Portfolioism: A Cautionary Tale for Architecture

Portfolioism: A Cautionary Tale for Architecture

Zekun Qin History and Theory Studies ‘Necromancing the Stone’ Under supervision of William Orr Architectural Association, 2022

Figure 1.

Figure 1. “Looking for the next big thing? See who has a pencil, a piece of paper and plenty of imagination. Our future architects will one day touch the fruit of their labor; for the time being, they publish on Issuu.” Design: Architecture Portfolios, a stack made by the account “issuu staff ” on the popular online publishing platform issuu.com.

Portfolio [noun]: a collection of drawings, documents, etc. that represent a person's, especially an artist's, work.1 The portfolio is very familiar to every architect and student of architecture for being a selfpromotional tool. However, with the ever-growing number of architecture portfolios shared on online platforms such as issuu.com, and the mushrooming tutoring agencies that help students achieve better portfolios for attending elite schools, the definition of a portfolio as a representational tool is more blurred than ever. With every ‘like’, ‘favorite’ and ‘save’ the new media transforms the uploads into contents – ‘consumable’ material on the Internet, while the application portfolios acquire a notion of commodity with certain exchange values.

In light of these novel phenomena, this essay will examine the new significance of the architectural portfolio, especially academic application portfolios published online, within today’s architectural discipline, and speculate that the flesh of these portfolios and their related practice has dubiously become a project – portfolioism – that exists alongside the project of architecture.

1

Cambridge Dictionary, s.v. "portfolio," accessed November 28, 2021, https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/portfolio.

Figure 2.

Figure 3.

Figure 2. AA Project Review 2019. https://pr2019.aaschool.ac.uk/ Figure 3. A slide from Zaha’s lecture at the AA. Zaha Hadid, “Architectural Education Symposium: Closing Lecture.” AA School. Lecture date Nov 5, 2004. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEiWlxY8z3I&t=1813s/

The Pluralist Discourse In 2013, Sarah Whiting, the then dean of the Rice School of Architecture, contributed to Log a conversation with Peter Eisenman where she described the current time of theoretical unclarity in architecture schools as “vaporous moments”, a condition where a plethora of voices coexist in the form of vapor – as they are too thin to be liquid fuel – without any of them powerful enough to become the energy for a new movement or a new collective consensus.2 For Whiting, it was beneficial for pedagogy when there were strong camps in the 1980s and 90s among practitioners regarding postmodernism because students had clear references to align with or fight against.3 “We don't have that same clarity today,’’ Whiting argues, “no stance has the critical mass to generate that kind of strong influence, or the strong influence to generate that critical mass.”4 Contrary to Whiting’s protagonist worries, educators in Britain have embraced the diversification of the discourse through the pedagogical structure of the unit system and vertical studios set up by Alvin Boyarsky first at the Architectural Association in 1973. I her publication: From the "Well-Laid Table" to the "Market Place: The Architectural Association Unit System, architectural historian Irene Sunwoo pointed out that Boyarsky’s agenda was to ensure the units “each offered tutors autonomous pedagogical territory for developing individualized architectural investigations”.5 Though questioned at first, the system soon became successful as the AA became the international locus that attracted the best thinkers of that era. Over the years, the AA found herself accommodating multiple, sometimes contradicting themes among the units. So much the school was comfortable with this notion of plurality that when alumni Zaha Hadid made her comment that the AA should consider restricting its studio units to only explore three or four tendencies during her public lecture at the AA in 2004, her opinion seemed rather unexpected.6 Nonetheless, the pluralist teaching system proved its vitality by staying relatively unchanged up to today, as well as influencing the pedagogy of a wide range of architecture schools including the Bartlett and Columbia University.7 However, despite the obvious embracing of a more plural discourse, how much of today’s architecture is really distinct? Has the architectural academia – the key facility in the production of architectural theory and practice – shown symptoms of wear and tear in the new conditions of our time? Does it produce progress, or merely “further and further diluted versions of the originals?”8 2

Peter Eisenman, and Sarah Whiting. “I am Interested in a Project of Engaged Autonomy,” Log, No. 28, 2013, 109.

Ibid., 109 4 Ibid., 109 5 Irene Sunwoo, From the "Well-Laid Table" to the "Market Place: The Architectural Association Unit System, Journal of Architectural Education (1984-), March 2012, Vol. 65, No. 2, Beginning Design (March 2012), 25.

6 Hadid, “Architectural Education Symposium: Closing Lecture.” 16:43 7 Sunwoo, From the "Well-Laid Table" to the "Market Place", 25.

8 Eisenman, and Whiting. “I am Interested in a Project of Engaged Autonomy,” 109.

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Figure 5.

Figure 6.

Figure 4. Jinghong Jiang, PORTFOLIO—Hong, published on Sep 21, 2020. 3 likes. https://issuu.com/1397864/docs/___patrick_kadk Figure 5. Jia Weng, Jiawengportfolio2015, Published on Jan 21, 2016. 135 likes. https://issuu.com/jiaweng/docs/jiawengportfolio2015_ff1ddd513cecde Figure 6. John Adrian, Architecture Portfolio| admitted to Harvard GSD,Yale SoA, Columbia GSAPP and UPenn AP. Published on Oct 10, 2020. 321 likes. https://issuu.com/johnadrianchristopher/docs/architecture_portfolio_-_john_adrian_3

Portfolioism is the Unconscious of Architecture A quick browse on the popular digital publishing platform issuu.com with some search words like “architecture”, “portfolio”, “admitted to” and you will be amazed by what you find: an almost curated collection of architectural projects with a surprising level of homogeneity, which students have condensed into portfolios. These academic portfolios (professional portfolios are cast out from this essay’s focus, for the projects are more often the firm’s work) are used for applications to graduate programs in elite architecture schools by students, most likely from Asia, who apply to North America or Europe.9 Amongst them are some incredibly well-drawn projects that share common traits, notably the love for complex diagrammatic drawing; the eager to show a process of scientific rigor, often with graphic notation of restrained color use; and most interestingly, the silent presence of pseudorandom patterns, perhaps as an unnoted consequence of postmodern values (figure 4-6). Some of these traits, unsurprising as they must look to us, would also appear throughout the project reviews of those elite graduate schools, but never discussed openly as part of their main thesis (figure 2).

In that regard, the common traits observed in application portfolios may be understood as a kind of Freudian “unconscious” of architecture – the relative artistic immaturity from architects’ “childhood” – as opposed to the conscious words written in curriculum and unit agendas. This “unconscious” is obviously a denial of the aforementioned plurality. Despite the diverse themes within the schools, the student body seems to know a singular formula – one set of boxes to check in order to make an appealing project.

We shall coin a term to accommodate such consensus, using ‘portfolio’ – the medium where the discourse is based on – to produce ‘portfolioism’ – the ideology and style related to purposely pitching one’s work to guarantee admission to elite architecture schools. In business, a portfolioist person can be someone who does not have a linear career path, but a collection of diversified expertise.10 On the contrary, portfolioism in architecture points to the monolithic practice of working on a specific medium of architectural discourse – the portfolio. Surely, one would also be critical about the collection found on issuu.com, as only a certain portion of students actually choose to keep their portfolio online after the application is done. However, it would be the same biased sample that the next cohort of applicants looks up to for their references. In that sense, biased is precisely the way portfolioism works – as an agenda to pollute the architectural intelligentsia through media-amplified presence.

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This is also interesting as Asia keep sending students to study architecture in the West. According to Rem Koolhaas, the West stopped producing manifestos and urban thinking when they stopped urbanizing after the 1970s, precisely when most of Asia happened to be rapidly urbanizing. And Asia did so in a vacuum of theory, when all produced in the west were reactionary tracts against modern architecture. See Rem Koolhaas, “Preservation is Overtaking Us” Lecture at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. September 17, 2004. (https://www.arch.columbia.edu/books/reader/6-preservation-is-overtaking-us#reader-anchor-0) 10 Rinne, April. “The career of the future looks more like a portfolio than a path.” Quartz at Work. February 27, 2018. https://qz.com/work/1217108/the-career-of-the-future-looks-more-like-a-portfolio-than-a-path

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Figure 7. Elliott Bishop, ‘The Sweet Proposal’ 2018. https://www.instagram.com/p/B7lEXo2J_un/ Figure 8. Mark foster Gage, Helsinki Guggenheim Museum, 2014. https://www.mfga.com/helsinki-guggenheim Figure 9. Nabila Mahdi, The Morphology of Architectural Ideals. 2017. https://nabilamahdi.com/The-Morphologyof-Architectural-Ideals

Portfolioism is Involution In anthropology, the concept "involution" was first introduced by Alexander Goldenweiser to describe the situation where a culture is unable to evolve into new forms but continue to develop only in the direction of internal complexities, leading to "progressive complication, a variety within uniformity, virtuosity within monotony"11 The concept has been picked up by the public on social media in China and became a viral word since 2017, in which case the meaning shifted to a general sense of bottomless competition without being more productive. In both the original and derived definitions, involution seems relevant to the current discourse that produced portfolioism.

In a way, portfolioism can be seen as a result of responding to the ever-growing competition within architecture. As the political and economic landscape in recent decades has arguably shaped the architectural practice into a pyramid only favoring the top firms and “starchitects”, a similar kind of intensified competition also has occurred in architecture schools. In many parts of the world, university students find themselves in a position of anxiety to “stand out” amid the looming inflation of their degrees, as overall admission numbers continue to climb in higher education. However, the act of “standing out” is made harder while the repercussions of postmodernist values render the architecture schools as a discourse of diversified voices and fragmented topics. How does one be qualitatively different in a pluralist environment? In Sunwoo’s observation, if Alvin Boyarsky's ideology of the “Market Place of Ideas” had a vital weakness, it would have to be the question of the inevitable boredom over simultaneity of voices or repeated “originals”.12 In this regard, the mission of “standing out” in the current landscape partly falls on the quantitative complexities of the project, which is a key factor attributed to the notion of portfolioism, as well as a key sign of involution. In the example of Wang Zi Geng’s portfolio upload (figure10), one of the most influential portfolios on issuu.com, each page is carefully populated with a maximum amount of density – lines, texts, photographic materials formulate a choreography of visual impact that the viewer cannot help but be impressed. Arguably, the same logic of overwhelming quantity can also be found in the iconic illustrations of Bartlett unit 10 (figure7), the maximalist drawings by students of Maria Fedorchenko’s unit at the AA (figure9), or the 3D-model-garbage-dump that is the forms of a Mark Foster Gage proposal (figure8), etc. Although these mentioned works belong to different disciplinary agendas and self-identify as unique discourses of investigations, they are all undeniably guilty of employing quantity as a means to gain legibility.

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Goldenweiser 1936; quoted in Geertz 1963, p 81 Hui,Yew-Foong. Review of the (Un) Changing World of Peasants: Two Perspectives, by Clifford Geertz and James C. Scott. Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia 24, no. 1 (2009): pp. 19. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41308109.

12 Sunwoo, From the "Well-Laid Table" to the "Market Place", pp. 33

Figure 10.

Figure 10. Zigeng Wang, Narrator_Wang Zigeng, published Oct 4, 2013. One of the most influential portfolios on ISSUU with 2504 likes as of Dec 2021.

Portfolioism is Market Selection The utilitarian nature of a portfolio determines that it stands closer to a ‘market’ than to the artist.

By definition, portfolioism produces a kind of intellectual project which exists to guarantee an offer from an elite architecture school. If one can abstract a pattern describing portfolioism, it would resemble a model of the free market: students are producers while the school admission offices are consumers. In making a good sell, students anticipate the demand from the schools by checking websites like issuu.com to see previous admitted students’ work, or directly look at the schools’ prized projects such as RIBA awards or distinction projects. Since the stylistic tendencies from each of the elite schools do not differ too much (with most graduate schools bulked up to accommodate a diverse range of themes), and the producer only has one product to sell, the result is often a generic style of architectural projects, the kind that happens to satisfy the school admission offices in a way resembling a ‘commercial success’.

The academic “market selection” can be no different from the actual market selection of the art world. In what the art critique Walter Robinson called “zombie formalism” in 2014, the prevailing style in contemporary painting was understood as a dead, pseudo-art-form driven entirely by the art market, which naturally pays higher prices (in millions) for paintings with qualities of “a chic strangeness, a mysterious drama, a meditative calm—that function well in the realm of high-end, hyper-contemporary interior design” even if they are uninteresting derivatives of past movements.13 For Robinson, zombie formalist paintings are not paintings, but “ain’tings”14; similarly, portfolioist architecture cannot be architecture, for the mechanisms that produced the two types of work are completely different.

The condition is a positive feedback loop: the academia decides on the offer holders and the medal winners, which are immediately referenced/copied by the next cohort of students. While the selected students go through these schools to become prize winners and even teachers whose work propagates the influence that they had absorbed earlier on. Therefore, portfolioism can be viewed as an agency for architectural academia to self-circulate and inflate ideas regardless of what happens outside of the ivory tower.

13 Walter Robinson, “Flipping and the Rise of Zombie Formalism”, Artspace, April 3, 2014. https://www.artspace.com/magazine/contributors/see_here/the_rise_of_zombie_formalism-52184 14 Ibid.

Figure 11.

Figure 12.

Figure 11. RAC studio, Cryptocene, Blockchain Dystopia at Shenzhen-Hongkong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism and architecture. Shenzhen, 2019 Figure 12. RAC studio, Student Works at Venice Architecture Biennale. Venice, 2018

Portfolioism is Overtaking Us Not only does portfolioism have an online presence, it has also materialized in the tangible forms of “portfolio agencies” – a type of tutoring business that offers paid advice to students trying to polish their application portfolios. One example is RAC studio, a shanghai-based business founded in 2015 by some Harvard GSD graduates, which helps undergraduate students from local universities to apply for architecture schools in North America and Europe. At RAC, each student works on the application material guided by a ‘design tutor’ who is normally a recent graduate or senior student from an overseas graduate school. Thanks to the high tuition fee, the portfolio tutors can easily earn three times more than they would do in architecture offices.

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In that regard, portfolioism is offering a genuine financial outlook for students of architecture.

On the other hand, a portfolio agency could see itself beyond the limits of a tutoring business.

RAC offers “intensive studios” where students work on new projects from scratch under the supervision of tutors, in case a student does not have enough strong projects from his or her previous studies. Like Boyarsky’s unit system, these studios are run by a “studio master” who chooses a theme – often borrowed from major architecture competitions or pitched towards design exhibitions. The ultimate goal, of course, is to produce qualifying work to be included in the portfolio. Amazingly, students at RAC alongside their portfolio tutors did win several architectural competitions and even made it to the 2018 Venice Biennale and 2019 ShenzhenHongkong biennale (figure11,12). As a result, the difference between the portfolio school and a real architecture school is momentarily blurred, as the former starts to generate “architectural research” that contributes to the broader discipline just like the latter does.

The one question naturally arises: is portfolioism overtaking us (Architecture)? When Rem Koolhaas titled his lecture “Preservation is Overtaking Us” given at Columbia University in 2004, it was very much an embodiment of the constant crisis within Architecture, in fear of being replaced and deemed no longer the powerful practice it once was.16 Today, that sense of crisis is even stronger amid discouraged construction industry due to the pandemic and climate change, while the discipline witnesses the flourishing of an ecosystem of portfolioist practices.

Apart from the tutoring businesses, there are growing numbers of for-profit student competition organizers, Instagram platforms that feature student projects for a fee, “star students” selling advice to followers on YouTube channels, and so on. While capitalizing on intensified competition of talents, these forms of practice treat student unbuilt projects as the end outcome of their production, instead of a mere step towards real architecture in the built world. They have effectively found ways to demonstrate that rather than constructing buildings, drawing unbuilt work can still make money, which brings the possibility of a new kind of architectural practice as a purely speculative discourse.

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Estimate based on the author’s personal experience working in similar environments.

Rem Koolhaas, “Preservation is Overtaking Us” Lecture at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. September 17, 2004. (https://www.arch.columbia.edu/books/reader/6-preservationis-overtaking-us#reader-anchor-0) 16

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Figure 13. Section of U.S. one-dollar bill, reverse, series 2009.

Portfolioism is Pyramid Scheme?

If portfolioism, as “the new kind of architectural practice”, were to continue as a trend, how sustainable is it? How does it compare to the extreme example of what is known as a pyramid scheme?17 In a pyramid scheme, investors are promised high returns with their initial payment, which only takes place when they bring new members to join the scheme, moving themselves up in the pyramid structure. In comparison, a portfolio school relies on the tuition of students to gain profit, while promising the investors (student) good returns when they successfully master the skills to qualify as top candidates. The problem is in today’s unappealing professional outlook, more graduates from those top universities are coming back to teach at the portfolio agencies in the very training program they used to take, understandably due to aforementioned financial reasons. And this creates a worrying resemblance to the pyramid scheme because the investment of the older student seems to be better rewarded if only there are constantly new students joining the game.

With every pyramid scheme, it is in the investors’ interest to share a key consensus that the scheme is creating genuine value and therefore shall continue forever. With portfolioism, isn’t it the same overlapping of interest to have all students and practitioners believe in the value and usefulness of their academic production? While the skills of making “cool drawings”, “architecture narratives” or “sophisticated diagrams” – essential skills to becoming a capable candidate for any elite architecture school – are in themselves at a certain distance with the skills required in real architectural practice, in reality, these skills are being heavily invested in by young architects and students trying to succeed. Perhaps we could argue that the current disciplinary directions revealed by portfolioism can be a bit like the result of an inflated bubble of false beliefs, or could we?

Of course, the majority part of our architectural education is not a pyramid scheme or bubble, as it does produce some valuable architectural design and thinking. However, it is not baseless to start observing the current development of the discipline in such a provocative way. Similar to Robinson’s notion of “zombie formalism”, the architectural academia could benefit from asking how much of what we do has genuine value, and how much of it has value mainly because others in the field also think it does.

To conclude, the essay has tried to establish the concept of portfolioism in a way that makes a cautionary tale – a fictional rehearsal for what might become real. Under the current conditions of architectural practice and academia, could we anticipate such an unconscious movement silently sweeping across the architectural discipline? If that isn’t hard to do, sooner or later, the fiction would be complete, as this movement consumes architecture until there is no more architectural discourse, only portfolioism. In that fictional future, the pyramid scheme will eventually reveal itself. The bubble will burst. The shared agreement on the idea of architecture as high art, as something valuable on itself even as a speculative discipline would no longer hold true. And architecture will surely die. That is the cautionary tale for architecture.

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In the 7th lecture “Endgame” of the AA History and Theory unit Necromancing the Stone, William Orr presented several links between architecture academia and a typical pyramid scheme as a provocation to gain insights into the ecosystem of architectural education.

Bibliography Eisenman, Peter. And Whiting, Sarah. I am Interested in a Project of Engaged Autonomy, Log, No. 28, 2013, pp. 109-118. URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43630873

Architectural Association School of Architecture. “Architectural Education Symposium: Closing Lecture.” AA School. Lecture by Zaha Hadid on 2004-11-05. Published on June 9, 2015. YouTube video, 01:35. https://youtu.be/EPPALfWYGRo. Sunwoo, Irene. From the "Well-Laid Table" to the "Market Place:" The Architectural Association Unit System, Journal of Architectural Education (1984-), March 2012, Vol. 65, No. 2, Beginning Design (March 2012), pp. 24-41. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41820035 Zhu, Jianfei. Criticality in between China and the West, Journal of Architecture, Vol. 10, issue 5, 2005. pp. 479-498. DOI: 10.1080/13602360500460541 Hays, K. Michael. Between Culture and Form. Perspecta, 1984, Vol. 21 (1984), pp. 14-29. URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1567078

Architectural Association School of Architecture. AA Project Review 2019. https://pr2019.aaschool.ac.uk/ Koolhaas, Rem. “Preservation is Overtaking Us” Lecture at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. September 17, 2004. https://www.arch.columbia.edu/books/reader/6-preservation-is-overtaking-us#reader-anchor-0 Rinne, April. “The career of the future looks more like a portfolio than a path.” Quartz at Work.

February 27, 2018. https://qz.com/work/1217108/the-career-of-the-future-looks-more-like-aportfolio-than-a-path Hui,Yew-Foong. Review of the (Un) Changing World of Peasants: Two Perspectives, by Clifford Geertz and James C. Scott. Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia 24, no. 1 (2009): 18– 31. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41308109.

Robinson, Walter. “Flipping and the Rise of Zombie Formalism”, Artspace, April 3, 2014. https://www.artspace.com/magazine/contributors/see_here/the_rise_of_zombie_formalism52184