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By Roger K. Lewis In a recent issue of Architecture magazine, a story appeared with the headline "Los Angeles Forum Addresses Theory." Written by Dirk Sutro, the architecture critic for the San Diego edition of the Los Angeles Times, the report summarized the proceedings of the first meeting of Anyone, an organization with the goal of "elevating architecture to the status of disciplines such as philosophy, theology and sociology." Sutro's characterization of the Anyone forum revealed a certain skepticism about much of the style and substance of what was said. "Obscure verbiage clouded the air," he wrote. Some presentations were "almost unintelligible," in part because of "esoteric vocabularies." According to Sutro, "the audience was often bored, or at the very least befuddled. By late on the second day, less than half of the original 600 attendees were on hand." Such observations come as no surprise to many architects, architectural critics, historians and educators who periodically attend conferences, especially gatherings like this. Anyone is another institutional creation of New York architect Peter Eisenman, who for more than two decades has been cutting across the grain of conventional architectural principles and practice. In addition to his keen intellect and undeniable design talent, Eisenman is famous for delivering his radical propositions and obscure explanations in convoluted English, both spoken and written. Likewise his projects - he has been labeled a Deconstructivist, a master of architectural chaos and collision - are characterized by convolution. With the support of the Getty Center in Los Angeles and the Shimuzu Corp., a Japanese construction company, Eisenman and Anyone assembled what Sutro described as "several of the world's most renowned thinkers": economist Akira Asada; French philosopher Jacques Derrida; "cyberpunk" author William Gibson; critic Fredric Jameson; literary theorist Kojin Karatani; "Deconstructivist" theologian Mark Taylor; and Harvard law and social theory professor Roberto Unger. Of course, architects were invited to make presentations as well. While most are not household names in the United States, many have international reputations and are familiar to architectural academics and practitioners in Europe, Japan and the Americas. Panelists cited by Sutro included Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, Japanese architect Arata Isozaki and Spanish architect Rafael Moneo. Los Angeles architect Frank Gehry, who is, like Eisenman, another famous American guru of colliding forms, also attended. Sutro said that Gehry, after one of the panels, confessed that he "didn't understand half of what was said." Indeed, what was said or who appeared at this forum ultimately is of less consequence than what the forum represented. It was yet another manifestation of a tendency of many intelligent, academically inclined architects to move the discipline of architecture onto a presumably higher intellectual plane, to make architecture concerned with more than just the artful, technically sound design of environments for human use. This tendency has been around for centuries, coming and going in waves, but it strengthened after the study of architecture acquired legitimacy as an academic enterprise, rather than just a craft, during the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe and the 19th and 20th centuries in America. In fact, there were no architectural academies - and therefore little academic discourse about architecture - in the United States until after the Civil War. Even then, and during much of the 20th century, many American architectural academies were associated primarily with engineering departments rather than with fine arts, humanities and social sciences. Sutro's report about Eisenman's and Anyone's aspiration to elevate architecture to the "status" of other disciplines begs several questions. Why does the academic status of architecture need elevating? What makes the disciplines of philosophy, sociology or literary criticism superior to architecture? Do architects have an intellectual inferiority complex? Implicit in the desire to "elevate" architecture is the belief that, because architecture is an applied rather than a fine art, it lacks scientific and scholarly rigor. Since architects have to solve messy, real-world problems, always mixing pragmatics with aesthetics, their endeavors are viewed by some as intellectually tainted, apparently devoid of theoretical underpinnings, less idealistic than the endeavors of poets, philosophers or physicists. Often one hears accusations about the lack of theoretical positions in architecture. Accordingly, theoreticians search for, invent and expound upon architectural theories that transcend mere functionality, technology, economic feasibility or visual delight. These latter concerns, theorists submit, lie in the realms of engineering, business, graphics and product design rather than in the headier realms of pure art, literature, science or philosophy to which the realm of architecture should correspond. Academic theorists reject the notion that architecture is only a profession practiced in the service of society, driven routinely by financial expedience and marketplace trends. Instead, they view architecture, like its would-be sister disciplines, as ultimately concerned with more profound values and meanings, including things metaphysical and spiritual. And, the theorists contend, these must be studied, understood and communicated explicitly in both physical and verbal language. Unfortunately, it's mostly the verbal language from which communication difficulties arise. Talented architects designing real structures understand the need for "theoretical" positions, whatever they might be, when creating a building. They implicitly advocate their "theories" in the act of design itself, often subconsciously. But most are content with letting their work, in conjunction with the eye and mind of the beholder, speak for itself without resorting to arcane verbal explanations. When verbal explanation is called for, architects are content with offering intelligible descriptions of what they did, and how and why they did it - typically a straightforward statement of artistic intentions. "This house merges with the landscape" or "this country club reaffirms the gracious, memorable traditions of colonial Virginia" or "this airport terminal connotes technology and flight." Nevertheless, the pronouncements and writings of architects and interpeters of architecture are replete with unfathomable prose. Frequently, I have read a passage in a text, understanding each word yet finding at the end of the paragraph or page that I have absolutely no idea what the author was saying. There always will be architects and architectural scholars who believe profound ideas can only be expressed in complex, coded verbiage. They seem intent on borrowing vocabulary and modes of expression from the obscure literature of other disciplines whose jargon has little to do with architecture. In fact, architecture has plenty of its own jargon. Eisenman and Anyone, whose theme for the second architecture conference next year in Japan is "Anywhere," have it backward. Rather than worrying about elevating architecture, they should instead explore how the intellectual rigor, diversity, substance and productivity of architecture can be matched by other disciplines. Roger K. Lewis is a
practicing architect and a professor of architecture at the University of
Maryland. |