CURRENT ISSUE

NOTE: Crit 69: Architects without Architecture was distributed in early May.

In his 1964 MoMA exhibition/book Architecture without Architects, Bernard Rudofsky cataloged centuries of vernacular buildings “produced not by specialists but by the spontaneous and continuing activity of a whole people.” Architecture, as both a profession and an institution, was being condemned as inwardlyfocused, self-interested and elitist. Similar sentiments followed, from Hans Hollein (“Everyone is an architect. Everything is architecture.”) and Peter Cook (“The prepackaged frozen lunch is more important than Palladio.”), among others.

Whereas Rudofsky was asking whether architecture needed architects (it did not), this issue asks, fundamentally, whether architects need architecture. And if architects do not need architecture, what do they need? Some would argue that they need little more than a problem to solve. In that case, disciplinary anxiety over what architecture is or can be, or to whom it ‘belongs’ becomes secondary to the training and thought processes that are specific to the discipline.

As Fred Scharmen points out, defending architecture as “belonging” to architects is problematic, given the term has been hijacked and there is no going back; Google searches result more often in computer science babble rather than anything that relates to buildings. But that is the point; architects do not need architecture to be theirs. If anything, the power of the architect is expanded as the definition is broadened, even as the training remains, by and large, the same. Hollein was half-right, half-wrong; everything may be architecture, but not everyone is an architect. Architects can look around and identify architectural problems; not everyone can.

But within architecture, the fallout from the Sixties is everywhere, having created various schisms or “camps” that quite often mirror the clich%uFFFDialectics that have plagued architecture for too long (“Form versus function, not again!,” Ole Bouman laments). The dots are not always so easy to connect, but at some level the debate is reduced to questions of priorities and ethics, which can be divisive, particularly when considered out of context. What is preferable is a general acceptance of what architects can do, not what they need to do.

The rise of information technologies over the past few decades has significantly decentralized the power traditionally held by governments, corporations, professional organizations, and cultural gatekeepers. Blogging has challenged the newspaper, cheap video cameras and YouTube have challenged Hollywood, and open-source programs have challenged the big software companies of the world. None of this is news, but the impact of these shifts in the relationship between producers and consumers is just beginning to be understood. Architecture, lying at that junction of production and consumption, can only hold out for so long.

Zachary R. Heineman
2009-2011 Editor-in-Chief