Background illustration by Lilli Carré.

The role of Archinect’s 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. 

In this installment we hear from Brendan Shea on the topic of Creative Rights & Intellectual Property. Brendan is a Los Angeles based designer, educator and maker. 

The Ibid of Influence

Parrot-like, we are made to repeat the old formulas; minds which should be made plastic to receive the new impressions resulting from changed conditions are made to solidify and congeal by the cold, chilling breath of complacency, smug satisfaction, and materialism directed against them. 

- Frederick Ackerman

Love and Theft

Consider this tale: an Empire produces a period of architectural evolution in structure and style, one beginning with the development of the Orders and types: the Doric, the Ionian, the Corinthian, the arcade, the theater, the agora, and the stadium. When given time, the Orders evolve, adding the Composite and the Tuscan, making them giant, and expanding their repertoire of types to include the forum and the hippodrome. In the end, the evolution creates an architecture for a world empire, that can be replicated, adapted, and exported to the far ends of its territory.

Architecture has always been a crucible in which familiar themes are continually recast. 

The architects of the evolution I’ve described and their works have faded from view. Did the Romans, who conquered Athens in the 3rd century AD, adopt the tendencies of Greek architecture consciously? Or did the earlier architecture exist for the Romans as a hidden, unacknowledged memory? The history of architecture is not without examples of this phenomenon, called cryptomnesia. Another hypothesis is that the Romans, knowing the Greek’s architecture perfectly well, set themselves to that art of quotation that Thomas Mann, himself a master of it, called “higher cribbing.” Architecture has always been a crucible in which familiar themes are continually recast. Little of what we admire in Roman structure, style, and type is to be found in its predecessors; the former is in no way deducible from the latter. Still: did Rome consciously borrow and quote?

Contamination Anxiety

In 1960, Reyner Banham famously ended Theory and Design of the First Machine Age with the admonition that architects who wish to keep up with technology might have to leave behind old ideas of what constitutes an architect in order to do so. Today, (wherever we are—the Second Internet Age? Third? Web 3.0 yes?) this has never been more true. Where the spaces we inhabit are more and more in other realities (in screens, and in virtual and augmented realities), do architects have a role in acknowledging a complex genealogy of influence when designing space? Can we conceive of other models for architectural practice and education not based on the originality of visual styles or characteristics?

Can we conceive of other models for architectural practice and education not based on the originality of visual styles or characteristics?

Blues and jazz musicians have long been enabled by a kind of “open source” culture, in which pre-existing melodic fragments and larger musical frameworks are freely reworked. Technology has only multiplied the possibilities; musicians have gained the power to duplicate sounds literally rather than simply approximate them through allusion. In Seventies Jamaica, King Tubby and Lee “Scratch” Perry deconstructed recorded music, using astonishingly primitive pre-digital hardware, creating what they called “versions.” The recombinant nature of their means of production quickly spread to DJs in New York and London. Today, an endless, gloriously impure, and fundamentally social process generates countless hours of music.

Surrounded By Signs

In 1994, David Foster Wallace taught a semester long course at Illinois State University titled “English 102 - Literary Analysis: Prose Fiction.” The syllabus for his course was released by the University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center, which made scans of his class handout to reveal the professionally pedagogical side of his teaching. Of course, with Wallace, no such side exists and, if it does, it is not of a conventional nature.

For the course, Wallace assigned popular or even ‘borderline generic’ fiction—novels that could be purchased at any bookstand across the country. And yet the challenge that he set forth was that it was these exact soft-core literary works that would produce the most radical readings. Nothing of Wallace’s syllabus indicates that such analysis should result in anything other than personal revelation. A better reader means a better writer, simply because a better reader is more generous and prone to finding wonder in the inane.

This “wonder” that Wallace identified has been diagnosed by others. Martin Heidegger held that the essence of modernity was found in a certain technological orientation he called “enframing.” This tendency encourages us to see the objects in our world only in terms of how they can serve us or be used by us. The task he identified was to find ways to resituate ourselves vis-à-vis these “objects,” so that we may see them as “things” pulled into relief against the ground of their functionality. Heidegger believed that art had the great potential to reveal the influence of the “thingness” of objects.

Interestingly, Wallace’s approach gave heavy emphasis to peer review. Students would be expected to read each other's work intensely, taking the time to truly understand the intentions of their peer writers. The goal of this attempt seems much less interested in tapping into, or contributing towards, a larger discourse. That is to say, this course was not an exercise in the participation of a larger movement (if we may call the development of an academia within literature or architecture or art a movement). The efforts of such localized reading and writing could only benefit the individual first before ever having consequences in the broader structures of a discipline, or—dare we say it—a profession.

Use Monopoly

A well-stated argument for this ambition in architecture can be found in Todd Gannon’s lecture given at SCI-Arc, in 2015, entitled, “Five Points for Thesis” in which he states that architecture (and art) should be, “celebrations of possibilities that are excluded from dominant paradigms.” He sees this as well represented in Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography, Bernard Tschumi’s 1975-77 “Advertisements for Architecture,” and Jeff Kipnis and Stephen Turk’s 2012 “White Walkers,” where architecture reflects and transforms the imperceptible influence of the myriad designs that structure our world. For example, if we look at something like Frank Gehry’s Peter B. Lewis Building in Cleveland, we could say that there’s not much new here. We’ve seen it in Bilbao. We’ve seen it in Downtown Los Angeles. If we follow Peter Eisenman, we could say that Gehry got the idea from Schinkel. From there, it’s pretty easy to lock Gehry’s project into a trajectory that goes back through Stirling’s Staatsgalerie to Le Corbusier’s Capitol at Chandigarh through Schinkel’s Altes Museum to Lord Burlington’s Chiswick House and Palladio’s Villa Rotunda. Each of these projects conforms to a similar plan diagram: central rotunda, U-shaped wrapper, and porch. With a few more steps, we could take Gehry all the way back through the Parthenon to the Primitive Hut. Trajectories like these are fairly common and tend to have a domesticating function: works are validated in terms of what came before.

Copyright is an ongoing social negotiation, tenuously forged, endlessly revised, and imperfect in its every incarnation

A time is marked, not so much by ideas that are argued about, but by ideas that are taken for granted. The character of an era hangs upon what needs no defense. In this regard, few of us question the contemporary construction of copyright. It is taken as a law, both in the sense of a universally recognizable moral absolute—like the law against murder—and as naturally inherent in our world—like the law of gravity. In fact, it is neither. Rather, copyright is an ongoing social negotiation, tenuously forged, endlessly revised, and imperfect in its every incarnation, though it is particularly worthy of reconsideration in architecture given the changing state of academic and professional practice.

The Beauty Of Second Use

More of us ride the art-architecture axis each year. The academic-designer-theorist-installation-artist (even guerrilla publishing house) model is less the exception than it is the rule among junior architecture faculty. Twenty years ago, architectural design exhibitions were seen as a purgatory for would-be built work or conceptual side projects in-between (or in lieu of) “real” commissions. In this earlier era, two classes of work—the representational model and the full scale pavilion—dominated exhibition strategies; a binary pushed to the point of hyperbole in MOCA’s A New Sculpturalism: Contemporary Architecture from Southern California (2013). Today, galleries (Storefront, NYC), museums (A+D, LA) and other alternative spaces (Materials & Applications’ empty lot in Silverlake) play host to serious architectural wagers that operate representationally (scalar, fragmentary, pictorial), but also engage the corporeal, phenomenologically-charged space of the viewer.

In the first life of this type of architectural creative property, if the creator is lucky, the content is sold. After the commercial life has ended, our tradition supports a second life as well. A pavilion is constructed for a museum, and the next season is transferred to a new site or rebuilt in a new gallery. A newspaper is delivered to a doorstep, and the next day wraps fish or builds an archive. Most books fall out of print after one year, yet even within that period they can be sold in used bookstores and stored in libraries, quoted in reviews, parodied in magazines, described in conversations, and plundered for costumes for kids to wear on Halloween. The demarcation between various possible uses is beautifully graded and hard to define, the more so as artifacts distill into and repercuss through the realm of culture into which they’ve been entered, the more so as they engage the receptive minds for whom they were presumably intended.

Source Hypocrisy

Three decades after Manfredo Tafuri declared “there is no criticism, only history,” arguing for an operative criticism of design whose “critical act will consist of a recomposition of the fragments once they are historicized: in their remontage,” the critical subject battling with the uncritical object(s) is a formula that might want to be inverted. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, different explorations of a postmodernization of North American architecture saw the enclosure of a vernacular culture for the benefit of a sole author or private owner flare up. But, this flame now seems smoldering at best.

This peculiar and specific act is close kin to what could be called imperial plagiarism, the free use of Third World or “primitive” artworks and styles by more privileged (and better-paid) architects and artists. Think of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, or some of the albums of Paul Simon or David Byrne: even without violating copyright, those creators have sometimes come in for a certain skepticism when the extent of their outsourcing became evident. And, as when Led Zeppelin found themselves sued for back royalties by the bluesman Willie Dixon, the act can occasionally be an expensive one. To live outside the law, you must be honest: perhaps it was this, in part, that spurred David Byrne and Brian Eno to recently launch a “remix” website, where anyone can download easily disassembled versions of two songs from My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, an album reliant on vernacular speech sampled from a host of sources. Perhaps it also explains why Bob Dylan has never refused a request for a sample.

You Can’t Steal A Gift

The ruins of abbeys which dot the English landscape no longer retain their opulence, yet they speak precisely for the history and condition of a place in a way only architecture can. Theirs is a power greater than words or concepts, more significant than universalizing allegories. But it takes little reflection to grasp that there is ample value that the term “property” doesn’t capture. In these and so many other traditional buildings – those with which we most prominently invest the supposed capacity to represent our cultures – what emanates from the experience of the architecture is not a quality purely specific to an endemic culture but something with a larger sense of intensity and utility. In this condition, architecture entices a specific form of belonging which transcends cultural tropes and speaks to something more innate to the human condition. When for example we encounter Western architecture from this vantage, we approach something not mighty and symmetrical but subtle and mundane, something with belies its own expectations. Stones in a field or the tactility of an old village, its perimeter smoothed into the forest around it such that meandering ground and stony cellars alike become one singular landscape, pronounce more sharply the virtues of a culture than a critical analysis taken from a basal dichotomy might hope to approach. What is more, in their gentle existence, they wield more capacity to bridge cultures than demarcative ideologies, existing simultaneously in two economies, a market economy and a gift economy.

The cardinal difference between gift and commodity exchange is that a gift establishes a feeling-bond between two people, whereas the sale of a commodity leaves no necessary connection. I go into a hardware store, pay the man for a hacksaw blade, and walk out. I may never see him again. The disconnectedness is, in fact, a virtue of the commodity mode. We don’t want to be bothered, and if the clerk always wants to chat about the family, I’ll shop elsewhere. I just want a hacksaw blade. But a gift makes a connection. There are many examples, the candy or cigarette offered to a stranger who shares a seat on the plane, the few words that indicate goodwill between passengers on the late-night bus. These tokens establish the simplest bonds of social life, but the model they offer may be extended to the most complicated of unions — marriage, parenthood, mentorship. If a value is placed on these (often essentially unequal) exchanges, they degenerate into something else.

The Commons

Architecture is still a professional endeavor. But professionalism is being negated or undercut by the idea of the quick, the superficial, or for some people, the most obvious choice of words; the now, right now, today, this very second. Social media has been an instigator of this activity. Uploading, posting, archiving, sharing, and viewing has generated a problem for architecture and its role in the public domain. One way of looking past this concern is for individuals to focus more on a body of work. As we develop and produce drawings, models, buildings, and text, we should focus on their relationship to one another and their relationship to time. This is critical for the development of a project. But currently, we face both uncharted waters and unanswered questions. A mediated discourse is quick, chronographic, and extremely public. Something that the discipline of architecture has not faced. But with the small collection of individuals and groups online and in institutions I remain confident in the direction and developing project we call architecture.

The cardinal difference between gift and commodity exchange is that a gift establishes a feeling-bond between two people, whereas the sale of a commodity leaves no necessary connection.

The world of art and culture is a vast commons, one that is salted through with zones of utter, rapid commerce yet remains gloriously immune to any overall commodification. The closest resemblance is to the commons of a language: altered by every contributor, expanded by even the most passive user. That a language is a commons doesn’t mean that the community owns it; rather it belongs between people, possessed by no one, not even by society as a whole.

The byproduct of these free exchanges, undiscovered public knowledge emboldens us to question the extreme claims to originality made in press releases and publishers’ notices: Is an intellectual or creative offering truly novel, or have we just forgotten a worthy precursor? Does solving certain scientific problems really require massive additional funding, or could a computerized search engine, creatively deployed, do the same job more quickly and cheaply? Lastly, does our appetite for creative vitality require the violence and exasperation of another avant-garde, with its wearisome killing-the-father imperatives, or might we be better off ratifying the ecstasy of influence — and deepening our willingness to understand the commonality and timelessness of the methods and motifs available to artists?

Give All

Well I suppose I should confess. This concluding section is a key to the preceding essay which names the sources of every line I stole, warped, and cobbled together as I “wrote” this essay (except, alas, those sources that my sources forgot to mention along the way). Every other paragraph is cribbed from the Cross-Talk series itself and revised, only slightly — for necessities of space, in order to produce a more consistent tone, or simply because I felt like it while assembling the essay inside of modified constraints. 

The rules of the game are: 

 1. 750 -1250 words (or more if needed) 

 2. Some images. 

 3. Limited (if any footnotes) 

 4. Due on August 19, 2018.

Epigraph

“Parrot-like, we…” to“...materialism directed against them,” is lifted from Cross-Talk #2: ‘Pedagogy of The Present — Frederick L. Ackerman’s Unrealized Vision for Architectural Education’ by Zachary Tate Porter posted by Zachary Tate Porter on Jul 25, 2017 12:18 pm.

Love And Theft

“The Doric, the Ionian…” to “...exported to the far ends of its territory,” is from Cross-Talk #6: Konstantinos Chatzaras on East vs West posted by Konstantinos Chatzaras on Jul 13, 2018 9:00 am.

Contamination Anxiety

“In 1960, Reyner Banham…”  to “...originality of visual styles or characteristics?” comes from Cross-Talk #2: Matthew Allen on 'Pedagogy' Today posted by Matthew Allen on Jul 26, 2017 12:02 pm.

Surrounded By Signs

“In 1994 David Foster Wallace…” to “...finding wonder in the inane,” is cribbed from the main body of Cross-Talk #2: Deboarah Garcia on 'Pedagogy' Today posted by Deborah M. Garcia on Jul 30, 2017 9:00 am.

Use Monopoly

“A well-stated argument…” to “...Stephen Turk’s 2012 ‘White Walkers,’” comes from the comments section in Cross-Talk #2: Constance Vale on 'Pedagogy' Today posted by Constance Vale on Jul 28, 2017 9:00 am.

“If we look at something like Frank Gehry’s…” to “... validated in terms of what came before,” is from Five Points for Thesis by Todd Ganon published in Sci-Arc’s Offramp:13 Guise in 2017.

The Beauty of Second Use

“More of us ride the art-architecture axis…” to “...phenomenologically-charged space of the viewer,” comes from Cross-Talk 3: Viola Ago & Hans Tursack on 'Biennales, Triennials and Exhibitions' posted by Viola Ago on Dec 28, 2017 9:00 am.

Source Hypocrisy

“Three decades after Manfredo Tafuri…” to “... now seems smoldering at best,” is plundered from Cross-Talk #5: 'Decadent Critic(sch)ism, Words for Fingers’  by Clemens Finkelstein posted by Clemens Finkelstein on Apr 16, 2018 12:00 pm.

You Can’t Steal A Gift

“The ruins of abbeys…” to “...wield more capacity to bridge cultures than demarcative ideologies,” is taken from Cross-Talk #6: Connor Gravelle on East vs West posted by Connor Gravelle on Jul 12, 2018 9:00 am.

The Commons

“Architecture is still…” to “...project we call architecture,” is from Cross-Talk #5: 'Mediated Discourse’ by Ryan Tyler Martinez posted by Ryan Tyler Martinez on Apr 19, 2018 9:00 am.

Title & Everything Else

The phrase “the ibid of influence,” plays with Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of influence,” which was in turn remixed by Jonathan Lethem’s February 2007 essay for Harper’s Magazine, “The Ecstasy of Influence.” Lethem’s essay is also the source for nearly everything else in this essay, including the format, structure and following passages (which are themselves by in large quotations).

“Or did the earlier…” to “...consciously borrow and quote?” in Love and Theft.

“Blues and jazz musicians…” to “...generates countless hours of music,” in Contamination Anxiety.

“This “wonder” that…” to  “...reveal the ‘thingness’ of objects,” in Surrounded by Signs.

“A time is marked not…” to “...imperfect in its every incarnation,” in Use Monopoly.

“In the first life of creative property…” to “... for whom they were presumably intended,” in The Beauty of Second Use.

“This peculiar and specific act…” to “...never refused a request for a sample,” in Source Hypocrisy.

“The cardinal difference between gift and commodity…” to “...degenerate into something else,” in You Can’t Steal A Gift.

“The world of art and culture is a vast commons…” to “...the methods and motifs available to artists?” in The Commons.

“This concluding section....” to “...simply because I felt like it,” in Give All.