Culture of Criticism: A Morning Thought

Up to this point, before the whole notion of its criticism was passed on to another Italian mastermind Andrea Palladio who would establish a new landscape for formal criticism using his own building as an object of investigation. Architecture could not really find its way to escape from being a dependent discipline. Palladio put his architecture in cultural and humanistic contexts defining the new dimension to Classical architecture by ways of criticism. Palladio’s architecture was not groundbreaking in terms of form, it was till “Classical� so to speak, but he was able to break free from the overly simplistic interpretation of architecture as a branch of art, which has been articulated critically by a scholar Rudolf Wittkower in 1949 in Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, probably the first criticism in architecture of our time. The lineage of the history of criticism would not be complete if I do not mention John Ruskin, an art and social critic who had lived a long life to advocate the value of the kind of artistic practice he believed. Amidst the rising early modernism movement in Europe, Ruskin’s rejection of conventionalism and standardization came from the critical methods based on his praise for the form of art and architecture created by craftsmanship, which he saw as a true essence of the nature, i.e. Ruskin was fond of Medieval Gothic architecture for its organic origin and its form which he believed come out of the social and physical environment for which the architecture was created. From this study, he set up criteria to justify architecture. Besides, We might remember that in the early 1900s there was the first textbook on the history of architecture by Sir Banister Fletcher, A History of Architecture. Despite the decisive renderings and drawings of styles and structures, and the unsurpassed accurate categorization of architecture, Fletcher’s book was a continuity of Vitruvius’ “how to build� treaty, until Wittkower came up with a critical view of architecture.

From Wittkower to Colin Rowe, to Peter Eisenman and John Hejduk, more and more critical studies of architecture have been done raising, again, the questions: what is architecture? This is a very critical point, especially for Sophie. First, in order to understand the essence of something, the best method our civilization has created is to look deeply beyond its form and to read it with objectivity. This can only be done when the “something� we want to understand is purely scientific; however, another question comes about: So, can architecture be thought of as scientific? The answer is a qualified no – architecture is a practice of both art and science based on the larger context of culture and society, on the ground on which the architecture is built. Architecture cannot be an art either because the context of public-ness that embraces the institution of a building concerns the acceptance and understanding of the society and culture. Nevertheless, there were only thoughts about architecture because no one had found the methodology. Architects such as Louis Kahn relied his teaching of architecture on, somehow, the sensory experience of the building derived the faithful comprehension of architecture as he said poetically: “I always ask what the building wants to be.� This, of course, can be seen as a process of criticism. Without knowing the context, requirement, and aesthetic program of the building, there was no way Kahn could ask for a solution. He took out his subjectivity and allowed “reasons and logics� to ask for the solution – the presence of architecture. Although Kahn did not use the term criticism, it was obvious that of all the factors he took into consideration, he utilized criticism as a principal tool to compose his architecture.

Perhaps it was the politics, or perhaps it was something about the post-war consumer society that not only scholars but also people who were interested in architecture continued to search for the answer. A series of journals, magazines, projects, and medias had been created to subscribe to the search for architectural criticism. Colin Rowe, a student of Wittkower, took off from what his teacher had started to understand the “Mathematics of [Palladio] the Ideal Villas,� extracting the DNA of the structure of Neo-Classical architecture in comparison with modern masterpieces such as Le Courbusier’s Villa Savoye by virtue of criticism. Concurrently, opening the new era of criticism by publishing the English translation of Italian critic Manfredo Tafuri’s “L’Architecture dans le Boudoir: The Language of Criticism and the Criticism of Language,� the Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS) lead by Peter Eisenman published a series of criticism in an architectural journal “Oppositions.� A series of critical writing and artistic projects such as Bernard Tschumi’s “Manhattan Transcript,� Daniel Libskind’s “Chamber Works,� and Rem Koolhaas’ “Delirious New York� stirred up the atmosphere of criticism, yet compelling enough to set a new standard of the current critical paradigm.

Maybe a few decades before that, when there was no foundation on which the judgment of architectural quality should be based, the appealing theory derived from thinkers in Europe, namely, the Phenomenology did gain precedence. Phenomenology treats architecture as an object, whose “essence� is to be extracted from a reflective study of an experience from the first-person perspective. That is, the viewer must treat architecture as phenomena using his/her intuitive experience to justify its essential quality. To a degree, Phenomenology allowed us to see the significance of architecture; however, as far as the subjectivity of individual was concerned, the fundamental structure of the first-person approach could also be inaccurate given that architecture is not solely perceived by phenomenological observation, but it has an intrinsic “scientific� quality to it, which Phenomenology could not validate. Even if it could, it would be without a degree of autonomy. Moreover, given that phenomenon is not a static fact or situation, but a dynamic entity observed through perception, there are huge possibilities for the viewer to misunderstand the phenomenon by means of the so-called “phenomenological illusion.� The perception of Phenomenology can also be very individual and personal. Therefore, for architecture, Phenomenology is not a falsifiable method. In other words, one could say, “I like this building because the effect of light that comes true the space between overhangs,� but who would take “personal perception� to the point of development. Although what Louis Kahn said about architecture might sound metaphysical, it was not his attempt to be argumentative whether he is phenomenological or not, but that his architecture is the scientific-based understanding of the effect of his buildings.

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Non is an academic based in Thailand and educated in the U.S. in History and Urban Studies. His core research topic is on the culture of criticism.