To justify and promote its practices the modern movement in architecture generated some of the most incoherent propaganda ever written, and then later engendered some of the most coherent criticisms of both its propaganda and practices. For about thirty years from, say, 1960 to1990 there first emerged the intuition that something about the modern movement wasn’t adding up followed by analyses and evaluations of various kind that called out the questionable veracity and validity of the movement’s philosophical origins, its contradictions and failures in practice, and finally the discrediting of many, though not all, of its practices.
Steve and I attended graduate school at the height of all that (late 70s, early 80s) when writers such as Colin Rowe and Alan Colquhoun, publications such as Oppositions and Perspecta, and architects such as Robert Venturi (Complexity and Contradiction) and Michael Dennis (Court and Garden)—most of them associated with schools of architecture—offered erudite, complex, and incisive commentary that despite their undeniable eloquence and convincing appeals to common sense never insisted on agreement, only an appreciation of the arguments made and fair consideration of them. It was “academic criticism” but only to the extent that it aimed to be useful in informing real world practice.
None of this was criticism in that way we think of movie or theater criticism—meaning thumbs up or thumbs down opinions about specific works—but rather an attempt to place theory and practice in historical, cultural, social, and economic context so that we may decide for ourselves. Persuasion was still the goal, but to the extent possible in an admittedly value driven conversation and despite however much the writing was always subject to the subjectivity of the writer, so was objectivity. Crucially, it was never only about historical, cultural, social, or economic context and always about the architecture and the architect’s practices in relationship with it. Those writing at that time viscerally or at least vicariously knew what it was like to be an architect. They knew that architects still always had (and have) agency no matter the context or era.
Later, though, we got quasi-poetic sociologically minded writers like Mike Davis (City of Quartz) and D.J. Waldie (Holy Land: a Suburban Memoir) who seemed to know or care little of architecture or architects and who wrote as if all that mattered in understanding our built environment was historical, cultural, social and economic context—the implication being that it, like Hegel’s ghosts, determined the architecture of societies and their cities. For an architect there was not much to learn beyond what any citizen generally interested in understanding the sociology of a place and time might.
Then toward the end of the questioning-of-modern-architecture era counter-reformation critics emerged who wrote mostly for newspapers and magazines about just-opened buildings as movie critics do about just-opened films resplendent with up-to-the-minute, off-the-cuff, trending, topical and entirely subjective commentary. Critics at turn of the century such as Herbert Muschamp at the New York Times and Nicolai Ouroussoff at the Los Angeles Times published articles that offered little more than gossip and promotional PR copy for their favorite architects (and themselves). For an architect there was not much to learn except which architects those critics liked.
Finally, today, we get nothing but gossip. We get descriptions of how buildings were built, the political twists and turns to get them built, who paid for them, what people are saying about them along with personality profiles of the architects who designed them.
Meanwhile, from the schools of architecture we get intellectually opaque dissertations ostensibly about architecture from those who, because they are so far removed from practice, so driven by the output demands of the institutional-educational complex, and so steeped in cloistered terminology (usually borrowed from other disciplines such as literary criticism, philosophy of aesthetics and psycholinguistics) produce writings so steeped in obfuscation that they offer next to nothing from which a practicing architect could learn anything.
We are mired in disingenuous discourse—what the Princeton University philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt calls “bullshit.” Instead of analytical, methodical discussions of facts and principles, or any kind of theoretical effort aimed at creating testable, conceptual frameworks with which to inform our practice (and vice-versa), we get pretend academics such as Sylvia Lavin at Princeton University and Jeffrey Kipnis at the Ohio State University who are neither interested in nor capable of any of that and just want to sound smart. And pretend architects such as Greg Lynn (FORM) and Thomas Heatherwick (Heatherwick Studios), who with little interest in the true practice of architecture or uncovering its truths in service to improving it in the 21st century just want their work to seem smart.
Architecture like any art should stand on its own, no talking or writing necessary. But there still is, in moderation, the room and need for both. For those of us who want to order our thoughts for ourselves and our fellow practitioners, or for those who are just learning, or because in practice we’re always having to explain ourselves and our work while it's in progress we do have to talk and write at least some. But in the 21st century because of the confusions wrought by the propaganda and practices of the modern movement, the reluctance of the counter-reformationists to accept the modernism’s failures and because so many of us feel threatened or are confused by sound reasoning in response to those failures, we obsfucate. As a result, it has been those who write about architecture and architects themselves who have contributed most to the dumbing down of the public discourse on architecture.