THE PERFORMANCE OF BUILDINGS, ARCHITECTS, AND CRITICS
Introduction
Buildings have to perform, accommodating the needs of inhabitants and accomplishing fundamental tasks like keeping out the rain or holding in the heat or cooling. Likewise, the architects who design buildings and the critics who assess them have to perform, meeting their professional responsibilities in the case of architects as well as garnering the attention of their audience in the case of critics. These various roles can seem at odds with each other. Some architects in the Howard Roark mold and some critics in Oscar Wilde fashion act as if concerns about the performance of a building are beneath them. At the same time, some experts in building performance sound like philistines when they dismiss the aesthetic concerns of architects and critics as a waste of time. Those polarized positions misunderstand what unites all three: their performance.
That misunderstanding stems, in part, from a tradition of seeing architecture as a visual art. That tradition has led architects and critics to focus on the form, space, and materials of a building, often assuming that it functions in the same way that artists and art critics assume that a painter knows how to apply paint correctly and so nothing needs to be said about it. That assumption changes, though, in light of the technological advances and increased complexity of buildings, causing us to view architecture not as a visual, but instead as a performing art (Figure 7.1). As in a theatrical, musical, or dance performance, the work of everyone involved in it matters: the performers, but also the director, set designer, sound engineer, costume crew, and so on. Like the performing arts, architecture also relies on the work of a project team – not just the architects, but the consultants, contractors, clients, inspectors – all of whose performance matters to the end result. And like the performing arts, architecture creates an experience for all who engage in it, and its success or failure at least in part depends on that.
Including architecture in the performing arts seems timely, as thinking about what constitutes performance has greatly expanded over the last several decades. The field of “performance studies” emerged in the 1970s, combining the traditional performing arts with social sciences like anthropology, sociology, and political science, and its practitioners study everything from religious rituals to community celebrations to political protests to workplace protocols as performances (Turner, 1986; Schechner 1988, 2002; Carlson 1996). The literature in performance studies almost never mentions architecture except as the backdrop to these other kinds of performances, and so plenty of opportunity exists for the architectural discipline to join this conversation.
FIGURE 7.1 Architecture is less …
Source: author.
A few have recognized that opportunity. Books like Architecture: A Performing Art (Andrews 1991) and Performative Architecture: Beyond Instrumentality (Kolarevic and Malkawi 2005) have connected architecture and performance, although they range from an explication of one architect’s own buildings to a diverse collection of essays based on a conference.
The performance and movement of users has also informed theories of space in popular architectural discourse, most notably in Bernard Tschumi’s Manhattan Transcripts (Tschumi 1995). In general, though, architecture has remained disconnected from the discipline of performance studies, which makes almost no reference to our field in its literature or core concepts. In this chapter, I hope to make that connection by drawing on concepts developed in performance studies to understand how we might design, evaluate, and critique buildings in new and more integrated ways.
Architecture as performance
What changes when we conceive of architecture as a performing rather than a visual art? It shifts our attention away from thinking of a building as an aesthetic object created by an architect toward inquiring into how it came to be, how many people engage with it, and how it changes over time, much as we would the performance of a play or musical piece. The role of the building evaluator and critic changes as well. A building becomes not something to look at and judge, like a painting, but instead something to experience and assess on its own and in comparison with other work, as we might a drama.
Perhaps the greatest change comes in valuing the work of everyone involved in architecture. Viewing architecture as a visual art has led to an over-emphasis on the work of the design architect, with very little if any attention paid to the large teams of people who design, detail, and construct a building and not enough attention paid to how the building performs after completion in terms of its operation and inhabitation. Unlike most of the visual arts, the performing arts remain a collective and collaborative activity that has a life long after the playwright, composer, and choreographer have completed their work, with the continual reinterpretation of its meaning and purpose by those who perform and experience it. The same holds true for architecture, which of all the arts remains one of the most collaborative and most expensive, with all of the people involved in it deserving of recognition and their work, worthy of assessment.
Not everyone plays the same role in the performance of architecture. Architects remain the instigators of work and the ones who orchestrate its design and construction much as a conductor or director would do. The inhabitants of a building play a role similar to that of the audience in a performance, experiencing the production over and over and responding to it in subtle ways and altering it in the process. And the evaluators and critics of a building, like those in the performing arts, serve to capture those responses and assess the meaning of what they have seen and heard, benchmarking that against other performances and situating the work in the history of the field, to current thinking in the discipline, and to the ideas and values of a culture or community.
Performance studies has identified several ways of thinking about what it means to perform, each of which has something to offer architecture. I will look at three of these conceptual frameworks, and connect them to the design, evaluation, and criticism of buildings (Bell 2008).
Mimicking, making, and moving
Aristotle viewed performance as a kind of mimesis or mimicking of life, which we experience in order to better understand ourselves (Aristotle 1952; Goffman 1959). In modern times, theorists like the anthropologist Victor Turner have argued that performance involves “poiesis,” the Greek word for making, in the sense that we make or enact our culture as we perform (Turner 1982). Others like the ethnographer Dwight Conquergood have likened performance to “kinesis,” the Greek word for moving, arguing that when we perform, we challenge cultural norms and move culture forward in the process (Conquergood 1992).
Those ideas about performance have also played out in architecture (Figure 7.2). Most architects prior to the twentieth century, for example, largely engaged in a kind of mimesis, mimicking the styles of previous buildings in incremental and evolutionary ways. Over the last century, poiesis and kinesis came to characterize architecture much more, with the modern emphasis on the making of architecture and on architecture showing how it was made, as well as on originality of architecture, moving the field forward by breaking with the past.
Architectural education has followed a similar path. Most students begin with imitation (mimesis), referencing the work of those who have come before them and to some degree mimicking the ways of thinking and speaking that characterize the discipline. As students become more proficient, they begin to make more original contributions to a field (poiesis) and in some cases, make a discovery or frame an argument that moves the entire field forward (kinesis).
That same framework also applies to the roles that architects, critics, and building evaluators play. Those who evaluate the performance of buildings do so through a kind of mimesis: gathering data about an extant building, comparing those findings to established benchmarks, and assessing them in terms of the existing literature. They do not mimic, but they do adhere closely to what we know in order to understand a new situation. And while they are not mimes, they do attend to the subtle ways in which bodies inhabit and interpret space.
The designers of buildings perform a kind of poiesis. Even when influenced by the past or an existing context, architects almost always make something new: physically, in the form of a new building or renovation, and culturally, reflecting their own ideas as well as those of clients and communities. Like the ancient poets who first engaged in poiesis, architects obviously play a central role in the making of architecture, but rarely do they fully understand the meaning of what they have made.
FIGURE 7.2 The performance cycle
Source: author.
That role falls to the critics, who operate through kinesis: assessing where the field is moving, what has helped or not helped it move forward, what constitutes a move backward, and what all of this movement means. Critics, in that sense, serve as intellectual kinesiologists, studying the movement not of bodies, but of minds, not just the thinking of individual creators, but also the collective mind of the discipline and the larger culture.
Like actors in a play, the architect, critic, and building evaluator have complementary roles to play in the performance of architecture. One does not trump the other nor can one occur without the other, any more than a play can run without all of its characters interacting on an equal footing. All three roles – mimesis, poiesis, and kinesis – contribute to successful performance, and that remains as true for architecture as for theater, music, and dance.
Enabling, knowing, and judging
A performer needs to have the ability, knowledge, and judgment to perform and here, too, performance studies has something to offer architecture. The ability to perform goes beyond talent and technique of the performer; it includes the ability of people to attend a performance. In that sense, a performance constitutes a community of all of the people involved in it – the performers and audience as well as everyone else responsible for some aspect of putting it on. And in the process, a performance can create a group identity or challenge assumptions of the community of people involved (Bell 2008). A building does the same. The ability of those who design and construct it remains just one part of an ongoing process in which the building enables – or inhibits – others from performing their duties as they live and work.
FIGURE 7.3 Performance characters
Source: author.
Performance also involves a way of knowing, a way of learning about others and also about ourselves. This notion of performance suggests that we understand some things only through their enactment, “in and through the body,” as Elizabeth Bell puts it, and through the careful observation of bodies in space. Architecture performs in this way as well. It creates the spaces within which bodies move, relationships occur, and interactions of all sorts happen among people. A building offers not only the setting within which people perform, but also a reflection of how we enact our daily lives.