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 Phoebe Webster & Jack Stewart Castner. Phoebe is a Los Angeles-based designer raised in Maryland and is a current Master of Architecture candidate at the University of California, Los Angeles. Jack is a Los Angeles-based designer, raised in Philadelphia and holds a Master of Architecture from the University of Southern California, where he was awarded the Mastery of Thesis Prize for Best Graduate Thesis. 

For better or worse, Instagram, Pinterest, et al. has radically shifted how architectural imagery is dispersed and consumed. Architects, historians, and critics alike market their work, catalog imagery, disseminate history and theory all through the image, caption, and occasional hashtag. Regardless of motivation, by using these mediums, they are also positioning their images in an ever-expanding field that is harder and harder to grasp; that is, until one decides to look for inspiration via #arches. That is not to say that the architectural canon has turned to chaos (a sentiment shared throughout history), nor is it to say that every image shared will have a place in history. While the rapid, public dissemination of architectural imagery through social media can cause visual fatigue—especially in an era of rampant copycat architecture, downloadable buildings/figures/scripts, and sometimes infamous cases of academic plagiarism—it also provides an opportunity to question traditional ownership ideologies and examine the byproducts of our changing relationship with intellectual property in digital media. 

''Quality is more important than originality. Doing something good is better than doing something first. In any case, originality is rare and not even the highest virtue of an artist. It may be better to do slight variations within established traditions and conventions.” [2]

Traditionally, architectural ideas were disseminated in print media: books, magazines, pamphlets, journals, etc. These mediums acted as platforms with which criticism could flourish with the rate of image production complementing the rate that text could be produced. Content, context, imagery, and criticism all existed in close proximity. That proximity is where social media platforms tend to fall short. A quick scroll through Pinterest shows just that; images of the Barcelona Pavilion coexist with photographs of a glass and steel vacation home somewhere in Switzerland with no differentiation and only a moderate resemblance binding the two. If one doesn’t know the source material when scrolling the feed, good luck finding it in the caption. Conversely, if one were to open a book about modern Swiss homes, the contextual information would surely exist alongside each image. 

Traditionally, architectural ideas were disseminated in print media: books, magazines, pamphlets, journals, etc. These mediums acted as platforms with which criticism could flourish with the rate of image production complementing the rate that text could be produced. 

As images are gradually stripped of their contextual framework—organized by algorithms and analytics, inspirational reference libraries, and embedded metadata—a potential for incidental alignment and juxtaposition grows. This new catalog of architecture, grouped by formal qualities (i.e. composition, color, and components of assembly), opens itself up for redefinition and reconfiguration as we imagine new opportunities for de-authored material. Intellectual property shifts to cultural property, ripe for interpretation and evaluation. The importance of author, context, and history diminishes, stripping the image of its baggage: structural hegemony, institutional preference, and authorship-anxiety. In this post-authorship climate, pedagogical barriers begin to fall, cross-contamination is encouraged, and the detritus of past-ideas become foundations for new growth.

Architecture is rooted in precedent and allusion. An exciting prospect of destabilizing intellectual property is the ability to return to these precedents and allusions for inspiration, dissection, and questioning. Buildings often considered too precious to do anything with, other than analyze the parti, can be challenged, reconfigured, and maybe even perverted. The buildings that make up the architectural canon, typically accepted as gospel, can be subverted and questioned. There is a complex relationship between plagiarism, precedence, allusion and reference in the arts and architecture, distilled in The Ecstasy of Influence by Jonathan Lethem. 

“Whatever charge of tastelessness or trademark violation may be attached to the artistic appropriation of the media environment in which we swim, the alternative-to flinch, or tiptoe away into some ivory tower of irrelevance- is far worse. We’re surrounded by signs; our imperative is to ignore none of them.” [2]

Here, it’s Lethem’s observation of the “flinch” that lends familiarity as architects fight to maintain both independence and novelty in a design culture that romanticizes the sole authorship of ideas and innovations. Ironically enough, even our starchitects such as Zaha Hadid and Frank Gehry, whose buildings have been copied in speculative and built work, have shown a fascination with the possibility of their work being copied, hopeful to have some “innovative mutations” [3] occur in the process.

This sentiment is being reflected in contemporary architectural production. Five-years ago, speculative projects were rooted in the sleek, the foreign, and the parametric; projects were often seeking to incorporate various aspects of the natural sciences and data analytics into architectural form-finding. Just as modernism expanded the field and post-modernism sought to contract it, it seems as though that trend is re-emerging as parametricism is losing its luster and work recedes into a familiar, discipline-specific territory. We’re now seeing a renewed interest in examining, re-evaluating, and delaminating our pedagogical inheritance. Contemporary production is flirting with the referential, fully enabled by a concept of intellectual property gaining plasticity. 

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[1] Giovanni, J. (1983, 03). Architectural Imitation: Is It Plagiarism. New York Times Online Archive. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/1983/03/17

[2] Lethem, J. (2007, 02). The Ecstasy of Influence. Harpers Magazine., 63. Retrieved from https://archive.harpers.org/2007/02

[3] Wood, H. (2017, 04). Never Meant to Copy, Only to Surpass: Plagiarism Versus Innovation in Architectural Imitation. Archinect. Retrieved from https://archinect.com/features/article/150002511