In this installment of Cross-Talk #9 — The Architecture Play, we talk with Jon Yoder and the reunification of theory and practice into a purely playful disciplinary atmosphere. 

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. 

“We have design totally wrong. The standard image of design is you have something in your head and then you kind of put it in the world. And what we’re arguing is design is kind of the reverse. We’re playing in the world. Stuff happens that changes our sense of what we were doing, and in a way it produces us.”—Mark Wigley (2017)

In the wake of the linguistic analogies that dominated architectural production during the postmodern period, different post-linguistic agendas began asserting themselves at the turn of the twenty-first century. The influences of Marxism, psychoanalysis, and post-structuralism famously waned as architects embraced digital fabrication, rapid prototyping, sustainable technologies, parametric modeling, and new material systems. These platforms all provided such fertile territory for design research that even theorists themselves raced to announce the death of theory. Terry Eagleton insisted the days of high theory were over; Michael Speaks announced a shift from theory to design intelligence; and Sanford Kwinter hailed architecture’s abrupt abandonment of Marxism. All this ironic theorizing about the end of theory signaled a waning interest in the poetic, semiotic and deconstructivist agendas that construed architecture as language.

All this ironic theorizing about the end of theory signaled a waning interest in the poetic, semiotic and deconstructivist agendas that construed architecture as language.

Linguistic analogies no longer sufficed, but neither did architecture’s longstanding assumptions about its social, political and economic machinations. The subsequent “Supermodern” shift posed by Hans Ibelings and Marc Augé, and the call for projective diagrams issued by Robert Somol and Sarah Whiting, promised to replace the hot textuality of architecture’s critical project with an architecture of cool performance. Critical historians recoiled, but speculative designers celebrated. The resulting critical/post-critical debates of the early-2000s radically repositioned theory within architecture’s disciplinary landscape. History and design, which had been intimately involved during the postmodern period, retreated to opposite corners of architecture’s expanded field. Historians abandoned theory, and designers embraced it. By the mid-2000s, theory had been consciously uncoupled from history and coupled with design. 

Unfortunately, the critical (Tafurian) attempt to strip theory (in its various ideological guises) away from materialist histories has sometimes led to a hermetic academicism that is decidedly disconnected from contemporary design concerns. If history concentrates on the past, and criticism operates on the present, then theory has traditionally focused on the future. It forwards propositions that implicitly aim to influence built form. Recently, however, theory has been subsumed by design. Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley, for example—two of the most influential theorists of their generation—suggest that design has taken over the role formerly occupied by theory. “If design is basically a way of looking forward,” they write, “this is not simply in the sense of inventing new artifacts. Artifacts become truly transformative by exceeding what was expected of them, exceeding our grasp. It is precisely in challenging us—triggering the potential of new ways of seeing, thinking, grasping, and acting—that design plays its role in redefining the human.” Theory’s new role has also helped to turn the tables on the expected relationships between design and ideology. Whereas ideology was traditionally understood to drive design, theory’s material operations are now helping to accelerate the design of playful ideologies. 

Rem Koolhaas was a key player in launching this inversion. The architecture of OMA embodied the liberating playfulness—indeed theatricality—of a new ludic Supermodernism. As their projects emerged en masse from childlike blocks of blue foam, architecture finally seemed to have freed itself from the anxious strictures of Modernism. Users were cast as actors in architectural plays, and their performances took place on the “empty stages” of non-proscriptive programs. This diagrammatic architecture was speculative and future-oriented. But its implicit looseness resembled the fumbling and fooling around of adolescence more than the seasoned expertise of adulthood. Its awkwardness was its charm. Recent emerging practices, on the other hand, prefer a more mature and promiscuous type of play—one that is both intensely focused on technique and effect and increasingly open to extra-disciplinary influence. For these practices, aesthetics comes first, and virtuosity is no embarrassment. 

...theory and design have aligned themselves along various post-linguistic axes of materialist experimentation.

Whether construed as postdigital or posthuman, the work of these practices is precise, even exquisite, in its honing of hybrid systems and composite material strategies. Theory is intrinsic. It no longer represents merely a choice between the dusty scholarship of intellection or the vapid formalism of fabrication. Gurus such as Jane Bennett, Graham Harman, and Jacques Rancière are still in the mix, but so are photogrammetry, printing, and milling. The simultaneous pursuit of new intellectual and physical formations in emerging design practice has helped to produce a diverse array of micro-ideologies—tactics, genres, and glitches—that might be termed materialist theories. Unholy hybrids are persistently unleashed. From the Neo-Primitivism of Ensamble Studio, Matter Design and T+E+A+M; to the Object-Oriented Ontology of Mark Foster Gage, Ferda Kolatan, Ruy Klein and Young & Ayata; to the Neo-PoMo/Pop of Jennifer Bonner, Bureau Spectacular, Sam Jacob and Andrew Kovacs—theory and design have aligned themselves along various post-linguistic axes of materialist experimentation.

Beauty, obsession, spectacle, and seduction are unapologetically at play. 

These contemporary practices are all playfully cultivating architectural expertise through ideological provocation and material refinement. If it sounds like reification and fetishism, it should. Beauty, obsession, spectacle, and seduction are unapologetically at play. And in the most exciting cases, these illicit and disproportionate fixations help to create cultural images with massively political implications. Here, theory is neither vague nor scattershot. It may no longer ground these practices, but it still grows and intensifies along with the unforeseen ideological agendas that inevitably emerge.