so.’ The object was utterly destabilised, becoming instead the subject of a wider discourse. Hans Ibelings feels that the 1980s constitutes a ‘golden age’ of architectural criticism. This happens to be when the ‘68 generation flooded the universities, assuming positions of authority, from tenure professorships to Bernard Tschumi becoming the dean of the architecture school at Columbia in 1988. Every dog has its day, and while the 1990s were accompanied by a sinking dread as in project review after review students were asked ‘Yes, but what does it mean ?’, by the 2000s architecture fell into a re-discovery of structure and building systems – the David Leatherbarrow world of material architectural culture.
While I was reading Dorrian, I was also reading Ali Smith’s Artful , four essays given as lectures for the Weidenfeld Visiting Professorship in European Comparative Literature at St Anne’s College, Oxford in 2012. One essay, ‘On Edge’ asks, ’Do words on the page hold us on a surface, above depths and shallows like a layer of ice?’ at which I immediately think of Dorrian’s feet in figure 6.2 in ‘The Aerial Image: Vertigo, Transparency and Miniaturisation’, a satellite image of London that is the surface of the lowest level of City Hall. One can view it from above, one can stand on it. Ultimately one is looking at, or standing on, an epilimnion which itself carries an image positioned thousands of feet below the putative eye, the camera lens. Where is the surface of this image: the pigment on the floor? the ground upon which London sits? And where, in this vertiginous in-between, are we? Ali Smith quotes Virginia Woolf on the cinematic image and how ‘the exchange between eye and brain when watching the cinema forms a separating surface between us and participation.’ What we see has become ‘real with a different reality from that which we perceive in daily life. We see life as it is when we have no part in it.’
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It is a fool’s errand to define what architectural criticism is today. It is clearly more than description although it is not at all clear who is equipped to judge the success or failure of a building or a landscape, or whether exhibit A is better or worse than exhibit B. The last fifty years have invalidated such judgements as the unhelpful creation of hierarchies of value and reward systems. 4 However, we are entering a new global era of hardened battle lines, social inequity and extreme ideologies that do judge right and wrong, good and bad – why would the discussion of architecture be exempt? Against this prospective rigidity, I find Mark Dorrian’s discussions of a wide range of often unpalatable architectural and urban installations so rewarding. Each case study is embedded in a description of a world exposed to enormous historical and ethical and political forces. His subjects , from Diller & Scofidio’s Blur to the images of ‘weapons of mass-destruction’ sites that led to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, are canaries reacting to the air in the mineshaft.
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This detachment has become so naturalised that we can’t even see it, which certainly impairs our critical faculties. Earlier, last fall, I re-read the 1969 Meaning in Architecture , edited by Charles Jencks and George Baird, a project that grew out of their respective dissertations at the Bartlett in the mid-1960s. It consists of 15 essays, from Reyner Banham’s ‘A Home is not a House’ to Kenneth Frampton’s ‘Labour, Work & Architecture’, to Martin Pawley’s ‘The Time House, or argument for an existential dwelling –1. design for human ambiguity’. All the essays are annotated with marginalia: questions and comments by the other contributors. This was the particular and popular book that translated Joseph Rykwert’s critical studies on semiology to a whole generation of young architects looking to escape the rigours of modernity. As criticism, it was an escape from New Criticism, whereby the object, whether it be a poem or a building, is a discrete, self-referential entity, answerable only to itself. Modern architecture sought coherence within itself, rather than with the world; purity of form was self-defining, one of the conditions of modernity. Ambiguity, double readings, metaphor, subjectivity and intentionality had little place in serious critique until, converging with Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture of 1961, Meaning in Architecture thrashed its way through a number of architectural scholars, historians and thinkers, arguing point by point that there was a wider, more holistic, more layered way to discuss architecture in the world, rather than in itself. 3 The contributors to this particular book, plus their schools, their students, their critical essays in the journals, undercut any codifiable critical position for the making of architecture. When, in 1961, Robert Rauschenberg declared in a telegram ‘This is a portrait of Iris Clert, if I say so’ he obviated the position of the critic who, as an observer, felt able to pronounce on a piece of art. It was at this point that artist became critic; that architects and their projects became critics and critiques. Ron Herron’s 1964 Walking City was an architectural proposal, a technological forecast and a critique of the authority of CIAM and its meta-theoretical urban solutions. Archigram effectively said ‘This is architecture, if I say
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Even books of collected essays are not discrete objects any more; Writing on the Image contains an afterword, ‘Postscript as Pretext’ by Ella Chmielewska on Dorrian’s work with Metis and a previous book, Urban Cartographies . A serious apologia, it gives context to Dorrian’s essays by showing them to be a continuation of his work where images and text interconnect and interact to establish an ambiguous liminal space: the kind of spaces examined in his essays. She invites the texts ‘to demonstrate , to make a place for writing : writing as a form of inquiry, the mode of writing with images that informs the thinking of architecture’ [her italics]. It is a given in Dorrian’s work that the terrain is unstable, shifting, netted with opposing forces, and in this place that never reveals itself clearly, is where the conditions for writing lie. f
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1 Mark Dorrian. Writing on the Image. Architecture, the City and the Politics of Representation. London, New York: I B Tauris, 2015 2 Ali Smith. Artful . London: Hamish Hamilton, 2013. p121 and p129 3 In 1941 John Crowe Ransom proposed a scientific approach to criticism based on empirical evidence found within the text. New Criticism’s emphasis on close reading held sway from the 1940s to the 1970s when it was assailed by the emergence of feminism, post-structuralism, New History, and in architecture, post-modernism. More or less. 4 Nonetheless prizes, magazine covers and hero-formation persist, occupying a parallel universe to the discussion of architecture as a social and cultural act.
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