In this episode, Tim Cox reflects on this issue of attention, and reads the aesthetic and ideological output of the interviewees as in conversation with the discipline of architecture’s waning cultural authority. He argues that this generation’s adoption of pluralistic language is a response to contemporary labor conditions in the neoliberal university, and questions what power architects and academics can legitimately exert over our built environment.
Download“I am a generation younger than the cohort we’ve heard from across this issue. While this generation’s academic careers were defined by the discourse of post-criticality and the 2008 financial crash, I began architecture school in 2017, during Trump’s first term, and a few years before COVID and the murder of George Floyd.”
“Architects propose solutions to clients and can proceed only with their approval. In this sense, the proposal is the defining discursive genre of architecture, and it is the structural limit of our power.”
“Architectural autonomy is a discourse that responded to modern architect’s proletarianization by retreating into the academy.”
“This generation’s rejection of disciplinary autonomy is not just oedipal or ideological, but an admission that the discourse of autonomy, as a technique for producing architectural authority, is not working in the way it did decades ago.”
“We can even go so far as to understand this group’s output as an aestheticization of their lack of cultural authority over building, an embrace of their marginalization within architectural practice.”
“Like artists, this generation of architects produce work that is about big issues, not work that proposes solutions. In this way, the spectre of Eisenmanian autonomy, of a separation between the realities of the world and the discursive space of the discipline of architecture, still haunts their ideological frame.”
“Despite pluralism’s associations with the noble & faltering political projects of democracy & diversity, pluralism’s hegemony as an architectural ideology is more accurately a response to the tightening pressures on intellectual labor in academia, and is ultimately compatible with the privatizing, commodifying, and productivity boosting goals of the neoliberalizing academy.”
“Without shared priorities or values, pluralism flattens architectural culture into individual, commodified perspectives.”
“pluralism is not a robust, or particularly progressive architectural ideology, it’s just a necessary prerequisite for the development of any ideological project.”
“How much can we ask of architects and academics, when our discipline does not have the power to actually shape the built environment? when we are merely decorating capital’s predetermined forms?”
Producer and Editor
Tim Cox
Writer
Tim Cox
Narrator
Tim Cox
Senior Editor
Joseph Bedford
Music
Background music Dreamsphere 1 by Sascha Ende has been used under CC BY 4.0.