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BUILDING UPON LOVE IN AN AGE OF INNOVATION

Peter Olshavsky

With recent efforts to recuperate modernity, innovation has been thrust into the foreground. While this effort might hold value for society, it can become pathological when innovation is mistaken as an end in itself. Evgeny Morozov has leveled insightful criticism against Silicon Valley’s obsession with this thinking.² Yet, within architecture the recent shift towards post-critical practices has opened its own version of this pathology. This dilemma has consequences for designers that need to be discussed from a position other than complicit approval. My position is that we can’t simply accept reductive forms of practice that blindly promote innovation. Using the work of Alberto Pérez-Gómez, I will argue for a richer approach. This will shift focus from foreground intelligence to a hermeneutic position that draws on a less articulate background to innovate appropriately.

Disciplinary shift

The dominant architectural conversation has shifted away from what Anthony Vidler describes as an “Age of Discourse.” Architecture in “the knowledge society,” Michael Speaks argues, is no longer propelled by “grand ideas or theories realized in visionary form.”³ As an early critic of Euro-American discourse, he and others point to the troubles of the critical project, which derives from the work of Manfredo Tafuri, Jacques Derrida, Theodor Adorno and various others. Specifically, he criticizes ineffectual concepts that sought “resistance” and “negation” of consumer society and metaphysical or political hegemony. “There is in the deepest motivations of architecture,” Rem Koolhaas similarly observed, “something that cannot be critical.”4 However, Speaks quickly moves past K. Michael Hays’ notion of “criticality,” to question theory as a whole.⁵ “Theory was interesting,” he says, “but now we have work.”⁶

Looking at academically inclined practices of the past forty years like Peter Eisenman and Diller+Scofidio, Speaks believes too much was being said and too little being done. The orientation of theory is supplanted by the demand that architecture “just works!” if I can misappropriate a quote by Steve Jobs, the patron saint of innovation. This is supported by the claim that “use-value,” as Speaks notes, is more important than “truth content.”⁷ Setting aside the fact that Speaks’ new found pragmatism reeks of rupture talk, it suggests that one must consciously build upon the teachings of our age. Architects should reshape their practices to innovate because global society demands nothing less. Speaks’ view indeed might help some academics and practitioners frame their practices outside of “criticality.” What has gone unmentioned is how he devotes himself to an end that is only a means, which neglects the background for the sake of the foreground, as he frames practices that are “after theory.”

Design intelligence

Design intelligence was coined by Speaks to characterize a diverse group of practices from Asymptote to George Yu and Neil Denari. It appeared, he says, in the 1990s but was “inaugurated” by the events of September 11, 2001. He contends that the multitude of knowledge generated during the design process is valuable to the business of architecture. But this knowledge is frequently overlooked in favor of the design. Contrasted with the earlier vanguard, he promotes a less object-focused practice.⁸ The “dislocative” possibilities of formal novelty, central to the earlier vanguard, are framed as a retreat from relevance. Instead design intelligence, he advocates, offers an important area for design research without rejecting the reality of current technologies and economy.

Design intelligence, he explains, is manifest through versioning or scenario planning that creates a set of “possible solutions.”⁹ These options are sought primarily through “prototyping.” Architects work rapidly with prototypes to physically test design solutions. This discourages practices that first critically assess an existing situation and act secondly. Instead action and thinking purportedly happen in unison. Speaks describes this as “­thinking-as-doing.” This should not be confused with “making” in the sense of Giambattista Vico. Human truth, for the latter, is more knowable because it is made. Making, Vico suggests, was anti-Cartesian, not simply technical and pointed to the need to understand the historical background from which practices arise. Speaks’ “thinking-as-doing” codifies studio-based production and brands its feedback and output as intelligence. Promoting instrumental production, Speaks has little concern for an individual craftsman, as his focus is the market viability of this knowledge. But Vico is after a reflective model for an individual’s self-understanding because it provides a “practical wisdom” so a maker is able to act prudently.10

Speaks has little concern for prudence. Design intelligence, Speaks argues, is limited only by technical exigencies. Practitioners in this vein hold “no philosophic or professional truth, making use of no specialized theory, these practices are open to the influences of ‘chatter’ and are by disposition willing to learn.”¹¹ The pursuit, control, and application of intelligence are what matters. The architect sacrifices adherences for the sake of realpolitik and solution-focused instrumentality. Adhering to philosophical values can create situations where one might have to compromise their stance for the sake of action. In place of a stance that might (and often does) create conflicting situations, openness and acceptance to information are foregrounded to face rapidly changing “real world” circumstances.

By claiming a monopoly on the “real,” Speaks is able to frame practice as chiefly neutral. The ostensible monopoly and the attending neutrality soften, if not hide, the ideological nature of the architect’s efforts. But to meet requirements, articulate needs or market demands, I argue, one has to recognize the complexity of the present situation, what came before, and how to act or “project” by employing design intelligence. But these actions suggest a point of view and a range of complex ideologically motivated evaluations. Even the basic belief that architects’ intelligence is valuable and can contribute to society stems from a brand of ideology. Ideology, as I use it, is what constitutes one’s intentions and actions even in the most normative sense. This constitution allows the architect to make sense of their practices and act. If we fail to recognize this ideology, can we be so sure we are not excluding outlying or exceptional intelligence?

Chatter and information

Even practices open to what Speaks calls “chatter” run the risk of excluding information. The term chatter describes contemporary reality as it is intertwined with digital information. Chatter might be “published on the web, found in popular culture, gleaned from other professions and design disciplines.”12 The term, according to Speaks, tries to account for the ability to process massive collections of information, analyze it instantly, and draw sometimes-surprising outcomes from such information. This diverse information and views opened by increasing access to chatter potentially escalates contact with alternatives. Information, as Cass Sunstein observes, might open a person to “a range of chance encounters, involving shared experiences with diverse others, and also exposure to materials and topics that they did not seek out in advance.”¹³ But exposure is countered by the capacity to filter information based on one’s tacit background, preferences as well as control methods in a pre-determined or unknowing way. I might be able to diagram the demographics and spatial conditions of an under-privileged neighborhood but tell you nothing about the people, architecture and their stories. In other words, I might be cherry-picking information that appears in the foreground of chatter while overlooking harder to see values that constitute the background. In short, chatter can offer surprises but it can equally exclude, obscure or reinforce what one already knows.

From Speaks’ various writings one can surmise that information dredged up out of the chatter can inform the boundaries of inventory, analysis, who participates, types of practices, ideas, visualizations, feedback loops, and the shaping of design innovation to name a few instances. But these are not simply neutral actions. Even simple information extracted from chatter is beholden to a specific orientation. The fact is that no matter how consciously reflective, one’s ideological position manifests how apophenia in any of the above settings is structured. One’s present position includes a range of issues, including our sediment past, future expectation, and the fact that we “are” our bodies.¹⁴ Ideological biases are part of being human. They inevitably shape the patterns we discover. This is not always an a priori problem. In fact, phenomenology teaches that consciousness is itself intentional. Any practice, even if entirely open-ended or scientifically inclined, Hans-Georg Gadamer explains, is beset by prejudices.¹⁵ These are not necessarily the heinous sort, but the tacit judgments cast pre-reflectively that open us to experiences. Even a seemingly banal act like collecting information assumes there is something to be found and perhaps taken away. Indeed these pre-judgments help make sense of one’s design practice, but they also shape its orientation.

In the Euro-American West, information drawn from chatter can become a veil of legitimacy operating under the broader protections afforded to techno-science. Information, though fabricated, can be reified as fact. This further veils its orientation. Recall the multitude of American and British “intelligence” after 9/11 that buttressed the call to war. If information is reified, it can be placed outside of personal and political change. Referencing CIA intelligence gathering, Speaks claims that information impacts ­practice, which makes practice more adaptable. Yet, practices do not seem to impact information, which implies that information is placed beyond purposeful shaping. It becomes impervious to critique or worse seems “natural.” Intervention can be dismissed as interference with its natural order. Attempting to manage or reconfigure it becomes a hopeless enterprise. We simply must listen and obey.

While theoretical discourse, as Speaks suggests, can become perverted as intellectual posturing, in certain circles, including the Essex School, it was and still is understood as a way of orienting oneself and one’s work.16 Thus it was interpretative, open to argumentation and never a static construction. Yet, Speaks frames it as a straw man. “Theory is not just irrelevant,” he says, “but was and continues to be an impediment to the development of a culture of innovation in architecture.”¹⁷

To articulate his definition of innovation, Speaks cribs the ideas of Peter F. Drucker, a prolific writer and renowned organizational management consultant. Speaks uses Drucker’s framework to distinguish between “innovation” and “problem-solving.” Problem solving reactively addresses an issue whereas innovation is a pro-active approach. Innovative designers do not simply address an existing problem. They “add something unexpected, something not given in the brief or competition guidelines.”¹⁸ An innovation is a “change that creates a new dimension of performance,” which might lead an innovator beyond a present predicament to new products, services, and perhaps new businesses.¹⁹ It offers clients “alternative solutions” to their problems. This, Speaks claims, makes design intelligence “inherently innovative.” In other words, innovation is framed as nearly an autonomous pursuit. It is valued outside of virtually any framework, except that it creates monetary value and “new potential for satisfaction.”²⁰ In this way, it papers over its solution-focused core while distracting us with refrains of technological progress and speculative promises of capitalist morality.

The specifics of how innovation happens are not as important as the underlying ideology and its implications for architects. In fact, the ideological issues associated with innovation raise more questions than answers. Are innovative designers after the best chances for impact, meeting client’s demands, publications, funding, or fame? Does the urgency to innovate actually attenuate the discussions on what constitutes our dilemmas? Does this urgency not promote practices that overlook the messy background, which as Jeremy Till suggests, always beset architecture with uncertainty and contingency?²¹ Are we simply innovating for the sake of innovation?

Consider “the world’s first eco-city” by William McDonough and Partners in Huangbaiyu, China. McDonough is best known for the 2002 book Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, co-written with Michael Braungart.22 This book puts forward a biomimetic account of innovation where people should act like communal leaf-cutter ants and architecture is at its best when it patterns itself on a cherry tree. McDonough had the chance to plant numerous works in Huangbaiyu as China’s broader effort to urbanize 250 million rural residences. The innovative design of the eco-city was, however, inappropriate. It did not account for the historically constructed social, cultural, and economic demands of the villagers. From plots of land that are too small to farm or tend livestock, to garages for people lacking the means to afford cars, its failures have been made plain by Shannon May.²³ In Huangbaiyu, the architect’s innovative solutions created an untenable situation.

Equally, what is framed as a site rife for innovation, Morozov suggests, might be a characteristic or compromise that makes a situation work for the parties with a stake in that setting. This has been the case with graffiti. Typically, graffiti is seen as an irritant in the smooth operations of many cities due to its associations with urban blight and the cost of its removal. Over the years, it has been suppressed with surveillance, defensible well-lit spaces, buildings networked to the authorities, and smarter anti-graffiti materials. But these have not and will likely never eliminate graffiti. New paint, adhesives, and other forms of marking will be invented or co-opted. This raises the question why and for whom does one innovate? But perhaps this unmanageable element might enable positive personal, cultural or economic developments? The rise of Street Art is a case in point. Not every kid with a spray can merit the esteem of Banksy or Barry McGee, but that’s not the point. Some neighborhoods, like Belleville, Paris, have embraced graffiti to cultivate a social and economic scene, instead of attempting to employ another graffiti fighting innovation.²⁴ This example suggests that the desire to problem solve through innovation can veil alternatives that better respond to how competing interests are played out through the contested domains of our selves, buildings, and cities. But to recognize when and where innovation should occur, should an architect not account for more than design intelligence allows?

Innovation built upon love

Many people assume our crises are so overwhelming that they tie our hands and force us to innovate. While the assessment of our situation might be true, it does not mean an innovative practice must be reductive. In fact, I will articulate an ethical praxis drawn from the nuanced and historical orientation found in Alberto Pérez-Gómez’s book Built upon Love: Architectural Longing after Ethics and Aesthetics.25 To distinguish its orientation from design intelligence, I will outline key distinctions – interpretive orientation, phronetic knowledge, meaningful innovation, and questioning – that show Pérez-Gómez’s stance as a more appropriate way to foster innovation.

Chatter / interpretive orientation

“An agent free from all frameworks,” Charles Taylor explains, “rather spells for us a person in the grip of an appalling identity crisis.”²⁶ Without orientation, one would be set adrift in the space of appearances. An architect would be unable to judge or make informed qualitative evaluations necessary for action. Design intelligence assumes that being set adrift is positive because it empowers the architect to be informed by chatter. Yet, what emerges from this ungrounded view does not guarantee positive behavioral, socio-political or disciplinary change. It might in the end encumber all of these.

“Genuine innovation,” as Pérez-Gómez suggests, “requires a wide-ranging hermeneutic of the discipline (a historical understanding of form, program, and intentionality) that provides the architect with an appropriate language to verbalize a position.”²⁷ This orientation goes beyond a flippant engagement with chatter. “The architect,” as Pérez-Gómez notes, “requires a broad cultural foundation to be able to generate an ethical response.”²⁸ A personal imagination is placed in dialogue with the intentions of contemporaries, different cultures, and other historical epochs. Through dialogue involving interpretation, which is always courteous and critical, an architect can establish a ground from which meaningful agency springs.

Design intelligence / phronetic knowledge

Architects should offer more than the speculative promises and capitalist morality because “consumption and possession” are the “bastard aims of desire.”²⁹ Contrary to this view, Pérez-Gómez argues for practical philosophy. “Only work grounded in … practical philosophy,” he says, “is capable of contributing effectively to cultural communication, becoming authentic innovation rather than mere fashionable novelty.”³⁰

Practical philosophy is rooted in “phronetic knowledge,” which comes from the Greek word phronēsis meaning practical wisdom. Phronetic knowledge is cultivated “through a profound comprehension of history and culture.”³¹ It is embodied and transmitted by specific stories, like Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. This knowledge comes from the bottom-up and is based on understanding normative conditions, including values, habits and the background from which information and practices emerge. Phronetic knowledge is not dogmatic nor does it dictate to practice. Rather it evokes sound judgment and seeks out what is meaningful. So, in place of instrumental concerns of how an architect might innovate, it shifts to ethical considerations of why an architect should innovate.

Innovation, contrary to Speaks’ suggestion, is not an end in itself. To avoid this shortcoming, Antoine Picon argues, “architectural innovation” must “make sense,” therefore it should be attentive to “meaning.”32 According to Pérez-Gómez, “meaning” should not be construed as a sign or intellectual construction. It is “more than merely information; it is knowledge of the world and its sensuous materiality understood by the body: a carnal, fully sexual, and therefore opaque experience of truth.”³³ It appears during a work’s reception. Meaning is “both the experience of something new, even destabilizing, while also recognizing the experience as familiar.”³⁴ “True innovation” is described similarly to meaning as “a work that appears new and unexpected, yet familiar – a work that lasts.”³⁵ Thus innovation is genuine, I would argue, when it is meaningful.

Creating meaningful innovation is similar to love. “Love and, by analogy, creation,” he argues, “have their origins in the deeply felt experience of beauty itself, sometimes destabilizing and never in line with the principlesof logic.”³⁶ It is not tied to any given aesthetic, rationalized practice or code ofconduct. No matter how hard one attempts to systematize genuine innovation for the sake of professional interests; it will not fit comfortably in normative design models, methods or production. This should not be lamented but celebrated.

When meaningful innovation in architecture – Antoni Gaudi’s Casa Batlló, John Hejduk’s masques, or Frederick Kiesler’s endless ­architecture – appears in the space of lived experience, it speaks to one’s most profound sense of existence. This is “an architecture that might be both beautiful and just, responsive to cultural contexts and genuinely creative, [therefore] the architect must recognize its medium is the space of desire. Thus architecture can inspire emotion and induce pathos, being both compassionate and erotic.”³⁷ Thus a truly innovative work has the capacity to reconcile ethics and poetics in a way that reveals and transcends its conditions in a singular fashion. It, as Pérez-Gómez suggests, “lovingly provides a sense of order resonant with our dreams.”³⁸ It might even change one’s life.

Problem solving / asking questions

Focusing on problem solving, whether it adds something new or not, is like being equipped with a hammer; it’s only a matter of time before one contrives all sorts of nails to drive. Instead of eagerly “projecting,” as Reinhold Martin suggests, architects should ask themselves “just what sort of world they are projecting … ?”39 In short, when facing a crisis, there is more to doing good work than enthusiastically “making a difference.” It is not only important, as Teju Cole recommends, to “reason out the need for the need,” but to demand a more enduring commitment.⁴⁰

My criticism of design intelligence should not be misconstrued as advocacy against the newfound faith in architectural knowledge or as an avoidance of problems. Nor am I promoting a retreat into criticality. “Design,” as Pérez-Gómez argues, “is neither problem solving nor mere formal innovation.”⁴¹ Instead of these false alternatives, it is important to seek questions worthy of consideration. These are often older than we think. In fact, reformulating questions, Pérez-Gómez maintains, “have ­contributed imaginative, poetic responses to our universal call for ­dwelling – answers from which we can learn and develop an ability to act here and now.”⁴²

Rather than a means without an end, asking questions from a grounded position is an attempt to respond to the true complexity of our situations where the paths to change are sometimes slow, full of ideological traps, and always tied to a fuller background against which our practice make sense. These differences are crucial, I believe, lest we solve precisely those things that make possible an architecture built upon love.

Notes

  1 Georges Bataille, The Tears of Eros, trans. Peter Connor (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1989), 19.

  2 Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism (New York: Public Affairs, 2013).

  3 Michael Speaks, “Intelligence after Theory,” Perspecta 38, 2006, 106.

  4 Rem Koolhaas, quoted by Beth Kapusta, Canadian Architect Magazine 39 (August 1994): 10.

  5 For an examination of the critical/post-critical debates see George Baird, “‘Criticality’ and Its Discontents,” Harvard Design Magazine 21 (Fall 2004/Winter 2005): 16–21; and Jane Rendell et al., eds., Critical Architecture (London and New York: Routledge, 2007).

  6 Michael Speaks, “Theory Was Interesting … but Now We Have Work,” Architectural Research Quarterly 6 no. 3 (December 2002): 209.

  7 Michael Speaks, “Intelligence after Theory,” 104.

  8 Michael Speaks, “Design Intelligence. Part 2: George Yu Architects,” A+U 388, no. 1 (January 2003): 150.

  9 Michael Speaks, “Design Intelligence. Part 1: Introduction,” A+U 387, no.12 (December 2002): 16.

10 Giambattista Vico, On Humanistic Education: Six Inaugural Orations, 1699–1707, ed. Gian Galeazzo Visconti, trans. Giorgio A. Pinton and Arthur W. Shippee, intro. Donald Phillip Verene (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 8.

11 Speaks, “Intelligence after Theory,” 106.

12 Speaks, “Design Intelligence – Part 1,” 18.

13 Cass Sunstein, Republic.com (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 11–12.

14 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception: And Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 3–5.

15 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London & New York: Bloombury, 2013), 289–292.

16 The Essex School refers to the Master’s courses formed by Joseph Rykwert with Dalibor Vesely in the Department of Art at the University of Essex. Their approaches, underwritten by hermeneutic and phenomenological frameworks, have influenced several generations of architects, historians and educators, including Daniel Libeskind, David Leatherbarrow, Alberto Pérez-Gómez and many others. See Helen Thomas, “Invention in the Shadow of History: Joseph Rykwert at the University of Essex,” Journal of Architectural Education 58, no. 2 (Nov. 2004): 39–45.

17 Speaks, “Intelligence after Theory,” 74.

18 Speaks, “Design Intelligence. Part 2,” 150.

19 Peter F. Drucker, Innovation and Entrepreneurship: Practice and Principles (New York: HarpersBusiness, 1993), 30–36.

20 Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1974), 60.

21 Jeremy Till, Architecture Depends (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009).

22 William McDonough and Michael Braungart, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things (New York: North Point Press, 2002).

23 Shannon May, “Ecological Crisis and Eco-Villages in China,” CounterPunch (Nov. 21–23, 2008), accessed June 10, 2013, www.counterpunch.org/2008/11/21/ecological-crisis-and-eco-villages-in-china.

24 “Mur de graff au square Karcher,” Mairie20.Paris, accessed November 20, 2013, www.mairie20.paris.fr/mairie20/jsp/site/Portal.jsp?page_id=1104.

25 Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Built upon Love: Architectural Longing after Ethics and Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 187–201.

26 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 31.

27 Pérez-Gómez, Built upon Love, 201.

28 Ibid.

29 Ibid., 5.

30 Ibid., 110.

31 Ibid.

32 Antoine Picon, “Architecture, Innovation and Tradition,” AD 83, no. 1 (January/February 2013): 133.

33 Pérez-Gómez, Built upon Love, 109.

34 Graham Cairn, “Conversation with Alberto Pérez-Gómez,” unpublished manuscript, unpaginated.

35 Pérez-Gómez, Built upon Love, 185.

36 Ibid., 28.

37 Cairn, “Conversation with Alberto Pérez-Gómez.”

38 Pérez-Gómez, Built upon Love, 4.

39 Reinhold Martin, “Critical of What?” Harvard Design Magazine, 22 (Spring/Summer 2005): 4.

40 Teju Cole, “The White Savior Industrial Complex,” TheAtlantic, March 21, 2012, accessed February 01, 2013, www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/the-white-savior-industrial-complex/254843.

41 Pérez-Gómez, Built upon Love, 210.

42 Ibid., 209.