testauthor on February 21st, 2007 at 10:24 am
link: post-critical
there are a couple of articles on that page. from what i understand this is a movement that is gripping the academic architecture scene, and princeton [where i'm at school] has been hiring several of its proponents [stan allen, sarah whiting, bob somol]. this is pretty controversial here, considering princeton’s historical emphasis on criticality, ‘resistance’, etc. Is this a phenomenon outside the architecture world? I’d love to hear people’s thoughts…
(See: post-critical architecture)
February 4th, 2006 at 12:19 am
interesting thread. the design | media arts scene is pretty much pre-critical.
as for the art world, i just read a really funny show description, which i will
quote a part of:
‘HOTEL CALIFORNIA’, the upcoming exhibition at The Glendale College Art Gallery, takes a casual snapshot of Los Angeles painting in the early millennium. The intention of this show, which consists of twenty-one small paintings under 24” x 36”, is to, with a relaxed hand, strike a chord that sounds like painting in this city.
maybe this can serve as an illustration of my feeling that people are trying
really hard to be casual and relaxed. looking forward to
reading those articles, i havent really gotten into this yet.
February 4th, 2006 at 12:23 am
This example is dutifully replicated—minus the theory—by post-critics such as Michael Speaks, in their championing of jargon and techniques associated with right-wing think tanks and the CIA.
haha
February 4th, 2006 at 3:26 pm
well in architecture school this whole ‘projective’ thing has manifested itself as kind of neo-humanism…ie making ‘nice’ things, and don’t worry too much about program or messy stuff like that. when i get back to school tomorrow i’m going to try and get my hands on the whiting/somol essay so i’m not just taking martin and baird’s words for it.
in review whiting tends to jump on anything political/socially relevant in projects, using a kind of militant PCism to say "don’t touch that! just focus on affect" (btw is it weird that they say affect when they mean effect? i can’t figure out why they do that)
February 5th, 2006 at 1:55 pm
would like to see that other essay too
February 5th, 2006 at 4:55 pm
[[Library:Somol, Robert and Sarah Whiting:Notes around the Doppler Effect and other Moods of Modernism|whiting & somol essay here]]
i don’t see how what they propose fits outside my understanding of what ‘critical’ architecture can be, except perhaps this:
[Architects] engage these other fields as experts on design’s relationship to those other disciplines, rather than as critics. Design encompasses object qualities (form, proportion, materiality, composition, etc) but also includes qualities of sensibility, such as effect, ambiance, and atmosphere.<i>
which is to say, design does not encompass non-object qualities. later on they specifically come out against the ‘uncanny’ in architecture, which would seem to suggest not straying <i>too far from the status quo
February 5th, 2006 at 4:57 pm
crap let me try that again
don’t see how what they propose fits outside my understanding of what ‘critical’ architecture can be, except perhaps this:
[Architects] engage these other fields as experts on design’s relationship to those other disciplines, rather than as critics. Design encompasses object qualities (form, proportion, materiality, composition, etc) but also includes qualities of sensibility, such as effect, ambiance, and atmosphere.
which is to say, design does not encompass non-object qualities. later on they specifically come out against the ‘uncanny’ in architecture, which would seem to suggest not straying too far from the status quo
February 6th, 2006 at 3:28 am
projective and critical - it seems like the usefulness of the projective is that it suggests "alternatives" (as opposed to reacting or combatting, which i guess is what characterizes the critical?) .. so if it fails to propose alternatives (which i have no idea how to determine) then it’s wholly within the status quo. just to be clear about the claim (i.e. the claim is that the projective is something other than the status quo)
doppler effect and parallax - this is saying that a person’s past experiences necessarily alters their immediate experience of architecture? that their immediate experience produces these recollections or feelings? this is what’s generally meant by affect? if that’s fair, then this reminds me of don ihde’s summary of phenomenology. this seems fair, though not so new. the "architecture as text" thing never really appealed to me (and banham had that critique in the early 80s in favoring gehry to the other postmodernist architects, and banham himself insisted on experiencing buildings).
hot and cool - i think this hot and cool thing is a little embarassing. on the one hand it reminds me of the obsessively commercial art (as advertised in the show i mentioned above), criticizing the overworked and belabored yet being self-consciously "relaxed" and easy-going; but on the other hand i understand the populist appeal of work that stands on its own terms (in relation to one’s experience of it) as opposed to "expressing" a text, idea, critique, but for me it has to do with an uneasiness with expert discourses (the latter operating i think effectively as advancing a discourse, the former offering no particular statement or positive contribution beyond what it is and how it is taken up by the discourse, if at all). which is what kind of confuses me about how whiting and somol insist that architects are experts of design and should stick to it? and then to insist (in the last sentence) "oh and projective architecture actually combats late capitalism by working within it" seems kind of disjunctive since those issues are given no interest or attention through the essay, its as if they feel obliged to do it!
reading that is funny when i consider the most recent michael speaks lecture that i saw which (a) involved mainly quotations of pop-science tracts about complexity and emergence and (b) concluded with a bizarre outburst about hating the people at october and grey room (with the paranoid justification that they hate him).
i still have yet to read the first critique of the post-critical, though i’m eager to now
February 6th, 2006 at 3:33 am
i mean if the basic argument is that architects should perform the ideas of the philosophers they’re reading, rather than literally expressing those ideas, then i think i’m down with that — that’s been my take on blobs and folds. but when things get distributed into an essay like this, the straw man oppositions and details and polemic kind of get in the way and (for me) undermine this argument.
February 6th, 2006 at 11:41 am
i agree that architecture-as-text isn’t so interesting, but i think reinhold martin is right that they conflate social critique and autonomous formal critique (specifically, eisenman). the essay is a little tricky that way…saying critical architecture only provides a universal (ie not individual) negative assessment of the past, without proposing alternatives. i think this idea of critical architecture is totally wrong, and they use it as an excuse to throw out the baby (any critical stance) with the bathwater (bad architecture). in the end ‘projective’ practice produces a sort of watered-down gehry…all the arbitrary formal decisions without the artistic heroism (i know i do gehry some injustice here, but lets face it very few people are as good sculptors as him).
the straw man oppositions of the essay bother me too, especially because i think so many of them are just flat out untrue. I think they are unsuccessfully borrowing a stylistic page from dave hickey here. also their willingness to coopt anything they like and call it projective…rem koolhaas is not critical? robert smithson? i think both of these are good examples of critical architects/artists who managed to develop something new and exciting out of this reaction to the old way. i’m not going to argue about robert mitchum (except to say that, according to what i read, if you offer your seat to a lady, you’re a mitchum man).
i suppose i should bite the bullet and try to offer up what i think critical architecture is, rather than what it is not. It is architecture/design/art predicated on the use of objects. how do we use it, what is right or wrong (or neither right nor wrong) about that, what can change. in proposing a new way of doing things (alternatives?), there is bound up a critique of the old. i don’t expect world-shattering ideas, or the exposition of philosophy (boring!), or even much rigorousness, but i do expect the proposition to unfold from some sort of conceptual basis grounded in being and acting in the world (a la heidegger, or maybe even banham, although i’d hate to co-opt them unfairly!).
maybe this sounds like i’m already on board with the post-critical crowd! maybe so, but from what i’ve seen of the projective method, it goes something like this "let’s put in a clerestory, because that’s nice. it’ll let the light in, and produce nice shadows on the wall." there’s nothing wrong with designing like that, except that if that’s all there is, then it’s just a willful disregard for the fact that architects, as a stumbling block in the development of the built world, can produce change in action, not just experiential effect…that is to say: affect — to what end? and not to pick on the projective method unnecessarily, but the architecture program here has taken a major leap backwards in terms of ambition. not only are the projects themselves rather mundane, but (as one of my classmates says), everthing is represented with "shit-brown chipboard on a shit-brown mdf base."…i didn’t come back to school to find out what architecture can never be. i guess i’m really showing my true colors now!!
i’m going to try and dig up a few more essays on this — maybe the michael speaks and the k. michael hays ones, esp since the hays article is what they are explicitly reacting to.
February 6th, 2006 at 12:39 pm
i added the hays and speaks articles, though i haven’t read them yet.
if anyone else reads this board still, and has opinions, please chime in! i’d like to hear more about whether this is affecting other disciplines. would david hickey be appalled by the strumming of paintings?
February 6th, 2006 at 1:32 pm
dave hickey loves this kind of painting.
i must be out of architecture because i dont quite follow the disciplinarity stuff and the hays, tafuri, eisenman histories .
i have a plan about board popouylation to go into action soon
February 9th, 2006 at 2:29 am
from miwon kwon’s essay on christian marclay:
In this way, Marclay’s deceptively simple methodology yields complex associations and meanings. These associations and meanings are not only a "critique," a reductive opposition to the commodification and marketing of music. They open up instead an imaginary terrain of possibilities for new compositions obscured within the overdetermined context of commercialism.
i am also reading claire bishop’s recently published history of installation art and she alludes to something like this as well, within the domain of artworks called installations (moving from psychological to phenomenological).
what’s funny about kwon’s quote is that it comes on the heels of a section where she credits his recompositions for leaving the seams visible: Importantly, these ’seams’ are not glossed over to equalize parts or to create a unified and harmonious whole, as many politically minded cultural practitioners are prone to do. and One crucial point of difference - what distinguishes Marclay’s work from others who recombine fragments of found cultural material - is the extent to which the coming together of the parts remains intelligible as a structurally integral aspect of the work. That is, ’seams’ are not smoothed over to create the illusion of a ‘natural’ whole. Meaning lies in the seams.
not to go too much into it, but ‘natural’ is an apt word to put in inverted commas when put in the light of the projective’s privileging of ‘emergence.’ i was just interested in how similar kwon’s argument is to the projective in the first quote, whereas her argument about seams is at odds with somol and whitings (non-sequitor) position that being able to observe work or construction within the object is a mark of the hot/ critical/ trying-too-hard.
February 9th, 2006 at 2:30 am
oh man i didn’t see your previous long post till just now! i am about to read it
February 9th, 2006 at 7:00 pm
i think the projective people are right to criticize past critical architecture for not being ‘positive’ enough, i only disagree with their conclusion. that kwon quote is great, btw. i’d like to read that article. i also like in zizek’s Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle when he talks about the latin american favelas as utopian projects within the space of the state (this is also in the [[Library:Zizek, Slavoj:The Ongoing Soft Revolution | soft revolution]] essay, but not developed quite as much). anyway, it doesn’t seem that ‘critical’ and ‘productive’ has to be an either-or debate
February 10th, 2006 at 3:32 am
ive been using a mac lately and im trying to set up a good OCR workflow..
for some reason my HP all in one doesn’t scan with this machine though,
i dont think HP bothered to make the drivers adequate for OSX.
will try to scan her essay soon though. i did OCR the latest martin article in
grey room ‘have we ever been postmodern’. never quite got a handle on latour
so im excited to read. this post-critical section is great for me to read. the
architecture world out here doesn’t get enough of all that (i think we are very
post-critical though i would challenge that the works are actually any more
projective than so-called critical architecture, particularly the "prototype" work
valorized by speaks in much of his JA series).
saw two guys from this group FAT last night. have you seen them talk?
February 10th, 2006 at 3:41 am
i wonder whether the poetry manifesto "projective verse" would be at all relevant to this
February 11th, 2006 at 1:43 pm
that stan allen [[Library:Allen, Stan:Practice vs. Project | essay]] you uploaded was good, and i agree with it in many ways.
however, his insistence on the lack of a ‘project’ (overarching set of ideological principles applied to creative practice) seems problematic. 1) it assumes that these ideological principles do not come out of ‘practice’ (ie they are inherent, a priori), and 2) it turns the ‘creative practitioner’ into a conduit, or maybe an amplifier, of material effects. what the essay points to is not a mutually informed theory and practice (as he seems to lay out at the beginning), but rather two parrallel and incommunicative practices — history/theory and architectural production. or perhaps even a ‘production-centric’ parrallelism, where it is now theory’s job to respond to production, but production cannot respond to theory. if ideological principle is abandoned, there’s not much left except for maybe craft…and i wonder if allen would agree if his position were reformulated in those terms (a return to craft).
this FAT group looks really interesting…maybe i can get them in for the lecture series
February 12th, 2006 at 5:41 pm
i just noticed the post-critical thread. i’ve been struggling with the whole issue of post-criticality, projective practice, neo-pragmatism. it’s very hard to define a clear direction in the debate. what i find troublesome is the more or less explicit alignment with neo-conservative by the proponents of a projective practice and justifying this with the failures of past practices and the "success" and opportunites of advanced capitalism.
i have posted some links to articles which relate to the topic more or less directly. one in response to the fascination with hickey (whiting/somol): [[Library:Kester, Grant:The world he has lost -Dave Hickey's beauty treatment|alt text]]
an essay by roemer van toorn who i have mixed feelings about: [[Library:van Toorn, Roemer:Fresh Conservatism. Landscapes of normality|alt text]]
and an intro by kenneth frampton to "commodification and spectacle in architecture": [[Library:Frampton, Kenneth:The Work of Architecture in the Age of Commodification|alt text]]
February 12th, 2006 at 7:15 pm
lf — the van torn essay didn’t get uploaded properly
i agree re: discerning a clear direction in the debate…how is ‘affect’ related to acriticality related to abject consumerism related to ‘hot’ and ‘cool’?
February 12th, 2006 at 8:10 pm
the van toorn text should be uploaded now: [[Library:van Toorn, Roemer:Fresh Conservatism. Landscapes of normality|fresh conservatism]]
February 12th, 2006 at 8:14 pm
the upload still dosen’t work, i’m not sure why. here is the direct link: http://www.xs4all.nl/%7ervtoorn/fresh.html
February 14th, 2006 at 2:42 am
the grant kester essay is really interesting for this conversation.
Hickey, and fellow travelers such as Wendy Steiner and Peter Schjeldahl, cast themselves as the embattled guardians of ‘experience’ over ‘discourse about experience’, the irrefutable evidence of the senses over the abstractions of theory.
when i saw him speak in my relational aesthetics class i found him incredibly smart, persuasive and articulate, but he also seemed bitter and i left feeling pretty uninspired (which is more my own fault im sure, and im sure he’d say that too) and hopeless
February 15th, 2006 at 1:03 am
it’s strange how an essentially conservative art critic like hickey has risen to such promenence in the so-called vanguard of architecture.
aaron, i’m interested to know if there are any other (counter) currents of thought at princeton these days
February 15th, 2006 at 9:58 am
beatriz colomina is fairly autonomous as head of history and theory now and has attracted some fairly good people, such as ed eigen, spyros papapetros, and liz grosz. several of the history/theory faculty and a handful of the studio critics are openly critical of projective practice, but usually for disparate reasons. and every year more of them leave and more projective people show up. stan allen was unable to hire bob somol into a permanent position due to objections from faculty and students, but he has him coming in (a recess appointment, a la gwb) every spring to teach seminar and be a thesis advisor (which h/t faculty are forbidden from doing, even if they have an architecture degree, as opposed to somol’s law degree). haha i bet michael speaks will be here next year.
many of the students are suspicious of what is going on, but there are new students every year and one gets the feeling they are filling the place with new students who are sympathetic or just don’t care.
February 15th, 2006 at 11:42 am
sorry that sounded so negative! i had to run to class
we are trying to get some interesting people for the student lecture series, including reinhold martin and felicity scott. also, i think that within the post-critical stance there is a very strong and (barely) latent obsession with criticality, which makes me hope that tihs moment won’t last too long. the essential problem with post-criticality in the educational environment is that it is boring…it probably makes for a very successful (if conservative) practice, but it does not give you much to sink your teeth into. is there anything to discuss about a dave hickey essay? he doesn’t give any criteria for value beyond individual taste…and i think this is a much more serious problem in architecture.
February 15th, 2006 at 7:52 pm
i don’t think there is much to discuss about hickey, but his name pops up to often to ignore him.
i’m not that familiar with felicity scott’s writings, is there anything you recommend?
don’t students enjoy finding new ways of doing new things without wondering what for or why? how does one critique post-critical architecture in the academic environment (as a post-critical architect)?
it seems with the whole post-critical debate the divide has become much more of a political/ideological divide which didn’t seem to be so much the case in for instance deconstivism.
February 16th, 2006 at 1:06 am
looks like the van toorn problem might have had to do with the lower case v.
seems fixed now
[[Library:Van_Toorn%2C_Roemer:Fresh_Conservatism_-_Landscapes_of_Normality]]
February 16th, 2006 at 2:28 am
just came across this link in a google search on projective architecture
http://www.berlage-institute.nl/03_postgraduate/projective.extended.html
interesting that so much of it is devoted to latour — reminds me to make sure
and read reinhold’s new grey room essay:
[[Library:Martin, Reinhold:Architecture's Image Problem: Have We Ever Been Postmodern? | Have we ever been postmodern?]]
February 16th, 2006 at 9:24 am
thanks sean (i will note not to use lower case)
maybe this conference will have the answers to all our questions:
http://www.projectivelandscape.nl/
February 16th, 2006 at 10:20 am
i posted the link to sarah whiting & ron witte’s practice
[http://www.wwarchitecture.com]
which is only notable for the tagline running across the bottom (it changes when you reload)
i hope the proceedings for that conference are published
February 16th, 2006 at 10:49 am
the tagline and the project descriptions are interesting in that they clearly position themselves as non-oppositional/restistive architects "exploiting" the potentials or the market.
February 16th, 2006 at 11:35 am
whiting and somol attack the ‘master-narrative’ in critical practice. disregarding for the moment the ascription of a single motif to all critical projects, it seems that in relinquishing a potentially oppositional narrative, there is no possibility of multiple other readings (as they suggest are inhibited by criticality).
re the ideological divide….yeah i wonder about that. my best guess so far is along the lines of martin’s statement that the post-critical movement is deeply oedipal.
February 17th, 2006 at 2:50 pm
i updated the wiki page with a genealogy, since there are so many names involved. if you add new articles please try to link to them there! [[Post-critical architecture]]
February 17th, 2006 at 9:47 pm
a different conference in holland from last year
http://www.janvaneyck.nl/~bavo/AG/htm/mf_3.htm
February 17th, 2006 at 9:53 pm
the related paper from it
http://www.janvaneyck.nl/~bavo/AG/htm/mf_contrib_he.htm
the abstract reads a little like reinhold’s new article i posted (which isn’t so great)
in that it’s direction forward is to renew the utopian impulse of modernism i think
(go and read the final 2 paragraphs of martin’s article)
February 18th, 2006 at 11:55 am
i agree that reinhold’s last two paragraphs in "critical of what?" are problematic. frampton also evokes the utopian in the his last parpagraph of "the work of architecture…" by way of bloch’s "not yet" which i find a more sucessful view of utopian possibilities. david harvey refers to bloch understanding of utopia as well, his position is similar to that in miwon kwon’s quote above in seeing the potential of forming an opposition from within the staus quo.
February 18th, 2006 at 12:30 pm
the intro of the "AVANT-GARDE, ARCHITECTURE AND RESPONSIBILITY" conference http://www.janvaneyck.nl/~bavo/AG/htm/mf_3.htm is a good synopsis of the debate but it oversimplifies it a little by focusing in on the form/program opposition.
February 19th, 2006 at 1:15 pm
Lf
can you articulate the difference between the frampton/bloch idea of utopia and martin’s? i read martin and kwon on the same side — architecture (or art) as suggesting other, potentially subversive, possibilities within the existing world. i have not read bloch so this probably explains my confustion
February 20th, 2006 at 12:03 am
i think i mainly have a problem with reinhold’s view of utopian possibilities because i’m not quite sure what he means. it seems for him the utopian is something that becomes whereas my understanding of bloch’s utopia is of something already there a latency waiting to be realized.
here is an essay on bloch for a longer discussion: [[http://aaarg.e-rat.org/images/6/6f/Ernstblochutopia.pdf|bloch]]
February 20th, 2006 at 12:05 am
i think i mainly have a problem with reinhold’s view of utopian possibilities because i’m not quite sure what he means. it seems for him the utopian is something that becomes whereas my understanding of bloch’s utopia is of something already there a latency waiting to be realized.
here is an essay on bloch for a longer discussion: [[Library:Kellner%2C_Douglas|bloch]]
March 28th, 2006 at 11:43 pm
aaron, urbach’s "Writing architectural heterotopia" is a nice find and i agree it ties in nicely with the last few posts above. it took me a bit to see what urbach was getting at but it comes together in the last paragraphs, especially the last sentence: "We might, in this case, be delighted to discover that we confront a sociospatial terrain already full of žfissures, overripe with heterotopic potential ready to implode."
April 7th, 2006 at 12:31 am
lecture videos from the delft conference are now online
[http://www.projectivelandscape.nl/]
July 11th, 2006 at 8:32 pm
the new issue of archplus (german architecture mag) is titled the production of presence and deals with essentially projective architecture. i just read the [http://www.archplus.net/archiv_ausgaben.php?show=178 intro] online but it was fairly depressing. it holds the doppler effect essay by whiting/somol up high. i agree with the assessment that instead of announcing an end of theory, projective architecture can actually open up the door allowing theory to merge with practice by means of experience/atmosphere/immersion; projective architecture builds new spaces of experiencing. there is also talk about a revival body politics as means of understanding how architecture works. but there was very little about how this all relates to an understanding of architecture beyond the dominant market/cultural forces (ie capitalism). it all falls in nicely with the "experience economy".
July 11th, 2006 at 9:35 pm
I wish I could read German! Watching the conference videos i linked to above, Sarah Whiting seemed a little surprised the hot/cold essay started such a huge argument (she was actually pretty defensive, saying "Give us a break.") Indeed, for such a poorly articulated essay to set off such a debate, there must have been some hard feelings lurking under the surface…
However I think that the reason that there is little about politics is that it is intentionally ignored (though Whiting/Somol/Allen do pay occasional lip service to politics as a concern of architecture). Whiting teaches the thesis-prep class now, and this year announced to the class that her goal was "to bring back the optimism of the 1950s." Which I suppose refers to a certain market-happiness among a certain segment of the population (or maybe not, i only know from sitcoms).
I found Roemer van Toorn’s talk at the Delft conference pretty intriguing, suggesting a ‘projective’ practice maybe more along the lines that you’re suggesting, Lf. He fairly openly scolded some of his fellow presenters for being too formalist. This rift seems to propose two alternative concerns with reality: 1) architects-as-realists (pragmatists) — the (economic) world is given, work with that constraint. architects should find their rightful place as developers of the experience economy (which they helped pioneer!); or 2) architects-as-activists - architecture’s role in the (economic) world is recognized, but not relinquished. Working within a system can also mean working without it — ie, architecture’s role does not have to be resonant with the dominant culture or economic paradigm.
i like how we have all these slow moving, tangential threads going at once.
July 17th, 2006 at 12:03 am
it’s interesting how the different threads tend to inform each other. i’m not always sure which thread to post to.
re. roemer van toorn, i find his writing pretty intriguing as well, but it’s hard to tell which side he’s on, which doesn’t mean that being on one side would make him preferable but his own apparent rift makes for some confusing reading.
i’ve been interested in post-war modernism so i’m interested in hearing what sw has to say about "the optimism of the 1950’s", but yes it’s quite likely refering to increased consumerism.
July 17th, 2006 at 2:22 pm
have you seen reinhold martin’s new book? http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262134268/sr=8-1/qid=1153160231/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-4842537-8911116?ie=UTF8
also, apparently jean-louis cohen is writing a book on architecture during the world wars, which apparently has not been covered much
July 18th, 2006 at 1:20 pm
i know about the book, but haven’t read it. i did read an excerpt in [http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=9055|Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture] which a few decent essays.
July 18th, 2006 at 1:21 pm
i know about the book, but haven’t read it. i did read an excerpt in [http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=9055 |Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture] which a few decent essays.
July 27th, 2006 at 7:19 pm
im guessing the optimism of the 1950’s has something to do with the eameses maybe? because you have the case study houses gearing up at the very end of the 40s and through the 50’s… the eameses i mention not for their house, but for their longstanding work for IBM and their representation of the US at that moscow exhibition in 1959. you could kind of be a designer that believed in truth in materials and good old fashioned problem solving without thinking about anything else that much. you could have a wholesome, uncompromising relationship with the administration and a burgeoning multinational (essentially just doing PR films). you could take science as your subject and (in the spirit of don herbert) just try to make it accessible and comfortable to the public. i think the housing crunch after WWII (and the market’s openness to mass-production architecture), the spread of electricity (which mirrors the internet for us), and the creation of credit (and therefore increased consumption, a valorization of obsolesence, etc) all contributes too, but i was thinking more about the role of the designer, especially as embodied by charles and ray eames, who i have to imagine are in some way a model for some people today?
July 28th, 2006 at 10:25 am
I think in terms of design they are more into late Le Corbusier (Ronchamp and Philips Pavilion), although there is some similarity between the Philips Pavilion and the Eames’ work for IBM, e.g. I think there’s a fundamental difference there, though…Le Corbusier using form (and the architect’s form-giving status) as an added-value, where the eames explored form (such as it existed!) as a means of communication, or as something to work with towards other ends? Here i’m thinking also of the plywood stretchers and furniture, things which are both formally pretty wild, but still very functional. I guess i’m saying I don’t see so much naivety in the Eameses as you do, although yes there is a kind of earnest problem-solving aspect to the work (although don’t we have that in ‘critical’ work today, only the set of problems is a little different?)
July 28th, 2006 at 3:26 pm
i haven’t the faintest idea what design sarah whiting is into so i’m happy to go with late le corbusier. maybe i was thinking about the role of the designer more than the form, and i was definitely being american-centric about it too.
i don’t want to sound like a i don’t apreciate the eameses (they’re a little like mr rogers or mr wizard for me, which isn’t meant to be insulting)… but the organic design competition at moma that charles and eero won, that was supported by a marriage of the art world and the commercial world on a scale pretty unimaginable today (which is probably more a way of saying that star designers have been coopted by "bloomingdales" to the extent that such a competition isn’t "necessary"). it would seem like the hal foster article sort of supports this too — the eameses steady conviction in removing boundaries between art & life, between design & mass-production, between science & popular culture, etc. is an entirely different issue today. i was simply referring to that spirit as "optimism" (without any sense whatsoever of what sarah whiting meant). nevertheless, these "transgressions" are still the mantra for a lot of designers, wouldn’t you say? i saw some housing competition recently with entries saying the house could be ordered from the factory and assembled on-site, drawing inspiration from the automobile industry. welcome to 1930-1950, right? who talks about blurring the boundary between art and life anymore with ipods, martha stewart, and the experience economy? (all the world is a stage, consumption is the new production). and why can’t i move beyond the idea that the soviets were definitely bad guys by the 1950’s and any optimism is largely underpinned by this competition with them, where designers, the public, the government, and industry all got along to make up for the housing shortage, get into space, and improve american domestic life.
i think the eameses were great at what they did. i think they were visionary for taking so many damn pictures and making so many short films. i love the irony that they basically did the architecture career in reverse (buildings, followed by furniture, exhibition design and films). i think their house is a great antidote to the attitude towards housing at the time (home is space for luxury and relaxation apart from work, or, home is the factory for women). but i also don’t see a whole lot of evidence that they thought too hard about making IBM PR, or about promoting the american way of life in moscow, or about what the furniture even meant beyond a crusade to (a) "give people affordable design" (designers have to say this since morris) and (b) make a chair out of one piece of material. not that there isn’t value in that, but i think they didn’t have to look outside of the problem they were given (or that they invented for themselves). i think this is the post-critical attitude, from what i understand of it, this relationship to the problem. i’m not against problem solving, i’m for not trivializing or oversimplifying the problem…. and i think the eameses did have a larger principle of environmental sustainability which undermines my argument a little, but i was trying to make a certain point
October 17th, 2006 at 3:23 am
some great ideas + posts here: http://mailman.thing.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/idc
January 29th, 2007 at 2:19 am
Hi all, just trying to swallow up what you have gathered. There is an article, "Post-Criticality" and Death by Academics by Dave Hickey, on Harvard Design Magazine fall 2006.
Do any of you have that in html/pdf format?
January 30th, 2007 at 4:26 pm
that looks interesting. i’m in new orleans right now but when i get back to school on friday i’ll go the library and ocr it for you
January 31st, 2007 at 2:46 am
i looked for it at 2 libraries this week and neither carries recent issues of HDM.. please do scan aaron
February 2nd, 2007 at 3:03 pm
[[Library:Hickey, David:On not being governed]]
February 3rd, 2007 at 1:56 am
that was a really strange paper! thanks for the scan aaron…
it reminded me at times of this essay (which you can read here http://www.lulu.com/content/642748)
i just read because of some conference at USC recently, about the future
of the art school or something (i didn’t go, i only read the papers… which by
the way are pretty good. definitely read the lane reylea one!)
bu the essay hickey’s talk reminded me of is this thierry de duve thing
about how attitude/ practice/ and deconstruction have taken over as the
educational paradigm from talent/ metier or creativity/ medium… they are
both focused on the effect of theory (modernism’s collapse) on the arts.
a couple of those essays might actually make interesting reading for this thread
February 3rd, 2007 at 1:57 am
http://www.lulu.com/content/642748
February 14th, 2007 at 3:20 pm
how does this lulu thing work?
i think i agree with the overall thrust of hickey’s [strange, indeed] essay, which is that architecture theory has to deal, somehow, with the commercial. but has it really not already done that, at least to some extent? I can’t speak for one of his examples [stones of venice], but i would hardly call the arcades project an ‘anti-commercial screed.’ and the fact that he can’t think of any other treatises that deal with the commercial just shows that he hasn’t read much architecture history or theory… i guess it is his tendency to generalize from his personal biography that makes me suspicious.
February 21st, 2007 at 10:24 am
im almost finished with architecture 2000 by charles jencks and although its
written in 1969, it is kind of appropriate (maybe i’ll scan the intro chapter).
he makes a point of addressing what he calls weak determinism (occasionally
calling them pragmatists) - a consequence being someone like mies who accepted
nazi commissions and signed nationalist petitions against other artists, etc.
an extreme case, but jencks is more interested to look at technocrats who feel
that the reality of the world is beyond their control and therefore they have no
moral responsibility in that respect. doesnt reinhold mention this or something?
its an interesting read
April 17th, 2007 at 6:29 pm
iDC thread referencing 4ARG’s post-critical page
Re: Toward a Post-Post-Critical Future
August 21st, 2007 at 10:48 am
This thread seems to have cooled down a little but I’ve just discovered this site (Hello to everyone) and so I’ll chip in a bit.
I just read an article in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism by Diarmuid Costello which described how Rosalind Krauss attempted to overturn Clement Greenberg’s formalism but how ultimately, in addopting the terms of his discourse, she ended up simply affirming his formalism. (Greenberg is relevant to this thread also because it is largely his version of the medium specificity of each art field that formed the idea of formal autonomy which Eisenman adopted. i.e the value of each Art form comes from the exploration of the language of its own medium. Painting explores the paint, Photography explores its reproducability, and for Eisenmans version of criticality, Architecture explores it own formal language of structural relationships, walls in relation to columns, grids, transformations etc) This then reminds me of another thing I read recently in Zizek’s Ticklish Subject where he talks about Hegel’s Negation of Negation. He says “its matrix is not that of loss and its recuperation, but simply that of a process of passage from state A to state B: the first immediate ‘negation’ of A negates the position of A whilst remaining within its symbolic confines, so it must be followed by another negation which then negates the very symbolic space common to A and its immediate negation (the reign of a religion is first subverted in the guise of a theological heresy; capitalism is first subverted in the name of the ‘reign of labor’), here the gap that seperates the negated systems ‘real’ death from its ’symbolic’ death is crucial: the system has to die twice.” TS - p72
So it strikes me that the comment by Reinhold Martin about the - not so hidden - oedipal motive is crucial. That whilst Stan and Sarah are trying to be “post-” they end up being “neo-” because they assume the terms of the ‘father’ they wish to kill. The system has, as yet, only died once. My thought is that they are ultimately “remaining within the symbolic confines” of the Academy. (Even if it is not the IAUS - where Stan was a pupil of Eisenman - it is still the the Academy). So in the end their is still quite a lot of similarity between the ideas of the postcritical people and the terms of Eisenmans new debate about what he calls “Close Inattention” or “Passive Inpassivity.” Its not as if any of these guys are about to propose anything like what happened in Berkley in the 60’s where all the architecture students abandoned the school and went out into the communities around Berkley and started designing old peoples homes for local folks in order to make their lives better. It still the Academy searching for new niches of formal invention. which is exaclty what Eisenman was upto except that now that his explicity academicism has run its course there is a need to find a more subtle academicism which at times can blur seemlessly into the what everyone is aptly calling the “experience economy”.
December 29th, 2007 at 11:53 am
responding to sean’s comments here http://aaaarg.org/claiming-contingent-space and here http://aaaarg.org/clintonism
i do think there are some connections between an enthusiasm for technocracy ['third way' politics] and post-criticality, although maybe by way of pragmatism rather than a wishing-away of real political issues. i’ve been taking a public sphere theory course and have been quietly uploading some of the readings here over the course of the semester and i think a lot of them are relevant to a discussion of a political art practice/discourse. i just put up this chantal mouffe essay http://aaaarg.org/toward-an-agonistic-public-sphere where i think she outlines well the problems/promises of neo-liberal and third-way politics and does a bit of triangulation of her own in trying to tame the passions involved in contemporary politics with the concept of an “agonistic” public sphere. i think hers is actually the most ‘post-critical’ move of all — rather than deny the existence of politics, she tries to make a special zone where it can occur — in effect, to have a politics-without-politics.
i’ve also uploaded some things by alexander kluge, whom i find to be especially interesting, particularly from the perspective of a politically engaged new-media practice… actually, if anyone wants to start a kluge reading group [separate from this discussion] here on aaaarg, let me know