destroying the "old world" to the ground. Those who are inclined to see the architectural paradigmatics in the sciences could also see it in the ideological constructions of the new party power. But due to the fact that this power and its ideology used such “fundamental” categories as “foundation” and “superstructure”, the structures resulting from this ideology turned out to be both fragile and not very useful, perhaps “beautiful”, although they had to be refer to the slaveholding experience of Ancient Rome, and the bourgeoisie - Florence and Venice.
Architects, economists and ideological leaders took up the "life-building". They built life on the basis of a new social system and a new social hierarchy, where there were no longer patriarchs and popes, princes and kings, merchants, millionaires and billionaires, but there were ministers, members of the Politburo, academicians, laureates of Stalin's prizes and heroes of socialist labor - rationalizers and initiators. Building a new life, they rejected the rotten culture of the capitalist countries, but willingly adopted everything that was advanced from them, although they could not explain how this "advanced" was born in the conditions of an ever deeper crisis of capitalism.
The general vector of hopes for life-building pointed in the 20th century, however, not only to the party or capitalist elite, but also to science. However, there was no scientific discipline that would teach life and give examples of it neither in the USSR nor in America, and does not exist to this day (chimerical education under the name "scientific communism" is no better than any "scientific capitalism"), but architecture, by the will of fate, was drawn into that very holy place, which, as you know, is never empty. This imperceptible change in functions was accompanied by the fact that the real school of life in the USSR was taken over by the party nomenclature, and the architect performed two functions - he carried out the decisions of this nomenclature (guided by the "advanced" experience of Ancient Greece and Rome or the USA), and then was already responsible for the mistakes of this party power, as if he was acting of his own free will.
It would be possible for a long time and in detail to describe the vicissitudes of this paradoxical era of life-building, which has now become history, but the essence of the matter is clear. The paradigmatics of architectural will was based in past eras on the transcendental ideology and the will of the social and estate hierarchy, and with the help of this will and ideology, whose creative power turned out to be tremendous, the greatest masterpieces of world architecture were created. Of course, architects would prefer to attribute these masterpieces (the pyramids of Giza, the Temple of Solomon, the Roman Pantheon, Byzantine temples, Muslim mosques and Gothic cathedrals) exclusively to their genius, but the fact remains that the decline of the transcendental will of the estate aristocracy and the church hierarchy has deprived architecture of the ability to achieve the same heights. Unless, of course, we do not consider the projects of the Palace of Soviets or the radiant cities of Le Corbusier and Leonidov, structures like the Brooklyn Bridge and the Eiffel Tower, as the corresponding heights.
And if architecture is destined to find in the future a new paradigm that would provide a democratic and free-thinking society with no less success, then the question of the transcendental force that underlies it cannot be excluded from the sphere of theoretical attention.
One cannot get rid of slogans alone, relying on the omnipotence of the new government, and hopes for social sciences and even philosophy, too.
The place of architecture in the development of world culture and social order in the future, which has developed to some extent by chance (although, perhaps, this accident is just a consequence of our misunderstanding of the reasons behind it), is likely to remain in the sphere of other spiritual movements and research practices, including the most architectural creative intuition. But what is the structure of such social design, in which architecture would really be entrusted with the functions of semantic support for new life and the construction of the New World, we still do not know.
I do not think that architecture alone would cope with such a grandiose task, but I do not see anything in modern socio-cultural institutions that would provide it with the necessary support within the framework of the new values of social equality and justice. Even if one retains faith in this support for the transcendental intervention of God, the modern church institutions representing his will are no longer capable of this (as evidenced by the not very successful experience of building religious buildings of the last hundred years). The question remains as to what and how the theory of architecture should be engaged in these conditions, which willy-nilly remains, in spite of its inglorious fate, a representative of the profession.
Without pretending to any prophecy, I will allow myself to state only one, which seems to me quite obvious assumption. Whatever we expect from new prophets in architecture, art or politics, an unbiased and comprehensive study of the situation in the world itself and the role of architecture in this world cannot but be the subject of its own interests and intensive comprehension. When I say “all-round”, I mean both the recognition of its current crisis, and the need for a new paradigmatics (first of all, a new categorical-conceptual apparatus) and consideration of all those conditions that determine the fate of architecture, which in previous architectural initiatives were left out of the analysis by virtue of their seeming "out of date", retrograde, class reactionary, prejudices of mysticism and idealism, or national inferiority. Comprehensiveness does not put any pre-selected filters in front of the latest scientific, technical and ideological ideas, but, given the experience of the past century, it should, apparently, try to prevent their one-sided idealization and overestimation, or, on the contrary, underestimation and exclusion from the field of vision.
The experience of the last century is very instructive not only in its real achievements, but also in no less obvious losses, which to some extent (of course, there is no point in reducing all the conditions for further development to them) prevented us from understanding both the nature of architecture and the nature of the world. in which architecture plays a vital role. Of course, assigning these studies, first of all, to the theory of architecture, I am aware that its success will be real only with the support of other intellectual initiatives and spiritual movements.
That is why the connection of the theory of architecture with sciences, technology, philosophy, art and cult spheres should become more and more transparent and intense.
But in the third millennium, all these spheres of spiritual life find themselves already in a situation of greater equality, and none of them can consider itself an exclusive legislator, demanding from other spheres of unconditional submission to her authority.
The disintegration of the synthetic state of architecture, which combined all roles and all knowledge in one person, and the transition from professional communication of the New Age to some new paradigm, suggests that in this paradigm, all spheres participating in communication will have equal rights, and the distances between them will be regulated not a one-sided hobby, but an all-round agreement.
