The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part III: Tactics
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Nigel Coates
clubs, and music—even relationships are much less prescribed. I just think
that all this can influence the culture that you work with in architecture and
if it doesn’t—if you try to tidy up—it falls back into the same old form.
Whilst in buildings as well as cities there must be components for
orientation, there must also be a sense of getting lost—traditionally an
anathema to architects who always strive to make things clear. I put my own
identity in my work to a huge degree—there is a deliberate ambivalence in
finding sources in things I like. If you are completely detached from what
you do, and don’t use your own experiences as a laboratory, then that touch
isn’t there. But at the same time I always undo that part, so that I can let go.
Our work sends out different signals for different people. My sexual orientation
is not fundamentally important in our work—except that maybe an
understanding of duplicity provides something extra. There are components
of the masculine and feminine in what I do—never meant specifically
for men or women—that indicate a sense of evolution, towards confounding
interpretation. This may not always be obvious, it may be that I’m as
chauvinistic as Le Corbusier was, but that is not what I’m trying to do. I try
to include elements of self-criticism and retreat.
Architecture is a public art, a setting up of frameworks which are
never absolute in use or interpretation. Each project is different. I don’t
mind that some of the interiors in Japan no longer exist. Some things come
together at a time, cause a stir, then conditions change. I think that is all
part of the way cities evolve. What is important is to do with what the original
project intended. Like Rachel Whiteread’s House—we knew it was going
to be demolished, and its passing reinforced what was important about
it: it is a memory.
I never want to build monuments. I have an excitement for the way
that places are, and therefore try to extrude what is there and then pile in
narrative metaphors for what it is, building up a condition which isn’t just
read once but also has a sense of the way it is used and added to. There is a
need for architects to bring together conflicting layers of signs, layer components
that set off triggers, generate erotic conditions in space. But for me
these conditions are always familiar—the hallucinating effect of nightclubs,
the way Soho has changed, ships and the Thames and its bank (HMS Belfast
is the best building in London). They create a frisson in a place, in small
scale and large scale with a constant switching of effects. The cultural role
of architecture has huge potential, but people will become more interested
in architectural expression only when it comes to parallel something intimate
in their lives.