On guiding, leadership, influence and motivation.

Late last year we launched the latest issue of VOLUME, simply titled The Guide. As the blurb states, it ‘presents a diverse collection of guides and attempts to guide […] the guide is understood as not simply a service or selling point, but as an exploratory tool, a generator for a proactive engagement with the city.’

Despite this pluralist approach to what a guide might be, the question remains as to what is actually guiding us as architects or designers. So, in an effort to expand the debate beyond the deadline for the printer, and beyond our office, we thought we would crack open this question once more by simply asking what guides you? What are your conceptual reference points? Who are your intellectual leaders? Are you driven by your tools, your working media? Larger ethical concerns such as sustainability? Or are you limited by the demands of the market? What do you feed your architectural black box?

Of the issue, Michael Kubo’s contribution Publishing Practices – which presents the findings of a survey of architects on their most influential books - is the most explicitly directed to revealing the reference points of architects today. The peaks in Michael’s graph are startlingly clear, Vers Une Architecture (1923), Complexity and Contradiction (1967), Delirious New York (1978) and by far the largest spike, SMLXL (1995). Since Koolhaas’ massive tome, Zumthor, Moneo, Evans and Moussavi each stick their heads up above the crowd, but a singularly defining work is nowhere to be seen. Could this doorstop be the final bookend on the canonical architecture text?

This question of defining books bubbled up on Twitter in a big way recently, spurred by the list-making fervour of the end of the decade. Captured by the hashtag #endofarchitecturetexts, the death of the canonical architecture book seemed to be accepted by the crowd (@loudpaper, @willprince, @javierest, @serial_consign, @ enriqueramirez and of course @microkubo) without dispute. While potential candidates were suggested, based on surveys of his students @kazys penned the 160 character tombstone: “there is no defining text for the 00s, that’s the defining text.”

Or – as Edwin argues in the previous post, Architecture left to it’s own devices – has theory simply lost its relevance to practice? By no longer being interested in the ‘dirtiness, the messiness and opportunism of practice’, are critics and practitioners simply ‘living on different planets’? In which case are we looking in the wrong places? Are the most instructive texts for the practitioner coming out of neurology, such as Jeff Hawkin’s On Intelligence, as Edwin proposes?

Perhaps it is too close to call, with the significance of particular text only becoming clear in retrospect. Or is it a broader symptom of contemporary practice’s marriage to the market, with our ‘leaders’ too busy building to consider publications? Importantly, Kubo’s survey and the Twitter discussion sought to determine which books are most influential, generating a compelling distillation of references, but leaving the larger question of ‘what guides you?’ wide open.

Have we simply turned to the internet? Will BLDG BLOG, Archinect, Mammoth, Pruned, City of Sound or Fantastic Journal emerge as having best captured the thinking (and attention) of architects today? But as Michael notes (without naming names) why do blogs aim to turn into books? Does this medium retain the exclusive rights to legitimacy and legacy? Can you only enter the canon when you are literally ‘in print’?

Of course, we want to believe Kazys, that there just isn’t a defining source of the past 15 years, that architects have their own interests beyond the canon and don’t merely follow unquestionably the latest manifesto/monograph of the day. We may no longer be the most irritating dinner party guests, leaving behind the constant quoting of Le Corbusier and Koolhaas while trying desperately to think up our own witty twist on ‘less is more’.

It would also be easy to dismiss the idea of the canon as something to be preferably jettisoned; the end of the insular discussions and autonomy of architecture, a first step toward re-joining society. But as Michael states, ‘the fact of having and naming an identifiable canon – of being able to label works as canonical – is central to the idea of architecture as a distinct discipline.’ He goes even further to state ‘the canon is the discipline’, which leads to the inverse question, without the canon, do we still have a discipline? Do we lose it all when we no longer have the same reference points – the ‘shared currency’ – to talk about? Will our established and broadly understood ‘body of knowledge’ dissolve into promiscuous pluralism – with sources coming from everywhere (and nowhere) leading – most shockingly – to the end of styles? In this case, the sensationally abbreviated Twitter hashtag #endofarchitecture may actually live up to its claim.

Who or what is steering this thing called architecture anyway?