Design Observer :: Join the Discussion http://places.designobserver.com/feature/future-of-architectural-criticism/34538/ en-us Design Observer Group 2012-07-09T20:37:37-05:00 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/1.0
She is of course right that the new digitized masses can be seen as a sort of little guy anti-literariness. An everyman culture.

What i find interesting though would be a more political reading of populist. Rather than the elite vs mainstream in a cultural sense. Populist in an original sense of "the masses", civic engagement, a la the American show "Spontaneous Interventions: Design Actions for the Common Good" at the Biennale this year.

I also think there is a not that recent turn towards criticism situated as/in praxis along the lines of the discussion at the Critical and Activist practice
http://dsgnagnc.com/the-critical-and-activist-practice-a-discussion/

Either way what i do think is that the form of criticism has changed away from explicit literary criticism and into a notion of the expanded field either more open to other voices and/or doing/making as criticism.

Finally, @faslanyc I word say no to your questions has "the time has come to let architectural criticism pass away"? I think it is if anything more needed necessary than ever. In fact i started a thread re: Criticism a couple of years over at Archinect, to help me understand the topic and my thoughts on it better. Some really good discussion there by and for architects re: criticism/crisis/bad crits etc...

http://archinect.com/forum/thread/103010/on-criticism-an-aggregate-thread/]]> http://places.designobserver.com/feature/future-of-architectural-criticism/34538/#comments 2012-07-09T20:37:37-05:00
And I would argue "New Criticism" should be retired as a too ragged straw-man. Apart from Wimsatt/Beardsley, this term is largely an illusion. Do Yvor Winters and Allen Tate and F. R. Leavis and William Empson actually believe in "objectivity," and if they do (which is debatable) do they mean the same thing by the term? It's a good way of ignoring the importance of those guys and critics like I. A. Richards or R. P. Blackmur, whose insights remain just as contemporary as more fashionable citations from Roland Barthes or Michel Foucault. Doesn't it sound equally ridiculous when someone refers to "French theory" as though it were a contiguous body of argument?

I think what architecture criticism needs is less anxiety. There's a whole world out there, and it's filled with buildings that can be written about. If you can live off the practice, good, but that's not, I think, the most important thing. As long as there is a public literate enough to follow criticism, and as long as it can reach that public, it will remain an important part of culture and the development of design. I'm not convinced it does itself any favors by vigorously policing its borders with art and literature and the rest.]]> http://places.designobserver.com/feature/future-of-architectural-criticism/34538/#comments 2012-07-08T16:18:46-05:00 As far as Manaugh, he partially partakes in the hipster culture but at least his is titled "Building Blog," not to be confused with architecture, and he does his own thing which is respectable. Robust criticism just doesn't exist outside of academia anymore. And I just can't get behind Kelly or Lange's takedowns, sorry--meanness is never a virtue, even in criticism.
I used to read Arch magazines when they were edited by experts but god knows what garbage they have in there now.
]]> http://places.designobserver.com/feature/future-of-architectural-criticism/34538/#comments 2012-06-25T18:57:59-05:00
A quick etymological search shows that the idea of criticism originally applied to the literary arts. Adapting this to important architectural projects was appropriate for European architecture for a time- the middle ages and the Renaissance, when the cathedrals or castles were a real text- but it is highly dubious whether criticism is appropriate for architecture at all now. Architecture existed before criticism; is it possible the time has come to let architectural criticism pass away?]]> http://places.designobserver.com/feature/future-of-architectural-criticism/34538/#comments 2012-06-22T14:38:24-05:00