Published in: Architectural Research Quarterly, Cambridge University Press

Ad Majorem Gloria Me: Order out of the Chaos of Architectural Education

June 12, 2001

I have been spending a bit of time in the academy recently and, you know me, always trying to extract some order out of the chaos, these are my notes:

There is indeed a variety of discourse (theories to you old timers). As far as I can tell, the main ones are the Computer Liberation Front; the Stylish (rather than scientific) Neo-Environmentalists; the Protectors of the Plebes, the Ultra Urbanists (obsessive about Asiatic intensities); and the Slaves to the Master Art Cinema. All these discourses are strung together by the standard gender, race and class issues that are by now so depleted that they are simply assumed, as it would drive everyone out of the room if they were actually discussed.

To be sure, this adds up to a soup vastly more exotic than the one that I was fed three decades ago in architecture school. The difference is the sophistication of the discourse, of course, but also the strange lack of discussion over the forms that are conjured up. There is a strictly limited canon of acceptable forms and that is that. I list them as the Anarchic, the Nebulous, the Tremulous, the Bleak and the Brutish. These formal conventions are applied across the discourses pretty much as a Chinese cook makes everything from a limited set of ingredients. By the way, none of these are particularly demeaning tags; the one that I call "nebulous" is designated by its own practitioners as "blob architecture."

The Anarchic and the Nebulous

The most widespread is the Anarchic, a style whose formal ideal can be described as high-tech shantytown. All sorts of industrial detritus are strewn up as weightlessly as possible so that buildings seem to delaminate before your eyes. The Anarchic architects fantasize about the disorder of modernity and are allergic to convention (other than their own). They also avoid the use of reason, which is something that cannot be laid to real shantytown builders. The Anarchic derives from Gehry's appreciation of the visual chaos of post-war LA. It was originally presented as a contextual response, but that "thesis" is now ignored and the Angeleno, Thom Mayne can use the same style for a bank building in provincial Austria, a place where things are somewhat at odds with SoCal. Although primarily commissioned by an ultra-chic clientele, one provincial Anarchist, Sam Mockbee, has been praised for imposing histrionic hovels on the unprotesting poor rural of Mississippi.

Why all this anarchism? To quote Michael Sorkin: "In a culture of fragmentation, architecture aestheticizes the confusions of the contemporary, (and in) urbanism mere irregularity substitutes for actual variety." But no matter, the Anarchic is reaching its time limit as cutting edge stuff. The latest Progressive Architecture Awards jury reports annoyance at having to swat away swarms of shards and slivers.

An associated style, the Nebulous is its quiet cousin. Instead of destroying clear form by imposing complexity, it tries to undermine it by ambiguity. As this is difficult to do with stuff as solid as a building, the necessary formal obfuscation is computer-generated; and computers, it seems, prefer to draw what can only be described as faceted ectoplasm (who'da thunk it?). But that too may be a dead end. Historians will find that the transcendental masterpiece in this category is Diller and Scofidio's "Blur Building" in Lake Constance, you know, the one that dematerializes itself under a fog of sprayed micro droplets.

The Tremulous

The third style, the Tremulous, like the others, rejects fixed form. It tries to destabilize it by implying motion. The urban buildings emulate the stream form geometry of highways, and for rural sites, they emulate the grassy disruptions of minor tremblors- - or something like that. Eisenman pursued the highway foldings with gargantuan single-mindedness in his West Side Manhattan project. Others, such as Studio d'A, design tiny buildings with improbable brick walls as wavy and light as curtains. These conceptions seem to move. Indeed, Michael Sorkin has published a book called Wiggle.

I suppose that within the Tremulous category would be those structures by Calatrava that actually move about. That they do so laboriously adds to their mystique, as there are plenty of cheap machines that can hit 100 MPH and

1,000 RPM thresholds too smoothly to seem any sort of achievement. For reasons best known to its practitioners, and never discussed, the Tremulous is the only one of all these styles that manages to be conventionally elegant. (This is likely to be taken as the cruelest criticism of this report.)

These three conventions are supposed to compensate for the long centuries of architects (male) having arrogantly imposed so much clear, decisive (hegemonic) form on the people. Apparently no architectural form in use prior to Ca 1990 is acceptable, including doors, windows, roofs, and vertical walls. Even the horizontality of floors is in question. This is supposed to be an architecture of ashes and sackcloth. However others see these avowedly recessive, hesitant, indecisive, forms as more elite and hegemonic than ever (try asking the common person what they think). The backlash to these sham apologies propels the authentically apologetic Bleak and Brutish styles.

The Bleak and the Brutish

Herzog & De Meuron are the barons of Bleak. They have made the mute big box fashionable -- no mean achievement. See their highway-caisson winery in California and the soggy wooden mega-crates perched on Swiss hillsides. De Meuron is also responsible for the transformation of that amazingly vigorous old power plant into the baleful New Tate Gallery in London, where the lugubrious lighting depresses art and patron alike.

Closer to home, Deborah Berke's new Yale Art School is Bleak to the bones; and appropriately so, as the modernist artist is expected to suffer in order to create. Beautiful painting studio environments are so very difficult to avoid, given the tall ceilings and the big windows that only the particular skill of this architect (one of my favorites for this sort of thing) is able to achieve Bleakness.

The last one, the Brutish style, is derived from the undeniable vitality of ethnic slums. The tag is an allusion to Thomas Hobbes's description of archaic poverty as "life was nasty, brutish and short". You can see the sartorial equivalent of the Brutish Style by taking a glance at a typical contemporary teenager.

This is the only one of the current styles that I really object to. The Brutish proposes that chain-link fences, clearance-sale paint colors, scrap yard front yards, and living room retail are preferred by the barrio inhabitants and, what is more, that it is superior to middle class conformity. I find the whole thing enormously insulting to the struggling poor who, if they were ever to be actually asked by the chief proponents of this humiliation, John Kaliski and Margaret Crawford, would surely reply that it embarrasses them and that they aspire to nothing so much as middle class respectability. But why pick on this one? None of these discourses involve empirical verification beyond the cinema-driven reality of a few big-city critics and the academic outposts.

As I said earlier, despite all the formal churning, frank discussion of form and its derivation is curiously absent. I suppose that this would undermine the central fiction of absolute invention; which rather than creativity or the transmission of knowledge is the current didactic method. Invention is the only currency valued from students being groomed for the position of Next Mediated Genius. . . or bust. The fact that none but a handful of each generation (generation, not school or class) can aspire to such a position deters no one. These, I am assured, are elite institutions.

Sure, it's a hoax; but it is only fair to add that the professors are touchingly committed to the students in a personal and generous way, and the students therefore seem happy enough with the situation, bless them.