Exhibition view. © Rob Cleary

I may be stepping over some kind of line by reviewing an exhibition that I have something in, but I promise to assume the responsibility of the critic—that is, to be critical, even self-critical. And to have a point. The eminent art critic Claire Bishop recently lamented that there haven’t been many projects that thematize our digital condition. [1] I'd like to elaborate on how this exhibition and the works in it did just that. The take away will be an encapsulation of some of the things to absorb from "the digital" and some themes being pursued in post-digital architecture.

Some preliminaries. The exhibition in question, architecture, architectural & Architecture, was up from June 16 to June 30, 2017, at the A+D Museum in Los Angeles. It was curated by Anthony Morey and Ryan Tyler Martinez. There were 100 contributors to the show, mostly young architects. The process of accumulating the material was very open, even slapdash – little more than "send us three things." One of the things was supposed to be a text, another an image, and the last an object. Each of these was to be matched with one of the three words in the title, which represented three facets of architectural concern: the general public's view ("architecture"), what the discipline claims to be ("Architecture"), and what you think architecture is about ("architectural"). The pairing of things to words and the juxtaposition of the three pairs was supposed to "reveal a possible new situation" and "provoke a conversation."

I offer my own contribution to illustrate—and as a foil. Taking the prompt at face value, I chose for my Architecture/text pair a very disciplinary textbook: Architecture Theory since 1968 by K. Michael Hays. For the architecture/object pairing, I ordered from Amazon a Lego model of Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum, which combines the architecture school application essay trope of "I want to be an architect because I played with Legos as a kid" with a work by the most famous American architect. The epitome of populism. More seriously, for the architectural/image pair, I produced a screen capture of a rotating digital model of Preston Scott Cohen's Tel Aviv Museum of Art – a very formalist work by an "architect's architect," but rendered in the way it would be seen by a designer in his office while designing it. This last one, the image on the computer screen, is where I see the most passion and innovation in architecture culture today.

I said my contribution would serve as a foil. If there was any coherence among the 99 other projects, it was in their reluctance to play the games I played. Everyone seemed constitutionally predisposed against
straightforwardly parsing architecture into three realms. They tended to carefully instill everything with thought and beauty, and each of the three things emerged unmistakably their own, as if the three modes –
the popular, the disciplinary, and the personal – were equally facets of their deepest sensibilities. Earnest is not quite the right word, but the contributions were definitely un-ironic. The mood in the exhibition seemed to be that each contributor was secure in their own cosmology.

An example. The three things offered by Emily Mohr and Jon Rieke of mr Studio each had aspects of the other types. In one corner of the "object" was text (a big letter B), and in another it had a draped surface (the product of a typical image manipulation feature offered by modelling software). The "text" contribution was entirely made up of drawings – it brought together dozens of plans to form letters, creating an elaborate font in which the "image" of each letter is itself a jumble of architectural precedents to be "read." Finally, the "image"contribution presented a top-down view of room in super flat style. On the table in the room was something similar to the model contribution. Admittedly, there wasn't any text—unless you look at the version posted on Instagram, in which case you remember that the image's natural environment is a world in which image and text co-exist as equals.

Beyond these conflations of medium, it was not at all clear which of the things was "popular," which was "disciplinary," and which was "personal." None of the things resisted being compelling or beautiful, and thus they were all potentially popular. All of them embodied disciplinary concerns about drawing, medium specificity, the production of form, and so one. And, finally, each was "personal" in the sense that deciphering what they signify would probably mean resorting to an explanation from authorial intention.

This last feature was the common denominator of the projects in the exhibition: everything seemed to point to a world of rich meaning beyond surface appearances, but to offer no obvious way to enter into it. Everything—or each triptych—contained a hidden microcosm. This is partially an outcome of the format of the exhibition: invite people to send three heterogeneous things with no didactics and you're asking to get something cryptic. But one imagines that in a normal exhibition of normal architectural projects this would easily be overcome. What if everyone had sent in a presentation model (object/popular), a rendering or a plan (image/disciplinary), and a project statement (text/personal)? Then it would have been an exhibition of 100 easily-understandable buildings. (Also: boring.)

The spontaneous arrival into the exhibition space of so many microcosms is thus a very strange thing. Is it evidence of some generational invisible hand at work? Maybe object-oriented ontology – with its objects "forever haunted by some hidden surplus" [2]—has tricked-down to common sense? I suggest that the prototypical microcosm is modeled, for starters, on the contemporary studio. Each of the architects' three things might be the result of a different workflow, but they are united as facets of a creative work routine. For example: work on a digital model for a while, fiddling around with meshes and plug-ins and algorithms; then play with line work, color, and spatial effects in Illustrator; then read some theory, write emails, comment on Instagram, craft a project text, and experiment with annotations and typography. Looking at the contribution from mr Studio, you could almost reverse-engineer their studio environment, what software they uses, their preferred modeling techniques, maybe even what they’re reading or the feeds they follow.

Shared among most contemporary workflows is a common process or movement: things are born digital then made physical. Many of the objects in the exhibition were 3d-printed or laser-cut – this is one way of going from digital to physical. Text is word-processed and typography is aided by layout software. Printing requires grappling with conversions from the RGB colorspace of screens to the CMYK colorspace of plots. Color choices are influenced by the eventual life of images on super-crisp, super-vibrant smartphone screens. Post-digital objects, images, and texts are not simply "made"— they are made in one realm only to be re-made in another. They contain a digital-to-physical movement within themselves.

The archetypal microcosm, then, is what's on the other side of our screens: the software, social networks, archives of images and precedents, and so on that are the environment of both architectural production and reception. Screens are windows onto a hidden universe. This is a familiar trope, but what it has enabled for architecture is something unique: architects can now channel their natural obsessiveness through software and into digital objects that can easily absorb an infinite amount of detail. We routinely put much more effort into digital models than we need to. InDesign makes fiddling with kerning, perfecting grid systems, and other typographic obsession into enjoyable pastimes. Images can be output one pixel at a time by algorithms of our making, and we can always increase the resolution if we need more depth to enter into.

Seeing architecture that takes part in our contemporary world is no big deal, but seeing it consistently thematized certainly is. Several contributors to architecture, architectural & Architecture thematized 3d-model microcosms. Kyle Branchesi and Shane Reiner-Roth of TALL presented something that looked like a BIM model sliced and splayed open like a loaf of bread, reminding us that all that intricacy is not necessary except as a feast for the eyes. Others thematized image microcosms. Mark Ericson offered “the two dimensional orthographic projection of a semicircle onto an interrupted epicycle of tori” in which one could imagine zooming into each pixel and finding a whole geometrical world. Whatever software or algorithm he used can probably do just that. Again this raises microcosmic questions – questions concerning, in particular, the fit between the limits of algorithmic precision (infinite), the limits of resolution (very high), and the limits of necessity (are the images really necessary at all? how so?). Finally, thematizing a text microcosm, Ashley Bigham of Outpost Office presented "an act of radical transparency" that includes 500 pages of her personal emails about architecture (with some personal details redacted). Certainly enough to make us "rethink how we write about architecture in everyday practice" in this day and age.

Grappling with the themes of the exhibition—image/model/text, architecture/architectural/Architecture—seems to have almost automatically produced such thematizations. So hats off to the curators for a great premise. But there is something circular here because the curatorial impulse itself has certainly been aided by the rise of the digital regime. Neatly tended Instagram feeds and digital hoarding have made us all curators. There were a number of projects that made architecture out of curating. Andrew Kovacs of Archive of Affinities [3] displayed an assemblages of mostly colorful found plastic pieces – reimagining Kurt Switter's Merzbau through ultra-cheap consumerism (the Dollar Store!) and Photoshop cut-and-paste.

Time to be critical. Architecture in the microcosmic mode can come off as insular. The exhibition didn't help in its presentation of things without explanatory text; it offered no obvious way to enter into architects' private universes. Compounding the sense of solipsism, few of the projects struck me as "social" in the sense of being overtly socially-engaged. Few were "green." I'm not complaining; maybe this is a necessary corrective against the recent green/social overload and constant boosterism in the profession. For all I know, the architects in the exhibition might all have deep ethical/sustainable commitments. But perhaps the curators should have added one thing to the object+image+text triads: simple statements of what we're looking at.

Luckily, it was easy to learn more. Clicking #architecturearchitecturalandarchitecture on Instagram opens an ad hoc parallel digital exhibition, and from there all the information of the internet awaits. More than one project brought the specter of social media into the exhibition space. An axonometric drawing by Igor
Bragado and Miles Gertler of Common Accounts imagined Likes and Views as standard architectural annotations. The entire exhibition was, in a sense, about social media. [4] Like Facebook, it pulled together the quasi-
intimate output of quasi-friends with the thinnest of pretense. We are evidently in a moment in which shared projects and disciplinary moods are things to be intuited from online feeds in the same way that we
try to divine the "political temperature" in moments of decision or crisis.

What warmed my heart most was to feel the sense of a shared project – all the microcosmic bubbles coming together into a foam, Sloterdijk-style. [5] True to the title, the things in architecture, architectural & Architecture retained some of the best elements of disciplinary investigation from previous generations: formalism and medium specificity, a focus on drawing, a tension between minimalism and maximalism, and theoretical literacy and ambition of the highest order. To these it added evidence of new values. Irony is out, and in its place is an openness about the process of creative labor in architecture. Nothing seemed incompatible with social/sustainable ambitions, and things didn't seem particularly unbuildable. This is inexhaustible territory for our post-digital age. The exhibition was one of the first to brings all of this together on a massive scale in the form of a single shared conversation. There many productive microcosms here to unfold.

[1] Claire Bishop, "Digital Divide," Artforum September 2012. An artwork that thematizes something is an artwork that not only "is" something, but which is also self-consciously "about" something. Thematization
is the general strategy of formalism/modernism; see Fredric Jameson, The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975).
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_ontology
[3] http://archiveofaffinities.tumblr.com/
[4] Of course, all architecture these days is, in a sense, about social media. See, e.g., Adrian Phiffer, "Why Instagram Should Be a Part of Every Architect's Design Process," archdaily May 14, 2017.
http://www.archdaily.com/871238/why-instagram- should-be- a-part- of-every- architects-design- process
[5] Peter Sloterdijk, Foams: Spheres Volume III - Plural Spherology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016).