On Architectural Writing Anlan Chen
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Description, Review, Critique Why So Few Good Critiques? The Many Faces of Architectural Writing
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Architectural writing should aid everyone ' s understanding of buildings and assist architects to design better ones. This is not to say that it should be an instruction manual or ignore the importance of the myriad intellectual endeavours which explore the human predicament –about which architects should always be conscious. Rather it is to say that architectural commentary should aim for clarity and precision of expression by means of lucid terminology and simplicity of structure.
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Alan Berman
Architect, Jury of the AJ Writing Prize
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Description, Review, Critique Description Merriam-Webster: a statement that tells you how something or someone looks, sounds, etc. : words that describe something or someone Oxford: A spoken or written account of a person, object, or event Review Merriam-Webster: a report that gives someone's opinion about the quality of a book, performance, product, etc. / a magazine filled mostly with reviews and articles that describe the writer's thoughts or opinions about a subject Oxford: A critical appraisal of a book, play, film, etc. published in a newspaper or magazine Critique Merriam-Webster: a careful judgment in which you give your opinion about the good and bad parts of something (such as a piece of writing or a work of art) Oxford: A detailed analysis and assessment of something, especially a literary, philosophical, or political theory
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From the given definitions one can say that description may be more observational; review may consists of opinions on the overall quality, which usually go published in the public media; whereas critique appears to be more systematically structured and in-depth, perhaps more theoretically oriented. The distinction between review and critique is not specific to architecture, but can be loosely compared to its counterpart in films—a film review provides a synopsis of the plot, some description of the film’s features and, most fundamentally, an explicit recommendation to the reader whether the film is worth spending time and money on seeing. Film critique, on the other hand, seeks to open broader questions and draw broader conclusions, to place the work within the directors’ filmography, within the wider historical and cultural context of films. Therefore reviews are more instrumental in its purpose—it helps you decide whether a film is worth buying or not. Even though architectural reviews are mostly on buildings that have already been built, they offer more or less the same general judgement on the merits and deficiencies on projects. Whereas architectural critique may have a wider agenda. Nevertheless it is hard to simply attribute subjectivity or objectivity to any of these genres, for their level of subjectiveness/objectiveness may vary considerably depending on the identity of the writer and the reader. Here are a few writings examples on a single project, the High Line in New York, which shows how the boundary between subjectivity and objectivity may be blurry at times. *Note: the subjectivity-objectivity scale is purely personal opinion.
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Genre Description
Project High Line, New York 2009 Author Diller Scofidio + Renfro (the architect) Reader the public The high line was a piece of obsolete industrial infrastructure in a part of Manhattan that was totally forsaken....What happened was that this very strange landscape started to form a whole ecosystem around it. The areas changed constantly because of its landscape context. We thought we could capture this rather otherworldiness - happened by itself as a matter of ruin, by this very perverse urban nature, and brought the public up without destroying the ecosystem. We designed these pavers that would come together with the vegetation in different proportions and gradience. So it could go from 100% hardscape to 100% vegetation, or any gradient in between..... We were really fascinated by New York plus 30 feet, because there you see all the unintended things, you see the blank party walls, the trains, garage doors and loading docks, cars being lifted. Because how would you experience it otherwise? That's the beauty of high line: these buildings were not designed to be seen. It was an accidental condition that came as a result of incongruous events. One of the most important thing about highline is that if it is about anything at all, it's about nothing. It's one place that New Yorkers can come and do nothing. Subjectivity
Objectivity
Author TripAdvisor (tourist website) Reader tourists The High Line is an elevated railway transformed into a public park on Manhattan's West Side. The park features lush horticulture, artworks, seasonal food vendors, community programing, and unique views of the Hudson River and New York City skyline. The High Line runs between Gansevoort Street to West 34th Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues. Subjectivity
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Objectivity
Author James Corner Field Operations (the architect) Reader the public Inspired by the melancholic, unruly beauty of the High Line, where nature has reclaimed a once-vital piece of urban infrastructure, the team retools this industrial conveyance into a post-industrial instrument of leisure, life, and growth. By changing the rules of engagement between plant life and pedestrians, our strategy of agri-tecture combines organic and building materials into a blend of changing proportions that accommodates the wild, the cultivated, the intimate, and the hyper-social. In stark contrast to the speed of Hudson River Park, this parallel linear experience is marked by slowness, distraction and an other-worldliness that preserves the strange character of the High Line. Providing flexibility and responsiveness to the changing needs, opportunities, and desires of the dynamic context, our proposal is designed to remain perpetually unfinished, sustaining emergent growth and change over time. Subjectivity
Objectivity
Although the last piece is descriptive, it is infused with the designer's own feeling towards the project and its context. This can been seen in words such as melancholic, stark, otherworldliness... which could have an impact on reader's preperception of the project before they experience it. Therefore grammatically speaking the description is no longer entirely objective, but intend to leave an impression on the readers based on the author's own inclination.
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Genre Review
Project High Line, New York 2009 Author Nicolai Ouroussoff, the New York Times Reader the public On High, A Fresh Outlook Ever since it was unveiled in 2005, the design for this park, conceived for a strip of elevated rail tracks abandoned nearly 30 years ago, has been the favorite cause of New York’s rich and powerful. Celebrities attended fundraisers on its deck. City officials endorsed it. Developers salivated over it, knowing it would raise land values. ...... I worried that it would one day be overrun with tourists and film crews. I imagined turning on the television to see Carrie stumbling down its promenade with a broken heel, weeping over Mr. Big. How, I wondered, could it possibly retain the tranquillity that made walking along its rusting, decrepit deck such a haunting experience? So I was overjoyed this weekend when I climbed the stairs at Gansevoort Street, entered the new city park and felt an immediate sense of calm. Designed by James Corner Field Operations with Diller Scofidio & Renfro, the first phase of the High Line, which opened on Tuesday, is a series of low scruffy gardens, punctuated by a fountain and a few quiet lounge areas, that unfold in a lyrical narrative and seem to float above the noise and congestion below. It is one of the most thoughtful, sensitively designed public spaces built in New York in years. ...... But as mesmerizing as the design is, it is the height of the High Line that makes it so magical, and that has such a profound effect on how you view the city. ...... But the care and patience with which this project was developed, both on the part of the architects and the High Line’s founders, Joshua David and Robert Hammond, is a rarity anywhere. They have given New Yorkers an invaluable and transformative gift. Subjectivity 10
Objectivity
Project High Line, New York 2009 Author Jeremiah Moss, the New York Times Reader the public Disney World on the Hudson ...... Today it’s difficult to remember that initial feeling. The High Line has become a tourist-clogged catwalk and a catalyst for some of the most rapid gentrification in the city’s history. ...... But the problem isn’t just the crowds. It’s that the park, which will eventually snake through more than 20 blocks, is destroying neighborhoods as it grows. And it’s doing so by design. While the park began as a grass-roots endeavor — albeit a well-heeled one — it quickly became a tool for the Bloomberg administration’s creation of a new, upscale, corporatized stretch along the West Side. As socialites and celebrities championed the designer park during its early planning stages, whipping community support into a heady froth, the city rezoned West Chelsea for luxury development in 2005. The New York City Economic Development Corporation published a study last year stating that before the High Line was redeveloped, “surrounding residential properties were valued 8 percent below the overall median for Manhattan.” Between 2003 and 2011, property values near the park increased 103 percent. ...... Hardest hit have been the multigenerational businesses of “gasoline alley.” Mostly auto-related establishments that don’t fit into Michael R. Bloomberg’s luxury city vision, several vanished in mere months, like species in a meteoric mass extinction. Bear Auto Shop was out after decades; the Olympia parking garage, after 35 years, closed when its rent reportedly quintupled. Brownfeld Auto, on West 29th Street near 10th Avenue, lost its lease after nearly a century. Today it’s another hole in the ground. Its third-generation owner, Alan Brownfeld, blamed the High Line for taking away the thriving business he’d inherited from his grandfather. “It’s for the city’s glamorous people,” he said. 11
Within a few years, the ecosystem disrupted by the High Line will find a new equilibrium. The aquarium-like high rises will be for the elite, along with a few exclusive locales like the Standard Hotel. But the new locals will rarely be found at street level, where chain stores and tourist-friendly restaurants will cater to the crowds of passers-by and passers-through. Gone entirely will be regular New Yorkers, the people who used to call the neighborhood home. But then the High Line was never really about them. Subjectivity
Objectivity
Despite the fact that reviews should be subjective by definition, one may consider the second piece to be slightly more objective than the former. As in this article facts, personal stories and statistics support the author's argument as he goes along. Therefore it seems like he is expressing mass opinion rather than just his own, which, appears to be more convincing and impersonal. In other words even though the author is still manifesting personal opinion, his opinions are more objectively argued.
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Genre Critique
Project High Line, New York 2009 Author Aleksandr Bierig Reader people in the building industry The High Line and Other Myths Where a building is a stop in time, a downbeat, landscape is essentially nebulous. It requires one to think about time and the possibilities of nature's inherent recombinant and mutational largesse. Buildings are often "mirrors" of a stylistic moment, a snapshot, whereas landscape's "mirrors" are incessantly mutable; they shimmer like a river, shifting, slowing at points, thriving and/or drying up. Designers are rarely the authors of urban policy (which in New York emanates from City Hall), but the disparity is harder to reconcile given that, as Carter points out, in planning terms, the High Line creates an unintentional and subtle picture of social inequity. As a "public" park, it is also a fiction (a manufactured "truth"). To appreciate the High Line in architectural terms, then, is to be complicit with the incredible wealth and privilege that built and sustains it. But within that specious bracket of pure architectural experience, the park is undeniably "there." And, as the panel suggested, it arrived at exactly the right moment, combining the remediation of an industrial site, the selfconscious conversation with that history, and the wealth that sustains these games. Climbing up stairs to the newly surfaced and planted linear park, one is immediately captured by the surrounding views, but the details of the work are equally important. The new paving tapers and disappears where it meets the plantings and also, albeit more heavy-handedly, rises up to support benches..... The idea of recreating the past is a constant and impossible struggle, but landscape's resistance to cliche and to human authorship allows for a broad range of historical deception. Though dropped along the surface by a knowing hand, the plants are, by definition, living of their own accord, just as did the weeds before them. In this sense, and without worrying too much about the horticultural regime required to maintain these "gardens," the vacuum nature is said to abhor has been filled with a studied "lawlessness." 13
In a video on the Web site of Architectural Record (which I helped to produce), Ricardo Scofidio declared that the project was about "protecting" the High Line from architecture. "It's about what was previously up here, about preserving that, not about making a statement about who we are as architects." Thus the mythology of the High Line persists (a highly nuanced myth watered by philanthropy and repenting architectural egos). Is it possible to make a building in this manner - like a landscape? The "absence of the author" perhaps helps explain landscape architecture's incipient rise to importance in the civic realm, given that instead we have the unseen hand(s) of overlapping "markets." Philosopher Karsten Harries, in The Ethical Function of Architecture, explores the human and philosophical implications of the built environment from every possible angle, only to admit that he is unsure where all of that analysis leads us: "Consider once more the suggestion that works of architecture be understood as public figures on the ground of comparatively private buildings, where temple and church provide paradigms that have lost their authority. How are we to reoccupy the place once held by sacred architecture? . . . The landscape park seems to me to hold great promise, precisely because it is not as exclusively oriented toward the past. Realized landscape no matter its origin or meticulous maintenance - will always be (semi)wild. And, because of this inherent instability and mutability, reading the land as if it were fixed, like a text, is impossible. The High Line (set just high enough off the ground to create the singular experience of the "landscape-architectural exception," yet not elevated to the level of the buildings that surround it) is not building and not quite landscape. The High Line is (like Barthes's point) a socially constructed mirage or half-truth. From its prospects we may see our surroundings anew, but the city appears as it always appears - a landscape, forever in flux (never completely frozen in time). Buildings only appear to be frozen, and landscape, by its very nature, helps to further destabilize this illusion. Insofar as the High Line is a series of overlapping "myths" (Its past and its present), the idea that it is also a "public" park is part of its myth.
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Objectivity
In this critique the project is, as in my opionion it should be, positioned in a broader context and discussed in a larger framework, such as "recreating the past" and "the absence of author in landscape architecture". This approach opens the project to a wider audience as well as a wider interpretation, instead of trying to be "objective" by evaluating the project against a set of criteria and pronounces it good or bad. For one thing, there has been a long- established truism that there is no absolute value in architecture. The discussion may be a metaphorical one. But it can simply be understood as no one can have sufficient authoritaty to make a true and final judgement on a building. This is because that no one comes with a clean slate. As we are aware now that we are all products of our time, place and culture. Critics approach a project with their own preconceptions and prejudices – in other words, pre-judgements. No matter how critical they were trying to be in their evaluation, the criteria itself is not definitely objective, not to mention the "critical" assessing process. For another, critique should not only evaluates, but also intepretates. It should articulates and identifies the significance of architecture, to involve the public as much as possible in the debate. For the vast amount of comments on social media or newspaper columns from "laymen" have proved that a lack of critical writing does not mean a lack of public interests. Therefore critique, as one of the professionals' major means to communicate with the public, should not restrain itself into the confinement of analytical assessment, but trying to find a language so as to be able to talk to the public. As Michael Kimmelman has famously put it:
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I’d like to believe that my role is to act as an advocate, not simply to respond to what’s proposed or built – which often means going beyond the role of a reviewer, as criticism is so often defined. Architecture is far too important to lose itself in questions about the state of criticism, which is not interesting.
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Why so few good critiques? First of all, it is necessary to clarify that critiques do not have to be all negative, and bashing a building is just as stressful and wrenching for the critic as it is for the architect. As there is a pervasive belief that criticism is only rigorous and true if it condemns the project; and critics should be fearless in making their unbiased judgement. Nevertheless with that in mind, even in countries like UK - where the “outrage” page in the The Architectural Review is often cited as best examples of criticism that is appropriately “strong” there is complaint over the quality and quantity of contemporary architectural reviews As Alan Davies has pointed out, most of the reviews are "really 'massage' pieces for the project, tailoring the constraints to flatter the choice." One does not have to look far than the mass construciton in today's suburbs to realize the inadequacy of today's architectural critiques. But why is it so? Several presumptions are drawn below as an attempt to solve the mystery.
Presumption 1 As stated in the chapter before, unlike film reviews architectural reviews do not sell. Rather they are commentaries on buidings that have already been bought.
Hence it may be futile for critics to rail against something that is already done and finished, for they will have little effect on the design outcome. Architects will not bother themselves with reviews after the completion of the building, but rather catering only to the clients' demands. 18
Presumption 2 While a negative review may be educational to
the architect or the public, it may be meanwhile traumatic to the developer and the client. So at least critiques of private developments have to step carefully around commercially sensitive issues. In countries like Australia lawsuits are common against criticisms, which, more often than not, the critic loses.
Presumption 3 For private properties critics mostly need the
architect’s help or permission in accessing the building.
Often the architect has paid for the photography that appears in the magazine and also owns the rights to the plans that are published alongside the review and photos. Therefore critics are burdened with the invisible responsibility of not shedding blood on the reviewed projects. Afterall a film reviewer doesn’t need a director for permission to view the film before reviewing it.
Presumption 4 It may be just a myth, but the general impression is that architects do not receive criticism well.
If such is the case, then if the reviewer is an architect, he may be reluctant to attack his peers, for this may jeopardise potential collaborations or future job opportunities, especially at a time when there are so few jobs on offer. However if the reviewer is not an architect, there is a reasonable chance that the architect won’t give the critic access to their best projects in the future.
Presumption 5 Few people are interested in reading about visually or formally bland buildings, which is why architects still prefer paid photographs being published in glossy magazines.
Thereby reviews may have become another form of cheap publicity, which have lost their original purpose. 19
The many faces of architectural writing Regardless of the type of writing, may it be observation, analysis, reflection, criticism, manifestoes, or narrative, architects have to be able to communicate their ideas both verbally and literally. As a profession known for its creativity architects have devised numerous ways to express their ideas. Below are a few that demonstrate the difference between various genres. 1. All texts, with a strong bold opening establising one's enemy, drawing a clear division between the enemy and himself.
Manifesto of Futurist Architecture Antonio Sant’Elia No architecture has existed since 1700. A moronic mixture of the most various stylistic elements used to mask the skewletons of modern houses is called modern architecture. The new beauty of cement and iron are profaned by the superimposition of motley decorative incrustations that cannot be justified either by constructive necessity or by our (modern) taste, and whose origins are in Egyptian, Indian or Byzantine antiquity and in that idiotic flowering of stupidity and impotence that took the name of neoclassicism.
...... I COMBAT AND DESPISE:
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1. All the pseudo-architecture of the avant-garde, Austrian, Hungarian, German and American; 2. All classical architecture, solemn, hieratic, scenographic, decorative, monumental, pretty and pleasing; 3. The embalming, reconstruction and reproduction of ancient monuments and palaces; 4. Perpendicular and horizontal lines, cubical and pyramidical forms that are static, solemn, aggressive and absolutely excluded from our utterly new sensibility; 5. The use of massive, voluminous, durable, antiquated and costly materials. AND PROCLAIM: 1. That Futurist architecture is the architecture of calculation, of audacious temerity and of simplicity; the architecture of reinforced concrete, of steel, glass, cardboard, textile fiber, and of all those substitutes for wood, stone and brick that enable us to obtain maximum elasticity and lightness; 2. That Futurist architecture is not because of this an arid combination of practicality and usefulness, but remains art, i.e. synthesis and expression; 3. That oblique and elliptic lines are dynamic, and by their very nature possess an emotive power a thousand times stronger than perpendiculars and horizontals, and that no integral, dynamic architecture can exist that does not include these; 4. That decoration as an element superimposed on architecture is absurd, and that the decorative value of Futurist architecture depends solely on the use and original arrangement of raw or bare or violently colored materials; 5. That, just as the ancients drew inspiration for their art from the elements of nature, we—who are materially and spiritually artificial—must find that inspiration in the elements of the utterly new mechanical world we have created, and of which architecture must be the most beautiful expression, the most complete synthesis, the most efficacious integration; 6. That architecture as the art of arranging forms according to pre-established criteria is finished; 7. That by the term architecture is meant the endeavor to harmonize the environment with Man with freedom and great audacity, that is to transform the world of things into a direct projection of the world of the spirit; 8. From an architecture conceived in this way no formal or linear habit can grow, since the fundamental characteristics of Futurist architecture will be its impermanence and transience. Things will endure less than us. Every generation must build its own city. This constant renewal of the architectonic environment will contribute to the victory of Futurism which has already been affirmed by words-infreedom, plastic dynamism, music without quadrature and the art of noises, and for which we fight without respite against traditionalist cowardice. 21
2. Purely graphical representation of the content
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The Manhattan Transcript Bernard Tschumiw
Without any explanation these graphics may be confusing to the reader, but it may be the author's intention to have the reader wonder, examine, compare and summerize. In this way the content and the
the architect's personal style is locked in reader's mind, thereby they may have a deeper understanding of the theory. 23
In contrast BIG's Yes is More can be understood by reader outside the architectural p r o f e s s i o n . It a i m s t o express the ideas through t h e s i mp l e s t a n d m o s t recognizable way - comics, which is both informative and entertaining. 24
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3. Exhibit core ideas through layout
In order to describe that modern body is no longer natural but a mutation of cyberbody living in the chaotic media age. DSR arranged texts, images and quotations in the form of patchwork that continues 26
Flesh: Architectural Probes
diller scofidio + renfro
even over the borderline of pages to display the interwoven yet contingent modern lives. And why architecture has to adapt to it. 27
3. Simple list of ideas, easy on the eyes and to be understood. MOMENTARY MANIFESTO FOR PUBLIC ARCHITECTURE DUS Architects 1. DO Design by doing is architectural beta-testing. Build 1:1 models in the public domain that function as immediate site analysis, architectural test case and social condenser. Put your practice to theory. Do the unthinkable: build a manifest, write a building. 2. MAKE IT BEAUTIFUL People like pretty things. 3. USE NEW OLD MATERIALS Celebrate mass consumption. Reveal the beauty of the everyday, by using ordinary objects in a different manner. Look beyond traditional construction materials, and re-introduce old crafts with new fabrics. Create social value from worthless stuff. 4. COOK Food is social construction material. It unites people. Cook, drink and dine together. A mere cookie can be the answer to a big brief. 5. CREATE A PUBLIC Shakespeare said it: "all the world's a stage". Architects have the world's largest audience. Discover for whom you are designing and respond to the res publica with the proper act. Public architecture is the staging of all events of life, and our tools can be those of performance artists.
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6. MIND THE DETAILS All details contribute to the architectural atmosphere. If you want people to meet, tie the drinks together and hand them out in pairs. A piece of rope is architecture too. 7. ACT UNSOLICITED Reprogram the brief, the building and the profession. Consider re-use of vacant office buildings rather than designing new ones. Use your own office 24/7 and program the space as club at night. Partake in society, rather than architecture competitions. 8. BE PERSONAL Establish human relationships. This social construction material is just as important as bricks and mortar. Communicate and educate. Host an excursion and exemplify the unknown. Step onto the street and speak the language of those who will live in your buildings. 9. PUT EVERYONE AROUND ONE TABLE Different people have different agendas. Place the client, manager, municipality, resident and neighbour around one table and they will communicate. Everyone is amateur and professional. An amateur can be a true expert at "residing", and a professional client may have no knowledge of architecture. Make the architecture at the table the subject of conversation and catalyst for the process. This creates mutual understanding, and speeds up the design process remarkably. 10. DESIGN THE RULES AND THE GAME Arrive early. Architectural decisions are made in the urban planning process. Design this process and ensure a great outcome. 11. PLAY THE CITY Play the city, don't plan it. Cities are shifting. Incorporate existing bottom-up initiatives and let these inform the top-down. Design a script rather than a blueprint; be the director. Reserve space for change and celebrate the informal. 29
Bibliography Bierig, A. (2010) The High Line And Other Myths. Log, No. 18, pp. 129-134. Bundgaard, J. (2014) Liz Diller: A moment of supreme nothingness. [Online Video] Available from: http://vimeo.com/87173567 [accessed April 4, 2014] Bjarke Ingels Group. (2010) Yes is More: An Archicomic on Architectural Evolution. Evergreen. Diller, E&Scofidio,R. (1996) Flesh: Architectural Probes. Princeton Architectural Press Dus Architects. Momentary Manifesto for Public Architecture. [online] Available from http://www.dusarchitects.com/officeprofile. php?menuid=manifesto. [accessed April 7, 2014] High Line. (2000) James Corner Field Operations and Diller Scofidio + Renfro. [Online]Available from http://www.thehighline.org/jamescorner-field-operations-and-diller-scofidio-renfro [accessed April 4, 2014] Moss, J. (2012) Disney World on the Hudson. The New York Times [online] Available from http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/22/ opinion/in-the-shadows-of-the-high-line.html[accessed April 4, 2015] Ouroussoff, N. (2009) On High, a Fresh Outlook. The New York Times [online] Available from http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/10/ arts/design/10high.html?pagewanted=all [accessed April 4, 2015]
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Sant’Elia, (1914) A. Manifesto of Futurist Architecture [online] Available from http://www.unknown.nu/futurism/architecture.html [accessed April 4, 2014] TripAdvisor. (2009) High Line. [Online]Available from http://www. tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g60763-d519474-Reviews-High_ Line-New_York_City_New_York.html [accessed April 4, 2014] Tschumi, B. (1981) The Manhattan Transcripts. Academy Editions, the University of Virginia
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