In this episode, we heard this generation struggle with their ambivalence around the discipline of architecture, which they saw as essential for maintaining a shared conversation, but also as exclusionary, politically suspect, and frequently irrelevant to the broader world. There was consensus around a need to expand the discipline, returning to this generation’s political and ideological commitments to liberal pluralism. Excitement around the changing discipline, especially in pedagogical contexts, went hand in hand with anxiety around maintaining architectural expertise, whatever that may be.
Download“The term discipline is sort of up for grabs as to whether it’s the right term. It’s sort of in my experience, wielded around like a sign or a flag or something that’s never quite definable to other people.”
“No one wants to say what architecture is and isn’t at this point in time. No one wants to be caught dead making those claims.”
“One of the problems of a discipline is how do you maintain the balance between tradition and novelty, to have consistency and newness.”
“I’m ready to not be a discipline. I think of architecture as a discourse, or rather a set of interrelated discourses, maybe. So if a discipline has a boundary, I think of what we do as a wild Venn diagram.”
“Crises are coming or they’re here. And even if we choose to look in and try to fortify the discipline, if we don’t simultaneously make those things relevant to the world … then it doesn’t matter what we want to do. We’re going to be irrelevant.”
“My critique there is that you have to have disciplinary knowledge before you can have anything be interdisciplinarity, right?”
“Ultimately, you do get a degree in someone who designs and produces buildings.”
“I think in any given day studio today at foundation level, first year at the thesis level. Visually, formally, even in terms of technique, as critics, you have to play soccer, hockey, basketball, chess, checkers, go with every student…it’s not the same game, the same scale of game. It’s a completely different paradigm of things you are talking about. And that can be exciting or it can be completely incoherent.”
“For a field that I felt some amount of comfort with its autonomy, with its questions of form making and its curiosity about technology and technique and craft, we’ve started to incorporate all kinds of other concerns that have to do with the social and urban, political and environmental. And as a result, what I see in the core courses is that there isn’t any one starting point for any one project, but there may be ten starting points.”
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.