James Amicone

B.S. Arch 2015, M. Arch 2018

Brief Reflections on Issue 13

Three years ago One:Twelve and its staff ushered out Issue 13, simply titled Politics and Architecture. It wasn’t particularly unique in that architects in the academic discipline have, for some time, prioritized attempts to define the sometimes forced relationship of architecture and politics. What made it especially unsurprising is the fact that most student-driven, architectural journals felt quite obligated to put out at least one issue dedicated to the topic during the heightened attention to political upheaval during the Trump presidency.

This particular issue of politics and architecture rightfully acknowledged the difficulty of providing any real succinct narrative to the topic. Rather than define the relationship between architecture and politics from a collective stance, it attempted to showcase condensed readings of various positions shared across the school: embassy projects, graphic interpretations of Ohio congressional districts, and developing thesis statements from graduate students exit reviews and Baumer Seminar essays. An instigating force that year was the Baumer seminar that borrowed from the spirit of Caroline Levine’s work entitled Forms, a book that challenges the literary concept of forms and politics in such a clever and digestible way that its attitude could find very real interest in a school that has dedicated so much airtime to form in architecture.

It’s really no secret that architecture reports politically in words better than it reacts politically in form. It is after all, the slowest of art forms. (If you don’t mind me being so broad, I find the categorization of architecture as art fairly unattractive. But it works for this analogy.) Art has always had the ability to respond with appropriate haste to political agendas. Architecture, on the other hand, is bound by them. We’re most often left with attention to the quicker-moving project rather than the built form when discussing the topic as architecture responds to it. This is a shame, seeing as how the built form and the correlating boundaries that make up or impose order are the most politically oppressing elements in our urban and rural spaces. Borrowing from Levine, “...there is no politics without form.” (Levine, 3) She is speaking on a broader scale in her book, but for us, form represents a whole hell of a lot concerning the discipline we take part in. This is also why the destruction of buildings and the physical environment is often a direct result of

political unrest. And in some cases, the reappropriation of buildings, boundaries, or the elements that make up the political city; see Portland, Oregon 2020, and/ or further back “Sous les paves, la plage!” 1968. Levine, again speaking to a literary point of reference, doesn’t make this connection with architecture overtly, but if we can borrow from the sentiment, she anchors the political argument in her work on the idea that “smashing or evading [political] forms” is not necessarily “the most effective means to advance the cause of social justice.” (Levine, XII)

Levine writes, “The best close readers are always attentive to many different forms at different scales operating at once. I began to track the ways that political forms try to contain and control us, while often in fact overlapping and colliding with other forms, and sometimes getting in one another’s way.” (Levine, XI)

There was some deal of conversation in our Baumer seminar at the time, as you can imagine from these readings, as to whether architecture can try to do similar things, perhaps not in the same way as art or literature, but managing within the complex organization that architecture becomes building. In the spirit of this disruption and formal collision that Levine describes, she writes to “... persuade those who are interested in politics to become formalists…” (Levine, 23) in that “formalism offers a promising way forward.” (Levine, XIII) We’ve reached a time where architecture can probably amend its previously defining assumptions to what formalist architecture means and find a new way forward. A New Architectural Formalist must believe to this extent that disruptions are possible and now plausible while the very capitalist foundations of which it is built upon is in need of more than just repairing the cracks. That is to say, the very foundation of building architecture may find new means and methods to achieve their realizations, and in turn, new ways to overlap and disrupt the oppressive tendencies that the built environment imposes. This seems to me the opportunity that Issue 13 presented. Enlightened by Levine’s work, the phrasing and attitudes mentioned previously found some very promising common ground in the journal that year. Where limited time and space to consider these things never gave way to an explicit challenge from the journal in the realm of architecture, a door was left open. And in the spirit of colliding and overlapping forms, why wouldn’t the Knowlton school be fertile ground for this reintroduction to take place? Because to remind ourselves again, the school has developed out of decades of formalist thinking and a rich architectural history curriculum. To forget that altogether in efforts to embrace a digital or image driven project alone would be disappointing to say the least.

Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017.