Shaun Murray’s projects are harbingers for a meaningful ecological (both machinic and natural) audit of specific sites and the development of a series of tactics and protocols that can deliver to architects a full understanding of their sites and of the agents, provocateurs, cybernetic systems and disparate observers and drifters that influence and use them in some way.
Modern architecture has currently failed to provide architects with these now very necessary tools for them to create architectures that are fully in tune with the wide gamut of artificial and natural ecological conditions. For those of us interested in the architecture for the new cyberised, biomachined inhabitants of the twenty-first century Murray’s research and propositions are a beacon in a still dark landscape of the future.
Murray has not only helped to develop this interesting and original approach to architecture and ecology (the subject of a Phd) but he has also developed various methods of representing architecture. Like any architect which deals explicitly with the ravages of time; the choreography of sudden and not so sudden shifts in geography and geometry have to be charted. Murray has needed to generate a draughting style that facilitates and explains his ideas.
I think it is high time to stop thinking about modern architecture as a ‘failure’. It has come to be trendy to say that, maybe, and if someone is talking about some uncapable designer who tried to make a few bucks by imitating the ‘Bauhaus architecture’ or ‘the Corbu style’ or something to that effect, maybe there actually isn’t much to recognize but misinterpretations and blunders. Le Corbusier himself would at times criticize imitators of his work because they simply took forms or certain materials and put them in place in a fashion that he himself had done somewhere else, but without feeling and interpreting the spirit that animated the creations they were trying to imitate, but only literally reproducing some parts of them. Besides this, however, can anyone seriously say that Le Corbusier did as much as ‘failed’?!? Because he was the foremost propeller, or at least one of the them, of modern architecture, and he certainly gave unforgettable lessons to not only his contemporaries (at least those who were willing to give him a listen), but also generations to follow. His work is the most vivid, live and outstanding even in today’s world. And he was producing modern architecture.
I think modernist architecture is like any architectural movement, it is thought provoking, ground breaking and inspiring at the best of times…. and at the worst, it imprisons people, and can crush whole communities. Its not that I think Shaun is calling all modernist architecture a failure, I think he’s just identifying its limitations and exploring the fact that we live in different world with different tools to the one that Corb et all, lived in and we should see what these new tools afford us as designers.