"One can paint a very silly picture of the architectural journalism, not just anyone of its practitioners, but of almost anyone of them. He or she is the second degree of the reactive mindlessness. Where the architect had to wait until he has been asked to do something for a client, the critic has to wait until the architect has done something in reaction to that client. At the end of the communication chain there is a reader who, at best, will react to this reaction. Here we have a carousel of emptiness. No wonder architectural journalism belongs to the least respected forms of cultural mediation. It is very instructive to compare this role play with the practice of embedded journalism as we know it since the Iraq War in 2003. Highly graphical pictures were brought to us right from the battle field. But these pictures were screened. They never really showed the grim side of the story. They were reminding more of a war film, than of capturing the reality of that war. Getting glitzy pictures and paying the prize of becoming a puppet of prefabricated reality. Very much visibility, very little understanding. The embeddee infiltrates his subject, but the subject very much infiltrates the embeddee to secure "operational security." It is hardly exaggerated to take this description of embedded journalism as being particularly apt to the practice of architectural journalism today. The most respected magazines and most authoritarian critics are often acting as shameless ghost writers, dividing their time between laudations and boring introductions to architect's monographs. Moreover, more often than not they base whole careers on the ones of design celebrities, rather than searching the world for architectural themes bigger than architecture. Is there any escape from this deliberate slavery? Perhaps it can be found in the very embeddedness of architecture itself."
- Ole Bouman, from "A New Brief for Architecture," in
Organizing for Change (2007), edited by Michael Shamiyeh &
DOM Research Laboratory.
John, what do YOU think of that assessment?
ReplyDeleteMr. Sky - Well, Bouman's answer to his thinking is Volume, a publication with the involvement of Rem Koolhaas, whose OMA offshoot, AMO, could be a practice version of the same sort of reaction. If Volume is a more suitable publication for architecture than something like Architectural Record, I would hasten to say yes, in favor of thinking that they're different beasts and need to be approached critically on the reader's part. Considering all the letters to the editor to Record about their preference for select names in their glossy spreads (that pages that seem to be Bouman's target), not all the readers are buying it.
ReplyDeleteActually, thinking about Bouman's indictment of journalists and critics, Blair Kamin comes to mind, in a positive way. While he many times reacts to new buildings in Chicago and the Midwest, his Pulitzer Prize is for a series on the city's lakefront, a piece less in reaction to a specific built work and more as a platform for an apprecation of the lakefront and a call to treat it with care and keep it public in the future. (Or so my memory serves me many, many years later). My point is that Bouman's argument is a very specific focus, mainly on the presentation of projects in magazines, magazines that also have critical articles and other layers on top of what he's geared against.
Ultimately, when I think of things like Volume and AMO, I think of them as attempts at being a step ahead of the crowd, though in different ways; the former embracing the world's "underbelly" and the latter apparently embracing the corporate world. What I do appreciate is the acceptance of thinking beyond the physical and the questioning of the role of architecture and the architect, even though my idea of architecture's direction is much different (more aligned with the roles of urban design and sustainability as a means for architects to adapt to changing concerns).