In 2006 the Stylos conference ‘The Projective Landscape‘ took place at the the Faculty of Architecture of the TU Delft of which I was the initiator and one of the organisers. What was it about? What were we after? Let me quote the preface we wrote in our pre-publication (a special edition of Pantheon):

“An architectural practice that does not blindly follow social ideologies and political intentions, that doesn’t retreat into autonomous formalism, architectonic grammatical codes or philosophical deconstructions of our reality. This much can be said of on the fresh contemporary architecture of a new generation. A way of practicing architecture that remains close to her disciplinary knowledge, and doesn’t look for her legitimations among philosophers, sociologists and other experts from beyond the architectural discipline. This new generation embraces the troublesome reality as a source of potential and vantage points. Always pragmatic, sometimes even opportunistic, but also often with their own ‘hidden’ and flexible agenda to bring qualities to a project that are not suggested in the brief and sometimes even testify of real (societal) engagement.

In the last five years a variety of architecture theoreticians and critics have tried to formulate and theorize this attitude in the practice of architecture. ‘Projective’ is one of many terms that tries to describe this kind of practice.”

- Pantheon// 5 July, 2006 published by Stylos (translated from Dutch)

When I read this it still sounds appealing and hopeful in the sense that the architecture discipline could navigate on their own bearings instead of following bearings that are imported from other disciplines. While my attitude now has evolved slightly (the conference happened almost 5 years ago) I still think that this descriptions, whether we call it projective, or post-critical, or whatever other buzzwords which has been uttered the last decade or so, is a signifier of the search for an answers to questions that have been troubling architecture since modernism. What should architecture be about? What should it do? What is its mandate? These questions raise other (more academic) questions like What are the boundaries of the architectural discipline? What is architectural knowledge anyway? Clearly in this discourse there is a great interest in what the ‘core’ or ‘autonomy’ of architecture is, and that the general feeling is that this got focus is lost by introducing all these other legitimization’s that come from ‘outside’ architecture. While I think this is true and important, it’s also dangerous, and the focus on autonomy of the discipline is a prerequisite for further isolation for a discipline that already suffers from (severe) autistic tendencies. The ‘projective’ attitude also seems to answer to this consideration through its pragmatism and inserting an ‘own’ agenda by manipulation of the brief.

The problem of discussing the ‘projective’ attitude is that it doesn’t look like something, it’s not a style. There is no specific formal language associated with it. Which makes it complicated to talk about ‘projective architecture’ since it’s not so clear cut what is or is not ‘projective.’ Another problem is the role of theory and criticism in the ‘projective’ attitude, a.k.a legitimation. Since modernism ‘theory’ (aka manifesto, ideology, philosophy, …) behind the object was what guided the ideological intentions of a building. The building was critique to the status quo itself, ranging from proposing various utopias to negations of the secret control mechanisms of capitalism (still have no clue how a building is supposed to do this), but pragmatism serves no moral appeals, it is about ‘what works’ not about ‘how it should work’. Perhaps the problem was that we were trying to understand this new way of practicing architecture through the effort of searching answers to the wrong questions, namely those of ’style’ and ‘legitimization.’

All these interesting considerations aside, my main conclusion after this conference had little to do with the matters that were discussed (what projective was, and how it could be a fitting theoretical framework for describing contemporary practice). Instead the more general issues that were troubling the discipline stood out to me. First and foremost there seemed to be a Babylonian confusion all over architecture.

Willem-Jan Neutelings at the Projective Landscape conference

The architecture theorists and architects didn’t understand each other. During the conference this disconnect between academia and practice was epitomized in Willem-Jan Neutelings‘ remark: “When I get to my office again Monday morning , what can I take from today’s conference and put into practice?” (the room remained silent, the theorists had no answers) Indeed what theory will help you do practice? And should this be the role of theory in the first place? My general believe by now is not that theory is there to guide practice, or to provide it with legitimations, but to try understand it. That’s one of the reasons this blog subtitle is ‘creating knowledge through practice’. Practice is a vast resource for knowledge, and much that is done in practice is not well understood by academia at all, since academia usually focuses on the building object not on the builder and the process. The gap between between practice and theory could be narrowed by making an effort to theorize what architects do, to try to learn from what happens in their offices, in their meetings, in dialogues with peers, in negotiations with clients and collaborating with consultants. Every office has their own ‘theory’ of what to do (which is often implicit and not well articulated) and what their buildings should be, they don’t need theorists for that.

Next to the confusion between practice and academia there is the confusion amongst architecture theorists themselves. Where before we had the classical tradition and the modern tradition, now we have a general post-modern confusion and no consensus at all about what is true. There are so many isms, or architectural sub-cultures and offices in which all boasts a private theory/concept that support their own style or ‘individual’ handwriting that each has developed their own slang, their own raison d’être, consequently it has become harder and harder to find a common ground for sharing disciplinary knowledge (Have you heard of Parametricism yet? ) Also here the lack of a lingua franca in architecture is striking, while I think deep down all these more or less superficial differences, which get more attention in the competition for attention, hide architecture’s commonalities.

The search for what architects share and have in come, is something I started researching for my graduation thesis. For my thesis I developed a theory to support my believe that all architects more or less think the same on a certain level, or more specifically deploy the same modes of reasoning when they design. But that’s another story I’ll reserve for the final part of this series.