As sustainability is becoming increasingly a requirement, the increase in applying different sustainability assessment and rating systems poses a new challenge to the field. Most projects are obliged to provide evidence of their sustainability strategies, energy conservation, reduction of carbon footprint, and concerns for world climate change. Yet, there is increasing criticism that “these tools [are] still unable to estimate the actual project outputs of sustainable projects, as sustainable measures and technologies can turn out differently in the use-phase. Also, the influence of project end-users is underestimated and not considered properly in these tools” (Abdalla et al. 2011)”

Criticism failed to provide an alternative to evaluation and assessment studies. As Bürger put it, “We live in an age in which the spirit of critique has become strangely numb” (Bürger 2010). There was a time during the mid-twentieth century when criticism was considered the drive to initiate change and improvement of the profession. This period was followed by a period of increased success in evaluation research. The rise of post-occupancy evaluation (POE) research was followed by a more holistic evaluative research covering all building aspects known as building performance evaluation (BPE). It was a clear shift of focus from the “occupant” to the “building” in an effort to achieve more recognition from the prevailing scientific community.

A chronic problem in the field is the value and benefits of its results, and how are they are utilized by practitioners, decision-makers, and users. As pointed out in the Federal Facilities Council (FCC) report:

only a limited number of large organizations and institutions have active POE programs. Relatively few organizations have lessons from POE programs fully incorporated into their building delivery processes, job descriptions, or reporting arrangements. One reason for this limited use is the nature of POE itself, which identifies both successes and failures. Most organizations do not reward staff or programs for exposing shortcomings.

(Federal Facilities Council 2001)

Among the barriers to making POE more effective, the report added: the difficulty in establishing causal links between positive outcomes and the physical environment; reluctance by organizations and building professionals to participate in a process that may expose problems or failures; fear of soliciting feedback from occupants on the grounds that both seeking and receiving this type of information may obligate an organization to make costly changes to its services or to the building; lack of participation by building users; and failure to distribute information resulting from POEs to decision-makers and other stakeholders (Federal Facilities Council 2001). Knowledge gained from evaluation studies should be fundamental for an informed new buildings and projects decision-making process.

Defining the socio-cultural context

Socio-cultural studies traditionally focused on the interface between society and culture and its impact on people and their actions. This approach was “first systematized and applied by L. S. Vygotsky and his collaborators in Russia in the nineteen-twenties and thirties. [It was] based on the concept that human activities take place in cultural contexts, and are mediated by language and other symbol systems” (John-Steiner and Holbrook 1996). While this chapter attempts to demonstrate the impact of socio-cultural context on architectural criticism and evaluation, it does not attempt to lessen the impact of other economic, environmental, or technological factors. And, as Bürger “politely” put it, “the general political climate can probably not be denied” (Bürger 2010).

According to Oxford Dictionaries, criticism means “(1) the expression of disapproval of someone or something on the basis of perceived faults or mistakes, (2) the analysis and judgment of the merits and faults of a literary or artistic work” (Oxford Dictionaries 2013). Criticism is perceived as personal opinion of a “recognized critic” based on experience and intellectual procedures aiming at highlighting success and failures of a “significant” project. Aiming at the professional press and community, criticism utilizes specialized terminology, usually out of the reach of the public. Being limited to “visual/aesthetic concerns, such as form, composition, order, etc., but it typically does not cover the addressing of needs for major stakeholders in buildings,” as indicated by Davis and Preiser (Davis and Preiser 2012), architectural criticism had limited impact and value in the public realm. Recognition that architecture criticism is in a state of “crisis” is found in most parts of the world. According to Stead:

Local commentators commonly complain that Australian architectural criticism is “not critical enough”, and that it is characterized by mild, politely descriptive, aesthetic or formalist approaches. Springing from this are a whole string of further assumptions – that critics are not sufficiently objective, that they are biased by their own connections within the small and close-knit architectural community, that they are complicit with the commercial bias of the journals, that they are timid and afraid of litigation, and that for all of these reasons architectural criticism is as nauseatingly sycophantic as it is irrelevant and ineffectual.

(Stead 2003)

On the other hand, attempts were made to bring architectural criticism to the public realm by appointing critics to write columns in popular newspapers, but their rapid disappearance from daily newspapers sends an alarming signal. Although Vanessa Quirk commented that we might think that “The Architect Critic Is Dead” when critics like Paul Goldberger left their long life career in architecture criticism to other media empires (Quirk 2012), as Alan Brake argues, “all the blogs, websites, and publications that cover architecture and urbanism” created a new platform for architectural criticism (Brake 2013).

It is acknowledged that criticism in architecture is not based in scientific inquiry and does not appear to have developed as a clear discipline with its own boundaries in both the Western and non-Western regions. Nevertheless, POE is increasingly accepted as part of the academic and professional activities ranging from the classroom to building commissioning now required by many governments and building authorities.

Do we need architectural criticism and evaluation to continue as separate realms or should they be combined in one? Davis and Preiser (2012) attempted to “bridge the gap between the affective and effective goals of architectural criticism” by exploring an “entirely new form of criticism that is instructive as both a tool to professionals and an explication of the built environment to the layperson beyond aesthetic platitudes” (Davis and Preiser 2012). To achieve integration between criticism and evaluation, they suggest: “For architectural criticism to be valid and comprehensive, the subjective or perceived criteria for criticism and the objective or measured criteria need to be brought together in a single coherent conceptual framework that can be communicated to others” (Davis and Preiser 2012).

Recognizing the socio-cultural context

While conducting various research studies in different contexts, several socio-cultural issues were identified. They ranged from mistrust of people in research and its benefits in changing their lives, and the use of research to harm them, to research as an accepted practice in a society. The political context might cause people to be suspicious of research efforts assuming that researchers are collecting information to harm them. In a village in Egypt’s countryside, people were hostile towards a research team, assuming they were collecting information and pictures of houses to inform authorities to demolish them.