discussions on networked publics

discussions on networked publicspanel 1. culturenetlab

Michael KuboMichael MeredithWill PrinceEnrique Ramirez

David ReinfurtKazys VarnelisMimi Zeiger

Throughout the last century, the practice of architecture has been closely related to the practice of publishing by architects. Just as architectures produce discourse in and of themselves, so the discourse of the book has often been used by architects to frame a related space in which (their) projects can be produced, received, and understood. Many of the most prominent architects of the past century have also been prolific publishers, whether as authors of book formats – including monographs, manifestoes, histories, pamphlets, transcripts, and catalogues – as editors of magazines and journals, or as the instigators of publishing houses or other channels of dissemination. Some of these architects have regarded the design process itself as a form of editing or curation, in certain cases assisted by prior backgrounds in journalism, scriptwriting, filmmaking, or other editorial practices that have informed their later practice within the architectural field. Their disciplinary agendas have also been influenced by operative critics – trained as historians or in related fields – who have sought to produce forms of scholarship that would have direct impacts on practice.

Architects and critics alike have seen books as strategic tools in the arsenal of the discipline, capable of producing effects independent of the constraints of traditional forms of architectural production. The specific combination of publishing and building has been exploited as a critical double form of architectural practice, as strands of work that are assumed to support each other, but which in reality often reveal a provocative (and in some cases deliberate) misalignment. Rather than simply seeing books as ‘guides’ for practice – still ultimately directed toward the production of buildings, with books either instructing, analyzing, or commenting – the most prominent architects and critics have understood well the strategic differences between publishing and building, exploiting both as parallel but distinct discursive modes of operation. In this history, publishing reveals itself as an alternative form of practice, parallel to and frequently more agile than other forms of production more typically understood as architectural.1

The Publishing Practices project traces the history and influence of architectural publishing as an operative device, through an examination of books produced by architects and critics in the past century.2 Case studies present the origins, composition, and after-products of ten influential architecture books, each one representative of a particular era of architectural production and a

specific conception of the role and performance of the book on the part of its producers. Beyond providing a particular narrative of the story of twentieth-century architecture through its publications, these case studies include reinventions and critiques of the privileged genres of the architecture book: the manifesto, the monograph, and the history.3 The manifesto is typically seen as being closest to the traditional idea of the guide. It is by definition polemical, seeming to outline a theory to be projected onto practice, either to legitimize or to inform particular forms of architectural production. Its lineage begins with the prototypical example of the manifesto in twentieth-century architecture, Le Corbusier’s Vers une Architecture (1923), and includes a series of conscious inversions and revisions to the type throughout the last century, from the ‘gentle’ manifesto – Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966) – to the ‘retroactive’ manifesto – Rem Koolhaas’s Delirious New York (1978).4 A related genre, also represented here, could be called the ‘city as manifesto’. This form emerged in the 1970s, halfway between the scholarly history and the traditional form of the theoretical treatise; it uses the description of a specific urban condition – its identification and presentation to architects, an account of its performances, or the deliberate retelling of its history – to construct a manifesto for rethinking architectural and urban practice in the present. Its foundational examples are Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971), Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour’s Learning From Las Vegas5 (1972), and – again – Delirious New York, which is thus both one of the first member of a new type and an explicit reformatting of an existing (Corbusian) precedent.6

As we have seen, for these architects the manifesto has not been simply reducible to a guide. Though it is deliberately polemical as part of its strategic mode of operation, it is not subordinate to or exclusively directed toward practice. Rather, the manifesto tries to create a context for other forms of architectural production to be received and understood – just as buildings (often by the same authors) create a discursive context in which writing and publishing practices, like the manifesto, can be received in turn. Neither is merely a demonstration of, or guide for, the other.

The second privileged form of the twentieth-century architecture book is the monograph. It attempts to consolidate a body of work into a set of agendas constituted through practice, in contrast

as canonical is closely related to the very idea of architecture as a discipline. The fact of having and naming an identifiable canon – of being able to label works as ‘canonical’ – is central to the idea of architecture as a distinct discipline, well defined unto itself (and not, for example, simply a subset of other practices). That is, if architecture is held to be a discipline, it must have a canon. In this formulation, the discipline doesn’t simply constitute its canon; we could say equally that the canon constitutes the discipline. The furthest consequence of this argument would be the idea that, as an architect, it is not simply assumed that one is aware of these books; according to its exclusionary role, if one does not know the canon, one is not an architect. In this sense, canonical books are not merely reducible to being guides (though of course they attempt to act as such): they are part and parcel of the constitution of the discipline itself.

While this may sound like an extreme or outmoded definition, far from being simply an arbitrary designation assigned to works after the fact, the very idea of canonicity has conditioned the production of architecture books for at least the last century. Whether the idea of a discipline has any validity, and whatever other forms of media have been produced and circulated in and around architectural practice, ephemeral or permanent, the agility and durability of the book has made it a privileged format for architects attempting to construct this canonicity – of both their books and themselves. Far from being an outmoded idea, the question reappears today when we see even the newest and supposedly most agile forms of media, such as blogs and websites, still aspiring to their own ‘canonicity’ – to engage with the canonical modes of architectural discourse or become ‘canonical’ themselves – by adopting the privileged form of the book.9

Rather than talking about the discipline – with all the boundaries and exclusions this implies – what if we were to talk about architecture as a ‘field’, and about publishing as one among its modes of practice, different from but no less important in its operation than the production of buildings?10

to the manifesto, which constructs its agendas by consolidating a series of theoretical or polemical statements. The monograph as a form is again initially dominated by the example of Le Corbusier, in the exhaustive form of his Œvre Complete, published in eight volumes from 1929 to 1965. The subsequent revisions to the genre have been innumerable. There is the inclusion of projects at the end of the manifesto to demonstrate that through theory ‘an architectural discovery has taken place’7 (in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, and, less well-remembered, in the first edition of Learning From Las Vegas; the method is also reprised in fictional, delirious form in Delirious New York). There is Peter Eisenman’s Houses of Cards (1987), which mixes the processes of writing, drawing, and building (along with building as drawing, drawing as writing, writing as building…) into a version of the monograph as a conceptual construct or form of architecture in itself. And there is the explosive S,M,L,XL (1995), by Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, whose promiscuous fusion of monograph and manifesto triggers a new type that is at once both a new genre of book and a massive new format.8

The last genre of book included here is the polemical or operative history. Polemical histories attempt to reconstruct the past – to lay out the ‘canon’ of architects and projects anew – to provide a context in which particular ways of working in the present can be received and justified. Examples range from the universalizing ambition of Sigfried Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture (1941), which purported to provide (and was largely taken as) the official history of the modern movement in architecture, to the more intimate (and certainly more humble) approach of the personal scrapbook of sources, as in Alison and Peter Smithson’s The Heroic Period of Modern Architecture (1965).

If we are going to talk about guides, then do we need to talk about these books as being ‘canonical’? How does one define the term? According to the conventional argument (typically made by those invested in the canon as something that needs to be ‘defended’), the identification of certain works

Publishing Practicestimeline graphic: over,under (www.overcommaunder.com ) / Chris Grimleybook survey graphic: over,under / Chris Grimley, Kyle Jonasen

Michael Kubo

In this field, both publishing and building practices would be seen as equally necessary in creating the possibility for discursive modes of operation in architecture.11 A ‘canonical’ book (if we still allow ourselves to use the word) would then be one in which this discursive operation is most clearly revealed in the book’s totality as a graphic object – a careful and deliberate construction of format, layout, images, and words – in relation to other discursive modes of practice. A list of canonical works defined this way might then correspond more closely to those works that have been the most instrumental in their operation: works which, if a slice were taken through the field in a particular era – its major sites of discourse, production, education, and dissemination – might be expected to be found consistently in those contexts, as forms of common knowledge or shared currency within the field at a specific moment. This definition of canonical is therefore less an assignment of quality or value than it is a function of the work’s instrumentality as a practice.

To get at this question of influence, it is also necessary to study the reception and influence of architecture books within the field, often very different from their agendas and intended performance. Along with the study of publishing as an operative practice (and its strategic role for its practitioners), the second half of Publishing Practices involved a survey of over 150 practitioners, educators, and students to gauge the impact of publications on those trained in architecture, from the time of their publication up to the present. The survey responses and the data graphics that were produced from them led to questions about the instrumentality and operation of books in architecture. On the one hand, the books that were listed most frequently by survey participants – S,M,L,XL, Delirious New York, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, Learning From Las Vegas, and Vers une Architecture (five out of the ten case studies already chosen) – affirmed the influence of those works. On the other, their listing was consistent across the different ages, places, and periods of education and current practices of the respondents, from those trained in the 1970s until the present; surprisingly, there were no peaks of influence for these books around the moment of their publication or for those trained in particular eras. Indeed, their consistent appearance in the lists of even the most recent students reveals the continuing influence of these publications up to the present, despite radical changes in the production and dissemination of both architecture and books and the emergence of other, competing forms of media in the digital era.

As the last member of this chronology, the survey raised the particular question of whether S,M,L,XL may stand as the final, definitive example of the canonical book. With its dramatic appearance at a moment of confluence between new modes of production, the rising cultural status of the architect, the first impacts of globalization on architectural and publishing practices, and the increasing influence of theory – but before the consolidation of history/theory and practice as increasingly separate disciplines catering to different audiences, the over-proliferation of architectural publishing, and the rise of digital media that would alter the traditional role of the book after the 1990s – its success may simply be impossible to replicate, in part the product of a historically unrepeatable set of circumstances. No publication emerged from the survey as a candidate for the ‘next’ canonical book; it remains to be seen whether there will be one again, or whether the idea of the canonical and the role of publishing among other practices have undergone a definitive change in the meantime.

[1] There has been a resurgence of interest in publishing practices in

architecture, particularly for magazines and journals and more recently

for the book. A first example of this interest was Clip/Stamp/Fold: The

Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X–197X, the collaborative

research of Beatriz Colomina and her Ph.D. students at Princeton, which

was initially exhibited at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York

in November 2006. A recent example is Mimi Zeiger’s exhibition A Few

Zines: Dispatches from the Edge of Architectural Production, initially held

at Studio X in New York in January 2009. In the past three years, seminars

on publishing practice have been taught at schools of architecture by,

among others, Jeannie Kim at Columbia, Ana Miljacki at MIT, Michael Kubo

in Buffalo, Lars Müller at Harvard, Luke Bulman at Yale, and Elite Kedan

at Florida International University. The recent formation of the Master of

Science in Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices (CCCP) at Columbia

under Felicity Scott confirms this new interest to introduce publishing

practices and their histories more fully into the pedagogy of architecture.

[2] Publishing Practices began as research directed towards a seminar on

architecture and publishing I taught at the University at Buffalo in January

2009, during my time as the Reyner Banham Fellow there. The work was

then further developed for an exhibition of the same name at pinkcomma

gallery in Boston, run by Chris Grimley and Mark Pasnik, in October 2009.

My interest in architects’ modes of operation through publishing is obviously

related to my own biography, as someone trained as an architect, but

whose professional work has been primarily in the production of books: first

as an editor at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam and

then as an editor and publisher for Actar Editorial, initially in Barcelona and

later as the director of their editorial office in New York. For their support

and comments on the first stage of the work in Buffalo, I thank Mehrdad

Hadighi, James Lowder, Mark Shepard, Hadas Steiner, and Brian Tabolt.

I thank Chris Grimley for a collaboration and graphic intelligence that have

been crucial to the more developed form of the research since then.

MOST POPULAR BOOKS

S,M,L,XL 57

Delirious New York 45

Complexity and Contradiction In Architecture 24

Learning from Las Vegas 21

Vers une Architecture 19

A Pattern Language 10

A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia 9

Modern Architecture: A Critical History 9

Invisible Cities 8

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Translations From Drawing to Building and Other Essays

Thinking Architecture

The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays 7

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Œuvre Complete

Architecture and Disjunction

Atlas of Novel Tectonics

Theoretical Anxiety and Design Strategies in the Work of Eight Contemporary Architects

The Image of the City

The Architecture of the City

Design With Nature

Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies

The Production of Space

Mask of Medusa

Architecture Theory since 1968

Content

The Function of Ornament

[3] Of the case studies presented here, Vers une Architecture, Learning

From Las Vegas, Delirious New York, and S,M,L,XL are examples of

‘canonical’ books that have recently undergone a more comprehensive

documentation of their origins, processes of production, agendas, and

modes of operation. Many of the images included in the timeline are

taken from these sources, which are listed in the notes that follow.

[4] For Vers une Architecture, see Jean Louis-Cohen, ed., Towards an

Architecture (Los Angeles: Getty Instititute, 2007), which provides a new

translation by John Goodman and a new layout that restore both the

language and the design schema of the original. For Le Corbusier’s publishing

practice more generally, see Catherine de Smet, Le Corbusier: Architect

of Books (Basel: Lars Muller, 2006). For Delirious New York, see Beatriz

Colomina’s separate interviews with Rem Koolhaas, in El Croquis 134/135:

OMA/Rem Koolhaas (2007), and Madelon Vriesendorp, in Shumon Basar

and Stephen Trüby, eds., The World of Madelon Vriesendorp (London:

Architectural Association, 2008). For Koolhaas’s background in journalism

and filmmaking prior to studying architecture, see Bart Lootsma, ‘Now

Switch off the Sound and Reverse the Film; Koolhaas, Constant, and

Dutch Culture in the 1960s’, in Jennifer Sigler, ed., Hunch 1 (1999).

[5] For Learning From Las Vegas, see Aron Vinegar, I Am a Monument:

On Learning From Las Vegas (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008); Vinegar and

Michael J. Golec, eds., Relearning From Las Vegas (Minneapolis: University

of Minnesota, 2008); Kester Rattenbury and Samantha Hardingham, eds.,

SuperCrit #2—Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown: Learning From

Las Vegas (London: Routledge, 2007); and Hilar Stadler and Martino

Stierli, eds., Las Vegas Studio (Zurich: Scheidegger and Spiess, 2009).

[6] Koolhaas places Venturi and Scott Brown within this shift in genres

and situates his own subsequent publishing practice in terms of that shift.

In an interview of the pair conducted with Hans Ulrich Obrist in 2000,

Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture is described as the ‘last

manifesto’ in architecture; afterwards, Koolhaas claims, there are ‘only

books about the city that imply manifestoes.’ The subsequent examples

he cites of this new genre – works on New York, Los Angeles, Singapore,

and Lagos – are essentially a list of his own later writings, with Banham’s

Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (which actually predates

the publication of Learning From Las Vegas, though not the Yale studio

on which it was based) arguably acting as a stand-in for his own writings

on other dispersed U.S. cities like Atlanta and Houston. See ‘Relearning

From Las Vegas,’ in Chung, Inaba, Koolhaas, and Leong, eds., The

Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping (Cologne: Taschen, 2001).

[7] Thanks to Enrique Walker for this formulation.

[8] For S,M,L,XL, see Gabriele Mastrigli, “The Last Bastion of Architecture,”

Log 7 (Winter/Spring 2006), and Brendan McGetrick’s recent interview

with Jennifer Sigler, the editor of S,M,L,XL, in Domus China (http://www.

brendanmcgetrick.com/blog/2009/10/01/editalk-with-jen-sigler/). The images

included in the timeline of archival materials from the production of S,M,L,XL

are taken with permission from Jennifer Sigler, from her lecture on the book’s

history at the Beyond Media ’03 conference in Florence in October 2003.

[9] For example, see Geoff Manaugh’s blog, BLDGBLOG (http://bldgblog.

blogspot.com/), contents from which have recently been published as

The BLDGBLOG Book (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2009).

[10] See Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production

(New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).

[11] Thanks to Michael Meredith for this formulation.

1923Vers une ArchitectureStudies

1929Œuvre Complete 1910–1929

1934Œuvre Complete1929–1934

1934 1946 1952 1957

1937Space, Time and Architecture

1949Le Modulor

1955Modulor 2 | Original Scale

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Sigfried Giedion, Walter Gropius: Work and Teamwork

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Œuvre Complete1934-1938


Œuvre Complete1946–1952


1 Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret), travels through Europe (sketches reproduced in Vers un Architecture)

2 Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret) Étude sur le Mouvement d’Art Décoratif en Allemagne

3 Images of American industrial buildings, published by Walter Gropius in Jarbuch des Deutchen Werkbundes (retouched and reprinted by Le Corbusier in Vers une Architecture)

4 Advertising for mass-produced kitchen equipment, from Le Corbusier’s personal archives

5 Photos and advertising for industrial turbines, from Le Corbusier’s personal archives (cropped and reprinted in Les Arts Decoratifs d’Aujord’hui)

6 Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret) and Amedee Ozenfant, Après le Cubisme

7 World map of subscribers, L’Esprit Nouveau, ed. Le Corbusier

8 Le Corbusier, ed. L’Esprit Nouveau

9 Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Malerie Fotografie Film (Bauhaus Bücher no. 8)

10 Sigfried Giedion, view from Pont Transbordeur, Marseilles & the Tour Eiffel, Paris

11 Sigfried Giedion, Bauen in Frankreich, Bauen in Eisen, Bauen in Eisenbeton

12 Sigfried Giedion, Befreites Wohnen

13 Le Corbusier, Les Arts Décoratifs

14 Le Corbusier, La Peinture Moderne

15 Le Courbusier, Urbanisme

16 Le Corbusier, Almanach d’Architecture Moderne

17 Le Corbusier, first English translation of Vers un Architecture, (Frederick Etchells,translator)

18 Le Corbusier, Un Maison – Un Palais

19 Le Corbusier, Precisions

20 CIAM conference meeting and standard layout of CIAM Grille

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21 Josep Lluís Sert, Can Our Cities Survive?

22 Le Corbusier, La Charte d’Athènes

23 Nigel Henderson (Independent Group), street life in Bethnal Green, London

24 Alison and Peter Smithson, Hunstanton School (cited in Reyner Banham, The New Brutalism), with the Smithsons’ American Jeep in the foreground

25 Robert Venturi, “Context in Architectural Composition,” MFA Thesis, Princeton University

26 Alison and Peter Smithson, Golden Lane Housing

27 Alison and Peter Smithson, Grille for CIAM 9, Aix-en-Provence

28 Alison and Peter Smithson, design for Independent Group exhibition Parallel of Life and Art, ICA, London

29 Catalogue for Independent Group exhibition This is Tomorrow, ICA, London

30 Team 10 meetings (Alison Smithson and Jaap Bakema shown)

31 This is Tomorrow

32 Independent Group portrait, from This is Tomorrow catalogue: Eduardo Paolozzi, Peter Smithson, Alison Smithson, Nigel Henderson

33 Alison and Peter Smithson, Upper Lawn Pavilion with Citroen DS parked in front

34 Sigfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History

35 Sigfried Giedion, CIAM: A Decade of New Architecture

36 Jacqueline Tyrwhitt, Josep Lluís Sert, and Ernesto Rogers, eds., The Heart of the City (CIAM 8)

37 Sigfried Giedion, CIAM: A Decade of Contemporary Architecture

38 Sigfried Giedion, Walter Gropius: Work and Teamwork

39 Le Corbusier, Les Plans de Paris 1956–1922

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1966Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture

1971Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies

1978Delerious New York

1965Euvre Complete O

1956-1965

1965The Heroic Period of Modern Architecture

1972 Learning from Las Vegas

1987Houses of Cards

1995Studies S,M,L,XL

40 Alison and Peter Smithson, “Patterns of Association and Identity,” foldout supplement in Uppercase 3

41 Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City

42 Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age

43 Peter Eisenman, map of travels in Italy with Colin Rowe while studying at University of Cambridge

44 Robert Venturi, Guild House (included in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture)

45 Peter Eisenman, “The Formal Basis of Modern Architecture,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cambridge

46 Kevin Lynch and Donald Appleyard, The View From the Road (Muriel Cooper, designer)

47 Robert Venturi, “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture: Selections from a Forthcoming Book,” Perspecta 9

48 Reyner Banham and Francois Dallegret, “Environment Bubble”

49 Reyner Banham, The New Brutalism: Ethic or Esthetic?

50 Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, “Learning From Las Vegas” research studio, Yale University

51 Reyner Banham, The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment

52 Arthur Drexler, ed., Five Architects

53 Rem Koolhaas, “Exodus, or The Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture,” competition entry for Casabella

54 Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, first issue of Oppositions

55 Rem Koolhaas, “The City of the Captive Globe” (with article by George Baird), Architectural Design

56 Casabella

57 Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, John Hejduk: 7 Houses (IAUS 12)

58 Peter Eisenman, House X

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59 Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, English translation of Aldo Rossi’s The Architecture of the City (Oppositions Books)

60 Peter Blake, God’s Own Junkyard

61 Peter Blake, “Townscape” image comparison, God’s Own Junkyard (reprinted in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture)

62 Peter Blake, “Long Island Duckling,” God’s Own Junkyard (reprinted in Learning From Las Vegas)

63 Alison and Peter Smithson, Urban Structuring: Studies of Alison & Peter Smithson

64 Alison Smithson, ed., Team 10 Primer

65 Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, second edition (reformatted)

66 Alison and Peter Smithson, “How to Recognise and Read Mat-Building,” Architectural Design

67 Reyner Banham, Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past

68 Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, Learning From Las Vegas, second edition (reformatted)

69 Alison Smithson, AS in DS: An Eye on the Road

70 Reyner Banham, Scenes in America Deserta

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71 Peter Eisenman, Chora L Works

72 Sanford Kwinter, Jonathan Crary and Michel Feher, eds., Zone 1/2 (Bruce Mau, designer)

73 “Rem Koolhaas/Office for Metropolitan Architecture,“ monographic issue of A+U

74 Richard Saul Wurman, Information Anxiety, diagram of dog breeds organized according to scale (reproduced in S,M,L,XL)

75 Rem Koolhaas, OMA 6 Projets, catalogue for exhibition at Musee de Beaux Arts, Lille

76 “OMA/Rem Koolhaas: Generic City,” special issue of TN Probe

77 Reyner Banham, A Concrete Atlantis

78 Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York, revised edition (reformatted)

79 Rem Koolhaas, spreads of first edition of Delirious New York reproduced in S,M,L,XL

80 Chuihua Judy Chung, Jeffrey Inaba, Rem Koolhaas, Sze Tsung Leong, eds., Great Leap Forward (Project on the City 1)

81 Chuihua Judy Chung, Jeffrey Inaba, Rem Koolhaas, Sze Tsung Leong, eds., The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping (Project on the City 2)

82 Rem Koolhaas/Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Content

83 Peter Eisenman, Guiseppe Terragni: Transformations, Decompositions, Critiques

84 Peter Eisenman, Ten Canonical Buildings 1950–2000

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places? Are the most instructive texts for the practitioner coming out of neurology, such as Jeff Hawkin’s On Intelligence, as Edwin proposes?

Perhaps it is too close to call, with the significance of particular text only becoming clear in retrospect. Or is it a broader symptom of contemporary practice’s marriage to the market, with our ‘leaders’ too busy building to consider publications? Importantly, Kubo’s survey and the Twitter discussion sought to determine which books are most influential, generating a compelling distillation of references, but leaving the larger question of ‘what guides you?’ wide open.

Have we simply turned to the internet? Will BLDG BLOG, Archinect, Mammoth, Pruned, City of Sound or Fantastic Journal emerge as having best captured the thinking (and attention) of architects today? But as Michael notes (without naming names) why do blogs aim to turn into books? Does this medium retain the exclusive rights to legitimacy and legacy? Can you only enter the canon when you are literally ‘in print’?

Of course, we want to believe Kazys, that there just isn’t a defining source of the past 15 years, that architects have their own interests beyond the canon and don’t merely follow unquestionably the latest manifesto/monograph of the day. We may no longer be the most irritating dinner party guests, leaving behind the constant quoting of Le Corbusier and Koolhaas while trying desperately to think up our own witty twist on ‘less is more’.

It would also be easy to dismiss the idea of the canon as something to be preferably jettisoned; the end of the insular discussions and autonomy of architecture, a first step toward re-joining society. But as Michael states, ‘the fact of having and naming an identifiable canon – of being able to label works as canonical – is central to the idea of architecture as a distinct discipline.’ He goes even further to state ‘the canon is the discipline’, which leads to the inverse question, without the canon, do we still have a discipline? Do we lose it all when we no longer have the same reference points – the ‘shared currency’ – to talk about? Will our established and broadly understood ‘body of knowledge’ dissolve into promiscuous pluralism – with sources coming from everywhere (and nowhere) leading – most shockingly – to the end of styles? In this case, the sensationally abbreviated Twitter hashtag #endofarchitecture may actually live up to its claim.

Who or what is steering this thing called architecture anyway?

Late last year we launched the latest issue of VOLUME, simply titled The Guide. As the blurb states, it ‘presents a diverse collection of guides and attempts to guide […] the guide is understood as not simply a service or selling point, but as an exploratory tool, a generator for a proactive engagement with the city.’

Despite this pluralist approach to what a guide might be, the question remains as to what is actually guiding us as architects or designers. So, in an effort to expand the debate beyond the deadline for the printer, and beyond our office, we thought we would crack open this question once more by simply asking what guides you? What are your conceptual reference points? Who are your intellectual leaders? Are you driven by your tools, your working media? Larger ethical concerns such as sustainability? Or are you limited by the demands of the market?What do you feed your architectural black box?

Of the issue, Michael Kubo’s contribution Publishing Practices – which presents the findings of a survey of architects on their most influential books - is the most explicitly directed to revealing the reference points of architects today. The peaks in Michael’s graph are startlingly clear, Vers Une Architecture (1923), Complexity and Contradiction (1967), Delirious New York (1978) and by far the largest spike, SMLXL (1995). Since Koolhaas’ massive tome, Zumthor, Moneo, Evans and Moussavi each stick their heads up above the crowd, but a singularly defining work is nowhere to be seen. Could this doorstop be the final bookend on the canonical architecture text?

This question of defining books bubbled up on Twitter in a big way recently, spurred by the list-making fervor of the end of the decade. Captured by the hashtag #endofarchitecturetexts, the death of the canonical architecture book seemed to be accepted by the crowd (@loudpaper, @willprince, @javierest, @serial_consign, @ enriqueramirez and of course @microkubo) without dispute. While potential candidates were suggested, based on surveys of his students @kazys penned the 160 character tombstone: “there is no defining text for the 00s, that’s the defining text.”

Or – as Edwin argues in the previous post, Architecture left to it’s own devices – has theory simply lost its relevance to practice? By no longer being interested in the ‘dirtiness, the messiness and opportunism of practice’, are critics and practitioners simply ‘living on different planets’? In which case are we looking in the wrong

Who’s Steering This Thing? On Guiding, Leadership, Influence and Motivation

Rory Hyde

The mass audience and mass media analyzed by the Frankfurt School are long gone. As digital media and network technologies are increasingly integral with everyday life, the public is transforming. Today we inhabit multiple, overlapping and global networks such as user forums, Facebook, Flickr, blogs, and wikis. In lieu of watching TV, listening to the radio, or playing records, we text each other, upload images to social networking sites, remix videos, write on blogs and make snarky online comments. The media industry, which just a decade ago seemed well established, is in flux, facing its greatest challenge ever. If we can be certain of anything, it’s that as Karl Marx wrote, “all that is solid melts into air.”

In 2008, Columbia University’s Network Architecture Lab published Networked Publics, a book produced in collaboration with the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Center for Communication examining how the social and cultural shifts centering around new technologies have transformed our relationships to (and definitions of) place, culture, politics, and infrastructure.

“Discussions on Networked Publics” seeks to explore the ramifications of these changes, giving particular attention to architecture and cities. In a set of five panels—culture, place, politics, infrastructure, and network society—we will explore the consequences of networked publics in detail. Our goal will be to come to an understanding of the changes in culture and society and how architects, designers, historians, and critics might work through this milieu.

Panel 1. Culture9 February featuring: Michael Kubo, Michael Meredith, Will Prince, Enrique Ramirez, David Reinfurt, and Mimi Zeiger

Panel 2. Place25 March

Panel 3. Politics13 April

Panel 4. Infrastructure4 May

Panel 5. Wrap-up T/B/A

All events are at 6.30 at Columbia’s Studio-X Facility, Suite 1610, 180 Varick Street, New York, NY

video: Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghanpamphlet: Merritt Palminterilots of help: Leigha Dennis, Gavin BrowningMichael Kubo’s text also appears in Volume 22, The GuideRory Hyde’s text originally appeared on the Archis Web site:http://archis.org/action/2010/01/26/whos-steering-this-thing/

discussions on networked publicspanel 1. culturenetlab