by Scott Singeisen
Architecture in the media used to be different; once a month the publishers of refined and respected professional journals and magazines shared information on newly completed works of architecture to the awaiting public. Before these works of design would be included in the pages of a magazine, the editorial review board juried the work for the same issues many architects and academy faculty members may recognize: success relevant to site, program, technology, design fundamentals, and theory. Architecture presented in the pages of these publications were in turn poured over by readers, studied, evaluated again, and considered. On many occasions, publications received well-written letters in support, or critical of, the works presented. This was our relationship with design media.
Then everything changed. The internet changed the expectation and satisfaction of this relationship. With the advent of websites as extensions of magazines, and newly formed web-zines to specialize in any of our shared community interests, the production and consumption of imagery became self perpetuating. But, it’s not about you or me – it’s about the kids.
The supposition is that media promotion of architecture through imagery alone is damaging the education process of architecture students as they now think of design analysis as a process of quick satisfaction, rather than an in-depth relationship. The pleasure a viewer obtains searching the many websites catering to architects and designers in search of inspiration is ultimately unfulfilling as a shallow and cursory evaluation of the information available which reveals a design without narrative – a lack of relationship. If the viewer is only looking at a photograph and not evaluating plan and section; material and envelope detail; process or site and context, then the relationship has begun with a cheap one-night stand. Unable to translate the lessons of the research and analysis, the design audience is forced into conjecture.
If the image viewer is responsible for discerning good design from bad design, we cannot blame the fractured relationship on the image supplier. Viewers must analyze a large amount of information in context in a very short period of time. If viewers are not prepared with precedent to build this analysis due to a post-modern educational system, then we must revisit the methodology and pedagogy of our academies.
We can begin by teaching and practicing better manners of critical thought. Educational institutions can return to the classic educational organization of the trivium; consisting of three parts in the following order: grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric. To be clear, I do not introduce classical education as a style reference, but as an educational paradigm from which other specialists can elaborate. As I know the three parts of the trivium are defined as such: grammar relevant to language, the structure of the language, and as a means of communication; dialectic relevant to how the language is used to support an argument in the affirmative or negative; lastly rhetoric relevant to the expression of design ideas poetically and with sophistication. All three of these parts are easily translated to the architecture principles of form, order, space.
A process of rigor and criticality – potentially a lack of awareness of – is largely absent from the evaluation of architecture imagery. Dispersing architecture and design imagery through the Internet has a place in our culture, but rigor and criticality of evaluation must be viewed as a lens. Media promotion of architecture should be prepared to present a full ‘trivium’ of information for each project, and viewers should be prepared to critically translate the information. This is architecture, not a one-night stand.
Scott Singeisen is a professor of Architecture & Urban Design at SCAD.
Scott thank you for being a man of ideas and ideals. You reassure me.
Scott, these are great points. I think that one of the most important skills as a designer today is intellectual curiosity. The methods to execute on this curiosity are evolving (and perhaps devolving) as our media changes. I think you are correct that finding the “heart” of a project is becoming more difficult when it is wrapped in so much image and style, and it is publishers’ responsibility to show that to us. I think that some design philosophies that have taken hold recently have made this much more apparent.
As a specific example of this, I think the advent of schools of thought like Object Oriented Ontology have lent legitimacy to the visual end justifying the means, and the downplay of design process, especially human centered process. It is certainly an honest expression of a technology focused approach, plucking ghosts out of the machine, but I do believe that the natural forces of form, space, and order still apply here, and the best expressions of the philosophy understand that. For the critical designer, the challenge is building a bridge of understanding between the easily imitated visual outcome and the true heart of process.
Great article Scott,
Walter
I have always thought of architecture school as a place where they teach a unique way of thinking – one that holds the responsibility of taking all factors in consideration before actually creating something worth sharing.
I do agree that the instant gratification crave as a result of over stimuli that this generation is experiencing hinders the full appreciation that architecture deserves and requires.
From a student’s perspective – I feel like the lack of narrative and in-depth relationship has a lot to do with the lack of mentors throughout school. Architecture has always been a mentor-mentee relationship (at least in the golden years!) and sadly I haven’t been exposed to that experience event though this will be my 4th year in architecture school. Just like reporters, architects, the public -and the would be mentors have a busy agenda and they don’t seem to have time to indulge students and create a relationship that will emphasize and establish a superior understanding in a unique way that the greats were exposed to. Everyone is in a hurry for some reason or another. Myself included.
Essentially – this is all incorrect at its core. Successful people succeed because of will and passion – and those who truly understand architecture feel it, breathe it, and more often than not are the ones that struggle the most in their career path.
Your article is very thought provoking and I have believed that all things must & are challenged, criticized and reworked before they epiphanous evolution comes and brings everyone to the next step.
Great article Professor.
My visualization of architectural design websites is similar to Michael Lewis’s description of Wall Street’s High Frequency Trading Firms in his award-winning book titled Flash Boys. My reasons are as follows-
a) Commercialization and Market Share: The profitability of every website is measured by its revenue generated from advertisement and subscription. With a focus on advertisement. They are usually not morally inclined to be bothered with the information disseminated or how the information affects the user. Instead their priority lies in the notion that they must, at all cost, have an increasing amount of audience. To meet this results they race to disseminate information faster than their competitors and since people find it hard to read, beautiful graphics and images are the only ways to capture their attention.
b) The pseudo-hypothesis that users are rational and educated to make well-informed decisions. Which leads one to ask who is best to offer a review/critique, is it the user or the expert? Subjectivists, formalists and propagators of reader-response theory are always in constant debate about this very issue.
As an undergraduate student of architecture I believe that critical thinking should be the main goal of every design studio. Yes I know that professors want to see beautiful perspectives with happy people but they forget that anyone can achieve that. Only an architect can understand the intrinsic representational value of a line.
I concur with professor Singeisen’s idea that architecture schools need to change their methodology and pedagogy.
This entire argument can be boiled down to ‘The future is scary!’, ‘Fire Bad’!
This is not to say that there is a lack of critical thought in the contemporary discourse, but that aesthetics has inevitably become a part of our work. New ideas postulate that buildings need not be analyzed in terms of context or process, and building objects need not be dissected to the point of complete understanding, in an effort to maintain their strange qualities.
Of course the internet changed everything, that’s the nature of time: change. It’s fallacious to think that things should stay the same in the face of new methods of communication. The public at large does not understand architecture, and they certainly will not understand a ‘trivium’ of information that attempts to make a building object knowable by dissolving that boundary between architect and subject.
Indeed, the public cannot simply read plans and sections, that’s why we use renderings, but still there is something missing in picking the best shots for your building.
As for the media, they can’t just pick a picture of a single space in a complicated project and throw it out there, every shot and rendering has its own point, whether it was a ‘moneyshot’ or something else, they should serve a function, so there must be a narration linked to that post, and the more the project was complex, the longer the text was.
I guess we should think about the final product for studio project as boards for the people outside instead of boards to impress the students and faculty walking in the hallway, that’s what I got in mind when thought about changing the mentality of teaching.
It is an idea worth mentioning.
Great article.
Asim