On the Uses of History, Theory, and Criticism for Architecture

It has been nearly two decades since Sarah Whiting, Bob Somol, Michael Speaks and Stan Allen, declared that architectural design practice should break from what they described as a design culture bogged down with theory, and restrained by what they called the “critical project.” This paper returns to the twin problematic of post theory and post critique. Yet it approaches the topic from a more institutional perspective, developing a new diagnosis based on the fate of institutional arrangements within schools of architecture involving the creation of “history, theory, and criticism” in the mid-1960s and its relation to design practice. It returns to papers delivered by Peter Collins, Bruno Zevi, Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, and Stephen Jacobs at the 1964, ACSA-AIA Cranbrook Teachers Seminar in order to revisit a number of arguments about why schools of architecture should develop a particular relationship to history within their own institutional context, different from art history and uniquely tied to theory and criticism; and how this development would enable studio design practices to be critical. Despite this institutional settlement, which gave birth to a new form of history inside schools of architecture that promised to transform practice into a new critical mode, larger processes of academic growth during the 1980s and 1990s have led to a severance of this relationship and a return to something close to what Collins, Zevi, Moholy-Nagy and Jacobs criticized when they challenged architectural education’s derivation of its history from the independent field of art history, which they deemed too disengaged from creative practice. The paper argues that our posttheoretical and post-critical situation within the culture of architectural design has more to do with the changing institutional configuration within education: namely the professionalization and thus polarization of history and design, and the erasure of the mediating field of theory and criticism.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AM.110.47

Volume Editors
Robert Gonzalez, Milton Curry & Monica Ponce de Leon

ISBN
978-1-944214-40-1