Asphalt Culture Bad language and mute modernism in architectural practice

The role of the architect in shaping domestic space, urban form and future communities has emerged as a critical field of contemporary inquiry. Asphalt Culture examines the motivations that underpin architectural practice today, questioning how and why specific forms and materials are chosen, and whether such decisions arise from rigorous critical reasoning or from shifting cultural trends. Through a narrative that is both personal and grounded in architectural theory, architect Gordon Shrigley reflects on how encounters with people and places have shaped his design methodology, using these experiences to critically examine the nature, responsibilities and possibilities of architectural practice in the twenty-first century.

In the wake of modernism’s collapse and the exhaustion

of postmodernism, architecture has entered a state of disciplinary retreat. The ambition to articulate the spirit of the age through form has been displaced by a narrow pragmatism that privileges specification over expression and performance metrics over cultural meaning. Asphalt Culture confronts this condition through the examination of three architectural projects that argue for a renewed architectural ambition. Grounded in the realities of the contemporary city yet oriented towards the enduring ideal of “the good life”, the book advances an architectural position that insists on architecture’s capacity to reconcile material constraint with social, cultural and imaginative aspiration.

• Addresses architecture’s current crisis of ambition in
  an era beyond the dominance of modernism and postmodernism.
• Sheds light on how architects make decisions about form and material, moving beyond technical metrics to understand cultural meaning.
• Combines reflective, first-hand experience with broader theoretical inquiry.

Asphalt Culture

Bad language and mute modernism in architectural practice

Gordon Shrigley

Specifications

Trimmed page size: 150 x 210 mm

Extent: 164 pp

Printed four-colour throughout

Illustrations: 6 specially commissioned and 12 historic photographs, and 33 drawings

About the author
Gordon Shrigley is a practicing architect based in East London. He studied Graphic Design at Bournville College of Arts, Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham and Architecture at the Polytechnic of Central London and Westminster University. In 1998, he was awarded a fellowship at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart. Shrigley’s drawings, which explore materiality, have been exhibited at a range of art institutions, including the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart and the Musée d’Art Moderne de Saint-Étienne. With an ongoing focus on reframing the intersections of architecture, the language of drawing and visual theory, his publications include Insignificance (Edition Solitude, 1998), Spatula: How Drawing Changed the World (Marmalade, 2004), Max Bill: HfG Ulm (Marmalade, 2006) and To Simply Draw (Drawing Matter, 2020).