“Architecture is too important to be left to architects”
- Giancarlo De Carlo
There is a lot going on in the field of architecture nowadays. In fact, the field of architecture including practice, theory and criticism is always rich with new lines of discourse, events, and exhibitions. Many of these resources are known by architects, designers, faculty members, and students, but never break containment into public discourse.
I see a few reasons why this condition could be preferred and a few reasons why it is problematic.
On one hand, the general public does not need to know everything that happens within the discourse. Just as research labs may keep certain discovers ‘in house’, there is value in an insulated architectural profession, experimenting with strange, uncomfortable ideas with the freedom that comes from a lack of public surveillance until a refined product is ready for the market.1
On the other hand, the separation of architectural discourse and popular culture leads to architectural products that do not properly respond to public need or current cultural climates.
How the discipline disseminates information, theories, and products to the public needs to be calibrated with care in order to ensure we are a properly avant-garde, pretentious, and cutting-edge field that still practically engages with the challenges of the time.
Today, the discipline is too disconnected from the public. No one really understands what is happening in the field, partly due to the self isolation of the discipline. This self isolation, initiated by academics, granted us freedom to explore and develop the ideas we wished to, but in return, we traded our cultural relevance.
In an attempt to fight this trend, I would like to start a series in which I discuss various contemporary resources and trends that are relevant in the current discourse of architecture but not to the general public.
Please let me know if you would like more posts like these in the future.
Thanks,
David
1: The Graduate School of Design at Harvard recently finished an exhibition entitled: Architecture as an Instructions-Based Art in which Curators Farshid Moussavi and Abby Kuohn displayed architectural construction drawings. These types of images are typically not displayed in academic settings because they are not useful for academics who typically use drawings to communicate conceptual or formal ideas. To Moussavi and Kuohn, architecture is a unique aesthetic endeavor because the primary output of architects (drawings) is not the end goal of our creative output. These drawings are interpreted and used as instructions for others to actualize our vision. The exhibition was an attempt to re-focus architectural images back to its rightful niche: as building instructions.
Below are some photos from the exhibition.
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