The Polytechnic

This commentary on the journal Fourth Door Review will be published sometime in some form in the magazine Green Building.

Review of Fourth Door Review

The Fourth Door Review is a very curious publication. It engages
thoughtfully with content that ranges from technology and new media to
holistic ecological theory, yet whilst it focuses in particular on
architecture and design, art and music - each issue typically include
a few random entries as well - there is a recipe for carrot soup in
this issue, for example. There is however, a pattern that connects the
entries, and in a marketplace saturated with safe approaches to
journalism, FDR is neither the woolly sub-phenomenological babble that
can too often characterise attempts at ecological holistic writing,
nor is it the glossy techno-worship that is frequently pushed at
visually vulnerable design students. It occupies rather, a
productively unstable and hybrid modern position, which can perhaps
ultimately be understood as contributing to a new interpretation of
the architectural historian Kenneth Frampton’s theory of Critical
Regionalism?
The Fourth Door Review is published on a highly irregular basis - the
latest, number eight, is the first for several years - and its
editorial seems to enjoy the fact that the arrival of issues is
becoming even less predicable! However, as soon as one starts to read
the publication, one can begin to understand why that might be.
Firstly, it is very beautifully produced - neither a book nor a
magazine - it is more like a lovingly crafted journal or notebook. The
content further supports such a diaristic interpretation: whilst there
are contributions from several different authors, the majority of the
material is developed out of a series of conversations between Oliver
Lowenstein - the journals founder and editorial co-ordinator - and
various artists, practitioners and thinkers. Whilst this unusual
editorial balance could be seen as a weakness in the journal, it
actually becomes a strength and defining characteristic. Indeed, in so
far as the substance of the Fourth Door Review is largely interview
based, it is perhaps best understood as working within the tradition
of a literary form that would include Fritof Capra’s Conversations
with Remarkable People, and even G.I. Gurdjieff’s Meetings with
Remarkable Men. Lowenstein is an independent academic and researcher,
and his projects and travels feed into and determine the direction of
each issue. His recent projects have included a proposal for a chain
of bicycle stations, and curating a exhibition exploring the cultural
use of wood in Scottish architecture, and the research generated for
latter of these projects in particular has found expression in the
current issue.
The FDR is then primarily a series of collaborative, even co-designed
texts: dialogues fleshed out where necessary with further stories,
anecdotes and facts. Their success is based upon the real quality of
the individuals that Lowenstein engages with. In the latest issue, we
meet architectural thinkers and practitioners of global significance,
such as Peter Zumthor and Juhani Palasmaa, in substantial
conversations that provide new insights to their work, thereby making
a real contribution to the academic material on these thinkers.
Operating at a similar level of cultural recognition are several of
the musicians whose work is explored. David Sylvan’s seminal works in
the eighties and nineties inspired many other more commercial groups,
and defined much of the sound of that period, whilst Jen Finer was a
guitarist (and more) with The Pogues. Sylvan - in a revealing and
personal dialogue - discusses recent developments in his recorded
music. Moving in a very different direction, Jen Finer discusses
both his millennial 1000 year duration Long Player, and more recent
though equally experimental acoustic-landscape art hybrids.
In summary, it is perhaps the range of material touched upon, that
makes FDR a dialogue worth eavesdropping on. In this issue, one finds
references to the CERN collider a few pages away from Stewart Brand’s
Long Now Foundation, Goethean Science based studies of flow near
internet based community mapping experiments. We find Passivhaus
pioneers next to the digitally fabricated patterned brickwork of ETH
Zurich’s Gramazio and Kohler, and references to Paul Virilio’s Grey
Ecology not far from a review of a Mongolian music festival. As
Lowenstein comments whilst deep in his Swiss travels, “I felt that I
was in the presence of a new hybrid, machine augmented to be sure,
though also within the bounds of craft, even if it was very definitely
another kind of craft, another way of making.”

Jon Goodbun (jon@wag-architecture.co.uk) was a founding partner of
architecture and design group WAG (www.wag-architecture.co.uk), and
contributes to the Polytechnic research group (www.thepolytechnic.org)
at University of Westminster, where he will shortly be submitting his
PhD thesis Ecological Cybernetics: Architecture and the Extended Mind