Four Walls and a Roof

October 17, 2019

Four Walls and a Roof

Four Walls and a Roof: The Complex Nature of a Simple Profession
Reinier de Graaf
Harvard University Press, October 2019

Architecture, we like to believe, is an elevated art form that shapes the world as it pleases. Four Walls and a Roof challenges this notion, presenting a candid account of what it is really like to work as an architect.

Drawing on his own tragicomic experiences in the field, Reinier de Graaf reveals the world of contemporary architecture in vivid snapshots: from suburban New York to the rubble of northern Iraq, from the corridors of wealth in London, Moscow, and Dubai to garbage-strewn wastelands that represent the demolished hopes of postwar social housing. We meet oligarchs determined to translate ambitions into concrete and steel, developers for whom architecture is mere investment, and the layers of politicians, bureaucrats, consultants, and mysterious hangers-on who lie between any architectural idea and the chance of its execution.

Four Walls and a Roof tells the story of a profession buffeted by external forces that determine—at least as much as individual inspiration—what architects design. Perhaps the most important myth debunked is success itself. To achieve anything, architects must serve the powers they strive to critique, finding themselves in a perpetual conflict of interest. Together, architects, developers, politicians, and consultants form an improvised world of contest and compromise that none alone can control.

dDAB Commentary:

This collection of essays written by OMA partner Reinier de Graaf, about half of them originally for Dezeen and other publications, came out in hardcover in September 2017 and sees its release this week in paperback. I learned about the book that same month two years ago, at an event about books organized by the Storefront for Art and Architecture. Instead of speculating on a "book yet to be written," as the participants were asked to do, and most did, de Graaf plugged his own Four Walls and a Roof. His comments indicated, to me at least, that the book was focused on the transformation of Cold War-era Socialist housing estates into buildings like the cover photo: precast concrete elements from housing blocks reassembled into more traditional homes. Needless to say, his presentation did not make me want to run out and buy the book. But the following year, when de Graaf kicked off WAF in Amsterdam and delved into the varied topics explored in the book, I was hooked. Purchasing the book shortly thereafter and slowly making my way through some of the essays, I found the book good enough to put it on my initial list of 100 must-know architecture books.

While de Graaf writes in the Preface that the essays' "profound incoherence is a reflection of the world they describe," they are actually fairly consistent, knocking down the myths that swirl around the realm of architecture by giving insight into how the profession functions. Given that half of the 44 essays were written previously without the intention of eventual publication and the balance were written for the book, it's easy to bounce around in the book based on one's interest; that's what I did, drawn to the parts on authority, individual inspiration, and "the large scale." The fourth of the book's seven parts (Part IV. Trial and Error) could be a short book in its own right. Across roughly 140 pages, de Graaf documents a decade in his life at OMA (2005-2014), nearly month by month, like a diary of work, travel, and frustration. There's still much of the book I still need to digest, but the economic, political, and other contexts in which architecture operates came to the fore across the essays I have read. It's a serious book, but one balanced by de Graaf's sometimes humorous, sometimes cynical, often fresh takes and writing style. Somewhere I heard or read him pan his own writing, but I wholeheartedly disagree.

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