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October 1, 2009
a.aaaarg.org is a conversation platform - at different times it performs as a school, or a reading group, or a journal and it was created with the intention of developing critical discourse outside of an institutional framework. Just what I need. I dig around and uncover “Criticality” and Its Discontents by George Baird from the Harvard Design Magazine (No 21, 2004-5.) He says:
The matter now coming into question is the concept of a “critical architecture”....Today “criticality” is under attack, seen by its critics as obsolete, as irrelevant, and/or as inhibiting design creativity..the lineage of “criticality”...has consistently focused intellectually on concepts of “resistance” and “negation.”
I have no idea what a critical architecture would be. Critical of what? Consumer society? The names Peter Eisenman, Michael Hays, Manfredo Tafuri, Kenneth Frampton, and Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio mean nothing to me.
Michael Hays “Critical Architecture: Between Culture and Form,” published in Perspecta (No 21 1984) is the place to start. Hays says:
In this essay I shall examine a critical architecture, one resistant to the selfconfirming, conciliatory operations of a dominant culture and yet irreducible to a purely formal structure disengaged from the contingencies of place and time. A reinterpretation of a few projects by Mies van der Rohe will provide examples of a critical architecture that claims for itself a place between the efficient representation of preexisting cultural values and the wholly detached autonomy of an abstract formal system. The proposition of a critical realm between culture and form is not so much an extension of received views of interpretation as it is a challenge to those views that claim to exhaust architectural meaning in considerations of only one side or the other.
The two positions sketched are symptomatic of a pervasive dichotomy in architectural theory and criticism. One side describes artifacts as instruments of the self-justifying, self-perpetuating hegemony of culture; the other side treats architectural objects in their most disinfected, pristine state, as containers of a privileged principle of internal coherence.
Hays examines some works by Mies van der Rohe that he describes as critical in the sense of being resistant and oppositional; ie an an architecture that cannot be reduced either to a conciliatory representation of external forces or to a dogmatic, reproducible formal system.
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