Post: Criticism
As a failed architect, the way I make architecture is by writing. I am trained as an architect and practiced the profession for a few years, but most of my life has been spent talking about, writing about, exhibiting or teaching architecture, design and art. So to justify a rather nebulous position in life and in theory, my writing is a way of creating architecture beyond or without buildings. I hope that my words can evoke the spaces, forms and images that can shape our environment. I have enough chutzpah to believe that I can do so more powerfully than most buildings can. Buildings, after all, are mute. For most laypeople it is difficult to find the careful articulation of structure, the composition of form and the choreography of space, let alone be able to understand what gives shelter, within these structures. I define architecture as the 'signification' of buildings - how they speak or how we can read them - and in that sense the field of architecture may be a façade or a story, a warped form or even a paean to a particular edifice.
In general, I think we need to stop thinking of writing as a commentary on architecture or any cultural production. Instead, it is a medium which can turn any form of making into a form of art. This is not to say that only writers can make art. Writing is a powerful tool that opens our eyes to the world around us. This is not only when it is engaged in what we think of as the 'art' of writing (literature), but especially as the 'derived' work of criticism.
In the 19th century, when writers such as Zola and Baudelaire were as famous for their critical assessments of other's work as for their own poetry and fiction, the dichotomy between authentic fiction and secondary commentary was less pronounced. It is a mark of the separation between art and technology today that we now understand the evocative acts of fiction and the supposed solutions of facts as completely separate fields. Not since T.S. Eliot commented on the need for the continuity of the classical tradition has a major fiction writer or poet entered successfully into the realm of criticism, and the same is true in the other direction. It is also part of the subjection of all forms of cultural production to the economic regime that we make a distinction between those things we think of as productive and created for a fee (which we paradoxically assume are therefore of less worth, either theoretically or ultimately economically) and those works produced without commission, on speculation, and useless in the narrowest sense of the term. Hence specialization and the subjugation of all labor to the regime of capitalism is the ultimate reason why we think of art as art, for art supposedly rejects this subjugation. Whereas, its integration into productive fields through analysis and evaluation as criticism is considered a lower form of making.
Forms of resistance to this division of the fields have come from both sides of the divide. Artists and designers have argued for the usefulness of their work either for the state (the constructivists) or industry (Bauhaus). Walter Gropius, the founder of Bauhaus, encouraged his faculty and students to design objects that could be mass produced. He sold his school as a prototype R&D lab for German industry, though the only concrete results of his efforts were some advertisements for ball bearings. His Russian counterparts at the Vkuthein school were more successful, designing everything from tram conductors' uniforms and restaurant services to the "agitprop" trains that went out into the country to sell socialism. Yet the push and pull of the socio-economic system to define what either an artist or a critic does as either making art or talking about it was so strong that few of these movements have survived or even been able to convince many observers of their profoundly refusenik status.
Critics, meanwhile, have mixed fiction and fact in movements such as The New Journalism of the 1960s. There was a brief moment, during the heady days before the First World War, that critics such as Marinetti could write manifestoes that were combinations of fact and fiction disciplined by their utopian aims. Most of the mixtures between fact and fiction were slyer. Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe could claim to embellish the truth in order to get a deeper mythic reality, while Hunter Thompson took refuge into drug-fueled flights of fancy in which fact and fiction blurred. The effect of their work was not so much to produce fiction as fact or vice versa, but to point out, in a critical manner, that these distinctions were the product of the culture that wanted affirmation of what it already knew and was.
The problem ironically becomes stronger when criticism confronts especially those aspects of art that are embedded in modes of operation not under the traditional rubric of the definition of art. For example, this is especially true in architecture and design, though also in some areas of drama and music. Design in the broadest sense of the word has always had to confront the fact that is both a productive activity and art, namely a form of engineering and useless form-making. It must both house us and be a beautiful frame to our lives. This is evident in the ambivalent placement of its academic training between engineering and art and the different allocation of it in various economic systems. It creates confusion for critics on how to combine evaluations of function or comfort within a criticism that tries to bring out the expressive potential of an object, image or space.
Industrial and graphic design must cope with this issue on an even more severe and continual level because they have never managed to separate the act and art of forming their productions fully from their expressive, evocative, elusive or allusive potential. Architects, from the first definition of their activities as a profession in the late 17th century in France, were able to argue for an underlying art of composition or an overlaying evocation through facades that were serviced by the allocation of resources to create serviceable volumes. More importantly, they took charge of both of these aspects of their discipline. Such were the teachings of Quatremere-de-Quincy, the 'Perpetual Secretary' of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Despite many stylistic transformations, Quatremere-de-Quincy's definition of architecture became the standard that has remained at the heart of the discipline.
The ironic outcome of this latter victory, the recognition of, but also the ambiguity about, both the artistic and the engineering aspects of architecture, is a profound insecurity felt by most architects and many designers about whether they are merely high-level productive technicians or artists whose work is usually misunderstood because it is subsumed in finished products. This in turn has led to a flight into the making of utopian, "paper" or experimental architecture and design. Those architectural productions that have been most influential, from the visions of Le Corbusier's Ville Radieuse to Rem Koolhaas' Delirious New York drawings, have usually been unbuilt. The distinction, though, must be made between the effect of such imaginations in the discipline, which has been very large, and outside of it, where it has not. It is also worth noting that the images these architects have produced have been embedded in texts that exactly mix techniques they have derived from documentary or technical description with fiction or expressive evocation.
Finally, there is the rigid distinction between the architect or designer and the critic. Only if one puts one's words in the service of a proposal for some form of building, rather than ensuing from something already existing (whether real or examined) can one be making architecture. Thus Koolhaas was criticized for many years as not being serious because he did not build anything, as was Zaha Hadid. Likewise, those architects and their architectures that appear only in fiction, such as Italo Calvino and his inspirational Le Città Invisibili (Invisible Cities), are considered purely writers.
I recognize what I do as being 'mere' criticism, in which I have concentrated much of my writing on an archaeology of this condition. Nevertheless, I have argued for a greater critical project: to question the very distinction between fact and fiction, production and illusion, and any form of subjugation of human creation to the affirmation of the social, economic and political status quo.
I cannot say what such a hybrid or chimerical construct might be. I am certainly attracted to those forms of writing whose landscapes come out of a reading of multiple layers and levels of reality, as in the work of John McPhee or Paul Theroux (which brings up the additional question of the distinction between journalism, travel writing and fiction), and in the manner in which some writers have constructed architectures either as objects performing active parts in their stories (the cathedral of Notre Dame in Victor Hugo's Hunchback, or the house in Henry James' Spoils of Poynton) or through the very structures of their narratives, as Dublin so famously functions in the work of James Joyce. I have looked especially towards the world of film and television, in which imagined spaces are made real or real spaces are turned into figments of the film's imagination. The narrative and constructed coherence fuse to make some of the most powerful architecture I know.
So in the end, perhaps I am a failed filmmaker.
