Complicity and Conviction: Steps Toward an Architecture of Convention

by William L. Hubbard and William Lines Hubbard

Book Overview

This book is about a failure of nerve in architecture, a failure the author contends is as threatening to human values as it is to the creative act itself. For almost two decades the tenets of modern architecture have been under attack, but until now the attack has centered on the abuses of modernist buildings rather than the abuses of modernist ideas. Complicity and Conviction shows how both modernism and its alternative, postmodernism, would have...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0262580578
• ISBN13: 9780262580571
• Release Date: June 1982
• Publisher: MIT Press (MA)
• Length: 260 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Recycling ideas

Engaging book, especially in the way architecture is being perceived and regulated. From other outer sources, such as scenographic architecture, typography, games and laws...although still using conventional/inevitable things. Because Hubbard believed that good models for an architecture of convention can be found elsewhere, outside the realm of architecture. For example, the correlation between games and architecture lies in the way we live in buildings in an unconscious patterned way. "Kids given a playground, will at once begin to create a new sport based on the relationships of trees, posts, benches, and the availability and shape of objects to be thrown or kicked..."They create a pattern of acting that makes sense, by making up rules that provide a kind of reality and so architects try to make up rules and use them while designing buildings as reflections and records of unintended patterns.In his book "The structure of the ordinary", Habraken has a chapter on patterns and how patterns play an important role in our structuring and understanding of environment. This idea of "pattern language" helps when an architect is attempting to recycle a built environment and transform form within a social body. Because society employs a variety of vehicles of understanding, and patterns represent continuity....Now, the title, I like. Complicity and conviction! After searching the two words in the thesaurus, I understood the meaning behind the book. Complicity means taking part with another person, in committing a crime for example, or as Hubbard suggested "meeting the illusion halfway", and conviction is the act of convincing or assuring a certain belief, like judges for example. So, who are we trying to convince and make beleive? Our client? Ourselves? Is the architect a manipulator? A manipulator who consciously shapes a building to manipulate what we will later do there unconsciously? Is the architect so powerful? Or is the architecture of today intangible and self-evolved like natural selection, or is it tangible and manipulative? Could an architecture of the past be used as an architecture of convention and restart it in our own day, as a design base for today's architecture, that reflects and responds to change, yet gives the impression of continuity? The idea of recycling an idea that was abandoned has particular interest to the way we think today. Is it because we have run out of ideas? These are questions that the book raises, consciously or unconsciously. These are concerns of the moment, concerns that we have when we are dealing with recycling an idea, and what we do will influence what is put upon that blank sketch book that so often terrorizes the architect.