Attention — Audio Journal for Architecture

In this episode, titled “Pluralism is Not Enough,” Joseph Bedford offers some provisional thoughts interpreting the situation of this generation of academic architects in the United States. He argues that, in contrast to previous generations concerned with the digital and pragmatism, this generation has reasserted architecture’s cultural, critical and disciplinary autonomy. Yet he also argues that this generation needs to reassert architecture’s relationship to a broad ideological field, beyond merely the single ideology of pluralism alone, in order to ensure that architecture as a cultural enterprise remains truly political and to enable the discipline to continue to advance.

In this episode, Tim Cox reflects on this issue of attention, and reads the aesthetic and ideological output of the interviewees as in conversation with the discipline of architecture’s waning cultural authority. He argues that this generation’s adoption of pluralistic language is a response to contemporary labor conditions in the neoliberal university, and questions what power architects and academics can legitimately exert over our built environment.

In this episode we hear from this generation on their experience with building practice in contemporary America. The cohort is focused on moving away from speculative or gallery work and towards substantial built projects, but they describe the challenges in getting a small, academic building practice off the ground. They highlight the ways that academic bona fides no longer translate to meaningful commissions. Whereas prior generations were rewarded for their disciplinary mastery, they find themselves lacking professional expertise, competing against more resourced corporate firms, and feeling that their perspective as designers is no longer valuable to clients.

In this episode we address the affordances and constraints of architectural academia. This generation highlights the important freedom academia provides to work through ideas that are not directly applicable to architecture as a service industry, but they also acknowledge the ways that labor structures like the tenure track process, or fellowships, push designers towards exhibitions, installations, competitions, and speculative work instead of a building practice. The group also comments on how the broader context of higher education in America, it’s neoliberalization and ballooning tuition costs, impacts architectural academia as a space of learning and a space of architectural production.

In this episode, we heard this generation struggle with their ambivalence around the discipline of architecture, which they saw as essential for maintaining a shared conversation, but also as exclusionary, politically suspect, and frequently irrelevant to the broader world. There was consensus around a need to expand the discipline, returning to this generation’s political and ideological commitments to liberal pluralism. Excitement around the changing discipline, especially in pedagogical contexts, went hand in hand with anxiety around maintaining architectural expertise, whatever that may be.

In this episode, our discussion of contemporary architectural theory is framed by the question of why there is no contemporary discipline-defining book of theory like Delirious New York, Complexity and Contradiction, or Animate Form. This generation explains the myriad reasons why this is the case, from their professional priorities, critiques of singular authors, the rise of the internet, the professionalization of writing about architecture, and their simple lack of interest. The group also discusses the theorization that does exist today, and their own approach to writing.

In this episode, we hear about the lack of ideological debate and disagreement within contemporary academic architectural culture. This generation airs their critiques of the performative, chauvinistic, binary debates of the past and argue instead for a pluralistic approach to ideology, where the approaches of varying practitioners can coexist without producing conflict. The merits of this approach remain an open question. This group emphasized how pluralism foregrounds diversity and inclusion, while others saw the ideological attitude as problematically apolitical, aligned with the incentives of social media, unable to push design forward, or complicit with the status quo of the market.

In this episode, we address the political context of the interviews: the after effects of 2020’s COVID-19 pandemic and George Floyd uprisings. This moment produced a politicizing discourse within architecture which asked academics to address politics through pedagogy, aesthetics, and labor practices. Despite a shared feeling that the political concerns of the moment were critical, there was anxiety and ambiguity around how architecture could represent, or be instrumental for, progressive politics.

In this episode, we hear about the difficulty of constructing coherent aesthetic camps in this generation, exemplified by responses to Michael Meredith’s “Indifference, Again” (2017). Instead, we list a range of aesthetic keywords that this generation identified as representing areas of interest: formlessness, informality, discrete parts, messiness, crudeness, simple construction, and familiar forms. The group discusses the importance of tooling one’s aesthetics to an audience outside of architectural academia, and question what authorship looks like today

In this episode we hear from this generation on their relationship to the digital. They discuss broad, societal experiences like watching the internet and social media emerge, and they grapple with the broken promises of connection and progress that these technologies once represented. Within architectural culture, they unpack their relationship to digital tools for design and fabrication, and outline why they have rejected parametricism for a less instrumental and more critical adoption of technology— a position described as post-digital.