Pools, Carparks and Ball-pits

The first restoration proposals to emerge after fire destroyed Notre Dame Cathedral’s roof and spire were jokes. The more serious schemes that followed Prime Minister Edouard Philippe’s announcement of a competition – many markedly similar, recreating what was lost in glass– were collected on mainstream design media websites like Dezeen where they attracted an unusually high volume of angry comments, accusing the architects of insensitivity. Soon after, Ulf Mejergren Architects’ proposal to replace Notre Dame’s roof with a meditative pool was edited into a carpark. It sparked a series of increasingly outlandish edits – first a multi-story carpark, then a ball pit – before the French Senate declared that there would be no competition after all. This at times absurd online interest might be new for architectural competitions, but it is easily explained through meme theory, as conceived of by scholars like Limor Shifman and Ryan Milner: systems of interconnected units of cultural exchange operating on both wider cultural and specific sub-cultural levels. In this essay I contend that meme theory can be used, in reverse, to analyse reactions to, and similarities between, even the most serious Notre Dame proposals. In applying this framework, we can begin to understand how competitions operate more broadly as part of a complex network online and how they relate to traditional competition conditions. &nbsp

Participation and/or/ against tacit knowledge: ILAUD, 1976–1981

For several productive years from 1976 to 1981, the International Laboratory of Architecture and Urban Design (ILAUD) engaged with the issue of participation in architecture and planning in the city of Urbino. Each year, these summer workshops—founded by Giancarlo De Carlo in 1976—brought together students, educators, and prominent practitioners from across the fields of architecture, urban planning, architectural history, and art to discuss and experiment on the issue of how designers should engage with users of the built environment. In this sense, the workshop’s participants were explicitly united against what De Carlo derided as formalism, and later as eclecticism and postmodernism. At the same time, despite this broad consensus, ILAUD’s public outputs—the student work and lecture transcripts collated in the annual reports—seem to betray a set of disagreements between participants from various European and North American schools and between planners and architects. On one side, were a group of schools who argued that participation involved an analysis of the built fabric and cultural heritage of a city and its architecture; on the other, those who believed that participation required the direct involvement of future users. Yet, rather than accepting these as fundamental differences in attitude, this paper uses such apparent contradictions to argue that these various approaches were united in articulating a new, broader, and more equitable relationship between users, clients, and designers, on the cusp of postmodernity

‘Crackpot’ and ‘Dangerous’: On the authenticity of Miesian reproductions

In 2016, the architectural press reported the planned reconstruction of Mies van der Rohe’s Wolf House, built in 1927 in Gubin, Poland, and destroyed during World War Two. Supporters claimed that, by consulting the architect’s presentation drawings, they could rebuild the house authentically. They cited a simplistic reading of philosopher Nelson Goodman’s distinction between autographic art—where an original is certified by the hand of the author—and the allographic, which is replicated through notation. Barry Bergdoll called the proposal ‘crackpot’, arguing that without the lost construction documentation it would become a ‘simulacrum’: an allusion to Jean Baudrillard’s notion of a copy without reference. Mies himself thought there was something ‘dangerous’ in building ‘a model of a real house’ after constructing his own full-scale façade mock-up for the unbuilt Kröller-Müller House (1913). Since then, an unprecedented number of reproductions have entered into their own ‘dangerous’ conversation with Mies’ work, trading to varying degrees on their authenticity. Some, like the Barcelona Pavilion reconstruction (1986) engage with heritage and archival practices in an attempt to accurately reconstruct a lost work. Others, often appearing in exhibitions such as OMA’s La Casa Palestra at the 1985 Milan Triennale, exploit the fame of Mies’ architecture to offer a rhetorical interpretation that reinforces their own authorial signature. Meanwhile self-professed 1:1 models, like Robbrecht en Daem’s Mies 1:1 Golf Club Project (2013), seem deliberately tied to Mies’ authority, stripping away materials to focus on a singular reading of the work in a model-making tradition stretching back to Alberti. By returning to Goodman’s autographic/allographic dichotomy and Baudrillard’s simulacrum, this paper seeks to make sense of these multiplying reproductions across art, architecture and conservation, and their conflicting claims to authenticity. Ultimately, this frames Miesian reproductions as one contested site in broader discussions of architecture’s relationship to authorship and authentic heritage

Pools, Carparks and Ball-Pits: Or Why the Notre Dame Restoration Competition is a Meme

The first restoration proposals to emerge after fire destroyed Notre Dame Cathedral’s roof and spire were jokes. The more serious schemes that followed Prime Minister Edouard Philippe’s announcement of a competition – many markedly similar, recreating what was lost in glass– were collected on mainstream design media websites like Dezeen where they attracted an unusually high volume of angry comments, accusing the architects of insensitivity. Soon after, Ulf Mejergren Architects’ proposal to replace Notre Dame’s roof with a meditative pool was edited into a carpark. It sparked a series of increasingly outlandish edits – first a multi-story carpark, then a ball pit – before the French Senate declared that there would be no competition after all. This at times absurd online interest might be new for architectural competitions, but it is easily explained through meme theory, as conceived of by scholars like Limor Shifman and Ryan Milner: systems of interconnected units of cultural exchange operating on both wider cultural and specific sub-cultural levels. In this essay I contend that meme theory can be used, in reverse, to analyse reactions to, and similarities between, even the most serious Notre Dame proposals. In applying this framework, we can begin to understand how competitions operate more broadly as part of a complex network online and how they relate to traditional competition conditions.ISSN:1875-1490ISSN:1875-150

Three Cities and a Village with Jan Morris

This essay explores the life and travel writing of Jan Morris through the places that she wrote about over her seventy-year career. It considers how individual subjectivity and biography, particularly queer identities and bodies, relates to our experience of cities. On a methodological level, the essay uses Morris’ writing to illuminate buildings (gender affirmation clinics, queer domestic spaces) and processes (decay, more-than-human relations) still often neglected by architectural history, while developing a writing approach that preserves her distinctive literary voice.ISSN:1420-971

Against Formalism: Encounters between planners and architects at ILAUD, 1976-81

For several productive years from 1976 to 1981, the International Laboratory of Architecture and Urban Design (ILAUD) engaged with the issue of participation in architecture and planning in the city of Urbino. Each year, these summer workshops—founded by Giancarlo De Carlo in 1976—brought together students, educators and prominent practitioners from across the fields of architecture, urban planning, architectural history and art to discuss and experiment on the issue of how designers should engage with users of the built environment. In this sense, the workshop’s participants were explicitly united against what De Carlo derided as formalism, and later as eclecticism and postmodernism. At the same time, despite this broad consensus, ILAUD’s public outputs—the student work and lecture transcripts collated in the Annual Reports—seems to betray a set of disagreements between participants from various European and North-American schools and between planners and architects. On one side, a group of schools who argued that participation involved an analysis of the built fabric and cultural heritage of a city and its architecture; on the other those who believed that participation required the direct involvement of future users. Yet, rather than accepting these as fundamental differences in attitude, this paper uses such apparent contradictions to argue that these various approaches were united in articulating a new, broader, and more equitable relationship between users, clients, and designers, on the cusp of postmodernity

Performing Pedagogical Practices: transmitting architectural tacit knowledge

Architecture schools have long used first-year design exercises to remove students’ preconceptions, before re-establishing shared knowledge and skills. This is grounded in the type of ‘collective tacit knowledge’ (Collins, 2010) that informs the correct way to practice by the standards of the discipline and culture. While scholarship in other creative fields emphasises repeated practice, socialisation and authority, there is little study of teaching the tacit in architecture. This problem is compounded in historical first-year pedagogies: cases like composition at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Bauhaus vorkurs exercises, or the Cooper Union nine-square grid. While there is growing scholarly interest in these seminal practices, their exact mechanism for transferring tacit knowledge is notoriously difficult to study through primary sources alone. Any process easily explained is unlikely to be tacit at all. Yet, without understanding it, we risk neglecting the ways that tacit knowledge—grounded in dynamics in the discipline and broader culture—has empowered certain groups and perspectives. Drawing on my own teaching experience, I am developing a student seminar using methods of re-enactment—from the field of history—to reveal those intangible, tacit qualities of these influential pedagogies. Students will perform design exercises, approximate classroom conditions, and act as instructor. In doing so, we can better understand the implicit biases transferred simultaneously: of class, gender, race, culture and sexuality. Indeed, queer theory points to the potential for performance to ‘queer’ pedagogy. It breaks down traditional instructor-student dichotomies, while students embody alternate identities and levels of authority. Ultimately, this critical, performative and queer scrutiny of pedagogies promises to improve how we transmit tacit knowledge in teaching architecture today

Viral Architecture: Understanding collective tacit knowledge in an online subculture

In this paper, I argue that theories of tacit knowledge—extended to encompass aspects of epistemology, ethics and aesthetics—provide a useful framework to explore the dynamic relationship between online architectural subcultures, their styles and underlying beliefs. To do so, I turn to a loose collection of accounts on Instagram, administered by young designers and academics, and linked through a traceable network of reposting, following and liking. These include meme accounts like @sssscvvvv, pages aggregating their owners’ idiosyncratic taste like @florisvanderpoel, and high concept photography like @estherchoi’s ‘Le Corbuffet’ recipe project. Brought together on Instagram-hosted ‘magazines’ like @malapartecafe, an architectural subculture has begun to coalesce around a distinctive posting style, involving both content creators and active followers. This combines interest in qualities of Instagram images themselves—through blurring or the messy aesthetics of memes—and cryptic captions disconnecting buildings from architect and place. Like other youth subcultures, these stylistic similarities are underpinned by frustrations towards existing social structures. Content creators wield popularity on social media to push against the dominance of older white male ‘masters’ and manifest dissatisfaction with systems of education and practice that exclude and silence young, outsider voices. While these posts might originate on a limited number of popular accounts, this ‘viral architecture’ subculture requires a distinctively active literacy from its followers, combining a fluctuating mix of references, within and outside architectural discourse. To ‘read’ a meme from @sssscvvvv might require understanding of internship conditions, ‘Object Orientated Ontology’ in American academia, #blacklivesmatter, and standard meme templates. Ultimately, I argue that this changeable body of references—assumed as shared by members of the subculture—should be understood as a type of ‘collective tacit knowledge’ (Collins, 2010), which is difficult to make explicit because it resides, in flux, in the subculture itself, understood through acculturation and continued contact