THE INFLUENCE OF THE “MILIEU” ON ARCHITECTURAL CRITICISM
Introduction
Criticism is an activity with a very broad cultural meaning whose purpose is to interpret and provide a context. It can be understood to be a hermeneutic that reveals the origins, relations, significances and essentials. The difficulty of passing judgement continues to increase in today’s age of uncertainty and questioning.
(Montaner 1999)
The critical question in this chapter, is the influence of the “milieu” on criticism and building performance evaluation. We will discuss how an understanding of the milieu as a concept is necessary to shed light on the contexts criticism seeks to explicate. In this particular case, the concept of milieu is understood to fall within the definition proposed by the geographer Augustin Berque: “as the relationship of a society to its environment” (Berque 1994). To define what is meant by criticism, we refer to an article in the Encyclopaedia Universalis (Devillard and Jannière 2007) and to an anthology of articles of criticism (Deboulet et al. 2008) in which the authors question beyond the criticism, the critical positions as well as the role of the criticism of architecture’s evolution.
Since the end of the 1980s, according to Hélène Jannière, criticism in specialized literature has become an “object of discussion” and, more recently, “an object of research,” both in France and internationally (Jannière 2008). “The need to reconstruct critical tools,” when faced with the “weakening of doctrines and reference points in architectural trends,” is perhaps one of the reasons for this interest (Jannière 2008).
In this chapter, we shall begin by identifying the respective distinctions and fields of criticism and POE/BPE (post-occupancy/building performance evaluations). Then, by underlining the need to take into consideration the reference milieus of the analysed building projects, we shall discuss the value of developing a hermeneutic approach to criticism and evaluation. Finally, “in today’s age of uncertainty,” we shall question whether the paradigm of sustainable development, adapted according to the milieus, could provide new reference points on which criticism and evaluation could be based. This ultimately facilitates an effort to develop common guidelines, which are important to re-establish the absent or weakened “reference points” mentioned by Jannière.
Architecture to envision changes for the future
What is criticism? An analysis of recent publications in France reveals the difficulty of defining it, and moreover, of specifying its origins. Valérie Devillard and Hélène Jannière, in their article for the Encyclopaedia Universalis, noted two schools of thought with regard to the historiography of criticism: one sees its beginning with the Renaissance and expressed through theoretical investigations and treatises; and the other envisages its beginning more with the publication of the first architectural journals towards the end of the eighteenth century, such as “1789 in Germany,” “1800 in France,” and their chroniclers (Devillard and Jannière 2007).
In the first case, the question was whether the premises of criticism should be based on the development of theoretical thinking and the existential distancing of mankind from its surrounding world; as science supplanted religion, there was less and less mysticism surrounding the natural world, and a more empowered feeling of man as having absolute dominion over it. In the field of architecture, the Renaissance is viewed as a specific moment that saw the birth of modern architecture when, similar to Man’s drawn distinctions between himself and the world he emerged from, the Architect started self-identifying as being distinct from the craftsman.
In the second case, by associating criticism with the development of academic and trade journals, criticism could then be partially linked to the “crisis of the unified world as developed by classical tradition” (Montaner 1999: 126). The evolution of techniques and the discovery of other cultures through journalism resulted in a multiplicity of choices and, in the absence of standards, a move toward eclecticism. In the eighteenth century, the search for universal values began to erode at the same time that convictions of beauty and proportion were linked to physiological phenomena. The journals and other media provided information, commentary, and judgment concerning these changes and directions.
The two schools of thought mentioned by Devillard and Jannière represent a foundation for criticism. However, several authors underline the singularity of the work carried out by the critic given that the contents are quite different from a large number of other texts and doctrines. These cannot be assimilated with other types of writings on architecture or magazine articles.
For Pierre Vago, director of the Revue Architecture d’Aujourd’hui from 1932 to 1947, criticism cannot be reduced to “research” or “theoretical dissertations,” even though it demands “the existence of judgment criteria based on reference data.” Criticism “is more than general, historical, sociological, philosophical or aesthetic studies,” even if it requires “a deep and wide-ranging understanding of all aspects of architecture.” Similarly, it cannot correspond to “a subjective and superficial opinion” (Vago 1964–65). According to the position held by Bernard Huet, chief editor of the Architecture d’Aujourd’hui magazine from 1974 to 1977, one should not confuse “criticism and the distribution of more or less complementary information.” According to him, “a journalist can be a critic” but “a critic should never be regarded as a journalist” (Huet 1995).