Not Quite Cliché

There is a category of things in the built environment that are too ordinary to be remarked upon and too strange to be ignored, and we resolve the tension by doing neither. We walk past them. We sit in them. We wait under them. A gutter, a gate, a generator hum, a blank wall facing the street, a bench that nobody can lie on. They register on the retina and dissolve before reaching judgment. This article is about that dissolution, and about what happens when we interrupt it.

Architecture is often discussed as the art of the exceptional: the museum, the cathedral, the tower that makes the skyline. But the exceptional building is the one we are already prepared to notice. The ordinary one is where the real decisions are hiding, because ordinariness is not a natural state. It is manufactured. Somebody drew that wall. Somebody priced that gutter. Somebody decided the bench would have an armrest in the middle. Every "normal" thing in a city is the residue of a choice, and the choice was made by someone with interests, constraints, fears and a budget. "Normal" is simply the word we use when we have stopped asking who.

What follows is a set of signals. They are not rare. That is the point.

I. The wall that faces the street

Figure 1. The perimeter wall as default residential edge: each wall makes the next one rational

Walk down almost any residential road in Accra, Kumasi, Lagos or Nairobi and count how many buildings present a face to you. Not a façade in the architectural sense, but a face: a door you could knock on, a window a person might look out of, a veranda where someone might be sitting. Now count the walls. Two and a half metres of rendered blockwork, topped with broken bottles, razor wire or an electric fence, interrupted only by a steel gate painted black or the colour of rust.

We have come to read this as a fact of climate or culture, the way the compound house or the courtyard is. It is neither. The perimeter wall as the default residential edge is a fairly recent arrival, and it is a political document. It records a moment when people stopped trusting the street to police itself, when the state's promise of safety was quietly privatised, and when the street in turn became what walls make it: a corridor with no eyes on it, which is precisely the condition that makes it unsafe.

This is the loop worth listening to. Each wall makes the next wall rational. An individual household building a wall is acting sensibly. A street of households each acting sensibly produces a landscape nobody would have chosen. The architect's role is usually confined to the plot, which means the architect is never the one who draws the street, and the street is the thing that has gone wrong. We saw the wall. We did not notice that the wall is a vote.

II. The bench with the armrest in the middle

Figure 2. The divided bench. The instruction is in the geometry, so it cannot be argued with

The same logic, miniaturised. A public bench with a divider halfway along its length is not a courtesy to the two people who wish to sit apart. It is a device to stop a third person from lying down. So is the sloping ledge outside the bank, the studs on the window sill, the gravel under the bridge, the spikes in the doorway recess that was, for a few hours each night, somebody's bedroom.

Hostile design succeeds because it does not look like a prohibition. It looks like a bench. The instruction is embedded in the geometry rather than written on a sign, which means it cannot be argued with. You cannot appeal to an armrest. The rough sleeper moves on, the commuter is none the wiser, and the space is reported as "clean." What the city has done is solve a visibility problem by making a human being less visible, and then called the result order.

The architectural question is not whether the studs are ugly. It is what the building has been asked to enforce, and on whose behalf. Listen to a detail long enough and you will hear a policy.

III. The generator, the tank and the borehole

Figure 3. The house as utility company: tank, borehole, generator, solar

In much of West Africa, a middle-income house is now a small utility company. It has its own water storage on the roof, its own borehole in the yard, its own generator under a shed, its own inverter in the hallway, and increasingly its own solar array. None of this appears in the architectural drawings as anything more than a note. The plan says "polytank." The elevation is drawn without the black cylinder that will sit on top of it for the next forty years.

We have stopped noticing that the skyline of our cities is composed, to a significant degree, of water tanks. We have stopped listening to the generator, which is audible in every compound between seven and ten in the evening and which we process as weather rather than sound. The building that houses all of this infrastructure is, in technical terms, a response to state failure. The citizen has taken on the capital cost of services that were supposed to be collective, and the house has been reshaped around that burden: the roof must carry tonnes of water, the yard must accommodate fuel, the power room must vent, the whole thing must work in the blackout because the blackout is the design condition.

What this tells you about the future is direct. When the state does deliver reliable services, these houses will carry the scars of having done without. When it does not, the houses that are being built today are the only infrastructure plan that exists. Either way, the architecture of the house has quietly become the architecture of the nation's utilities, and nobody signed off on that as a strategy.

IV. The open gutter

Figure 4. The open drain, covered only where money or authority appears

The storm drain that runs along the edge of the road, a metre deep, concrete-lined, uncovered. Into it go rainwater, greywater, plastic, the occasional motorbike and, every rainy season, a child. We have built thousands of kilometres of these. They are the single most common piece of civil architecture in Ghanaian cities, more common than pavements, which frequently do not exist at all.

An open drain is a decision to prioritise water over people, and a decision about which people. It says that the volume of runoff from an increasingly paved city is the engineer's problem, and that the volume of pedestrians is nobody's. It is also a contextual failure that pretends to be contextual wisdom: the argument that covered drains silt up and cannot be cleaned is true, but it is true because there is no maintenance regime, and the absence of a maintenance regime is itself a design choice made at ministry level and then inherited by the kerb.

Look at where the drain is covered. It is covered outside the bank, the hotel, the church, the ministry. The slab appears where money or authority appears, and disappears where they do not. A map of drain covers is a map of influence. You have walked over it.

V. The plaster that hides the block

Figure 5. The delusion of finishes

Technically, our buildings are honest only when they are unfinished. The sandcrete block, the reinforced concrete frame, the timber roof: all of it is visible on site and all of it is buried by the time the client moves in, under render, paint, tiles and suspended ceilings. Finishing is the process of making the structure look like something else, usually something European and usually something thirty years out of date in Europe.

This would be a matter of taste if it did not have thermal consequences. The block wall that might have been shaded, ventilated and left to breathe is sealed and painted a heat-absorbing colour. The roof that might have had a ventilated cavity is closed off by a ceiling board to hide the trusses, and the hot air is trapped where the people are. The air conditioner is then specified to correct a problem the finish created, the generator is sized to run the air conditioner, and the whole sequence is presented to the client as "modern."

We have learned to see the finished house as normal and the unfinished one as poor. The building in its unfinished state is often the better climatic machine. The finish is a cultural signal about status, and the cost of the signal is paid every month, in fuel.

VI. The kiosk that is not there

Figure 6. The open spaces covered by outcrop of intentionally placed shops

On any drawing of a new commercial building there is a clear setback between the building line and the road. On the completed building, within six months, that setback is occupied: a container, a kiosk, a table of phone credit, a woman frying yam, a man repairing shoes. The architect did not draw them. The planning authority will periodically demolish them. They return.

This is the most reliable piece of feedback the city ever gives a designer, and it is nearly universally treated as noise. The kiosk is an instruction. It says: there is demand for small-scale trade at this exact point, there is foot traffic, there is shade or there should be, and the building you have designed has ignored all of it. Informality is not the absence of design. It is design operating faster than the drawing, with better data.

The future of the African city is being settled by this contest between the drawing and the kiosk, and the kiosk is winning on every front except the legal one. An architecture that listened would draw the kiosk first.

VII. The corridor that became a street

Figure 7. The setback on the drawing; the kiosk on the ground

Human behaviour in buildings is rarely what the plan predicted. The lift lobby is where people take their calls. The fire stair is where they smoke. The car park is where the real meeting happens after the official one ends. The university corridor is where the students actually learn from each other, having sat in silence through the lecture. The mosque forecourt and the church car park are the most successful public squares in many of our neighbourhoods, and neither was designed as one.

We call these "unplanned uses," which is a way of blaming the user for the gap between the plan and the life. The more interesting reading is that the building has two architects: the one who drew it and the population that inhabits it, and the second one is rarely consulted by the first. Every worn path across a lawn, every door propped open with a brick, every window that has been permanently shuttered because the sun comes through it at three o'clock: these are post-occupancy evaluations, written in the only language users have, and they are ignored because nobody goes back to read them.

VIII. The new building that is already old

Figure 8. A curtain wall at six degrees north, fighting its own envelope for its whole life

Drive past a new ministry, a new bank headquarters, a new university block. Glass curtain wall, often tinted blue or green, on every orientation including west. A tall podium and a slab. A name in stainless steel letters. It looks like the future. It is a picture of the future that was current in Singapore, Dubai or Shanghai about fifteen years ago, imported whole, and it will perform in our climate about as well as a greenhouse.

This is the cliché that is hardest to notice because it arrives dressed as progress. A curtain wall facing the afternoon sun in a city at six degrees north is a technical decision to spend the building's entire operating life fighting its own envelope. It is also a cultural decision to say that a serious institution should look like it is somewhere else. The cost of the signal is, again, paid in fuel, and it is paid by the public in the case of public buildings, which means that the aesthetics of prestige have a line in the national budget that nobody has itemised.

Contextualism is frequently mistaken for pastiche: put a pitched roof on it, use laterite, add a pattern from kente. That is not what context means. Context is the sun path, the rain, the dust, the way people actually queue, the fact that power will fail, the fact that the building will be repainted by someone with a different budget in twenty years. A contextual building is one that will still work when the premise behind its design has collapsed. Most of what we are building now assumes the premise will hold.

IX. Listening as a discipline

None of these signals is hidden. That is what makes them useful. You do not need special access to see the wall, the drain, the tank, the kiosk, the bench. You need only to refuse, briefly, the reflex that files them as normal.

Three practical habits follow.

First, ask who benefits from the thing being unremarkable. Normality is a service provided to somebody. The drain is normal for the engineer, the wall for the insurer, the curtain wall for the minister who wants to be photographed in front of it. Identify the beneficiary and the object stops being furniture.

Second, read the building after it is finished, not before. The drawing is an argument; the occupied building is the evidence. Go back. Look at what has been added, removed, blocked, painted over, extended. Treat it as the client's real brief, delivered late.

Third, draw the street, even when you have only been given the plot. The most consequential architecture in our cities is the space between buildings, and it is the space nobody is paid to design. An architect who insists on drawing the pavement, the drain cover, the tree, the kiosk and the place where the taxi will actually stop is doing unpaid work. It is also the work that will determine whether the building is any good.

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The phrase "not quite cliché" is meant precisely. A cliché is something so familiar that it has lost its meaning. What is described here is the opposite: things so familiar that we never got around to finding their meaning in the first place. They were not worn out. They were never examined. The wall, the drain, the tank, the bench, the glass: each is a sentence the city has been repeating to us for years, and we have taken the repetition for silence.

It was never silence. It was instruction, and it is still being given. The only question is whether we will be the people who heard it, or the people who listened.

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