Our role, as I understand it - Dan Jencks Mini-Essay

Having not come from an architectural background, I feel I didn’t have the same knowledge of architectural history and theory as my peers. I knew the big names, and the periods of art history, but had little understanding of the motivations and ideals behind the various movements. I would argue that to critical thinkers such as ourselves, these cause and effect relationships are the single most important factor in understanding why shifts in design occur, and how our designs can fit into a larger conversation about society and culture.

All of the history/theory classes I’ve taken in the last 3 years have helped explain these relationships, but I’ve especially enjoyed this class and the realizations I’ve made throughout the semester. The time period we covered is probably the most directly relevant to the architecture of today, and the shockwaves of these writings are still rippling through the most celebrated architecture of today.

Something I most certainly will not forget from this class is the simplified timeline of events connecting modernism with what I would say is still the predominant movement of today, critical regionalism. This timeline tells the story of the architect’s rise and fall from grace, and hopefully promises a return to form in the coming decades.

As architectural students, we are taught to hold some sort of special reverence for modern architecture. It is an architect’s architecture: stark, simple, beautiful, exclusive. Thinking of modernism in its inception, it must have been even more shocking then than it is today. It was a really grand experiment, a celebration of industrialism and an increasingly borderless society. It required a tremendous amount of trust between the architect and society, which was granted to us. Unfortunately, it was not perfect. To the uninitiated, modernism felt cold and inscrutable. Its universality soon felt placeless, and its utopian ideas about how society should function soon felt prescriptive and disrespectful of local culture. At its worst, modernism was exercised as control over the public; a prescriptive way of life that lacked local identity. As the weaknesses of modernism became apparent, the public’s willingness to trust the experiments of the architect was weakened as well.

Postmodernism was a response to this phenomena, an abandonment of experimental, and return to the vernaculars of the past. At its most simple, I see postmodernism as an over-correction by architects in an attempt to restore their good will—an apology. It was people-pleasing and understandable. A non-risk, it gave up on the avant-garde attitude of early modernism in favor of the ornamentation of the past. The resulting style was legible to the public, but fairly irrelevant. I would argue again that this weakened the trust between architects and public as our role seemed superfluous; architecture lacked meaning, it didn’t drive the culture forward as architect had done in the past.

In addition to the damage done to our role by our own movements, the architect’s relevance was under threat by general society and economics. Globalization and its global economy increased demand for building that could be easily constructed and replaced. These buildings needed to be mass produced, and the global availability of materials and labor produced a new international style—junkspace. In addition, the increasing specialization of labor further divided the individual power of the architect, as the design decision of projects become more of a committee decision.

While we still live in a sort of design vacuum, the method I see as most relevant and accepted in architecture today is critical regionalism. I imagine critical regionalism as a compromise between the many pressures facing architects today, as well as the architect’s subtle attempt to return to relevance. It takes the lessons learned from modernism’s shortcomings postmodernism’s irrelevance and applies them to the social, economic, and political climate the architect must work in today.   Architects today find themselves in a global society, with local identities disappearing around them. They find themselves in a weakened position compared to their predecessors, without the same implicit trust of the public. At the same time, we are trained to diagnose the issues of the built environment and respond to them. We can’t start over and experiment wildly as the modernists did; we lack the freedom and trust of the public. We can’t buy into globalized construction methods and vernacular without further weakening our own relevance. We can’t invent a new method, nor will we give up and lose the significance of place. What we can do is bend our designs, our response to context, our construction details in a way that subtly feels challenging, but not out of place. Neither obvious nor incomprehensible, these designs challenge the public, but explain themselves. It uses accepted and understood construction methods, but differently from the expected.

I think that all of this is to say that the role and relevance of architect has been in a slow decline for the last century. Globalization and our own risky moves have challenged us, but we are working on ways to prove our necessity. Placelessness isn’t an issue visible only to the architect anymore; the public understands and is frustrated by loss of identity as well. We can defend and celebrate local identity with our designs and simultaneously reaffirm our own cultural importance.    

I think that studying history and theory has helped me to better identify these trends and our role today—at least how I understand it—as guardians of place.