In this episode we trace the genealogies of this generation through academic lineages, their movements through the geography of American Academia, and the post-critical or projective discourses which defined much of their time as students.
Download“Genealogies are sometimes a way to reinforce those systems of power. That said, we, everyone has one. Everyone has a genealogy, everyone has influences.”
“The conversations that were happening at Princeton had to do with the recognition of a kind of failure that people perceive the architecture was not quite living up to the challenge of responding to the contemporary city, to ecological problems. And the kind of purely formal, Eisenmann kind of camp of design needed to be rethought.”
“The directorship of Sylvia Lavin; not all directors are, you know, they’re all useful at institutions, but they’re not all so focused on shifting and supporting a generation. And I think that the moments, the years that Sylvia Lavin was at UCLA, I think it was very intentional that she took a firm position on how her school faculty and students would traverse that transition from the pre-digital into the digital and then develop sort of a set of children. Maybe they went on to launch into the post digital.”
“For Bob, all of that work was really about legibility for architecture that would be about engagement. Something that’s not so hard, that can nominate new audiences, create new audiences, as he used to say, because it doesn’t necessarily rely on prior knowledge. It’s more about what it’s going to make once it arrives in the world.”
“When I read, you know, the project descriptions of OMA projects, and I saw the projects, it connec ted in my head, more so than any other architect. And I was just, to me, it was like, Oh, yeah, this is exactly what, like, you know, as a 20 year old, it was like, Oh, yeah, this is exactly what architecture should be.”
“Michael Meredith told Ivi something that has become a real touchstone for us as an office which is, ‘Don’t overthink anything, make things, make more things, make more things and eventually just like, look back on it and try and figure out what the hell you were doing.’”
“This was our second education where we actually learned from our colleagues instead of professors, and colleagues that had been educated in a different system as us.”
“Something that was interesting about possible mediums was that even that struggled to find a way to kind of connect all those practices because they had different interests.”
“We are the children of the post critical generation, I think that’s very accurate. One of the main messages that I got from that generation was that you communicate a position not by writing a book with a grand sweeping theory of everything, but by having a conceptual position in practice.”
“When I look at the post critical, the post-theoretical… I see a late capitalist exhaustion with the production of academic discourse, and I think that a lot of that writing came out of a drive to differentiate oneself from one’s peers. It’s hard to think about the post-theoretical or the post-critical without just thinking about cannibalism.”
Interviewer
Joseph Bedford
Producer and Editor
Tim Cox
Writers
Joseph Bedford and 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.