Criticality: notes on an ugly word. James Pallister looks at a new platform for critical ideas

摘要

To paraphrase Herman Goering, whenever I hear the word criticality, I reach for my Browning. Well, not literally; it's frowned upon for journalists to carry handguns. Still, it's an ugly phrase, part of a long tradition of unpleasant neologisms spawned in architecture and the social sciences. But what does it mean? In architectural academe it originates in K Michael Hays 1984 essay, Critical Architecture: Between Culture and Form. In it Hays rejects a choice between cultural dependence or formal autonomy, and argues that architecture should be 'critical': materially of its culture but, through its language and form, resistant to dominant economic pressures. Anyway criticality is old news. In the early 2000s critics Robert Somol, Sarah Whiting and Rern Koolhaas ushered in the birth of 'Post-Criticality', something Jason Nguyen described in Manifold in 2007 as 'architecture that investigates innovation, intelligence, provision - seemingly anything but social critique'.