John Shannon Hendrix has proposed a schmooz (reverse-zoom: “a conference-style zoom that begins with a Q&A session and ends with formal presentations) on the topic of the meaning(fulness) of architecture in the face of contemporary practices that have reduced architecture pedagogy to training functions, exempting the industry from its customary apprenticeship responsibilities.
John’s statement:
Architects should be banned from society. Engineers can design buildings, contractors can design houses. Architecture no longer has any value for society. As Nikolaus-Ion Terzoglou wrote in The Cultural Role of Architecture, “Architecture has concentrated mainly on technological means and instrumental procedures that, in certain cases, manage empty forms without conceptual content …. This situation has marginalized architecture as a form of mental expression and spatial imagination. An almost exclusive and one-dimensional emphasis on material and technological means reduces the ontological complexity of architecture and often leads to results which lack mental depth.” Architects have abandoned the elements of architecture which have given architecture value to society: the expression of ideas, the communication of cultural values, the modelling of philosophical structures. Psychoanalysis could provide fertile ground for those elements of architecture if the practice of architecture were able to return to them. Most students coming to architecture school say that they want to be architects to make the world a better place, but they soon discover that that is not possible, given the constraints put on the architecture profession. The elimination of architecture is necessary for the survival of the human race.
Don Kunze’s Quick Response:
In architecture schools we are used to parsing building from architecture to emphasize the distinctly different ways one and the same artifact plays to different purposes, but out in public the distinction is not well developed, so when we say architecture many people assume we’re talking about building. Let me make a Lacanian point, however. Our “building” is never free of an architectural premise, which is there because we are not bugs or bunnies but speaking beings. So, to say that architecture is as necessary as food — misleading in the sense that it is necessary in a slightly more complex way — is not off the mark. Even people with very little in the way of buildings (maybe just tents) have their architecture in the form of things that situate them within the cosmos. In some sense, when building is minimum, architecture is maximum, extending temporally and spatially to include the cosmos. Is the architecture/building dyad an x+y=1 affair (always summing up, in different proportions, to make the ‘1’, the “whole” of our experience of the built world)? Is it a Möbius strip? A torus? What is the relation of architecture’s material conditions to subjectivity in general? How can we theorize this contemporary “desert of the Real” in Lacanian terms?
More?
Participants are invited to submit short statements/ideas/questions to be posted here. These can serve as an introduction to informal comments or as the core of a more formal intervention. If you wish to make a brief (<10 minute) presentation at the first (informal) zoom, contact John Shannon Hendrix. If this discussion zoom/schmooz is productive, there will be a second, more formal zoom with prepared interventions.
As always, we encourage presenters to circulate their position papers before the event and if possible develop presentations made available on YouTube.
Resources:
Frédéric Declerck, “Lacan on the Capitalist Discourse: Its Consequences for Libidinal Enjoyment and Social Bonds.”
Stijn Vanheule, “Capitalist Discourse, Subjectivity and Lacanian Psychoanalysis.”