The Loeb Fellowship and PLOT magazine present a symposium at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where they will question and confront the ways architectural criticism is practised and understood today.
What Criticism? takes place Friday, February 14th 9:30AM - 6:00 PM, in a series of four panel discussions covering themes of contexts, forms, interpretations and approaches of criticism.
Participants include Iker Gil, Jimenez Lai, Uriel Fogué, Andres Lepik, Michael Kubo, Inga Saffron, Troy Payne, Urtzi Grau, Ciro Najle, Meredith Tenhoor, Anthony Acciavati, and Michael Abrahamson.
On Wednesday, February 12th Cynthia Davidson, Founding Editor of Log journal, delivers an opening lecture at 6:30 titled ‘The Care and Feeding of Criticism’.
For more information please visit whatcriticism.com
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The title of this series intends to confront the idea of just one way of practicing or understanding criticism nowadays, as well as to shamelessly suggest a refuting of its supposed pure existence. As Foucault pointed out already in 1978, critique is by nature “condemned to dispersion, dependency and pure heteronomy,” and its contemporary forms emphasize those conditions in many aspects that urge for conscious reflections and a renewed vocabulary.
As we know, critique was originally born in the century of systematization, legitimatization and organization of facts of the modern times. It offered a mode of thought to relate rationally to its present, making philosophy and the critical attitude the abstract construct of the also modern being. This attitude was meant to work as the alert, the B-side of a political and social order, its denunciative Other that exposed a determined kind of relationship to what exists.
We might say that at this point of history, that reductive and dialectic method has been proven to have failed and become obsolete. The extreme changes of communication that took place during the last decades and the ones we cannot yet predict, the shift from continuity to iteration, our devices, and the entire set of things and skills that define our existence, all necessarily challenge us with questions about mostly every preset concept. At the same time, as we know, these new platforms amplified audiences and multiplied voices, putting criticism’s roles and actions into discussion again, live and globally.
Dispersion and dissolution are not at all equivalent to disappearance or the cease of existence, but on the contrary; they imply a spilling, dissemination, and distribution.
This conceptual sprawl, this revolution from a contained discourse towards a collective formation, poses new questions such as: How to embrace this new properties and opportunities without losing significance? Do we need to achieve some constitutions to give sense to this intellectual practice? What are its new possible forms? Where does the difference between simple dissemination and the active distribution and commitment to the transformation of our environment rely? Are there that many forms of criticism? Can we think critically about architecture and cities without the aim for sense and virtue? Does criticism need to be useful?
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