CW: And to define the terms in such a way that
they can push back the legacy of the sixties—which is to say the legacy
of the social movements, the legacies of ordinary people willing to live
and die for various ideals to ensure that injustice doesn’t reign in the
same way it did before they began the struggle. And that battle is
actually lost for them. That’s what’s so significant about Allan Bloom’s
Closing of the American Mind, because on one hand it was clear: it
was the closing of his mind, because he was unwilling to accept the fact
that he now lived in a different world! And it’s just the facts; there’s
no way that he could ever go back to a time in which just he and his white,
highly cultivated and highly cultured peers, hiding and concealing all
that racism, sexism, and homophobia, could constitute this gentleman’s
club—that’s just long gone.
MC: Is that the loss of cultural safety
that you speak about when you refer to Matthew Arnold?
CW: That’s exactly right. Now of course
they make the link between cultural safety and that genteel context, and
safety on the street where the barbarians are raging. The barbarians for
them—who are taken into custody, and they see [it on the] six-o-clock news—tend
to be black/ brown men. And we “barbarians,” like myself, who are
inside the academy and calling intoquestion that very narrow consensus
that had served as the pillar for the conversation that was so genteel
and civil. Now that’s gone! And he knows that. And they’re upset at the
liberal administrators who preside over the institutions that allow for
pluralism to take place. I think it’s become vicious partly because they
know they’re so far removed from creating a situation that they want. I
mean, you read the New Criterion, you know what I mean: you see Hilton
Kramer—he is upset every issue! You say, “Come on Kramer, settle down brother—the
Marxists haven’t taken over, the feminists haven’t taken over, you know
that and I know that.”
MC: So there’s a lot of hyperbole out there?
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What
does this have to do with architectural criticism? I think it has much
to do with architectural criticism because there is certainly a new energy,
an excitement among the younger generation of architectural critics. Theory
is now fashionable in disciplinary studies, an absolute necessity. The
next decade promises to be a period of intellectual ferment in precincts
once rather staid and serene. Architecture, “the chained and fettered art,”
as John Summerson put it twenty-seven years ago in Heavenly Mansions, is
the last discipline in the humanities to be affected by the crisis of the
professional managerial strata in American society. This crisis is threefold:
that of political legitimacy (what is the political legitimacy of architectural
practices?), intellectual orientation (how we think about them, how we
understand the forms and styles, how does it relate to that rearrangement
of space that is so very important for inhabitants therein?), and social
identity.
Like their counterparts in critical legal studies in law schools,
feminists, poststructuralists, and Marxists in humanities, and liberation
theologians in seminaries, oppositional architectural critics are now turning
to the works of people like Antonio Gramsci and Raymond Williams, Stuart
Hall and Michel Foucault, Annette Berzhaid and Sheila Roboth, and a host
of other cultural critics trying to respond to the present crisis in the
larger society. And though we are, I suggest, in the embryonic stage of
this response, intense interrogation of architectural practices will deepen.
The political legitimacy of architecture is not a question of whether and
why buildings should be made; rather, it has to do with how authority warns
that it does not want the way in which buildings are made. Architecture,
viewed as both rigorous discipline (science), and poetic buildings (art),
is often distinguished from other arts by its direct dependence on social
patronage and its obligation to stay in tune with the recent developments
in technology. Yet architectural critics are reluctant to engage in serious
analysis of complex relations between corporate firms, estates, and architectural
practices. The major fear is that of falling into the trap of economic
determinism or economic reductionism, of reducing the grandeur of precious
architecture to the grub of pecuniary avidity, and surely the forms, techniques,
and styles of architecture are not reducible to the needs and interests
of public and private patrons. But this deadly reductionist trap should
not discourage architectural critics from pursuing more refined investigations
into how economic and political power helps shape how buildings are made
and not simply how they come to be. Needless to say, Manfredo Tafuri’s
Architecture and Utopia is a move in this direction. Yet even that text
stays a bit too far removed from the ground, where detailed historical
work should focus on a plausible objection to this line of reasoning that
architectural critics simply don’t have the historical and analytical training
to engage in such an inquiry, so it’s better to leave this work to cultural
historians.
That objection leads us to the crucial issue of the political legitimacy
of architectural critics. Why are they trained as they are? How are they
produced? What are the assumptions and presuppositions that regulate the
curriculum that is producing these elites—talented, but elites? Gone are
the days of Montgomery Schuler and George Herbert Shipale and the great
and now late Louis Mumford. This professionalization of architectural criticism,
which has its own traps of insulated jargon, codes, and etiquette. The
changing frameworks and paradigms have become dominant at particular historical
moments, and these frameworks and paradigms yield insights and blindnesses
for those who work within them. These genealogies should highlight not
simply the dynamic changes of influential critical perspectives in the
academy, but also how these perspectives shape and are shaped by the actual
building of edifices, and how these perspectives relate to other significant
cultural practices going on in other fields—for example, the impact of
painting in the early work of Le Corbusier, or the populism in Venturi’s
work and how he understands populism given a historical moment in which
he is writing, while he could end up in Las Vegas rather than Harlem. What
Aaron Betsky calls “a trivialization of the architectural profession” and
James Wines dubs its “failure of vision” must be unpacked by means of structural
and institutional analysis that goes into molding architects and their
critics. In this way the issue of the political legitimacy of architecture
is posed in neither a nostalgic, moralistic manner that translates the
will of an epoch into space, nor in a nihilistic mode that promotes
an easy (and ironically a lucrative) despair; rather, the challenge is
to try to understand architectural practices as power-laden cultural practices
that are deeply affected by larger historical forces such as markets and
the state and the academy, but also as practices that have their own effects,
their own specificity, even if they are not the kind of effects of which
one approves. ![Next page](../images/forward.gif) |