Review: Truth and Lies in Architecture

Melancholy wouldn’t be most people’s pick for the driving emotion of the architect. Egotistical self-belief might more likely come to mind. But, in his collection of essays, Truth and Lies in Architecture, acclaimed Australian architect Richard Francis-Jones sets off from this shore of profound sadness.

And who can blame him, when the practice of architecture “has been progressively desiccated, undermined and commodified through the instrumental processes of the contemporary development industry and professional practice”? Francis-Jones lays some of the blame on the “predominance of the negative critique” in our schools of architecture, in which the student is expected to present and then ‘defend’ their proposition. The process, he says, is “needlessly negative and combative, more suited to the courtroom setting and trial of an accused”.

It’s paradoxical, then, that in Truth and Lies, Francis-Jones is in full combat mode, leaving no stone unturned as he critically excoriates contemporary architecture and examines the tracks of its diminishment. As he points out, architecture has never been more challenged than it is today. “Addressing the sheer scale of the triple challenges of environmental sustainability, in the form of climate change; the social, in the form of class, gender and racial inequality; and the cultural, in terms of identity, exclusion and prejudice in particular against First Nations People, is a seemingly overwhelmingly task for architecture.”

Hence, the melancholy. But Truth and Lies is a tour de force of big architectural issues: truth, lies, theory, image, intuition and consciousness, to name a few. On intuition, for example, Francis-Jones pronounces: “It is rooted in a deeper connection to the world we inhabit; it is our feeling, rather than our knowledge. It is a manifestation of the interconnectedness of all things. Remarkably, it is the means for a holistic response to the vastly complex nature of our human condition.”

In his essay headings, Francis-Jones presents a constant dichotomy between what architecture is and what the architect does. Hence: “The Truth of Architecture and the Lies of the Architect”, “The Slowness of Architecture and the Speed of the Architect”, “The Face of Architecture and the Mask of the Architect”, and “The Nature of Architecture and the Extinction of the Architect”.

As one might expect, modernism gets a pasting: “The singular truth of modernism and the march of ‘Progress’ became intolerant, with cultural and ethnic diversity, inclusion and equity trampled underfoot. Enabled through scientific and technological advancements, the twentieth century witnessed an unleashing of human suffering and environmental degradation on a breath-taking scale.” Progress that almost killed us all.

Francis-Jones’ writing is a delightful mix of philosophical portent – “Is architecture silent to questions of truth?” – mixed with manifesto slogans: “Architecture tells its truth through lies, distortions of construction for formal purpose. Lies that may help us glimpse truth about the world and our place in it.” The latter refers to the ways in which architecture can explain how it’s made and assembled into a tectonic composition and then bend that representation for poetic intent. “Weight can be made weightless, enclosure made open, solidity made transparent.” Truth and lies.

Author Richard Francis-Jones. Image: Supplied

Truth and Lies is unashamedly anti-neoliberal: “The ideology of our time with its emphasis on efficiency, change, the free market, and speed, is in many ways the antithesis of the necessary conditions for making architecture.” And anti-tower block cities: “The tragic ubiquitous mechanically-serviced glass office boxes of the twentieth-century are not architecture. Any building that damages and undermines our symbiosis with the natural world is not architecture. Building, development and construction perhaps, but not architecture.”

Other times, it veers off into the plain weird. In “The Fall of the Architect”, we learn approximately half of us “suffer or experience the ‘call of the void’ or ‘l’appel du vide’” – an impulse to step off into the nothing below. Somehow, Francis-Jones sees this as a rejection of high-rise and a “reminder to look down and understand that the architect’s mission is to connect us more deeply with the nature of the ground from which we all belong, and long to return”. Possibly a step too far.

Truth and Lies is both confronting and inspiring in its scope, capturing perfectly the enormity and terror of the architect’s task – “perhaps paradoxically, the less chance of success the greater the poetic force and the more important it is to persist”.

This article was first published on architecturenow