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Architecture Depends
Polemics and reflections on how to bridge the gap between what architecture actually is and what architects want it to be. Architecture depends—on what? On people, time, politics, ethics, the real world. Architecture, Jeremy Till argues with conviction in this engaging, sometimes pugnacious book, cannot help itself; it is dependent for its very existence on things outside itself. Despite the claims of autonomy, purity, and control that architects like to make about their practice, architecture is buffeted by uncertainty and contingency. Circumstances invariably intervene to upset the architect's best-laid plans—at every stage in the process, from design through construction to occupancy. Architects, however, tend to deny this, fearing contingency and preferring to pursue perfection. With Architecture Depends , architect and critic Jeremy Till offers a proposal for rescuing architects from a way to bridge the gap between what architecture actually is and what architects want it to be. Mixing anecdote, design, social theory, and personal experience, Till's writing is always accessible, moving freely between high and low registers, much like his suggestions for architecture itself.
- GenresArchitectureDesign
254 pages, Hardcover
First published March 31, 2009
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
May 12, 2020
A different but refreshing perspective on architecture
May 22, 2025
The tower thus signifies a removal that allows specific rituals and values to be established at the earliest stages of the nascent architect's education.
Jeremy Till's Architecture Depends opens in the Arts Tower in Sheffield, and the School of Architecture and Landscape on the top 6 floors of the tower - with it's (in)famous paternoster lift one of only two operational in the UK (must admit I wimped out, but watched my daughter, for who Till is her favourite architectural thinker enjoy the ride), - a building that enables him to immediately land one of his key points, as above.
For a non-architect, but with an interest in the area, this was a fascinating read - and as a member of another profession many of the 'ivory tower' points carry over, although Till would argue that architecture is a uniquely dependent and contingent profession.
The book didn't assume much architectural knowledge, indeed I found that element very accessible. For me, at least, rather less accessible was the heavy dose of philosophy, where it felt, if anything, Till assumed rather more familiarity. By contrast, when Till drew on literature, I was better able to appreciate his arguments - authors cited including Ivan Klima, Hermann Broch, Bruno Schulz, Italo Calvino and, most of all, James Joyce:
Immediate, multiple, connected, and powerful. These are the conditions of time that architecture needs to face up to. In its immediacy, time cannot be escaped. One has to be alert to what Robert Smithson calls the "temporal surfaces," aware of time as experienced rather than of some abstracted and eventually ideological construct of it. In its multiplicity, time presents a diversity that architecture has to accept - the linear, the cyclical, the personal, the instant explosion of the event, the longue durée and, in order to do that, has to relinquish its mythology of stability and strength.
[...]
It is Joyce more than any philosopher who most acutely describes time as lived, and so indicates the impossibility of placing it into a neat set of cat-egories. In Ulysses, he weaves threads of epic time (the time of the Homeric gods), natural cyclical time (the rivers, the shifting sands), historical cyclical time the repetitive sense of Ireland's identity), linear historical time (the particular chronological response to colonization), personal time (Joyce's own life reinscribed in the pages), fuzzy time (memories snatched), focused time (the endless newspapers), their future time, my future time (when will finish it?)... and so on and on. The relationship of these threads is always restless, so that no one temporal modality predominates over the others. In Ulysses the present is never seen as held in the thrall of the past, but the two coexist in a continually evolving relationship—a present in which the anticipation of the future is always at hand ("Coming events cast their shadows before them," muses Bloom, the hero of Ulysses). Time in Ulysses inheres in the commonplace objects and situations of Dublin. Joyce's time, as he follows Bloom, Dedalus, and their friends through the streets of Dublin, is the time of the everyday, but it is by no means ordinary, summoning up as it does the richness of multiple and coincident modes of time.
Jeremy Till's Architecture Depends opens in the Arts Tower in Sheffield, and the School of Architecture and Landscape on the top 6 floors of the tower - with it's (in)famous paternoster lift one of only two operational in the UK (must admit I wimped out, but watched my daughter, for who Till is her favourite architectural thinker enjoy the ride), - a building that enables him to immediately land one of his key points, as above.
For a non-architect, but with an interest in the area, this was a fascinating read - and as a member of another profession many of the 'ivory tower' points carry over, although Till would argue that architecture is a uniquely dependent and contingent profession.
The book didn't assume much architectural knowledge, indeed I found that element very accessible. For me, at least, rather less accessible was the heavy dose of philosophy, where it felt, if anything, Till assumed rather more familiarity. By contrast, when Till drew on literature, I was better able to appreciate his arguments - authors cited including Ivan Klima, Hermann Broch, Bruno Schulz, Italo Calvino and, most of all, James Joyce:
Immediate, multiple, connected, and powerful. These are the conditions of time that architecture needs to face up to. In its immediacy, time cannot be escaped. One has to be alert to what Robert Smithson calls the "temporal surfaces," aware of time as experienced rather than of some abstracted and eventually ideological construct of it. In its multiplicity, time presents a diversity that architecture has to accept - the linear, the cyclical, the personal, the instant explosion of the event, the longue durée and, in order to do that, has to relinquish its mythology of stability and strength.
[...]
It is Joyce more than any philosopher who most acutely describes time as lived, and so indicates the impossibility of placing it into a neat set of cat-egories. In Ulysses, he weaves threads of epic time (the time of the Homeric gods), natural cyclical time (the rivers, the shifting sands), historical cyclical time the repetitive sense of Ireland's identity), linear historical time (the particular chronological response to colonization), personal time (Joyce's own life reinscribed in the pages), fuzzy time (memories snatched), focused time (the endless newspapers), their future time, my future time (when will finish it?)... and so on and on. The relationship of these threads is always restless, so that no one temporal modality predominates over the others. In Ulysses the present is never seen as held in the thrall of the past, but the two coexist in a continually evolving relationship—a present in which the anticipation of the future is always at hand ("Coming events cast their shadows before them," muses Bloom, the hero of Ulysses). Time in Ulysses inheres in the commonplace objects and situations of Dublin. Joyce's time, as he follows Bloom, Dedalus, and their friends through the streets of Dublin, is the time of the everyday, but it is by no means ordinary, summoning up as it does the richness of multiple and coincident modes of time.
August 14, 2017
This is a book I read over quite some time, in irregular instalments. This is largely because my initial interest turned into scepsis and then into boredom. The book starts in an appealing and promising way, berating architectural practice and education for their false autonomy. However, this is hardly new: why should designers of buildings fare differently to designers of cars, clothes or furniture? Are buildings so durable that they can be exempted from wider socioeconomic constraints? The author does a decent job in exposing this falsehood with clever asides and insightful remarks that make many pages enjoyable and stimulating. On the other hand, even more pages are dedicated to the same old, tired subjects and discourses that pass for theory in architecture.
The book's main virtue is its willingness and openness to a wider view of roles and processes in architecture in the real world rather than in splendid architectural isolation. Rather paradoxically, its main weakness is its inability to go beyond existing architectural frames: talking about reframing isn't the same as actually doing the reframing.
In its defence, a total reframing of architecture is probably asking too much of the book and author but the problem lies with the approach: to change architecture one cannot remain firmly within the architectural domain and use its self-referential and associative, easy theorizing, for example taking the easy way out by suggesting to replace drawings with story-telling (the author admits to being hopeless with drawing but what changes in the process of building specification if one uses a different modality?), exchanging older popular notions like design as problem solving with newer ones like sense making (shouldn't one talk about designing instead?), or making things fuzzier, like proposing we exercise architectural intelligence rather than architectural knowledge (isn't this playing with words?).
So in the end, the book remains a readable collection of observations and quotes (possibly too many of the latter) but offers no real conclusion or closure - arguably a fitting epitaph for architecture, only I suspect that like many bad habits architecture may be more resilient than that.
The book's main virtue is its willingness and openness to a wider view of roles and processes in architecture in the real world rather than in splendid architectural isolation. Rather paradoxically, its main weakness is its inability to go beyond existing architectural frames: talking about reframing isn't the same as actually doing the reframing.
In its defence, a total reframing of architecture is probably asking too much of the book and author but the problem lies with the approach: to change architecture one cannot remain firmly within the architectural domain and use its self-referential and associative, easy theorizing, for example taking the easy way out by suggesting to replace drawings with story-telling (the author admits to being hopeless with drawing but what changes in the process of building specification if one uses a different modality?), exchanging older popular notions like design as problem solving with newer ones like sense making (shouldn't one talk about designing instead?), or making things fuzzier, like proposing we exercise architectural intelligence rather than architectural knowledge (isn't this playing with words?).
So in the end, the book remains a readable collection of observations and quotes (possibly too many of the latter) but offers no real conclusion or closure - arguably a fitting epitaph for architecture, only I suspect that like many bad habits architecture may be more resilient than that.
November 2, 2015
Till's swift narrative saved me from boredom of architectural reading. The main message is clear; Jeremmy Till is about to tell you what's been wrong with architectural pedagogy and how contingency (or ever changing society factor) is obvious importance in architectural decision.
It start with false belief of autonomous dogma from architectural education that hold vitruviusian motto as means altogether with modernist's shadow that never really banished. Product of architecture is always (as borgesian view speaking) 'footprint' of its predecessor. Thus, we always start with 'precedent' before talking about 'site context'. We somehow tend to subside the latter.
Deluded detachment leads architect and students to 'black box' that allows them to dream on utopian idea without actually solving present problem. Self-importance came naturally as community of architecture having its own rites while collaborating art, philosophy, and practice, but again, finished product probably changed in form, but still lacks of appropriate solution. It sound cynical from me, but Till explain it better.
While the issue been discussed way back, Till made different approach to younger architect with present case. This proven argument balanced with historical err that we may overlook.
It's a good reading to build critical, yet realistic perspective of architectural issue. But that's about it, I cant find an answer whats more of contingency except to "be within people, critical, and more enduring", in fact in the end Till leaves the answer of its product to us. Certainly, because its relativistic nature.
February 4, 2021
« Remember who you were before you were branded an architect. Remember that you too inhabit this world. Remember that you too use buildings, occupy space. And remember that users, you included, are more than abstractions or ideals; they are imperfect, multiple, political and all the better for it.”
Jeremy Till’s ‘Architecture Depends’ has accompanied me through architecture school ever since the final year of my bachelors when my thesis director suggested I read his work on scarcity (strelka press) whilst I was questioning the way young students of architecture are trained and formatted. Here I am now, 6 years or so later, a licensed architect since only a few days ago, FINALLY finished with reading the book although I cannot say that I will not pick it up again, as it is a great source of inspiration, of self questioning and a nice starting point for oh so many debates and fights amongst architect friends.
Jeremy Till’s work is rich in examples, sources and snippets of his own life as an architect, all these elements serve the main argument of this book which is rather self evident : architecture depends, as the title suggests. It is contingent and yet, the profession does all that it can to chip away at that contingency, to erase it completely through discourse and ideology, through the construction of firm black lines around white empty spaces, refined narratives and the edification of professional orders designed for the protection of the territory to which architects cling to, their wish of power and authority over the average citizen. When I first discovered this book, I was overjoyed to have discovered such an architect who seemed to clearly see as I did, the issues with architecture as a profession, as a discourse, a process and a self perpetuating capitalistic system. He is well aware of the position he takes, acknowledging quite often actually, how his comrades may react to such opinions.
Jeremy Till is also funny, he takes pauses between arguments to further feed his points with small stories (demarcated with a different typography), often sarcastic, yet oh so poignant. I have no doubt that each architect today has a slew of similar experiences, moments where you realize how absurd this profession is and also how wonderful indeed.
I’ve cited this book in nearly each important work produced for academia, that is to say, my bachelors thesis, my masters thesis and my licensure professional thesis. They each have been tainted with the work of Jeremy Till, and I am all the better for it although it has not made my defense in front of the jury of professionals easier or more enjoyable. After now being reminded of Tills arguments only days after my licensure, a tinge of regret haunts me as I recall one practicing architect ( yes, dressed in black as Till could predict ) sitting across from me during the questions segment of my oral presentation. “The problem with your thesis here is you speak of innovation, of ecology and of communication, and how these connect to current issues of architectural practice today, but your biggest problem is your lack of hierarchy, you need to pinpoint one thing and stick to that, you are too all over the place.” Now with the support of Till’s complaints regarding the profession’s appreciation of simplicity, sleekness and a utopian form of perfection, born from that obsession for problem-solving which perpetuates a form of demand for a profession that is in truth, not all that necessary when you consider the history of mankind and his capacity to design and create cities before the creation of the Architect with a big A, I have formulated a rebuttal. Less is not more! Simple is not necessarily better... but alas I cannot formulate such an argument as well as Till manages to do so in this book. And so, I truly do recommend every student of architecture take the time to read this book that is quite different from all the other theory publications professors will throw at you upon your arrival on the first day of school... try hard to listen for it isn’t always enjoyable either. Architects take a hard beating in this book, we are told to rethink our position, to let go of our authority and our power that we have been trained and formatted to defend and protect. A tough love self help book for aspiring architects perhaps.
Although I adore this book, a negative point is the author’s efforts in making his arguments accessible. He wishes architecture be more aware of reality outside the architecture bubble, all the while being a bit pretentious about it ... I have a hunch the everyday joe might not read into Henri Lefebvre or Heidegger’s definitions of space for example, even-though it is nice to have some more chill examples from popular culture : “ My brief excursion into Elvis Costello is to weave another warp into the weft of architecture. In using a ‘popular’ source, this warp brings to architecture a necessary sense of the everyday, but also with Costello a necessary sense of the political.” It’s hard to always find a balance. This book is most decidedly aimed at architects, maybe also politicians...
His manifesto of sorts for a lo-fi architecture sounds wonderful and great, and his metaphor via Costello makes sense, it’s just not so easy to apply to such a contingent field and it leaves me wanting more. More examples, more processes, more ways to get out of this binary system. Situated knowledge is one answer and I follow this proposal whole heartedly as well, but actual going about applying it to the practice is another question. Nevertheless, a wonderful book, although not always simple to follow, I highly recommend it for all architecture students starting out, it may possibly protect a piece of your soul as you go through the gut-wrenching meat grinder of architecture school’s formatting.
I have stood by this book for so long, I would have given it a 5 but now at the end of my studies, his argumentation seems so self evident that I almost feel now like there wasn’t a need for so much defense of this contingency, it’s just pretty obvious now, and when you see the work of AAA for example or other architecture collectives working for this cause, this books seems to only prove the same point which we have started already to agree on, but maybe I am just always looking for something to complain about!
Jeremy Till’s ‘Architecture Depends’ has accompanied me through architecture school ever since the final year of my bachelors when my thesis director suggested I read his work on scarcity (strelka press) whilst I was questioning the way young students of architecture are trained and formatted. Here I am now, 6 years or so later, a licensed architect since only a few days ago, FINALLY finished with reading the book although I cannot say that I will not pick it up again, as it is a great source of inspiration, of self questioning and a nice starting point for oh so many debates and fights amongst architect friends.
Jeremy Till’s work is rich in examples, sources and snippets of his own life as an architect, all these elements serve the main argument of this book which is rather self evident : architecture depends, as the title suggests. It is contingent and yet, the profession does all that it can to chip away at that contingency, to erase it completely through discourse and ideology, through the construction of firm black lines around white empty spaces, refined narratives and the edification of professional orders designed for the protection of the territory to which architects cling to, their wish of power and authority over the average citizen. When I first discovered this book, I was overjoyed to have discovered such an architect who seemed to clearly see as I did, the issues with architecture as a profession, as a discourse, a process and a self perpetuating capitalistic system. He is well aware of the position he takes, acknowledging quite often actually, how his comrades may react to such opinions.
Jeremy Till is also funny, he takes pauses between arguments to further feed his points with small stories (demarcated with a different typography), often sarcastic, yet oh so poignant. I have no doubt that each architect today has a slew of similar experiences, moments where you realize how absurd this profession is and also how wonderful indeed.
I’ve cited this book in nearly each important work produced for academia, that is to say, my bachelors thesis, my masters thesis and my licensure professional thesis. They each have been tainted with the work of Jeremy Till, and I am all the better for it although it has not made my defense in front of the jury of professionals easier or more enjoyable. After now being reminded of Tills arguments only days after my licensure, a tinge of regret haunts me as I recall one practicing architect ( yes, dressed in black as Till could predict ) sitting across from me during the questions segment of my oral presentation. “The problem with your thesis here is you speak of innovation, of ecology and of communication, and how these connect to current issues of architectural practice today, but your biggest problem is your lack of hierarchy, you need to pinpoint one thing and stick to that, you are too all over the place.” Now with the support of Till’s complaints regarding the profession’s appreciation of simplicity, sleekness and a utopian form of perfection, born from that obsession for problem-solving which perpetuates a form of demand for a profession that is in truth, not all that necessary when you consider the history of mankind and his capacity to design and create cities before the creation of the Architect with a big A, I have formulated a rebuttal. Less is not more! Simple is not necessarily better... but alas I cannot formulate such an argument as well as Till manages to do so in this book. And so, I truly do recommend every student of architecture take the time to read this book that is quite different from all the other theory publications professors will throw at you upon your arrival on the first day of school... try hard to listen for it isn’t always enjoyable either. Architects take a hard beating in this book, we are told to rethink our position, to let go of our authority and our power that we have been trained and formatted to defend and protect. A tough love self help book for aspiring architects perhaps.
Although I adore this book, a negative point is the author’s efforts in making his arguments accessible. He wishes architecture be more aware of reality outside the architecture bubble, all the while being a bit pretentious about it ... I have a hunch the everyday joe might not read into Henri Lefebvre or Heidegger’s definitions of space for example, even-though it is nice to have some more chill examples from popular culture : “ My brief excursion into Elvis Costello is to weave another warp into the weft of architecture. In using a ‘popular’ source, this warp brings to architecture a necessary sense of the everyday, but also with Costello a necessary sense of the political.” It’s hard to always find a balance. This book is most decidedly aimed at architects, maybe also politicians...
His manifesto of sorts for a lo-fi architecture sounds wonderful and great, and his metaphor via Costello makes sense, it’s just not so easy to apply to such a contingent field and it leaves me wanting more. More examples, more processes, more ways to get out of this binary system. Situated knowledge is one answer and I follow this proposal whole heartedly as well, but actual going about applying it to the practice is another question. Nevertheless, a wonderful book, although not always simple to follow, I highly recommend it for all architecture students starting out, it may possibly protect a piece of your soul as you go through the gut-wrenching meat grinder of architecture school’s formatting.
I have stood by this book for so long, I would have given it a 5 but now at the end of my studies, his argumentation seems so self evident that I almost feel now like there wasn’t a need for so much defense of this contingency, it’s just pretty obvious now, and when you see the work of AAA for example or other architecture collectives working for this cause, this books seems to only prove the same point which we have started already to agree on, but maybe I am just always looking for something to complain about!
May 5, 2013
A book I read a couple of years ago. It's a good book, worth reading. Jeremy Till offers a critical, if not polemical, insight on questions relative to future practice, the architect's shifting role, architecture's engagement, etc. Architecture depends on internal and external factors. In this respect, the discipline should be more connected to society rather than being only focused on the building and its site. Architecture should integrate contingency within the discipline for a better engagement to re-shaping the world. In short, this is the thesis that the book defends. A must-read.
October 2, 2020
I quite enjoyed this. Considering it is an architectural theory book it's not too dry, the little anecdotes at the end of each section helped w this.
Some lovely ideas in here, eg about architects forever wrestling to escape the decay of time and create "timeless" buildings, when clearly it is an inevitability that needs active engagement. Also had an interesting portion on how the profession excludes via specialised knowledge in an endless cycle. The main takeaway is that architects need to embrace chaos and the contingent nature of building buildings and worry less about order and control.
Very hippy (read: social) interpretation of architecture so no wonder I liked it. Cheers Ambrose for the rec (if only I read it while I was still at uni ahah)
Some lovely ideas in here, eg about architects forever wrestling to escape the decay of time and create "timeless" buildings, when clearly it is an inevitability that needs active engagement. Also had an interesting portion on how the profession excludes via specialised knowledge in an endless cycle. The main takeaway is that architects need to embrace chaos and the contingent nature of building buildings and worry less about order and control.
Very hippy (read: social) interpretation of architecture so no wonder I liked it. Cheers Ambrose for the rec (if only I read it while I was still at uni ahah)
July 17, 2022
Jeremy Till succeeds at lucidly diagnosing the sickness that rots the core of the modern architect, and indirectly, that of the figure of the expert. To achieve this, he describes the dependency of architectural praxis on an epigenetic territorial network in which the real overwhelms the imaginary. Instead of dealing with such context through rejection, abstraction, and/or concealment, he proposes to embrace the contingent and accidental nature of existence and describes an architectural praxis that dismisses authority, transcendence, and the eternal in favor of a more grounded, more situated and more collective exercise in which the site, always understood as a social product, becomes the foundation for the architect's engagement. This leads to an understanding of architecture that moves away from the object towards the processes, systems, and assemblages that produce it, simultaneously introducing a posthuman understanding of temporality.
What makes this book great is its bravery to reject the comfortable and addictive discourse of the architect-as-god that can be found in the underbelly of every pseudo-religious theoretical exercise so common in the academy and the profession (which only shows the inability to deal with the complexities of reality and its resulting obsession with order), and instead accepts and thrives in the much rougher, painful, and frustrating but also affirmative, vital and honest complexities of the real.
I find this book to be crucial for the education of an architect and I am truly sad that books like this were neither recommended nor discussed by my professors during my time at university. I will make sure to read this yearly.
What makes this book great is its bravery to reject the comfortable and addictive discourse of the architect-as-god that can be found in the underbelly of every pseudo-religious theoretical exercise so common in the academy and the profession (which only shows the inability to deal with the complexities of reality and its resulting obsession with order), and instead accepts and thrives in the much rougher, painful, and frustrating but also affirmative, vital and honest complexities of the real.
I find this book to be crucial for the education of an architect and I am truly sad that books like this were neither recommended nor discussed by my professors during my time at university. I will make sure to read this yearly.
June 15, 2022
An enjoyable read, covering topics from education through to professionalism (which started to fade, for me, in the middle, then suddenly picked up again in the last few pages). It did however seem that he was over-reliant on Lefebrve and Zygmunt Bauman to back up everything from aesthetics to ethics, with plenty of Tafuri and Le Corbusier thrown in. But, everything was well referenced, so that’s a bonus. There was just something about his tone that got under my skin and stopped me from being totally taken with his approach.
March 21, 2019
Strong and important message, but occasionally laborious and inaccessible. Plainer English would have done this book wonders, but on the other hand I have learnt all kinds of new words and I was actually sad when it came to an end.
I would recommend it to anyone with the patience to continue after reading a few pages.
I would recommend it to anyone with the patience to continue after reading a few pages.
January 31, 2018
Incredible insight to current architectural practice, heart warming and brilliant
For architecture students everywhere!
For architecture students everywhere!
September 25, 2018
Direct, clever and deep critic essay. The author is able to make you think from the other side and go deeper in the human social network.
September 9, 2025
Whole lot of yapping, starts off good and has lots of interesting points of view and information, though it feels like the author forced himself through it and didn't enjoy writing it.
February 21, 2015
Jeremy Till’s Architecture Depends is an in depth critique of the autonomy and insularity of the profession as it exists today. Till constructs a complex argument, interspersed with meaningful yet witty anecdotes, critiquing mainstream architectural theory, from Vitruvius to Corbusier to Eisenman, by subjecting it to arguments derived from seminal thinkers from outside the profession – philosophers, geographers and sociologists like Freud, Nietzsche and Lefebvre to name a few. The book sets out to establish the territory for future discourse concerning the social role of architecture, as well as establishing a framework for its ethics; a subject that he contends has not been successfully dealt with before.
The book is organised into three parts and in the first part the author traces the trajectory of the resistance to the dependency of architecture from Vitruvius’s imposition of order on the discipline, to the Modern movement and its preoccupation with beauty, order and cleanliness as well as post modernism’s insular obsession with form, both attempts to de-temporalize architecture and guard it against the changes affected by time, and finally we see this resistance embodied in the detachment from society prevalent in many architecture schools today. Early on, he introduces his chief literary support, Zygmunt Bauman, a celebrated social theorist who has written extensively on modernity’s attempts to separate itself from uncertainties in favour of increased individual security.
The second part deals with the existence of architecture in both time and space and the failure of architects to deal with this duality – interestingly illustrated through the example of architectural photography and its attempts to capture buildings when just completed, in those fleeting moments when they are free of the influence of others. Before, they are subject to influence by the mass of non-architects like builders and workmen, and after, to the changes affected by users. The author argues that architecture needs to be a setting to allow the multiplicity of time to exist, and architects need to stop treating space as an abstract entity divorced from time. He argues for “Lo-fi” architecture that lends itself to changes wrought by users and time right from the planning stage.
The last part tackles the professional practice of architecture today that seeks to self-legitimise by developing expertise only in areas of knowledge it can be sure to control, often excluding study of the processes and concentrating instead on the object of architecture. In addressing the mainstream architecture of magazines and headlines, Till sidesteps projects that embrace contingency through public participation and community design that could have illustrated the success of contingent architecture. In his conclusion, he proposes the necessity for a new definition of architectural ethics, not as a commitment to superior aesthetics or tectonics that were previously associated with the term, but in ‘being responsible for the Other’ – he advocates for sustainability and accountability to people whose lives will be affected by the construction of the building and its use.
The strength of Till’s argument lies not in its novelty, he himself admits it to be obvious, but in its pertinence and superior handling of a complex and taboo subject within the discipline. Drawing on the work of architectural and non-architectural theorists, he steps on many toes as he seeks to expose serious failings in the last century of the practice of architecture; gaps between what architecture really is – contingent and dependent – and what architects have limited it to being.
The book is organised into three parts and in the first part the author traces the trajectory of the resistance to the dependency of architecture from Vitruvius’s imposition of order on the discipline, to the Modern movement and its preoccupation with beauty, order and cleanliness as well as post modernism’s insular obsession with form, both attempts to de-temporalize architecture and guard it against the changes affected by time, and finally we see this resistance embodied in the detachment from society prevalent in many architecture schools today. Early on, he introduces his chief literary support, Zygmunt Bauman, a celebrated social theorist who has written extensively on modernity’s attempts to separate itself from uncertainties in favour of increased individual security.
The second part deals with the existence of architecture in both time and space and the failure of architects to deal with this duality – interestingly illustrated through the example of architectural photography and its attempts to capture buildings when just completed, in those fleeting moments when they are free of the influence of others. Before, they are subject to influence by the mass of non-architects like builders and workmen, and after, to the changes affected by users. The author argues that architecture needs to be a setting to allow the multiplicity of time to exist, and architects need to stop treating space as an abstract entity divorced from time. He argues for “Lo-fi” architecture that lends itself to changes wrought by users and time right from the planning stage.
The last part tackles the professional practice of architecture today that seeks to self-legitimise by developing expertise only in areas of knowledge it can be sure to control, often excluding study of the processes and concentrating instead on the object of architecture. In addressing the mainstream architecture of magazines and headlines, Till sidesteps projects that embrace contingency through public participation and community design that could have illustrated the success of contingent architecture. In his conclusion, he proposes the necessity for a new definition of architectural ethics, not as a commitment to superior aesthetics or tectonics that were previously associated with the term, but in ‘being responsible for the Other’ – he advocates for sustainability and accountability to people whose lives will be affected by the construction of the building and its use.
The strength of Till’s argument lies not in its novelty, he himself admits it to be obvious, but in its pertinence and superior handling of a complex and taboo subject within the discipline. Drawing on the work of architectural and non-architectural theorists, he steps on many toes as he seeks to expose serious failings in the last century of the practice of architecture; gaps between what architecture really is – contingent and dependent – and what architects have limited it to being.
March 5, 2014
A refreshing antidote to the starchitect model that still grips much of contemporary architectural discourse. Till asks that maybe, just maybe, we consider the context of where architecture lives beyond just geometric angles on a site plan. He's not afraid to slay sacred cows from Frank Gehry to the now-cliché of the ever-suffering architecture student persona. The world's "mess" is to be embraced, not corralled or avoided, by our master builders. Let go, Howard Roark, let go...
July 21, 2013
If you are an architect you should read this book, it can open your mind in ways you've never even consider.
Plus, if you see architecture as being something else than what star-architects do to fulfill their egos, you will certainly love this book.
I've not rated it 5stars just because its a bit hard to read, with all the philosophical theories and metaphors that Till uses, but I largely recommend it.
Plus, if you see architecture as being something else than what star-architects do to fulfill their egos, you will certainly love this book.
I've not rated it 5stars just because its a bit hard to read, with all the philosophical theories and metaphors that Till uses, but I largely recommend it.
September 28, 2013
Till takes aim at the architect in the ivory tower, who stands above the construction process and attempts to vainly control it. Instead, he advocates architects embrace 'contingency', and dive into the flux of a building project, engage with the various other people who shape it, and who it is for.
June 5, 2012
Unlocked my thesis work - It is funny funny book. Culmination of conversation you probably had with someone at some point if you are an architect. Jeremy Till takes what you have been wondering into succinct words.
August 31, 2013
Lectura obligada para arquitectos y excelente general
October 9, 2021
Not easy to read, even harder to digest, but Till's indignant charge into the profession has merit. We should have stopped smelling our farts long ago.
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