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Shumon Basar'sarticle, "The Poisonous Mixture," an entertaining and enlightening meditation on the architect's position in the early twenty-first century, servesas a fitting conclusion for this collection. Previously employed in the office of Zaha Hadid and an educator at the Architectural Association in London, Basar no doubt has seen many professionals grapple with the various forms of "impotence" that may afflict the contemporary architect. Cultural, political, economic, technological, and other changes prompt (often unforeseen)transformations in the architectural discipline, issuing a constant challenge to the architect's abilities and adaptive skills. Indeed, Basar writes from experience,noting the young architect's devastating acknowledgement of powerlessness and the subsequent freedom to be earned by relinquishing the idealistic and ultimately unrealistic desire to "achieve everything." This message,passed on through Basar'stext and his related activities as an editor, author, lecturer, critic, and curator, may prove particularly relevant to architects who today struggle to find their place in our ever-changing world.

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"The Poisonous Mixture"

(2004)

The Deal A dopey-looking architect is happily married to an improbably beautiful woman when a sudden recessionstrikes. In a fit ofpanic, they go to Las Vegas to try to save themselves.In a casino, the wife duly declines the advancesof a suave,smoldering magnate' He persists, finally making an offer to the frnancially desperatecouple: One million dollars to spend one night with the beautiful wife. After dismissing the outrageous proposal, the architect and his wife lie back in bed and, from the righteous silence hovering between them, the possibility of agreeing to the million dollars begins to seem not so obsceneafter all. lVhat's "one night," they think, compared to the thousands of nights that their fortifred, water tight mariage will indubitably contain. But once the deal is consumed, the very edifice of the marriage begins to fall apart, brick by brick, as the architect-husband becomesdistraught with anxieties that his wife might actually have enjoyed the night she spent with "the client." Nothing, the architect realizes, will ever be the same.

The Detail \oody Harrelson's character in the film IndecentProposal suffers an ignoble fate becausehe didn't focus on the detail. He didn't understand how the torrid part-Robert Redford's plea for "just one night"-would relate to the fragile whole of his marriage.

The good parable should teach us that one must not underestimate the latent dangers of imperfect detailing-that vigilance to detail should be secondonly to breathing for

2004). Mixture," in Clntent,ed. Rem Koolhaaset al. (Cologne:Taschen, Shumon Basar,"The Poisonous @ 2004 TschenGmbH and Office for Metropolitan Architecture. Reprinted with permission from the author and publsher.

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any self-respecting architect. "God is in the details," pronounced Germany's very own architectural St. Augustine, Mies van der Rohe, which probably came as a surprise to those who thought God had died and gone to heaven. Amen.

The Virtuous IndecentProposal was released the year I started my education in architecture. Very quickly, I felt the need to become au fait with the rules governing what is considered virtuoris and what is sinful. Ever since Mies's unique brand of fastidious, materially tersearchitecture proliferated to become the DNA of the neutered world that surrounds us, architects have valorized, with reiigious ferment, the absolute gravitas of "detailing": thatis ,as trangef et is hi z at i onof s c r ew s , j oi nt s , gap s , a n d j u n c t i o n s .I n a f u r t h e r perversity, the construction of the detail should be almost imperceptwist of obsessive tible and, above all, it should not show evidenceofhaving been made by human hands. Along with wearing one'sshirt with the top button closed(without a tie) and listening to freeform jazz whrle drafting, the (male) architect's pursuit of the controlled finish is a wayward, contagious infliction peculiarly at odds with the true unwieldy scale of architecture and the manifold. abstract dimensions in which it is situated.

The Battle "Architecture is a poisonous mixture of power and impotence."- \hen I read this statement as a student, my idealism was violated in the way a child's world is slowly abduction of Santa Claus, Sr:perman, and the Man in dismantled with the successive the Moon. "But surely," I protested, "if our concepts are bold enough, if our passion is hi-octane fueled, can't we achieve anything? Shouldn't we be able to achieve everythingT" It's only when one begins to try to build something that one understands the

lectureat ColumbiaUniversity, 1989 ' Rem Koolhaas,

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second half of architecture's dialectical recipe. Like Hercules, or Bruce \illis in Dl Hard, the architect must fight a veritable battle against ever-embittered combatants who seem ro wanr to see him fail. There are building regulations, bored bureaucrats, economic vicissitudes, nefarious political climates, unspoken histories, indifferent construction industries and the "public." And often, above all of these harbingers

of impotence, the architect faces The Client in a relationship that can be as infernal or beautiful as any marciage. This litany is sometimes referred to as "external forces," implying that the nature of practice is the reciprocity between this "outer realm" and the "inner lsalrn"-1hs seat of the architect's creativity and will. Understanding the

character of architecture's "impotence" might, I thought a few years later, be the key to liberation: how to unlock idealist delusion and give way to Practicable strategy.

The Schism There are two piles of images on my desk. The first includes a series of diagrams and flowcharts showing how a firm, OMA, has recently been extending its operations and presenceby affiliating itself with diverse companies and experts. The other pile is a series of close-up photographs of three buildings in Holland, revealing how various joints, gaps, surces, and apertures have held out over time.2 Cracks, oxidation, deterioration, patination, a panel lling off here, dead flies: a mesmerizing smear of decay in color. Leafing through the rwo sets of images is like looking at two possible future outcomes of a single decisive present.

The Inevitable The picrures of aging buildings are a Dorian Gray-like reminder of the inevitable perishability of everything. It might sound portentous to claim that it is the fear of

'?Netherlands DanceTheater,The Hague; Kunsthal, Rottetdam; Educatorium, Utrecht.

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death that both plagues and motivates architects. This would assume that buildings are physical personifications oftheir authors, estranged metonyms, or abandoned lookalikes. Any building is however marked by the mortality of its material assemblage. It can go wrong at any time, and might do so in public. The author is unable ro hide from the unforeseen problems-the imperfectioll5-6f ths creation. This may be why he claimed it was too much like because, if the building is the

James Stiding never revisited his finished buildings: visiting ex-loves. Perhaps going back is so teri$'ing

architect, any tectonic failures are tantamount to corporeal failures. It's like staring at your own expiry, and tealizing that there is nothing you can do to stop it.

The Tactical "The important thing is to be aware one exists."3

I organize the diagrams into a matrix of my table and behold a spray of acronymsOMA, AMO, VPRO, 2x4,IDEO; proper n2mss-pmcla,Hawatd, Ove Arup; and

a miscellany of individuals, some of whose names I rccognize and others I don't. In relation to the photos ofdecay, these diagrams seem ro outline an exploratory search for external, abstract organizatioll-abstract not in rhe senseof "not-there," but in the

way that freedom is abstract. The various permutations of letters and names look like a desire to discover sa6gi6s-ga6lics of ensuring one's freedom. Having been taughr rhat the only way architects can generate the conditions oftheir freedom is by building more and better, getting bigger commissions and ending up w ith afat cigar and a helipad, the spidery networks of intedaced diversification that orbit OMA look insane, and therefore the right thing to be doing. I can't help but think that the inward-looking architect-frozen by its love for frozen things-seems species of

doomed to D-list subjugation.

Jean-Ltc Godard, Pienot Le Foa (London:Loimat,

L969).

These bubble diagrams on the other hand, Iinking Chinese TV broadcasting with notions of rethinking Europe, attest to an unbridled locomotive where Surrealistic juxtapositions begin to operate at the level ofculture, economics, and language.

The Cure It isn't just a question of accepting that there are waves, and agreeing to surf them. Imagine, like Leonardo da Vinci, that you can create weather, and with weather, the mother of all waves. It could strike anywhere (New York, China, Las Vegas, the Ruhr Valley, Portugal . . . ) so one has to appear as though one can and will be everywhere at once. Make friends with culture (that's where the money is), hang out with fashion (it works for Christina Aguilera), celebrate superficiality (it's today's depth), be brutal and soft (we want it both ways), see the treasure in Junk (there is no such thing as obsolescence), spawn tribute clones (it's the true measure of fame), ditch piety and ennoble promiscuity (when have the youth ever been wrong?) and most of aII, realize that power isn't something worth believing in, you have to live it. From architecture's funeral pyre, a new Andrew Lloyd \ebber musical could be born. The proiect ofarchitecture, if it is to survive intact and potent, must transcend its former self: it has to wake up and realize that the true and only important task is the vigilant corruption of the chain of causality that begins with "client" and ends in "building." aggrandizing? Appear selfSure'

Accept Machiavellian tendencies? Dance like John Travolta?

Just don't look inwards, look out. The most powerful effect of impotence is the desire to find the cure.

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