In this episode, we hear about the difficulty of constructing coherent aesthetic camps in this generation, exemplified by responses to Michael Meredith’s “Indifference, Again” (2017). Instead, we list a range of aesthetic keywords that this generation identified as representing areas of interest: formlessness, informality, discrete parts, messiness, crudeness, simple construction, and familiar forms. The group discusses the importance of tooling one’s aesthetics to an audience outside of architectural academia, and question what authorship looks like today
Download“No one wants to claim authorship, no one wants to pin themselves to a style, no one wants to pretend to be the author of a style. Nor are people of my generation comfortable with being camped in these ways. We’re more likely to give you a list of 10 things.”
“There’s an attitude of informality in the work. So whether it is slumpiness or drupiness or haphazard stacks or scattered plans or cut up gable roofs. There is a kind of controlled informality.”
“So we see a lot of discrete parts. But the parts are not of a single object. There are accumulations of things. … there’s a sense that the objects themselves are not enough.”
“The gap between academia and practice: in order to bridge that gap, the work dwells on construction, on materiality and fabrication, and turns the professional practice of architecture into an academic pursuit.”
“people are working on things that we might describe as relatively familiar, on a kind of spectrum of familiarity. But they are also introducing intentional manipulations to them. They’re perverting them. They are manipulating them, they’re abstracting them. They could be kinky and it could be droll. They could be critically banal.”
“I’m interested in the ways that architects begin to produce images as discursive arguments. And in which ways do those images themselves carry the ideas of the project as opposed to whether or not the images they’re creating speak directly to the physical built world that they’re trying to represent.”
“I now think that audience is a rather unfortunate word for it, but that was the word that was always used. ‘Create a new audience.’ And what was meant by that was that we’re not after the overly intellectualized subjectivity who reads, we’re after the audience, the one that Hollywood can make so well.”
“I remember during those transitional moments, everyone was making fun of things that look remotely postmodern. Everyone was making fun of things that are ‘stupid.’ Or, you know, ‘shallow.’ As though to have formal qualities is to be dumb, right?”
“I’d never want to side on the authentic. Just feels a little gross. But then I also don’t want to side on the ironic. I don’t want to be in either camp.”
“Things move so quickly now and work is shared before it’s even done. And so I think that there might be the possibility of more of a shared voice. It seems to be an impossibility of voices that are that particular.”
“We can think about authorship as a way to test other kinds of power relationships between ourselves and other people.”
Interviewer
Joseph Bedford
Producer and Editor
Tim Cox
Writer
Tim Cox
Narrator
Tim Cox
Interviewees
Curtis Roth, Andrew Holder, Michael Meredith, David Eskenazi, Michael Young, Kyle Reynolds, Kyle Miller, Hans Tursack, Katie Macdonald, Kyle Schumann, Jaffer Kolb, Kelly Bair and Kristy Balliet, Bryony Roberts, Meredith Miller, Anna Neimark, Neyran Turan, Michelle Chang, Ashley Bigham, Erik Herrmann, Jerome Haferd, Clark Thenhaus, Paul Preissner, Stewart Hicks, Brittney Utting, Daniel Jacobs, Mira Henry, Matthew Au, Jimenez Lai, McLain Clutter and Cyrus Peñarroyo, Andrew Kovacs, and Jon Lott.
Senior Editor
Joseph Bedford
Music
Background music Dreamsphere 1 by Sascha Ende has been used under CC BY 4.0.