Cross-Talk is a 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 an introduction premise along with four responses by four practitioners to a single topic. For this week's iteration, we look at 'Academic Aesthetics.'

Among the general public, there is little understanding about what architects actually do. This situation is complicated further by the dichotomy between the avant-garde and the pragmatists, the academy and the profession, the speculators and the practitioners—you get the idea. Eisenman articulates a distinction between practice and Project, and even Alberti differentiated design and construction. Ask someone outside the profession what architects do, and you may get the reply, “don’t architects draw blueprints?” That wouldn’t be wrong, although the term blueprint may induce nausea among those in the design crowd. It is curious that practicing architects devote enormous effort toward the production of construction documents, yet the documents are rarely championed as exquisite artifacts of graphic achievement in the way that, say, hand sketches have been in the past, or digitally produced diagrams are today. What are the underlying systems created by academics and professionals that perpetuate a discrepancy between academic and professional aesthetic production?

This situation is complicated further by the dichotomy between the avant-garde and the pragmatists, the academy and the profession, the speculators and the practitioners—you get the idea. 

The major distinction between an “academic aesthetic” and a “professional aesthetic” may be the audience toward which those representational preferences are directed. In an academic setting, the audience is primarily going to be other designers; there are the professors, the classmates, and the visiting critics. Therefore, academic work is predisposed to portray idyllic representations of their underlying ideas. They are afforded more liberty in representing ideas imaginatively, using representation as a tool for expressing larger predilections and ambitions beyond any one project (post-digital collages as a reaction against the flood of glossy renderings, for example). But, how often are students aware of these larger representational implications? How often are students simply adopting the stylistic biases of their particular academic zeitgeist? It is curious to observe the rate at which academic aesthetics evolve when compared to the rather stable representational techniques of professional offices.

The academic image making process revolves around a very different value-set than that of a professional image making process. The success of an academic project is often judged in terms of its departure from known conventions of architectural production, i.e. novel images (and texts) that bear latent aesthetic or theoretical value without necessarily drawing a conclusion, thesis, or replicable hypothesis. Students are encouraged to get away with fanciful projects, so long as they visually assert a certain qualitative aesthetic production, or are justified with tenuous references to theoretical antecedents. Students hunt to find quotes for aesthetic justification the way a lawyer searches for legal precedent in their court cases; punchy graphics are often substantiated with hollow rhetoric that isn’t deeply challenged or questioned. In a professional aesthetic, however, the graphic preferences shift from representing romantic speculations to representing commodified products and profitability. The portrayal of good design takes a back seat to the portrayal of value. Can we create a system where the best design IS the best value proposition?

Most pedagogical approaches have set up a system where the idea of the architect as artist, theorist, curator, and sculptor is championed over, say, the architect as builder, economist, or business person. More “vocational” aspects of architectural practice (LEED, sustainability, BIM, economics, building systems) are often seen as irrelevant to critical discourse, or conflicting with the idealized view of the architect as an artist, or architecture as a cultural practice. It’s as if one must choose sides, and deal with the consequences. Architects have worked themselves into a system with an inverse correlation between cultural capital and financial capital (representation may be partly to blame). It seems as if one can choose to be a starving artist who has respect, or a well-paid commercial architect who has no creative soul.

The academic image making process revolves around a very different value-set than that of a professional image making process.

Take a look at any issuu portfolio that contains a mix of academic and professional work; not very integrated, is it? Has the profession not caught up to the academy, or is the academy losing sight of what is important to the tangible practice of architecture? Should we refocus our pedagogical frameworks in order to narrow the perceived gap between academic aesthetics and professional aesthetics? Or, should we embrace this dichotomy, and encourage aesthetic discrepancy between academic and professional settings? In reality, interesting things are going to occur when hundreds of internet-surfing students are packed into close quarters for months at a time, all of them striving to produce the next best thing. Maybe, we should just sit back and enjoy the show.