5 minute read
engaging with difficulty
Building Critique
stephanie white
The week before she died, in September 2022, Hilary Mantel wrote ‘what makes craft into art is the margin left for contingency, the space made for ambiguity’.1
Dennis Rovere2 sent me a book last spring: Building Critique. Architecture and its discontents3, which asks ‘Can architecture be critical despite its interdependent relationship with power and profit?’ and then answers with eleven essays that range from theory to activism. The editors’ introduction, ‘A Critique of Practice or a Practice of Critique’ lays out the issues: as critique is at the centre of progressive thought, it was long thought that deconstruction of certain practices revealed structural weaknesses that were either naturalised ideology, unsustainable hierarchy or myth. Critical architecture of the 1970s and 1980s meant to translate largely academic critical theory into design work: projects themselves illustrated disjunctions between social reality and capitalism with which the practice of architecture is indubitably intertwined. Commercial and institutional architecture was untouched by this critique which became increasingly de-politicised and ineffective. Post-criticality engages a different set of social parameters, casting architecture as a way to propose alternatives to socially weak critical architecture which was difficult to apply to practice.
The essays in Building Critique are characterised by what the editors call ‘gradual openings’ to other lines of influence, mainly sociology and geography, poststructuralism, feminism, postcolonial theory and media studies. The very fact that we are in an era of global migration means that the direction of thought is no longer solely from the global north to the south, or from the centre to the periphery, but is multi-directional: the global south is arriving in the north with different, no less sophisticated, spatial and social understandings.
The basic referents are neither new, nor surprising. Manfredo Tafuri’s Architecture and Utopia: Design in Capitalist Development came out in 1978. Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space in 1974, and The Critique of Everyday Life in 1988. Bourdieu’s conception of habitus was articulated in lectures at the Collège de France in 1982-3. Out of these seminal texts comes the sense that a critical spatial practice is a mode of action, an engagement with hegemonic structures, not a withdrawal from them.4
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1 cited by Gaby Wood in The Guardian, 25 Sep 2022
2 On Site review 40 contributor, and author of The Xingyi Quan of the Chinese Army, Penguin Random House, 2008
3 Gabu Heindl, Michael Klein, Christina Linortner, editors. Building Critique. Architecture and its discontents. Leipzig: Spector Books, 2019
4 Chantal Mouffe, ‘Critique as Counter-Hegemonic Intervention’. EIPC European Insititue for Progressive Cultural Policies, 2008 http://eipcp.net/transversal/0808/mouffe/en
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muf 5
Lisa Fior’s essay in this book, ‘Don’t make it sound heroic; that’s why we have put the keynote last’ states at the very beginning:
Since muf started working together in the mid-1990s, we have been trying out ways to expand a project brief in order that it reflects more than the source of funding and the limited indicators of success. This way of working includes the acceptance of compromised briefs and then expanding their scope through a willfully literal interpretation. Often, this also means working for free and then making it sound better by calling it ‘unsolicited research’.
And a bit later:
We wedge the door open for other people and other agendas so that they can enter and complete the brief in ways that are sometimes obvious and sometimes less so. We describe this as ‘unsolicited research’, the extra work necessary to make a project both meaningful and bearable.
Clearly this is a long and fairly subversive process, to leave hidden directives and clues to future designers of public spaces, for that is muf’s terrain – the public spaces of London, and for the public filling such spaces. The process starts before design, continues during construction and is active after the project is signed off, supposedly complete. Fior calls it wedging open a door by degrees. She cites Ruskin Square beside the East Croydon train station, meant to fit into a masterplan by Foster+Partners, masters at ensuring the clarity of their projects. Wilfully literal, quotes from Ruskin justify design moves: ‘A healthy manner of play is necessary for a healthy manner of work’ framed the site as a garden with sports facilities: not the British obsession with football, but for Afghan refugees fostered in the community who play cricket. The garden, a temporary re-wilding of a derelict site, introduced ground rules – landscapes can host young people, that the formal next to the wild is a design language, and that Ruskin’s epigrams are references for future design decisions by the developer and other designers. Temporary moves, over time, come to be seen as embedded and logical. A Ruskinian ‘festival of toil’, part of a requisite art strategy for planning permission, was developed by muf’s Katherine Clarke and a local organisation that works with young men, who ultimately made their own work clothes, a clay oven, cast aluminum tools and built furniture from site hoardings. This material making and un-making of a site is a strategy that seeds its future.
STEPHANIE WHITE is the editor of On Site review.
