Attention — Audio Journal for Architecture

In this episode, titled “Pluralism is Not Enough,” Joseph Bedford offers some provisional thoughts interpreting the situation of this generation of academic architects in the United States. He argues that, in contrast to previous generations concerned with the digital and pragmatism, this generation has reasserted architecture’s cultural, critical and disciplinary autonomy. Yet he also argues that this generation needs to reassert architecture’s relationship to a broad ideological field, beyond merely the single ideology of pluralism alone, in order to ensure that architecture as a cultural enterprise remains truly political and to enable the discipline to continue to advance.

In this episode we hear from this generation on their experience with building practice in contemporary America. The cohort is focused on moving away from speculative or gallery work and towards substantial built projects, but they describe the challenges in getting a small, academic building practice off the ground. They highlight the ways that academic bona fides no longer translate to meaningful commissions. Whereas prior generations were rewarded for their disciplinary mastery, they find themselves lacking professional expertise, competing against more resourced corporate firms, and feeling that their perspective as designers is no longer valuable to clients.

In this episode, we heard this generation struggle with their ambivalence around the discipline of architecture, which they saw as essential for maintaining a shared conversation, but also as exclusionary, politically suspect, and frequently irrelevant to the broader world. There was consensus around a need to expand the discipline, returning to this generation’s political and ideological commitments to liberal pluralism. Excitement around the changing discipline, especially in pedagogical contexts, went hand in hand with anxiety around maintaining architectural expertise, whatever that may be.

In this episode, we hear about the lack of ideological debate and disagreement within contemporary academic architectural culture. This generation airs their critiques of the performative, chauvinistic, binary debates of the past and argue instead for a pluralistic approach to ideology, where the approaches of varying practitioners can coexist without producing conflict. The merits of this approach remain an open question. This group emphasized how pluralism foregrounds diversity and inclusion, while others saw the ideological attitude as problematically apolitical, aligned with the incentives of social media, unable to push design forward, or complicit with the status quo of the market.

In this episode, we hear about the difficulty of constructing coherent aesthetic camps in this generation, exemplified by responses to Michael Meredith’s “Indifference, Again” (2017). Instead, we list a range of aesthetic keywords that this generation identified as representing areas of interest: formlessness, informality, discrete parts, messiness, crudeness, simple construction, and familiar forms. The group discusses the importance of tooling one’s aesthetics to an audience outside of architectural academia, and question what authorship looks like today

In this episode we trace the genealogies of this generation through academic lineages, their movements through the geography of American Academia, and the post-critical or projective discourses which defined much of their time as students.

In this episode we hear from the group of American academic architects that has been brought together by this issue of attention. The group pushes back against their characterization as a generation, though there are throughlines in the group— namely their responses to the digital project, the crash of 2008, and their individual, pluralized approaches to architecture.

In this episode, Megan Eardley interviews the investigative journalist and veteran beat reporter Caryn Dolley about the use of biometric and building surveillance devices in organized crime networks. With reference to her journalism and research for her book “The Enforcers” (2019), Dolley describes the movement of illicit and counterfeit goods through night clubs and the duplication of the state security apparatus in post-Apartheid South Africa.

Like proof, evidence typically refers to things, traces, marks, or signs, that can be studied to establish relevant facts and evaluate competing theories. But while proof has been associated with tests and verification procedures since the thirteenth century, evidence (or the Latin evidentia) refers to something that is “manifest to the senses” and “obvious”– there in a way that is not subject to dispute. To examine evidence is thus to contend with the politics of presence, practices of display, and conditions of access. In this episode, Megan Eardley discusses these concerns with Eyal Weizman, who is a critical proponent for forensic research in architecture today.

In this episode, Megan Eardley interviews the writer and artist Bryan Finoki. He describes how he came to study the security industry and reflects on his process of harvesting his own field recordings, synthesized sounds, and files scraped off the web, to make Dark Freqs, an original sound composition produced for Attention and this issue on Detective Work.

In Episode 1, Anna Goodman explains how contemporary architects in the United States often pursue community-engaged work through the design of processes. Analysis from the architectural historian Susanne Cowan helps demonstrate how this contrasts with early modern designers’ strong association of community and territory. The episode features excerpts from interviews with Jeff Hou, Maria Sykes and Mary Comerio as well as audio recordings of the work of Louis Mumford.

In Episode 3, Anna Goodman explores how a focus on the process of design over its products located community design at the intersection of anti-institutional activism and other social movements. It focuses on a series of events catalyzed by the construction of Berkeley’s People’s Park, using audio clips of participants provided by the Pacific Radio Archives, the documentary Design as a Social Act as well as commentary from the urban and architectural historian Anthony Raynsford.

This piece asks the question: “what is theory?” It begins by attempting to define “theory” as a term or as a concept, a task that involves addressing ideas of abstraction, generalization, science, discourse, language and rhetoric, as well as the persistent oppositions between theory and practice, theory and history, theory as engaged and instrumental or theory as reflective and critical.