Against Pluralism, Again
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Metropolis (Published December 17, 2018)
Architect Jennifer Bonner’s “Best Sandwiches” project, featured in the new book Possible Mediums. Courtesy Actar.
“Art exists today in a state of pluralism: no style or even mode of art is dominant and no critical position is orthodox.” Postmodern art critic Hal Foster wrote these words in 1982 in an essay under the title, “Against Pluralism,” but the diagnosis rings true of architecture today. Then as now, the most that can be said of the field as a whole is that, as currently constituted, the condition of no orthodoxy is the orthodoxy. As Foster put it, pluralism has become institutionalized: architecture “of many sorts is made to seem more or less equal—equally (un)important.”
But this is not a failure of architecture or of architects. Rather, the disposition toward many coexisting and diverse projects stands as a rebuke of the reactionary politics of our time. The heterogeneity of the field today is perhaps its defining characteristic and an indicator of its vitality. So what then is the problem with pluralism?
Put simply, pluralism arises out of a condition of no criticism, which is itself a symptom of theory’s persistent failure to articulate and negotiate architecture’s role vis-à-vis structures of oppression. Today, criticism often comes in one of two polarized forms: either as scorched-earth screeds against an apparatus beholden to neoliberal power; or aesthetic navel-gazing that treats politics as the subject of much hand-wringing but little commitment. Each evades reality in its own way, and both do the field a disservice. There are today no coherent critical frameworks that grapple with the discipline’s political and aesthetic urgencies on the one hand, but also the structural foreclosure of their rapprochement on the other. In the absence of cogent frameworks for critique—that is, to be left without criteria—cultural production is ruled by a subtle logic of banality: everything is equally good or equally bad, and consequently, nothing is (nor can be) at stake. This is an illusory leveling. The problem is not the sheer diversity of options, but the lack of capacity to come to terms with this condition.
Possible Mediums presents the work of (mostly) early-career architects. Pictured: First Office’s entry to MoMA PS1 YAP’s summer pavilion competition. Courtesy Actar .
Yet our moment is not without criticism or theory. Theorists and architects are now engaging critique—that is, criticism and theory—directly and vigorously, as demonstrated by two recent publications. These books, Not Interesting: On the Limits of Criticism in Architecture by Andrew Atwood, and Possible Mediums, edited by Kelly Bair, Kristy Balliet, Adam Fure, and Kyle Miller, propose new conceptual frameworks for architecture in a milieu mostly unbothered by the vexations of theory. These books do not impose new orthodoxies, but rather each works against the contemporary void of clear disciplinary priorities.
Not Interesting and Possible Mediums belong to a time in which the critical apparatus—journals, conferences, institutions—that made critique essential to previous generations has atrophied or has been absorbed into the ambit of architectural practice. Both books—efforts of practicing designers, critics, instructors all—reject the premise that theory be left to theorists or criticism be left to critics. Instead, they posit fundamental questions: How can “possible mediums” form the bases for new critical projects? And, how can we move shoptalk criticism beyond the tyranny of the merely “interesting”?
In contemporary pluralism, architects are pressured to package themselves as commodities.
What these books have in common, besides the benefit of the talents of Sean Yendrys, who designed both, is the incisiveness of their purposes. Whereas earlier forms of critique often left architects with a fatalistic sense that “there’s nothing to be done,” each of these titles is undertaken with a spirit of generosity aimed at jump-starting critical conversations in contemporary architecture, just when the discipline is stubbornly unwilling to ask difficult questions of itself. These two books might just mark the leading edge of new alignments of theory, criticism, and practice.
Possible Mediums is a collective effort that grew out of a conference of the same name convened in 2013 at The Ohio State University. The editors all received degrees in architecture from UCLA in the 2000s. Not coincidentally, many of the contributors also entered the field at the end of the 2000s, and their often highly original work can in some ways be seen as a rejection of the slick formalism ushered in by the digital turn.
In contrast to Possible Mediums, Not Interesting features relatively few illustrations. For those, Atwood re-drew elevations of buildings like Gordon Bunshaft’s 1974 Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. (pictured) and juxtaposed them with fanciful settings, such as a mountain-scape or even the surface of the moon. Courtesy Applied Research & Design .
At moments, the book reads like a guide on how to see and decode contemporary architecture, as Whitney Moon’s cunningly titled contribution, “A Contemporary (Self-Help) Guide to Profile-Spotting in Architecture,” suggests. Possible Mediums presents the work of (mostly) early-career architects, who each offer their own explanations of what is happening at the same time that their work posits basic but provocative questions about composition, representation, structure—that is, architecture’s traditional disciplinary concerns.
The term medium is employed here as something between techniques and thematics. It calls to mind Rosalind Krauss’s theorization of the “post-medium condition,” the idea that an artist produces new mediums when “certain procedures, techniques, or constraints are elevated to the level of a defining characteristic,” as the editors write. These so-called possible mediums, then, are more than a nomenclature of shared formal similarities, and rather identifications of theoretical kinships.
The section on “Stacks,” which are usefully defined as “discrete objects accumulated vertically,” is illustrated by Jennifer Bonner’s “Best Sandwiches,” Andrew Kovacs’ “Medusa,” First Office’s “Dolmen” for PS1 in New York, and The LADG’s “The Kid Gets Out of the Picture,” among others. More than a formal technique, stacks are shown to carry water for designers pursuing varied preoccupations. Formal resemblance, found objects, part-to-whole structuration, the list goes on, but all emerge as recurring figures of ongoing projects. Notable too is the fact that the book contains just about as much original writing as design work. An introductory essay by John McMorrough defines medium in no less than a half-dozen possible ways, and an afterword by Dora Epstein Jones offers a complementary excursus on the possible.
Today, the architect’s need to differentiate their work from everything else that is “equally unimportant” intensifies the value placed upon the production of difference.
By contrast, Not Interesting takes the culture of criticism as its object. Observing the ubiquity of the fuzzy signifier “interesting” in the language of everyday criticism, the author Andrew Atwood diagnoses the effects of its overuse. What is circumscribed by “interesting” or rather, what constitutes the field of its negative? “What if we forced ourselves to turn from the interest of the urgent, the signal, the foreground, and deliberately attend to the boredom of humdrum, the confusion of noise, the comfort of background?” he asks in the book’s first pages. What, in architecture, receives attention and what does not?
Atwood expands the critical terrain of the interesting by planting it alongside its logical complements: the not interesting, the boring, the confusing, the comforting. As he spells out in a particularly striking passage, this reconfiguration has its roots in the conviction that the ways in which architects decide what matters, matters: “Our instinct to turn away from those things that do not seem to warrant our attention is to concede to established systems of power in architecture and to refuse to challenge some of the aesthetic habits of critique embedded in our contemporary debates.”
The German architect O.M. Ungers’s House without Qualities (1955) in Cologne is contrasted with a slice of anonymous Oakland, California, architecture. Courtesy Applied Research & Design.