The polemical ecological drawing reaches back to 1920 but also forward to 2000, mapping activity that hasn’t happened yet. Yet this is not simply history, or a simple history. They are like a flock of birds that endlessly generates a fluid shape in the sky, or a school of fish making forms in the water, but is not able to see this collaborative architectural effect from the inside – until a historian draws it for them as a kind of mirror, as if saying ‘Look at what you have made together’ or ‘Look at your own organism,’ which are the same thing. Architects unwittingly shape their own pulsating creative environment and this space might be more radical than any of their projects. The distinct dynamic form of the field is produced by the movements of those who inhabit it. It is a kind of organic system, a quivering swarm of interacting questions, concepts and personalities in which everything affects and is affected by what is around it. On the contrary, the drawing seems to marvel at the idiosyncratic behaviour of these free-floating yet highly competitive creatures.Īrchitectural discourse appears to have an ever-changing shape but a constant self-sustaining ecology. To visualise this sustained detachment is not to criticise the architectural animal. They inhabit parallel worlds of their own making. To read the drawing even more literally, architects don’t live in the world. Architectural discourse is literally portrayed as a disconnection from the very world it claims to address – floating away and interacting with itself under very little external constraint. Architecture is implicitly understood to be a form of agitation detached from the everyday landscape with only an indirect or occasional engagement with normative lived space. The drawing even suggests that this steadily evolving yet seemingly solid ground oblivious to the polemics of architects might be eighty per cent of the built environment. Only designers like Buckminster Fuller and the Eames, who challenged the conventional figure of the architect, enter this UNSELF-CONSCIOUS zone of activity that is driven by technologies, regulations, infrastructure, services, chemicals, drugs, electronics, vernaculars, popular taste, consumer culture, eclecticismsand improvisations. The least undulating unperforated stream at the bottom of the drawing is symptomatically the one least influenced by architects. The biggest – such as UTOPIAN, HEROIC, FASCIST, BUREAUCRATIC, and POP – name whole blobs as territories of investigation that have clearly defined borders and yet are linked to adjacent territories by two or more thin isthmuses. Labels get larger and bolder as the clusters aggregate. The image conveys the sense that there is a dense biodiversity of experiments at any one historical moment as architects test different possibilities within semi-autonomous streams of interrelated work. Closer up it is a series of idiosyncratic spaces, a flowing interior environment filled with the names of architects clustered around the labels of the most significant architectural tendencies. Architecture constantly throbs – apparently.Ĭharles Jencks, ‘The Evolutionary Tree’, Architectural Design, October 1970, 527.įrom a distance this idiosyncratic portrait of the twentieth century appears to be a single continuous densely populated landscape perforated by serpentine lakes of inactivity. Their restless fluidity is magnified by the unwavering beat of thin vertical lines that mark the passage of eight decades. The liberated yet interlinked blobs freely fluctuate in an unending dance – expanding and contracting, merging and diverging. It is a kind of stable ground or coastline away from which the others float, moored only by two narrow umbilical cords. The lower strand pulsates the least and sits flat on the bottom. They sometimes widen to merge with adjacent strands, or become as thin as a single line, but finally end up more or less the same width as they started. Thick curving felt-pen lines drawn by hand portray six lightly shaded pulsating chronological strands of architectural activity moving from left to right across the page. It was labelled ‘The Evolutionary Tree’, yet is really a kind of landscape image. Some time in 1969, the 30-year-old critic and historian Charles Jencks made a blobby diagram that would become as iconic as any drawing of a building or city by an architect.
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