Cross-Talk is a new recurring series on Archinect that endeavors to bring architectural polemics and debate up-to-date and up-to-speed with the pace of cultural production today. Each installation will feature four responses by four writers to a single topic. For this week's iteration, the topic is 'Academic Aesthetics'.

When did styrofoam imply conceptual rigor?
When did glitching imply philosophical implications?
When did bad collages imply abstract perfection?
When did hot wire-cutting imply digital naiveness?
When did plans become tools of estrangement of contemporary culture?
When did the analog become a symbol of digital mastery?
When did architecture become an endless series of empty ideals, ethos, and frameworks?

When did aesthetics merely become a representation of beauty or taste, and cease to become the questioning or advancement thereof? When did aesthetics lose all architectural baggage and become empty signifiers, ready to adopt any persuasive commentary that erupts on an hour, daily or yearly basis? 

What has come forward in today's climate is a plethora of Aesthetical Jargon. While specific modes of research may falsely imply a certain highbrow level of narrative, today's aesthetics have only pushed the limits to a new high. While aesthetics have long pursued and reinforced a certain approach to thought, theory, and or abstract concepts, current trajectories could be said to have become modes of distraction and arbitrary assignees of unflushed out concepts, theories or thoughts. White foam, blue foam, wire cutters and glitches (to name a few) now attempt to imply critical rigor with unquestionable validity and yet are continuously producing one-liners barely worthy of a glimpse if not a pass. 

In an arena of architectural discourse that sees the image as a mere symbol of thought, as a plethora of unrelated directions of architectural interest has occurred, there still seems to be an unequivocal appearance to them all.

In the currant climate and tendencies of architectural discourse, the image has been demoted to a mere symbol of thought. With such delegation the discourse has exploded into an outburst of unrelated directions, interest and genres and yet, they all appear the same. We would not be hard-pressed to find a collection of white, foam, laser cut models inscribing the halls of theory and conceptual thoughts. While considering such a simplistic and mastered approach, one could argue the early 1900's presented a seemingly simple architecture to regress back to a time before aesthetics. 

Such appearances are common through the halls of academic institutions and have become the standard in high-brow conversations. So much so, that the makers themselves are, at points, unaware of what is being shown, if at all. They hide, deceivingly, behind their explicit weight and historically latent footnotes.

The question arises- if thought then inherently produces an aesthetics what is it and how is it translated. Even further, who is the audience for such an aesthetic if, in the end, its destiny is that in parallel to the endless dissertations filling architectural libraries for eons to come. Aesthetics, their value, and implications are an integral part of architecture, culture, and humanity as a whole and yet, what occurs when such weight, gravitas, is up for service and even further appropriation by academic institutions. 

Should academia be allowed to present itself through aesthetic, and should aesthetics be so tied to institutions?

Should academia be allowed to present itself through aesthetic, and should aesthetics be so tied to institutions? One could draw a correlation between style and aesthetics, and it would be easy then, of course, to tie such connections back to institutions of the past yet those institutions were both aligned with the thought and simultaneously were built from the implications of the thoughts themselves. Aesthetics were not empty colors, shapes, techniques and or mediums awaiting a small flicker of an idea to exist only a minute longer in contemporary relevance, but they were quintessential elements of the argument, the progress, and repercussions of any single decision.

If one were to question the aesthetics of academia, one would only have to search the hash-tags of any institution today, and with little surprise, it would be hard to differentiate between them.  If one were to inquire about the thoughts behind such institutions they would find it much more feasible to differentiate between their ideals, ethos and pedagogical frameworks; how then, do their appearances become so comparable? If so, what does that mean for today's thoughts and tools of representation that both one single image can give birth and destroy an institution’s meaning in a matter of moments with little to no repercussions.

The role of Archinect’s new series Cross-Talk is to bring forward the positive aspects of the polemic and allow for the resulting conflict to bring to life an otherwise still and comfortable climate of creativity—if there can be one. Cross-Talk attempts—if to only say that it did—to allow text the freedom that the image has accepted and embraced.

Cross-Talk attempts to force the no, to contradict itself, to anger, to please and then anger again, if only to force a stance, to pull out the position of the self, of the discipline and of the hour as a means to begin and maintain conversations moving forward. 

Each session of Cross-Talk will be oriented around one topic.
Each topic will be addressed by four texts.
Each text will be produced by a different author.
Each writer will have their own stance.
Each stance will be meant to agitate others.
Each agitation will produce a possible crack in reason.
Each crack will reveal a possible new position.