There is a strain of contemporary architectural criticism that is troubling me. You have probably heard that print journalism is facing a perfect storm: a global recession combined with a paradigm shift to a new system of delivery. So we can forgive the current gloominess of a lot of current architectural journalism. What is less easy to forgive is the increasingly nostalgic tone of self-published architectural writing on the web. Hitherto print journalists have had a tendency to either dismiss or overly praise their online competitors. Both of those approaches is born of fear. With this industry in tumult, the worst has already happened and we can take a long hard look at what is going on online. Here, one might think that there would at least be some optimism and some vision of the future. This is unfortunately not the case.
Trawling through the blogs and websites written in the UK, one is left with the clear impression that a slow retreat from the future is taking place, particularly in the field of architecture and design criticism. Take a website like thingsmagazine.net. Here a group of ex-RCA students have turned trawling the web for odd images into an art form. One of their typical blogs features links to 30-year-old images of China, steam locomotives from 1983 and forests grown into the form of Russian words in the former Soviet Union. It’s diverting, makes you giddy and leaves you feeling the way you did when you were a kid and had played too many video games: entertained, a bit poorer and none-the-wiser. In a world of almost infinite self-publishing possibilities the web is home to a huge host of visual effluvia, a flotsam and jetsam of jpegs. Some people think this is an end in itself.
It is wrong to single out thingsmagazine.net that merely does what a lot of other people are doing but in a more rigorous and programmatic fashion. A site like Strange Harvest by Sam Jacob has, to take three posts at random, the Russian words again, a giant figure of Christ in an odd church design and a deeply nostalgic although well-written piece about raving on the M25. Fantastic Journal by Jacob’s partner at FAT, Charles Holland has The KLF, a Brief Design History of the Ice Cream Van and Monster Moves, the National Geographic TV show about moving really big things. Implicit within the text on these different websites is the belief that this is part of a valid research process for the architecture and design practice, of which both of these self-publishers are members.
I would strongly argue that it isn’t valid. This is not because I believe in the distinction between high and low art, but because the internet isn’t the real world. We are not here replicating the work of the Venturi’s in Las Vegas or Reyner Banham in Los Angeles. We are just sitting around looking at 100K of digital information perceived in two dimensions, with no register of what is more important than something else.
In addition, one sees how the web has become a medium of nostalgia. This goes for those of a modernist bent as much as a postmodernist one. Sit Down Man, You’re a Bloody Tragedy, a blog by Owen Hatherley, author of the recently published book, Militant Modernism, is clearly focused on an interesting collection of articles he has had published plus some online-only musings. This includes an article on Ford which was prompted by a link to a piece about the Ford Anglia on the aforementioned Fantastic Journal. Here we have a fan of civic modernism and an arch postmodernist agreeing on the delights of a car that was popular in the Seventies. This is the kind of scenario that should give us cause for concern.
Inherent in the system of blogging is writing in isolation and then linking with other bloggers. In architecture and design, this search for consensus is creating a general atmosphere of nostalgia, which is pathetic at a time when the future is up for grabs. If you cannot agree on the present what chance do you have about agreeing on the future? Far better, it seems, to concentrate on the past. Not in any critical way of course, but by designating some grainy images as interesting. Probably of a John Carpenter film. Or Poundbury. If the future is frightening, retreat from it. When DAB radios first came out, they were all designed to look like old radios. When old radios came out, they were designed to look like cabinets. We’re experiencing the equivalent with architectural criticism.
Of course, the joy of the web is that people can publish what they like and my strong misgivings are not going to stop the indulgent retrospection that appears to be welling up to greet the recession. I do hope, though, that bloggers are not deceived by the idea that what they are doing is providing a serious vision for the future.
After reading the Abrahams’ article, I took a look at the websites he references. It seems they are not intended to be criticism blogs at all. Thingsmagazine.net specifically expresses this in their rebuttal to Abrahams’ characterizations. Most are simple reporting the latest news, buildings, or things. Some do this better than others. I’ve gotten several RSS feeds from different sights only to be bombarded with the same news, same images, and same sources. Those that actually carve out a niche inevitably stand out in my inbox.
Instead, Abrahams argument should have pointed to the lack of criticism blogs on the web, not any nostalgia with the milieu of those that currently vie for being the first to report on Zaha’s burning building or cattle branding books. One would think that the web would be ideal for disseminating one’s own criticism and theories, particularly for students and young professionals eager to make a place for themselves. This doesn’t seem to be happening even though this form of communication has the potential to completely undermine the gatekeepers of architectural discourse. The bigger question here is why?
I think this article by Abrahams is interesting but could go a lot further.
I started a serious blog – coromandal.wordpress.com – over a year ago. It’s about editing and gleaning information on the web – and using my editing choices to build an argument. I then started another blog called strawdogs.wordpress which I think could be one of the blogs Abrahams thinks is nostalgic. I like coromandal better than strawdogs because the argument it makes is much clearer and stronger.
Looking at old pictures or words can be nostalgic but isn’t always. Picasso collected images of African masks; Francis Bacon gleaned ideas from photographs of animal carcasses. Serious artists glean and repackage – and not just the postmodernists. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, they say.
I think the web gives the opportunity for the novice to self publish. Criticism is a serious business and with so many voices entering the ring, there is a very real possibility that criticism becomes too populist. But, maybe this surge is a reaction against the opposite tendency – too few voices for too long offering narrow ideas.
Did you wake up on the wrong side of the keyboard this morning? Did a blogger run off with your wife?
Is this magazine providing a vision for the future? Are most? It’s my understanding that a HUGE portion of architecture publication is about looking at buildings – built, un-built, whatever – not necessarily speculating on what’s to come. But, if that’s what you’re looking for, then I think you’re being disingenuous by citing the sites you’ve listed here. They make no attempt to address the future – it’s not their goal. Neither is it the goal of MOST architecture publications.
That said, it’s not hard to find a blog that is featuring current projects and is critical of the work being done, offering opinions on projects as they arise – OR to find a blog that deals more in ‘theory’, and is writing speculatively about architecture and design [altho, I have to admit, there are fewer of the latter]. You seem to have failed to look – and this magazine should be ashamed of your poor research. One thing we know for sure about the internet is that it makes it harder for you to formulate an argument based solely on the sources that support you – it’s incredibly easy to see multiple sides of everything, and more difficult to ignore / manipulate facts.
Are the internet and blogging hurting intelligent architectural discourse? I’m not sure – but probably not. What I can say for sure is that the ‘net isn’t plagued by ‘nostalgic’ sites – and that your article is dishonest in holding these sites you’ve listed as examples.
Additionally, a large number of bloggers are young people – getting their first taste of writing about architecture and design. We have yet to see where the conversation is really going – although I would argue that the explosion of ‘green’ and ’sustainable’ design and technologies has been largely fueled by the internet. That, and I think you may be pointing the finger at the wrong people – because someone [a great many 'someones', it would seem] is reading this stuff. What does this say about READERS is the most important question.
Tim,
I posted a response to your piece at Fantastic Journal, as did several other of the other blogs you mention.
Needless to say I think you’re wrong! The nostalgic angle is interesting but I’m not sure why you’ve chosen the sites you have. It all seems a little personal and deliberate and has little to do with the content of each. Unless you object to us linking to each other at all. Andy why should we not be engaging in conversation?
Writing about the recent past doesn’t make you nostalgic anymore than writing about car design makes you Jeremy Clarkson. It’s what you say that’s important.
Anyway, was curious as to the agenda behind your side swipe as much as anything. Perhaps you could elucidate further?
Charles Holland
It’s got everything to do with the content. I read a lot of blogs as we all do, and I’d noticed a strange phenomenon in several I read regularly which I didn’t see elsewhere. It may seem unfair to you but I took the time to think seriously about what I noticed, I read a lot of material on them, discussed it with my colleagues and came to a conclusion. Given the fact that one of the categories on your blog is entitled Nostalgia, I find it a bit odd that you are getting upset at being described as nostalgic.
With relation to some of the things you say in your post on your blog:
For a start, I am not interested in reinforcing the hierarchy between web and print. Nowhere in my article do I do so. Indeed in my opening paragraph I establish the fact that the boundaries are blurring. Indeed – and don’t tell my publishers this – I appear to be looking to the web for something more positive than I am reading in print. Perhaps you believe in a hierarchy. I don’t.
I don’t look to Venturi Scott Brown as an example of critical writing but I would emphasise that there is a great deal of difference between what they did and what you do. They went out into the world and recorded it. Their analysis grew out of an engagement with reality. My main beef is with anyone who confuses the act of recording and analysing the real world with the act of downloading and analysing jpegs.
Yes, we need to analyse our past in order to create the future. However if we mediate our understanding of the past exclusively through archived images on the internet; thinking through its associative connections as our single system of understanding, then we are making a mistake. It’s not the thinking about the past, which prompts the nostalgia but revelling in the mediation of it. There are a lot of architecture and design blogs i like (eg Subtopia, Core77, Lebeus Woods’ blog). These tend to relate to the real world or propose something for the future, tell me something about the world as it is. They also tend to be American.
You say I write ‘a self-censoring ideology of what it’s acceptable to write about’. I don’t. I am saying that if one represent the pasts as it is in the present, one naturally falls into thinking about the future. And surely at this time, in this economic, social and political climate we should be doing that. That’s my only agenda. It says a lot that you read my disagreement with you as a personal slight rather than a considered response to your writing and publishing.
There is a spectre of contemporary architectural criticism haunting Tim Abrahams
Worryingly bad piece, Tim. Did you formulate your anxieties about the web in 1996? You suggest (obliquely) that the blogs (that you don’t like) are mere self-publishers who award themselves and their friends auto-validated authority. Where does your authority come from? You paint a picture of these bloggers (again, of those that you have a political disagreement with) as ‘isolated’, ‘pathetic’, ‘non-critical’ and un-serious along with a steady stream of slyly pejorative terms for their output. These are very hard terms, and yet you have no compelling reason to use these them, other than suggesting these bloggers are disengaged from ‘the real word’. This is a very very dated argument against online life from the 1990’s.
Your point that these bloggers are not relevant because you do not address current pressing issues is surprising as this is precisely what these blogs are primarily about. Even a cursory look at the sites will demonstrate this. The combination of refusing to see these blogs for what they are with an attempt to discredit them though derogatory terms means that there is indeed something else going on here.
Is your issue with their method? I hope that you do not think there is only one way to interrogate and understand the world. That would be scary. I hope that you do not think that only something which presents itself as ‘live documentary’ can be truthful (or worse ‘neutral’) because that would render you tediously dull and usefulness as cultural commentator. It is clear that what worries you about these blogs is that they ARE critical whereas you as a Blueprint writer can never be. As Blueprint is pat of the game of validating the world as it is, it can have no true engagement with either potential ‘futures’ (as you put it) or ‘real world’ contemporary issues. You say that these blogs think ‘Not in any critical way of course, but by designating some grainy images as interesting’. This is an almost perfect description of Blueprint (except ‘grainy’ of course)! Maybe you should start your own independent blog. You’ll feel less frustrated as a writer that way.
How can you possibly contend that these blogs don’t represent a coherent critical ideology? What could be more cogent than fetishizing “George and Mildred” and endlessly sucking Jarvis Cocker’s cock?
They’re only love-lorn honkeys. Leave them alone.
Whimsy or die!
Strangely, Nostalgia features in a recent post on http://www.fimoculous.com
“This way of thinking — nostalgia for nostalgia — now seems commonplace. But it didn’t exist in the Reagan ’80s or the Wategate ’70s” (http://www.fimoculous.com/archive/post-6122.cfm)
As an aside, Tim, your article reads as if you didn’t go the the RCA, haven’t published a book, and are not the principal of a firm of Architects, and you are very upset with the people who did/have/are…
I find paradoxical the criticism of “nostalgia” mixed in the same paragraph with the criticism of the ‘not real’ internet. It seems that the author is nostalgic of the good old days, when public opinions where reduced to opinions printed in the “real world” not open to any response from readers. Readers that to be “real” had to limit themselves to read and let the writing to ‘real writers’.
Mr. Abrahams, the future is the internet, with its bloggers, its links all over and it is here already. One day nostalgia will be the only thing that will recall that once existed printed press.
Nostalgia may not be a substitute for criticism, but neither is the uncritical acceptance of whatever new gadget a Cedric Price or Zaha come up with, nor is the thoughtless rejection of any attempt to reclaim good design from the past. After all, if it’s good, what does it matter how old it is? If there is anything “not-real” to our contemporary world, it is this unrelenting and arbitrary flight ever forward.
How dare you criticise the gadgets of the socialist visionary and paper architect Cedric Price? You’re talking about one of the all time gadget-eers there pal! He would gadget away for hours, that one…. Before he died. Six years ago.
This sounds like a straw man argument. Not sure what you attacking unless it is the absence of any clear position taken by those you mention. I would venture to say that you dislike the disorganization of these blogs themes and content. It sounds like an impulse to want to organize the decentralized non-hierarchical attention grabbing sites. Sounds like a problem of any media where popularity doesnt seem to measure the quality of a work.
In any case the sites you mention a loose collections of the notable. A conversation of the incidentally interesting, a step above the quotidian. Just because they are not rigorous collections doesn’t mean they are irrelevant. Less forceful, sure.
It’s culture, man.