This Thing Called Theory

Teresa Stoppani, Giorgio Ponzo, George Themistokleous

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315406244
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

In the age of post-digital architecture and digital materiality, This Thing Called Theory explores current practices of architectural theory, their critical and productive role. The book is organized in sections which explore theory as an open issue in architecture, as it relates to and borrows from other disciplines, thus opening up architecture itself and showing how architecture is inextricably connected to other social and theoretical practices.

The sections move gradually from the specifics of architectural thought – its history, theory, and criticism – and their ongoing relation with philosophy, to the critical positions formulated through architecture's specific forms of expression, and onto more recent forms of architecture's engagement and self-definition. The book's thematic sessions are concluded by and interspersed with a series of shorter critical position texts, which, together, propose a new vision of the contemporary role of theory in architecture. What emerges, overall, is a critical and productive role for theory in architecture today: theory as a proposition, theory as task and as a 'risk' of architecture.

Chapter 1
This thing called theory

Teresa Stoppani, Giorgio Ponzo and George Themistokleous

In the early 2000s, after semiotics, psychoanalysis, deconstruction’s flirt with Derridean philosophy and Deleuzian redefinitions of folds and diagrams, the impact of the digital in architecture seemed to have vanquished the ‘need’ for architecture to refer to discourses from the humanities. Issues and questions of architecture seemed to look elsewhere, while the concerns of the humanities began to converge with the sciences. Today, in an age of extreme specialization and thus far inconceivable intersections of strands of knowledge, architecture needs to reinvent itself. As architecture reconsiders its status as a discipline in relation to digital technologies, material sciences, biology and environmental transformations, it continues to introject thoughts and practices developed ‘outside’ architecture. It is indeed the very openness and connectedness of architecture that can offer a line of continuity in the process of self-definition and reinvention that has always characterised it as a practice of the multiple and of the critical. As a discipline that never simply makes physical environments, architecture acts in and through all its intersections with its ‘other’ as a critical and cultural agent.

At the turn of the millennium, architectural discourse seemed to have been muted with the shift from the alphabet to the algorithm.¹ It has more recently emerged that, even for the digital, it is already not only possible but indeed necessary to construct an archaeology,² and this has to be both historical and critical. In 2013 Log’s ‘Stocktaking’ issue³ borrowed Reyner Banham’s 1960 instrumental opposition of tradition and technology⁴ to resume (or restart) a critical discourse on contemporary architectural practices, attempting to relate them to recent and not so recent disciplinary pasts. In the same year the ‘Ways to Be Critical’ proposed by Volume⁵ seemed to reduce the issue of criticality to a series of positions of militant criticism. A void seemed to have been exposed, and with it the need to address this gap with a critical discourse of architecture from within.

This book proposes that theory, beyond its mediatory function⁶ and its problematic tag of authorship and authority,⁷ and far from dead, extinct or rejected, remains crucial to the discipline. In the age of post-digital architecture and digital materiality, This Thing Called Theory explores the critical and productive role of architecture theory as a form of architectural practice, a critical voice from within that finds different articulations in the thinking and making of architecture, and opposes the instrumentalization of its use. It is only through a choral project that the multifaceted nature of architecture theory, its differences and complexities can be grasped and articulated.

This book is not an anthology of previously published materials or a systematic survey of current or recent positions,⁸ but documents the development of a fluid conversation, not without differences and contradictions, that emerged from a critical consultation (and provocation) on architecture theory in the making. The different voices gathered here propose not a thinking for architecture or about architecture, but, more essentially, by architecture.⁹

The book addresses interdisciplinarity, but it does it from within architecture not from the outside in: how architecture can generate thinking rather than absorb thinking from the outside; how, having introjected and having been transformed by and with its outside it continues to instigate its change and redefine its role, moving with(in) its outside. The notion of the outside of architecture and of theory’s position in this relation then has to be addressed. The claim here is that architecture theory operates in architecture from within. Yet it is also the hinge that both opens and mediates architecture’s relation to its outside as ‘the place one can never occupy fully or completely for it is always other, different, at a distance from where one is’.¹⁰ This is the task and the risk of architecture theory. As it positions itself outside, as ‘other’ to architecture, theory opens the limits of the discipline and produces a distance from it. This paradoxical shifting of positions enables theory to introject ideas within its discourse, thus continuously redefining architecture’s disciplinary boundaries. Able to detach itself, theory accesses multiple outsides and attains a critical distance from and for architecture.¹¹ While architectural praxis is already defined within its constitutive edges, theory as mediator plays a critical role in addressing architecture’s relation to the outside and by doing so re-configures the discipline of architecture.

Theory is an open issue in architecture. It relates to and borrows from other disciplines and practices, thus opening up architecture and showing how it is inextricably connected to other social and theoretical practices. A contingent selection, the essays in this book bear testimony to the richness of issues at stake in a discipline – Architecture – in constant transformation. Organized in sections, the book moves gradually from the specifics of architectural thought, its history, theory and criticism and their ongoing relation with philosophy, to forms of theory that are produced by architecture and for architecture, to its social and economical contexts and the critical positions formulated through architecture’s forms of expression, to more recent forms of architecture’s engagement.

The thematic sections are accompanied by short critical texts – ‘repositionings’, which conclude each of the sections and provide a critical lens to re-read its chapters together as a conversation, by questioning and relaunching their issues. Read together, these short texts propose a new vision of the contemporary role of theory in architecture. What emerges, overall, is a positive, both critical and productive, role for theory in architecture: theory as a proposition, theory as a task and a risk, and as an intrinsically inescapable condition of architecture.

There are indeed relations, cross-references and echoes between papers and across the sections of the book, which the linear sequence of the format cannot possibly mirror in their complexity. While we propose here a sequence as a possible itinerary across different contemporary ideas, the reader will discover other resonances and indirect conversations between authors and arguments. All together, the sections of the book provide a view of the many facets of ‘this thing called theory’, without imposing one perspective on it.

The purpose of the book is not to systematically document how many disciplines impact on architecture theory, but to show how architecture theory engages with the different practices of architecture.

The intricate relationship between architecture and its ‘Theories and histories’ (Part I) is revealed in the recent re-emergence of a project of architectural history as problematized by Manfredo Tafuri half a century ago. Rather than producing a historiography of architectural history, the contributions to this section look at how historical work addresses the crisis of the discipline, and at its role in relation to current practice. The understanding of peculiar conditions of crisis performed in the work of the historian is crucial to address the context of operations for architecture (De Michelis), and informs not only architectural practice, but also architectural agency in cultural programming. Tafuri’s project is even more effective when it is (re)activated in devising cultural programmes (Figueiredo) or in identifying agendas for the architectural project (Fischer), but also in proposing new forms of theoretical practice (Miller). Here the notion of an operative history compromised with the agendas of practice is reversed into an approach that sees practice itself as generative of self-critical questions and research agendas (Miller).

Far from instrumental (operative), the production of history as theory can pinpoint moments in the past that help in understanding aspects of present crises. The relation ‘Between history and philosophy’ (Part II) that often informs theory also shows that there is not one past but a multiplicity of interpretations of it, and each moment of history-making is the taking of a position (Djalali). These concerns are mirrored in different ways of addressing the history of the present, from the appropriation to architecture of Agamben’s redefinition on ‘use’ and ‘inoperativity’ (Boano), to the reactivation of feminist discourses in architecture for its renewed political practice (Frichot). The problematic and transformative nature of theoretical discourse in architecture is mapped in the evolution from critical theory to beyond any intellectualism, suggesting that a way forward can be found in architecture (Hauptmann).

Representation, far from neutral, critically engages with the production of theory, across the history of drawing long before and long after the digital, and ‘Beyond the image’ (Part III). Drawings of architecture differ from drawings of art in their relation with actuality and potentiality, between the determinacy and indeterminacy of the impermanent (Benjamin). Architectural drawing moves beyond its representational scope to produce alternative understandings of its cognitive and intellectual spaces (Luscombe), and established drawing techniques can be questioned as knowledge is converted into data and architectural representation implicates a non-human agency (Jasper).

‘Critical displays’ (Part IV) of architecture, through both architectural exhibitions and the architecture of exhibitions, explores and critiques underlying political and production processes (Kossak) where architecture, no longer only a place of representation or inhabitation, becomes a mediated site of the political. The expansion of architectural work beyond its physicality and in relation to a multidisciplinary field of production is considered in the relationship between architecture and audience (Chapman). Criticality and materiality converge in contemporary architectural exhibitions where the curatorial project exposes and frames the materiality of architecture as a form of made theory (Liefooghe; Figueiredo). Criticism is both a formative moment of architecture (Fischer) and an essential element of its making in its interdependence with theory, history and creation (Hatton).

The thought embedded in the relationship between the designer, the materialization of a project and its use can be a territory of theoretical exploration (Adler). ‘Theories of things’ (Part V) suggests an approach to architecture’s formed material that moves beyond Platonic conceptions of form, towards an ongoing process of materialization that engages the capacity of the mind to operate without the intellect (Walker). It is particularly the expendability of material technologies that reveal the ‘thing’ as a multifaceted chimera, where the thingness and the thinking of the thing converge (Wingham).

In these permutations of ideas and things, economical value is at stake. The ‘Transactions of architecture’ (Part VI) questions the capacity of the discipline to claim a role in the development of the city (Burke), increasingly dematerialised within economic paradigms that relate to subjectivity only as an economic entity. The quasi informal growth of the city (Issaias) as well as its gentrification (Runting and Frichot) seem to materialize the global neoliberal strategies that address spatial and environmental issues only when they are reduced to exchange value. It may seem that there is no way out from these global financial projects. To change reality would require to reactivate emancipatory strategies (van Toorn) and to open up the total interior that has become the dominant figure of capital development (Adams).

It is here that architecture has to find new ‘Forms of engagement’ (Part VII) with the political. A project that, at the moment, cannot be positively defined. But we can attempt to say how it should not be, what it should not do: it should not be a nostalgic and often rhetorical attitude that looks towards past political ideologies that cannot be reactivated (Ciorra); it should not indulge in a narcissistic practice that only aims at reproducing itself (Amaral), and finally it should not pretend to step back from dominant economic strategies while actually embracing their latent effects (Spencer).

There is probably one thing we can say about this future project: we will see it emerging from architecture itself, as it happened with the ‘digital turn’, when architecture anticipated the trends now largely implemented across other fields of innovation (Carpo).

Is this enough to define what ‘this thing called theory’ is? No, this is not enough. If practising theory within architecture means to continuously activate a project, relentlessly performing a (re)positioning (Stoppani), attempting a definition is not what matters. What is at stake instead is the delineation of a few facets of (this thing called) theory and the mapping of its changing.

Notes

1Mario Carpo, The Alphabet and the Algorithm (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011).

2Greg Lynn, ed., Archaeology of the Digital (Berlin and New York: Sternberg Press, 2013).

3Log 28, ‘Stocktaking’, summer 2013 (New York: Anyone Corporation, 2013).

4Reyner Banham, ‘Stocktaking 1: Tradition and Technology’, Architectural Review vol. 127 no. 756 (February 1960).

5Volume 36: Wa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 This thing called theory
• Part I: Theories and histories
• Part II: Between history and philosophy
• Part III: Beyond the image
• Part IV: Critical displays
• Part V: Theories of things
• Part VI: The transactions of architecture
• Part VII: Forms of engagement
• Index