Michael Webb: Two Journeys

FROM THE BOOK

The least interesting thing about Michael Webb is that he was part of Archigram. Thinking of him within such an influential gang of supposed misfits, who pretended to get along, severely underestimates how much of a misfit he was and continues to be. Fitting him into anything,
a monograph like this one for example, requires some violence. It is probably impossible to make even a small introductory essay about him without vandalizing work that is magical precisely in the way it eludes conventional labels, thinking and modes of representation. Webb has a certain ghostly presence in our field. Not the ghost of something past, departed, or faded. It’s rather that he has managed to be permanently arriving—as if he has been walking steadily toward us in an unwavering straight line for more than sixty years, with each of his small set
of around six or seven projects getting ever bigger in our eye in a kind of expanding ever-more- detailed cone in which the projects form widening Technicolor streaks as he adds more and more drawings and paintings to each of them. Yet this steadily growing and by now kaleidoscopically intense cone remains a phantom. We see more and more of Webb, and everything he draws and says is so surgically precise that our eye is ever more filled with ultra-high- resolution detail, yet the effect of all this sharpness is paradoxically cloud-like. Webb uncannily reverses the normal relationship between detail and focus. It is as if the whole point is to show us that to really focus on architecture with the highest possible resolution is to reveal a blur. Architecture, classically called on to represent stability and clarity, becomes a shadowy creature or series of promiscuous creatures mating in perpetually ambiguous motion.

There is a haunting quality to each of Webb’s mathematically precise drawings, a kind of dispersal of fixed limits that defies our attempts to pin him down. Or to say it the other way round, his work makes other architects look rushed and clumsy. If we wait a week, there
is always a new drawing or painting that tweaks a project that we thought we already knew. No project is allowed to sit still. Webb would still elude us if we waited another half century and studied and compared each and every one of the successive drawings in his expanding archive. Not because he avoids architecture, but precisely because he goes so deep. He is so relentlessly dedicated to architecture that he is almost unrecognizable within it. The very idea of a building is undone. All its material, organizational, and conceptual elements are taken apart, stripped, cleaned, reworked, and reassembled in a form that is no longer recognizable as a building and yet directly addresses the issues that buildings are supposed to address— as if the actual project is a kind of philosophical enquiry with the architect continually asking a small set of questions rather than offering a collection of possible answers. One of the least pretentious architects on the planet is deeply rethinking architecture from first principles.