We architects are notorious for interpreting, convincing, deploying semantic nuance, and yielding to self-reference. Yet, the two most frequent verbs in a student’s vocabulary during studio reviews are I like and I want, invariably leading to well-known consequences. This confusion between the I and the anticipated expectations of a formidable profession might verge on identity crisis, but lately it is beginning to slip to a far more dubious ground, evident in the increasing popularity of the call to performance, driven by ecological exigencies and consumerist greenwash alike. Pondering the etymologic distant origins of this tiring term–performance–pumps buoyancy into a crucial question: can architecture be a complete provider? In a stochastic leap, it may be even more apt to provoke, can the architect be a complete provider–can the architect perform? If so, perform how, and for whom?
Hugely consequential, the double-loop reflective practice theory of Donald Schön suggests that there is a clear limit to professional expertise beyond which the only recourse is reflection-in-action. This would be a paradigm shift for architects in all stages of becoming, from students to the dwindling milieu of architecture critics. However, a shift to reflective practice should urge us foremost to focus on its implicit call to reconsider performance. Reflective practice–seeking the root and not only the cause of consequence–may re-establish that the core of architecture’s substance is composition-in-action; the synthesis at the crux of nowhere-here/never-now axes. Only through the regeneration of compositional dexterity will architects recapture our purpose as determiners of vision, not followers of a runaway global promise. Composition is about space as much as it is about materiality; is about analogy as it is about computation; is about digital organic as it is about analog exception; is about complex adaptation as it is about singular apparition; is about redundancies as it is about economy; is about the inchoate as it is about the polished; is about transformation of consciousness as it is about determinism. Isn’t it time we recognize that authorship is not anathema to collaboration, but nutrient? The perpetual dualistic discourse in the wake of modernism has left cracks wide open in architecture’s corpus, through which the last serious attempts to safeguard a continuum of theory and history are being alarmingly exhausted. As the bandwagon of performative architecture is about to abduct consequential criticism all together, someone, somewhere whispers, “composition…” Because that is what we do best.
Kenneth Frampton whispered in the preface to the fourth edition of Modern Architecture, “Herein lies the paradox confronting the architecture of our time, for while techno-science in the form of digitally driven environmental and structural engineering takes the art of building to an entirely new level of cultural sophistication, this seemingly positive potential tends to be vitiated by our lack of any overarching vision beyond the perpetuation of a consumerist waste economy upon which our continual accumulation of maldistributed wealth fatally depends.”
OrbitalMonkeys 