In this episode, titled “Pluralism is Not Enough,” Joseph Bedford offers some provisional thoughts interpreting the situation of this generation of academic architects in the United States. He argues that, in contrast to previous generations concerned with the digital and pragmatism, this generation has reasserted architecture’s cultural, critical and disciplinary autonomy. Yet he also argues that this generation needs to reassert architecture’s relationship to a broad ideological field, beyond merely the single ideology of pluralism alone, in order to ensure that architecture as a cultural enterprise remains truly political and to enable the discipline to continue to advance.
Download“this generation’s assertion that architecture is first and foremost a cultural enterprise makes their collective project critical.”
“we can also see their shared project as part of a disciplinary history, in the way that it criticizes two key disciplinary projects that were dominant from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s; namely, the digital avant-garde and pragmatism.”
“My concern was that while this generation is, in my view, disciplinary, their adoption of a single ideology of pluralism is impeding their ability to foster the progress of the discipline.”
“In short, the license to treat referentiality as little more than vague likeness became a condition of those platforms which now governed the way that work was shared and circulated.”
“The platforms themselves have thus brought about a new superficial familiarity with a wider range of forms, but these forms have been shorn of a meaningful understanding of their historical context.”
“while pluralism is an ideology, it is only one ideology. I would argue that architecture needs a much wider ideological field to operate within in order to sustain its cultural progress in a democratic society.”
“Such things as rocks, stacks, ziggurats, profiles—and the various other commonalities recently put forth to understand the work—are not projects in any ideological sense. There is no camp of rocks, no argument for stacks, no project of ziggurats.”
“A project requires the articulation of a singular author’s intent, a strong claim about what is new in the work and how what is new reinterprets and critiques what has gone before.”
“My argument here, ultimately, is that architecture must be understood as part of culture, and that culture must be understood as inextricably tied to politics, and that, in a democratic society, politics must be understood as a debate and negotiation between different ideological positions.”
Producer and Editor
Tim Cox
Writer
Joseph Bedford
Narrator
Joseph Bedford
Senior Editor
Joseph Bedford
Music
Background music Dreamsphere 1 by Sascha Ende has been used under CC BY 4.0.