What is Critical Architecture Theory?

The result of the convergence of deconstruction and architecture during the 1980s was "critical architecture theory." In 1990 this phenomenon became a subject of debate after the architectural historian Sylvia Lavin suggested that "critical theory" was nothing other than a brand of literary theory and criticism that had lost its original object, namely literature, "through a progress of progressive expansion" in which critical theory "appropriated in its domain the results of research in all sorts of disciplines…." 1 In Lavin's opinion, because "an explicit aim of critical theory was to undermine the tyranny of Western philosophical tradition," this brand of theory, which had "a ring of resistance to it, an aura of the avant-garde, of the radical," appeared "to offer architecture the radical weaponry once offered by a flat roof and a little exposed concrete." But Lavin concluded that in applying the techniques of literary criticism to architectural literature, "critical architecture theory" had lost its own object, namely architecture, and architecture's concern with ideas about form. Consequently, critical theory was a freewheeling activity incapable of making "a serious contribution to the world of architecture ideas." Lavin's criticism forced proponents of "critical architecture theory" to clarify their positions, and it soon became evident they were all defending slightly different points of view 2. Of the points of view, two are more self-conscious than others.

The first, of which Mark Wigley is the prime representative, posits that during the 1990s, architectural theory became a non-prescriptive discourse, an autonomous "subdiscipline actively transforming the organization of schools and the directions of research." 3 Wigley asserts, "this is not the reassuringly prescriptive theory that so many voices were calling for in the late 1960s…Rather, it is a new way of troubling discourse." This position, which extends Manfredo Tafuri's critical history project, 4 assumes that "new forms of rigorous scholarship have taken responsibility for cruelly interrogating the discipline. Nowhere is the faith in the structural role of contradictions more evident and the dedication to uncovering what the discipline represses more obsessive." 5 This "psychoanalytic" program openly conceives theory as an irritating and corrosive brand of criticism that tactically undermines those discourses that are thought to perpetuate the inherently repressive nature of architecture as a discipline and as an institution. According to Wigley, the architectural theoretician, who is a specialist in words, should work in parallel to the architect, who is a specialist in images.

In contrast to this first point of view, which in its exploration of the architectural unconscious applies the techniques of Derridean deconstruction to discourse, the second point of view, voiced by K. Michael Hays, is characterized by its promotion of a different critical method, one derived from Fredric Jameson's "transcoding technique." According to Hays, critical theory is a "mediating practice" that produces "relationships between formal analyses of a work of architecture and its social ground or context." 6 Rather than achieving a synthesis, this mediation allows the two terms to express and interpret each other by a process of mutual disruption and transformation. Overall, this position assumes that the context and the object cannot be approached separately because the world is a totality. But this totality is seen as a new concept of culture, which is "no longer something possessed" but something "constructed and deconstructed by theory." Like Wigley's deconstructive outlook, Hays' critical endeavour evidently derives from Manfredo Tafuri's "historical project" of the late 1970s, which was inspired by Michel Foucault's criticism of Western humanism, and conceived the task of criticism to be forcing into crisis any and all discourses of power, including the concept of history as discourse of truth. 7

Excerpt from the Introduction (pp.1-4) of Louis Martin's thesis The Search for a Theory in Architecture: Anglo-American debates 1957-1976 - unpublished, excerpted with kind permission of the author.

Notes:

1 Sylvia Lavin "Essay: The Uses and Abuses of Theory," Progressive Architecture 71:8 (August 1990): 113-114, 179.
2 The immediate effect of Lavin's criticism was to prompt replies by K. Michael Hays and Jeffrey Kipnis: K. Michael Hays, "Rebuttal: Theory as a Mediating Practice" and Jeffrey Kipnis, "Rebuttal: Theory Used and Abused," both in Progressive Architecture 71:11 (November 1990): 98-100, 158.
3 Mark Wigley, "Post-Operative History," ANY: Architecture New York 25-26 (New York: Any Corporation, 2000): 47-53
4 Manfredo Tafuri, "The Historical Project," Oppositions 17 (summer 1979); reproduced in Introduction to The Sphere and the Labyrinth (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1987)
5 Wigley, "Post-Operative History," op. cit., 53.
6 K. Michael Hays, "Introduction," Architecture Theory since 1968, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1998), x-xv.
7 Manfredo Tafuri, "The Historical Project," op. cit., 9.