CRITICAL MEASURE CRITICISM MATTERS

摘要

The task of articulating concepts of form, space and sociability in their etiology and contexts via another medium has always been criticism - and architecture's - challenge. The sequence of drawing before building and writing about it afterwards limns a discursive territory inhabited by a double displacement in which the word is always needed to shape the way in which we think about the built environment: seeing after sight. Criticism, like architecture, stands on the shoulders of something called theory. We all embrace this - no theory, no revolution, of course. But there are so many constructs available and, as critics and practitioners, we sort through them on the basis of both affinity and practicality. Criticism is both enlightened and vexed by the need for conceptual alliances and if I demur at explicitly incorporating too much of the arcana of psychoanalysis or up-to-the-minute cybernetic biologism in my own work, it's not for lack of desire for conceptual underpinnings or any special disdain for expository shopping. But I am interested in augmenting architectural criticism to exceed a filtered humanities/lit-crit/kunstwissenshaft/analogically based corpus of dogma and tactics and in the search for additional informants from the side of my concerns - as both designer and writer - to weigh in judgement. This is not to reject other approaches: criticism needs many modes. But a robust critical field requires self-criticism and the critique of critique is part of the job.