By seeing beyond the glittering novelty of form, it is criticism's role to assess and promote the positive effects architecture can bring to society and the wider world

The task of articulating concepts of form, space and sociability in their etiology and contexts via another medium has always been criticism − and architecture’s − challenge. The sequence of drawing before building and writing about it afterwards limns a discursive territory inhabited by a double displacement in which the word is always needed to shape the way in which we think about the built environment: seeing after sight.

Criticism, like architecture, stands on the shoulders of something called theory. We all embrace this − no theory, no revolution, of course. But there are so many constructs available and, as critics and practitioners, we sort through them on the basis of both affinity and practicality. Criticism is both enlightened and vexed by the need for conceptual alliances and if I demur at explicitly incorporating too much of the arcana of psychoanalysis or up-to-the-minute cybernetic biologism in my own work, it’s not for lack of desire for conceptual underpinnings or any special disdain for expository shopping. But I am interested in augmenting architectural criticism to exceed a filtered humanities/lit-crit/kunstwissenshaft/analogically based corpus of dogma and tactics and in the search for additional informants from the side of my concerns − as both designer and writer − to weigh in judgement. This is not to reject other approaches: criticism needs many modes. But a robust critical field requires self-criticism and the critique of critique is part of the job

I see criticism − and there is some utility in separating it from theory − as a service profession. Not that I think of myself as an architectural barista brewing up steaming cups of truth, but that my perspective is increasingly both quantum and moral and that here criticism truly must be practical. The main issues confronting the planet are distributive − the apportionment of resources and equity − and architecture fascinates not just for its capacity to map, but to serve. It isn’t that its power to charm − to move − is negligible, uninteresting, even less than central, but criticism must situate the nature of its own urgency. Many registers − from the urban to the micro-tectonic − demand many criticisms and the search for a unified field, even as a metaphor, seems unproductive, particularly given the rapid shifts of taste among both theoretically minded architects and those with other operational reflexes. There are styles of criticism apt for the design studio, the newspapers, the net, the glossies. But it’s trying to me that so many practitioners have embraced the theoretical as the royal road to a Formalism that is then advertised as expressive insubordination (Modernism is dead, long live Modernism) only to discover − or more often to fail to − that this is precisely the kind of architecture that the voracious global culture machine finds most tasty. While I can be as intoxicated with the power of a torqued ellipse or a morphing facade as the next aesthete, architecture as ‘pure’ form − that is form that is not answerable to any criterion beyond sensory pleasure − cuts relatively little ice. The era of a thousand flowers blossoming hasn’t exactly outlived its usefulness, but when I gaze upon the ludicrous, hyper-energetic, size-queen, skylines of Qatar or Pudong or 57th Street, I reach for the Pepto-Bismol. What victory is won? What are we really to make of those twisted dicks and riven shards and perforated signifiers of nothing in particular beyond the significance of signification?...Continue Reading

> via The Architectural Review