Daniel Rosbottom reflects on a new collection of architectural writing by Tony Fretton
‘AEIOU: Articles, Essays, Interviews and Out-takes’
Tony Fretton
Jap Sam Books, 160pp, £25
A.E.I.O.U. Five open and unrestricted sounds of the human voice, which come from the lungs, frictionless, like breathing. Five fundamental components that form the basis of the English language, whether written or spoken aloud.
Tony Fretton’s writings seek to engage with fundamentals and to find and explore a language for architecture that is real, authentic, natural, human, of the world. They are not the writings of an architectural critic or an architectural theorist or an architectural historian but of an architect. They understand architecture intrinsically and, in the manner of other master architects, as teacher, thinker, designer and maker of things. They embody this ongoing discourse. They are precise, succinct, lyrical and yet open to interpretation and intentionally ambiguous in their meanings. Like his buildings, his written works are often contingent upon other things while remaining confident in their own language and form. They remind me that he started something in British architecture that I am now a small part of, and which he is clearly still thinking about and working on.
As a collection they speak of a deep sensibility rather than shallow theory. They do not strain for profundity, although sometimes they find it. They are often content to be fleeting, yet haunting, and they are poetic in the truest, most original sense of bringing things into being which did not previously exist. They occupy a space between art and life, to quote Fretton quoting Rauschenberg.
‘Speaking’, ‘Designing’ and ‘Writing’, the three acts which introduce this little book are, for Fretton, all parts of the same whole. Interweaving with each other and following on from one another. Writing as the final ordering, iteration and reflection upon the thoughts and feelings and intuitions that emerge in the experience of designing and making something, alongside the conversations which have revealed, connected and cocooned it through the complex and often elongated process of building buildings. The words here build upon this understanding. They are tools for the architect and a work of architecture.
The essays are reiterative, re-edited, re-worked. They are the work of a mind that has spent its life in and around and beyond architecture, restlessly questing and questioning, turning and returning, touching and toughing it out. Valuing outcome more than income perhaps. The words flow, ideas are densely packed into a small volume and often into a few lines.
Fretton’s words are as lucid and spare as his sketches, sometimes as intentionally awkward, avuncular, or as matter of fact as his buildings might often appear, before the second sight properly reveals their essentialness, their situated-ness, their beauty”
These lines of thought walk a line in the space between the lines. A difficult place between figure and ground, this and that, here and there, now and then. They make a rewarding read: The Red House re-read, the Lisson listened to by its own author. As Fretton says, “Building is subtle and difficult, its role constantly fluctuates between a functional and an imaginative one.”
Fretton’s own words are often as lucid and spare as his sketches, sometimes as intentionally awkward, avuncular, or as matter of fact as his buildings might often appear, before the second sight properly reveals their essentialness, their situated-ness, their beauty. They have something of that awkward eloquence or eloquent awkwardness that makes Fretton’s architecture revelatory. They have wit, in the best sense of the word.
Fretton writes about himself and others and through others about himself. The lines interweave and coalesce into a discernible image, a sustained and continuous project. The words and ideas are often found in other things and other places. Sometimes confounding, occasionally profound, they establish the foundations for his place in the world, upon which his buildings stand. Often humorous and always generous, they set a standard, but are not the standard musings of an architect. They articulate. They are articulate. They are articles. They are artful. They are art.
