Explorez tous les épisodes du podcast Attention — Audio Journal for Architecture

In this episode, titled “Pluralism is Not Enough,” Joseph Bedford offers some provisional thoughts interpreting the situation of this generation of academic architects in the United States. He argues that, in contrast to previous generations concerned with the digital and pragmatism, this generation has reasserted architecture’s cultural, critical and disciplinary autonomy. Yet he also argues that this generation needs to reassert architecture’s relationship to a broad ideological field, beyond merely the single ideology of pluralism alone, in order to ensure that architecture as a cultural enterprise remains truly political and to enable the discipline to continue to advance.

In this episode, Tim Cox reflects on this issue of attention, and reads the aesthetic and ideological output of the interviewees as in conversation with the discipline of architecture’s waning cultural authority. He argues that this generation’s adoption of pluralistic language is a response to contemporary labor conditions in the neoliberal university, and questions what power architects and academics can legitimately exert over our built environment.

In this episode we hear from this generation on their experience with building practice in contemporary America. The cohort is focused on moving away from speculative or gallery work and towards substantial built projects, but they describe the challenges in getting a small, academic building practice off the ground. They highlight the ways that academic bona fides no longer translate to meaningful commissions. Whereas prior generations were rewarded for their disciplinary mastery, they find themselves lacking professional expertise, competing against more resourced corporate firms, and feeling that their perspective as designers is no longer valuable to clients.

In this episode we address the affordances and constraints of architectural academia. This generation highlights the important freedom academia provides to work through ideas that are not directly applicable to architecture as a service industry, but they also acknowledge the ways that labor structures like the tenure track process, or fellowships, push designers towards exhibitions, installations, competitions, and speculative work instead of a building practice. The group also comments on how the broader context of higher education in America, it’s neoliberalization and ballooning tuition costs, impacts architectural academia as a space of learning and a space of architectural production.

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.

In this episode, our discussion of contemporary architectural theory is framed by the question of why there is no contemporary discipline-defining book of theory like Delirious New York, Complexity and Contradiction, or Animate Form. This generation explains the myriad reasons why this is the case, from their professional priorities, critiques of singular authors, the rise of the internet, the professionalization of writing about architecture, and their simple lack of interest. The group also discusses the theorization that does exist today, and their own approach to writing.

In this episode, we hear about the lack of ideological debate and disagreement within contemporary academic architectural culture. This generation airs their critiques of the performative, chauvinistic, binary debates of the past and argue instead for a pluralistic approach to ideology, where the approaches of varying practitioners can coexist without producing conflict. The merits of this approach remain an open question. This group emphasized how pluralism foregrounds diversity and inclusion, while others saw the ideological attitude as problematically apolitical, aligned with the incentives of social media, unable to push design forward, or complicit with the status quo of the market.

In this episode, we address the political context of the interviews: the after effects of 2020’s COVID-19 pandemic and George Floyd uprisings. This moment produced a politicizing discourse within architecture which asked academics to address politics through pedagogy, aesthetics, and labor practices. Despite a shared feeling that the political concerns of the moment were critical, there was anxiety and ambiguity around how architecture could represent, or be instrumental for, progressive politics.

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

In this episode we hear from this generation on their relationship to the digital. They discuss broad, societal experiences like watching the internet and social media emerge, and they grapple with the broken promises of connection and progress that these technologies once represented. Within architectural culture, they unpack their relationship to digital tools for design and fabrication, and outline why they have rejected parametricism for a less instrumental and more critical adoption of technology— a position described as post-digital.

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.

In this introduction we hear from Joseph Bedford addressing what this issue is about, who he interviewed, what their work is about, what questions he asked everyone, why he undertook the project, and how his interests in this generation intersect with his larger interest in the fate and future of theory, and the understanding of architecture as a discipline.

In this episode we hear from the group of American academic architects that has been brought together by this issue of attention. The group pushes back against their characterization as a generation, though there are throughlines in the group— namely their responses to the digital project, the crash of 2008, and their individual, pluralized approaches to architecture.

In this episode, Megan Eardley interviews the investigative journalist and veteran beat reporter Caryn Dolley about the use of biometric and building surveillance devices in organized crime networks. With reference to her journalism and research for her book “The Enforcers” (2019), Dolley describes the movement of illicit and counterfeit goods through night clubs and the duplication of the state security apparatus in post-Apartheid South Africa.

In this episode, Megan Eardley interviews the artist, puzzle-maker, and escape room designer Laura E. Hall about the design of escape rooms for the public, building community, and the politics of play. Together, they reflect on the popular appeal of detective work in an era of corporate dragnet surveillance.

In this episode, Megan Eardley introduces Issue 7 by relating contemporary spatial practices to the literary detective story and present day political realities of surveillance, state violence, and justice work.

In this episode, Megan Eardley invites listeners to reflect on the way that detective work operates between form and event. She interviews the artist Janice Kerbel about the use of detective work in pieces such as “Bank Job” (1999), “Doug” (2014), and “Sink” (2018). They discuss how detection can be built into form, Kerbel’s experiments using plans to foreclose events, her relationship to language and writing, and how she seeks to reclaim small spaces within which we can act freely.

Like proof, evidence typically refers to things, traces, marks, or signs, that can be studied to establish relevant facts and evaluate competing theories. But while proof has been associated with tests and verification procedures since the thirteenth century, evidence (or the Latin evidentia) refers to something that is “manifest to the senses” and “obvious”– there in a way that is not subject to dispute. To examine evidence is thus to contend with the politics of presence, practices of display, and conditions of access. In this episode, Megan Eardley discusses these concerns with Eyal Weizman, who is a critical proponent for forensic research in architecture today.

In this episode, Megan Eardley interviews the writer and artist Bryan Finoki. He describes how he came to study the security industry and reflects on his process of harvesting his own field recordings, synthesized sounds, and files scraped off the web, to make Dark Freqs, an original sound composition produced for Attention and this issue on Detective Work.

This episode presents Dark Freqs, an original sound piece by Bryan Finoki. Please note that the piece incorporates recordings of police brutality.

In Episode 1, Anna Goodman explains how contemporary architects in the United States often pursue community-engaged work through the design of processes. Analysis from the architectural historian Susanne Cowan helps demonstrate how this contrasts with early modern designers’ strong association of community and territory. The episode features excerpts from interviews with Jeff Hou, Maria Sykes and Mary Comerio as well as audio recordings of the work of Louis Mumford.

In Episode 2, Anna Goodman describes a shift in the way architects in the United States viewed community starting in the early 1960s. Using audio clips from participants in an experimental park and playground built under that leadership of the influential community designer Karl Linn, it documents a transition from practices that linked community to the space of the neighborhood to those that focused instead on process.

In Episode 3, Anna Goodman explores how a focus on the process of design over its products located community design at the intersection of anti-institutional activism and other social movements. It focuses on a series of events catalyzed by the construction of Berkeley’s People’s Park, using audio clips of participants provided by the Pacific Radio Archives, the documentary Design as a Social Act as well as commentary from the urban and architectural historian Anthony Raynsford.

In Episode 4, Molly Esteve describes the life and work of the architect and environmental justice advocate Carl Anthony. Using Anthony’s own words and commentary from Jah Sayers, the episode demonstrates how the Black radical tradition pushed designers and planners beyond the neighborhood to a metropolitan approach to community liberation.

This piece asks the question: “what is theory?” It begins by attempting to define “theory” as a term or as a concept, a task that involves addressing ideas of abstraction, generalization, science, discourse, language and rhetoric, as well as the persistent oppositions between theory and practice, theory and history, theory as engaged and instrumental or theory as reflective and critical.

This piece asks the question: “what is architectural theory?” It asks what the phrase “architectural theory” names for us, how architectural theory differs from theory per se, and what are its distinctive features that might remain the same despite changing historical epochs.

This piece addresses the question “how has architectural theory changed over time?” In particular, it explores the longue durée of two millennia of architectural writings in the west. In doing so the piece addresses the historicality of architectural theory in the western tradition. It asks what the big paradigm changes are that architectural theory has gone through, how it was different in earlier centuries to now, and whether there are different genres, formats, media, or dominant questions and problems that have defined it in different epochs.

This piece asks “is architectural theory Western or can it be global?” This means asking: is theory universal or is it geographically particular? Is theory inherently linked to Western notions of reason, philosophy, metaphysics, historical thought, and critique? And what is the relationship of theory to other modes of thought such as rhetoric, myth, symbolism, proverbs, moral and teachings?

This piece asks “how do you teach architectural theory?” We ask what are the ways that each person teaches architectural theory in their specific classroom and in their specific school? How do they approach this as a pedagogical challenge? Do they approach architectural theory as something to survey or to explicate (chronologically, thematically, or philosophically), or as something to do, to demonstrate, or to perform in the classroom? And what are the methods that each person uses in the classroom to teach architectural theory?

This piece asks “what are architectural theory classes for?” What is the purpose of the architectural theory class in relation to architectural design in the curriculum? What is the purpose of the architectural theory class in relation to the formation of the student—their ethical awareness, citizenship, the engendering of their “critical thinking,” even the cultivating of their souls? What is the impact of architectural theory classes on architectural practice once students graduate and work as architects? And does architectural theory make architecture better; both in studio and in the world?

This piece asks “is architectural theory dead?” This might seem a strange question to ask given the lengthy discussion throughout the issue. Yet, at the turn of the millennium, a new generation of architectural theorists declared the “end of theory.” Nearly two decades on, a different generation addresses this question again, and asks why there was a perception of decline twenty years ago and whether or not, from our vantage point, this assessment is correct.

What is music like without the sound of a space? Historian Emily Thompson discusses the aesthetics, technology and politics of spatial absence at the dawn of the recording era while John and Susan Edwards Harvith explain how musicians coped with, adapted to and sometimes thrived in the acoustically dead confines of the recording studio.

In the 1950s, classical record producers were fixated on realism, aspiring to put listeners in the ‘best seat of an acoustically perfect hall.’ Not so for John Culshaw, however, a maverick producer who used new stereophonic technology to produce operas that were more dramatic, more spatially immersive and (so he claimed) more faithful to a composer’s intentions. Sonic highlights from Culshaw’s producing career accompany a reading from his two memoirs, ‘Ring Resounding’ and ‘Putting the Record Straight.’

The pianist Glenn Gould was dogmatic about his recording setup, placing the microphone as close as possible to his piano to exclude the sound of the surrounding room. That is, until he encountered the music of Alexander Scriabin—Gould felt that no one acoustic could do justice to Scriabin’s mystical musical language, and devised a system of ‘sound cameras’ that could zoom into or zoom out of his piano. Gould’s ambitious ‘Acoustic Orchestrations’ experiment remained unfinished, however, until music professor Paul Théberge discovered it in an archive and brought the project to completion.

One day, while practicing the prelude to Bach’s Cello Suite #1, Yasuaki Shimizu accidentally ran his tenor saxophone through a reverb machine. The sound so moved him that he embarked on an odyssey to record each of the six Cello Suites in a different acoustical environment. In this piece, Shimizu takes us into a warehouse, a stone quarry, a mine, a concert hall, a Baroque villa and a Gothic palazzo, showing us how the unique acoustics of each site drew out the emotional nuances of each suite in Bach’s masterwork.

Bad acoustics inspired Daniel Neumann to become a composer and sound artist. After struggling to tame echoes, flutter and too much reverberation as a sound engineer at a nightclub in Leipzig, Daniel embraced these and other acoustical peculiarities and made them the focus of his work. In this piece, Neumann talks about how he uses sound to raise awareness of the idiosyncratic sounds of architectural spaces and plays us an iteration of his piece, ‘Free Field / Pressure Field / Diffuse Field’.

This piece addresses the term “Postmodernism” its history, legacy, and use within the discourse of architecture.

This piece addresses the term idea and practice of collecting as a current trope within architectural culture.

This piece addresses the concept and practice of composition in architectural design. Formerly dominant in Beaux-Arts education and somewhat taboo in functionalist modern architecture, composition was a key feature of postmodern architectural discourse and has returned to prominence in recent years in the work of many young architects.

This piece addresses contemporary attitudes towards the idea of kitsch within the academy and architectural practice.

This piece addresses the concept of figuration in architectural discourse today.

This piece addresses the practice of critique as it still operates within architectural design culture today. It taps a new generation of practitioners as to what they see as their relationship to this tradition.

This piece addresses the concept of delight in architectural discourse today.

This piece addresses the idea of discipline in architectural discourse today.

This piece addresses the concept of weirdness in architectural discourse today.

This round-table conversation between Stan Allen, Jesse Reiser and Michael Meredith addressed the personal experiences of the participants of formalist pedagogy across several decades.

This interview with Axel Kilian and Sigrid Adriaenssens addressed the idea of form-finding in architectural design.

This interview with Julian Rose and Garrett Ricciardi addressed their project The Formless Finder.

This interview with the art historian James Meyer about formalism in minimalist art. The interview discussed his historical work on minimalism, Anne Truit, Modernist painting and sculpture at large.

This interview was with the architectural critic and theorist Jeff Kipnis following the publication of his new book, Jeff Kipnis, A Question of Qualities: Essays in Architecture (MIT Press, 2013). The interview ranged across Kipnis’ theoretical stance but delved in particular into his contributions to theories of affect in architecture.