Review: "On Common Ground", Francis Reed
Working Press, London 1991, 89 pages. 5.80 Pounds Sterling.

The "Common Ground" of the title of this book is a reference to a
principle of diversity and interdependence  which Francis Reed
identifies as running through nature and, ideally, human life. The
subject of the book is, almost tangentially, architecture. A survey of
the history of Common Land takes up a third of the book; a critique of
the alienation of industrial, Capitalist life and building from nature
and the land takes up another third, and the final  third is a wide
ranging exploration of cosmological ideas as they might manifest
themselves in a future architecture. 

Francis Reed is not short of his own ideas - in many ways this book is
a very personal statement - but he is very often happy for his sources
to speak for themselves. It is illustrated with many well-reproduced
sketches from his notebook and a similar number of original
photographs, some of which reproduce less well but which nevertheless
help to tell the story. It might sometimes appear that the book does
not know what it is about, but this is because the author  is linking
several ideas with one of his own. 

Common Rights ...were the residue of rights that in all  probability
antedate the idea of private property in land  and are therefore of vast
antiquity (p.7, quoting  W.G.Hoskins). These lands were by no means
chaotically  managed, but were regulated by complicated local rules &
organised at formal meetings of Commoners. They constituted a
productive resource which was inherent in  the community, largely
outside the control of the Manor,  and has been systematically eroded.

Common Land represents a link to an ancient way of life which was less
alienated from nature. In its complex local  rules it reflected the
minute adaptation of nature to  specific conditions. "Through the
process of development  and the synergy of inter-relationships, things
at once  become themselves and achieve a transcendent dimension; in
places we call this Common Ground "genius loci",   perception the
"saturated complex", and in people the  process of individuation" (p.
37). If I understand this  and the thrust of the book correctly, it
means that the  network of relationships between living things
constitutes  a common ground which they all share, but also
individuates them. The local and specific nature of the interlocking
rules governing the processes of life means a  variety and diversity
which is both evolutionarily  beneficial and a source of delight. 

"To some [Classical Architecture] may have had connotations of free
thought independent of medieval theocracy, but it has always been used
to conceal enormous brutality"  (p. 52). Reed respects the Beaux-Arts
trained Mackintosh and Corbusier, but "to be really alive, architecture
will always have to go beyond the Classical framework" (p.54).

For Francis Reed there is in the Gothic style a pre-dualistic
"paraphrase of nature".The Rennaissance was a "winter", and today there
is "a diseased architecture of monumental banality" (p. 36).Reed has
sympathy for what Colin Ward called the Moral Left, who work
collaboratively with materials; an undercurrent on the margins, from
the Arts and Crafts to the pioneers of the Modern Movement. The
post-modernists, however, have created a cardboard pastiche without a
"genuine inner force" (quoting Christopher Alexander, p. 41).
"Deconstructivist" architects produce "...a devious architecture, a
slippery architecture thats slides uncontrollably...towards an uncanny
realisation of its own other nature...The architect expresses nothing
here. What is being dissolved is a set of deeply entrenched cultural
assumptions..about order, harmony, stability and unity (quoting Mark
Wigley, p. 59). 

"Even the marginality of the dispossessed can be appropriated...with
the arrival of the new Yuppie Internationalism  with corporate post
modernism as its aesthetic, we have the perfect expression of a culture
which...displays a passivity towards the totalising forces, systems of
exploitation, administration and control, and at the same time
continually simulates signs of "individuality" to produce a totally
colonised but "irresponsible" subject - the free individual" (quoting
Hannah Vowles and Glyn Banks, Art in Ruins exhibition 1988, p. 59).

"If so much of our predicament is rooted in an eclipse and  negation in
the relation between things, a way forward may  lie in the idea of
dynamic balance - embodied, for  instance, in traditional Celtic
metaphysics or the wheel  of the Four Elements, or in much of the "New
Science"" (p.63). A localised "mythos", such as the "Matter of
Britain" or "Albion", can be thought of as a part of the  consciousness
or memory of the planet itself which is concerned with the relation
between people and a particular part of the Earth (p.63).

Reed says that there are "archetypal symbolic themes which form a
common ground of the human imagination" (quoting Kathleen Raine,
p.66), which also have a bearing on architecture. These are such as the
meeting of inner and outer forms, water, and the flow of space.  Celtic
tradition "introduces a feeling of transparency and interpenetration of
one element with another, of transposition and metamorphosis" (quoting
Kathleen Raine, p.68).

The Four Elements can be seen reflected in the traditional house as
well as in renewable energy sources.  Earth represents walls and Air
space, forming a polarity of shelter; Water in the well outside and
Fire in the hearth inside form a polarity around which life is
lived.  Earth also represents geothermal power, whilst the others have
obvious connotations with renewable energy

John Betjamin is brought in: 'Architecture can only be made alive again
by a new order and a new Christendom... it is unlikely that this will
be capitalism' (p.82) Reed draws in many ideas which could come
together to inform a new metaphysics; and he sees Architecture as
playing a mediating role in groping towards a new consciousness for
the continent. This is not an argument for an indiscriminate
appropriation of new age fads, and Reed is fully aware of the dangers
of submerging the self in the cosmos, but he argues that rational
materialism is sterile without vision; that, in fact, much of what
passes for materialism is little more than abstract technological
romanticism.

There is a general consensus that Architecture as a discrete profession
is in crisis. Reed's book can be seen as an attempt to redeem the
profession by opening its economistic ideological framework to a
plurality of other influences, including Japanese ecomancy, Lovelock's
Gaia hypothesis and Sheldrake's Morphic Resonance theory. There is
certainly a worthwhile idea behind this book, concerned with restoring
severed connections, which may indicate a direction in which our
civilisation and its architects could look for that all too necessary
rebirth. Whether such a rebirth will destroy or preserve Architecture as
a profession remains to be seen.

Malcolm Stroud

From Here & Now 13, Glasgow, Autumn 1992
 

