Now, repeat after me

Emmett Scanlon

The value of repetition is not so much to be found in the idea that practice makes perfect, but in the notion that the implementation of a philosophy of repetition inevitably leads to an anonymity of styling. This could act in turn as an antidote to the pervasive individualism embodied in the structure of architectural practice. Similarly, vernacular architecture was an architecture generated out of a collective understanding of individual identity and the relevance of such an identity to a physical, manifest context. This kind of architecture was one where ideas of continuity and newness were fused, and formal, organisational or sensual ideas were consistently carried from building to building to building, across entire villages and towns.

Adam Caruso, by inviting us to �alter and extend� what already exists in our environment, asks us to recognise the formal, organisational or sensual ideas latent there, to carry them with us, and for these ideas to be the seeds of new work. While not supporting this proposition with reference to his own work, the principle was illuminated by an apartment building on Dublin's North King Street shown by a successive speaker, Shelley McNamara of Grafton Architects. Here, the realised building makes formal and material connections to its almost-erased context. This building is unique in the literal sense of the word, but does not stand as an isolated, independent intervention, or a static immutable object. While respecting its context, it has exploited formal and material precedents, and invented a new model - specifically, a new model for the mediation of the citizen with his city through the building�s moveable facade. It invites occupancy and seeks appropriation. It becomes then this new kind of architecture, an architecture which is never actually static, because it can now provide further seeds for new growth and development. This, in fact, is its potential.

Adam Caruso, we are told by the various sources of media, is an ordinary man, making ordinary buildings, for ordinary people. His interest in the ordinary however, is an interest in reality and not the superficial realisation of what appears to be humble. In an after-conference conversation with Caruso, he spoke with wonder about the repetitive process of making working drawings and their potential to represent and make concrete in two dimensions the three-dimensional reality. Each drawing is part of a wider set, representing the connected elements which combine to make architecture manifest. Embedded in this process is a recognition of the potential occupation and use of architecture, and an attempt to make an architecture which is open, generous and inclusive to all. The relevance of Caruso at a symposium on the city is that he is an architect involved in the physical construction of cities. He demonstrates a method of operation, one in which the emphasis is shifted back to the actual, physical and cultural reality of our cities, and where this reality is being used as a generative and general apparatus for the creation of new work. Here, in one sense lies Caruso�s connection to the vernacular architecture of old. In the repetitive implementation of such a methodology, one can see the potential for developing a new kind of architecture, one which is not born of fashion or individual taste, but one in which ingenutiy and invention and used to re-interpet conventions. And, if we realise that even in ordinary things lurk the deepest of mysteries, then we have a way of working in our cities which could sustain architecture forever.

Emmett Scanlon, a M. Arch. student at UCD, is currently researching architects' consistent fascination with a concept of 'the ordinary'.