On Friday February 14, LIONarchitecture owner/partner Matthew Teismann took part in the “What Criticism?” symposium at Harvard Graduate School of Design. The symposium was organized by Florencia Rodriguez, Harvard GSD Loeb Fellow 2014 and editorial director of PLOT.

Matthew moderated the Impossible Friendship panel featuring Iker Gil, Jimenez Lai and Uriel Fogue.

Below is the description of the symposium:

“How do we embrace these new properties and opportunities without losing significance? Do we need to achieve some intellectual or formal constitutions to give sense to this practice? What are its new possible forms? Where does the difference lie between simple dissemination and the active distribution and commitment to the transformation of our environment? Are there multiple forms of criticism? Can we think critically about architecture and cities without the aim for sense and virtue? Does criticism need to be useful?

This symposium intends to pose these questions and confront the idea of a single way of practicing or understanding criticism nowadays, as well as it shamelessly suggests the impossibility of its pure existence. As Foucault pointed out already in 1978, critique is by nature “condemned to dispersion, dependency and pure heteronomy,” and its contemporary forms emphasize those conditions in many aspects that urge for conscious reflections and a renewed vocabulary.”