An Over-Genrelization

In 1863, nearly 3000 of the 5000 entries to the Paris Salon were rejected by the Academie Royale Peinture et de Sculpture. This scale of dismissal prompted a public outcry that got Napoleon III’s attention, who in turn ordered that an exhibition be launched to exhibit this rejected work, initiating the first in a series of Salon des Refusés. Included in this initial sideshow were artists who are commonly understood to be the forbearers of the 20th century avant-garde painting: Camille Pissarro, Gustave Courbet, Paul Cezanne, and Edourad Manet to name a few. The outrage of the 3000 rejects is easy to understand: exclusion meant no sales. Seen on the grand scale of art history, however, the rejects initiated the collapse of an Ancient Régime power structure that awarded merit based on a combination of technical virtuosity and pictorial content: The Hierarchy of Genres. The hierarchy was established in 1669 the secretary of the French Art academy, André Félibien, who ranked the genres in order of descending importance: 

1. History Painting
2. Portraiture
3. Genre Painting (pictures of everyday life)
4. Landscapes
5. Still Life 

This ordering was based on the ability of each genre to convey moral content (or narrative) to its audience. History paintings were valued highly because some of the narrative content of an image exists a priori of the picture, it is a shared cultural story that is represented and inflected by the painting. One of the paradigmatic images of this genre is Jacques Louis David’s 1786 Oath of the Horatii. The painting depicts the sendoff of the brothers Horatii by their father in support of the interests of Roman state: individual sacrifice for the benefit of political continuity. David produced this painting on the eve of the French Revolution, its themes straightforwardly reinforcing the agenda of the state. Thus, History Painting is good because it can communicate a complex message, where a Still Life might struggle to do so. 

Jump to: 2017 and the Chicago Architecture Biennale, curated around the rallying cry “Make New History.” While some may attempt to marginalize the show as a return to postmodernism, it seems more appropriate to see it as a Félibienistic History Painting, in which precedent is utilized as a mirror against which we can properly see the present. The exhibition put on full display a contemporary situation which can be characterized by a divergent series of modes or genres constitutive of a discursive geography, the contours of which are patrolled by practices with vested interests in epitomizing an autonomous approach to form making. 

Seen on the grand scale of art history, however, the rejects initiated the collapse of an Ancient Régime power structure that awarded merit based on a combination of technical virtuosity and pictorial content: The Hierarchy of Genres.

The most telling piece of the exhibition with respect to this interpretation was the collection of Horizontal City models in the G.A.R Hall.[1] In the Horizontal City, a series of historic spaces were reinterpreted through the filters of contemporary practice, resulting in a room full of divergent yet strangely familiar architectural artifacts, each planting the flag of its own camp. The conceit of History (and the curatorial specification of a standardized model format) served as the bridges between these mini-disciplines. Thus, one of the effects of the biennale has been the clarification of an idea that has been circulating through the academy for years: the authority of the delimited Genre as a method of disciplinary legitimation. [2] The biennial staged a pseudo-Félibienian sorting, where it is not yet possible to rank, or perhaps even name, all the architectural genres, but a preference for the genre as a delimited territory of inquiry is nevertheless present.

Thus, one of the effects of the biennale has been the clarification of an idea that has been circulating through the academy for years: the authority of the delimited Genre as a method of disciplinary legitimation.

In practice, one effect of this encampment of genres has been a preference for the atelier over the office and for the auteur over the architect. In many cases, the precinct of an architectural genre scales down to the contours of a singular practice. In other cases, there are fine-grain distinctions made between sub-genres which distinguish between like-minded albeit distinct personas i.e. the Andrews (Atwood vs Holder vs Kovacs). Regardless to which group a practice belongs, the space within each genre is set up like a factory, the products of which are built up in studios all over the country and sent out to various Biennales, Biennials & Exhibitions in a perpetual cycle of re-contouring the disciplinary modalities. Somehow, the bracketing of practice into a series of genres creates space for the commodification and dissemination of architectural work, often through exhibitions but more frequently through their digital equivalents: Instagram feeds. It is architecture’s embarrassment (or not) that this work can not be effectively sold as objects, in the way that the products of art or fashion can. Many projects have attempted to grapple with this dilemma (Props from Besler & Sons, all sorts of trinkets from MOS) but most of us are still continually caught renting storage units for old models, or simply dumping them when space becomes too tight.

[1] Participants include Adamo-Faiden, Andrew Kovacs, Angela Deuber Architects, Besler & Sons LLC, Bureau Spectacular, Charlap Hyman & Herrero, Diego Arraigada Arquitectos, DRDH Architecs, fala atelier, First Office, formlessfinder, June14 Meyer-Grohbrügge & Chermayeff, Karmuk + Kuo Architects, Lütjens Padmanabahn Architekten, MAIO, Norman Kelley, REAL Foundation, Sauter von Moos, Tham & Videgärd Arkitekter, The Living, The Los Angeles Design Group, Thomas Baecker Bettina Kraus, UrbanLab, and Welcome Projects. It is my feeling that T+E+A+M should also be included in this contingent, their contribution to the exhibition also being a very large, very impressive, horizontal model.


[2] Michael Meredith first highlighted this phenomenon in his 2013 essay “Post Medium Specific Architecture” in which he states “The ‘problem’ of medium has resulted in the proliferation of architectural genres, which have simultaneously become both more diffuse and more specific, a series of genres, sub-genres, and micro-disciplines. Each of these medium-specific genres operates like Set Theory; each has its own maps, narratives, histories, theories, disciplines, and paradoxes”