Well, it is the prerogative of men to enter the world without acknowledging that they are men. - Sylvia Lavin — Harvard GSD M.Arch.I (Lian)
Watching Sylvia Lavin and Eric Owen Moss in conversation at SCI-Arc last night, prolific Archinect blogger Lian Chang took careful note of a few key impasses -- where Lavin and Moss either failed to see eye-to-eye, or artfully dodged one another's argumentative traps. Lavin, an imposing academic presence as the Director of the Critical Studies MA/PhD for UCLA’s Department of Architecture and Urban Design, set out to engage Moss, world-renowned architect and current SCI-Arc director, on architectural agency and pedagogy. When the architect’s reach is so far and deep, what is their responsibility to their environment, both physically and temporally? On a more psychological (and abstract) level, how does the architect’s memory of their past serve their present understanding?
To pose these questions, Lavin presented the audience with a few (now nearly nauseatingly ubiquitous, at least in Los Angeles) photos: of Moss on the beach, and in a collection of contemporaries’ portraits. The beach photo incited a back-and-forth where Lavin tried to convince Moss of the (potentially problematizing) difference between the architect’s intent and a project’s historical interpretation -- that the latter is not in service to the former. From Chang’s paraphrasing of their conversation:
SL: This image nauseates me...partly because I've seen it so many times. But also because at the height of feminism...and this is everything good and everything that is awful about a boy's club. I feel like it's my professional duty to say this.
EOM: I think you're attributing motives or reading something... well, that is there, I'll give you that...but the people who were there weren't thinking that. It wasn't in my head.
SL: Well my job is precisely to have something in my head that is not in your head. I'm not playing the psychoanalyst, [trying to figure out what's in your head.] What I'm doing is reading the image against its historical background. It's not meant to be personal--
EOM: I'm just saying as I recall whatever the hell I thought I was doing, standing on a beach--it wasn't intentional. I do think that letting things go instead of chasing back things that were formative in my life...I prefer to let things turn over.
Lavin was clearly frustrated by Moss’ refusal to admit that he could have been part of something that he wouldn’t necessarily individually intend -- that is, part of a celebrated male-dominated architectural community that existed during the upswing of ‘70s feminism. Lavin’s didn’t seem to be trying to corner Moss into admitting sexist complacency or misogyny, only to question his professional operation as championing the architect’s intent above all environmental or historical interpretations. The conversation moved into Moss’ current role as Director of SCI-Arc, and his operations in Culver City, as Lavin tried to tease out a pedagogical focus despite Moss’ insistence that “I'm the guy who said that SCI-Arc doesn't have a pedagogy”.
What followed was a kind of hilarious exchange between someone whose professional title is “Director of Critical Studies”, and an architect refusing to engage with critical interpretations of his work. If the first rule of improv is to “say yes” to your interlocutor, then Moss wasn’t exactly playing nice -- when Lavin started questioning the style of building photographs on EOM’s website, Moss refused to accept any premise that didn’t prioritize the intent of his firm, but didn't say what that intent actually was. Going beyond rejection of the intentional fallacy, Moss seemed to embrace the romantic model of the architect as a solitary, self-inspiring creator of immaculate ideas -- a perspective that Lavin, in the opening of the conversation, suggested was harmful to architecture's professional reputation. In an era of collective criticism and the “diffuse democracy” of the internet, a collage of interpretations and criticisms can crop up in response to any authority’s opinion, and in this day and age the architect has a responsibility to accept the inevitability of that reaction.
In some ways, though, Moss’ refusal to engage with alternate critical opinions, or concretely define his own, may partially explain his strength as director at SCI-Arc. How do you keep an educational institution founded on youthful, innovative contrarianism fresh after forty years? By refusing to adopt any pedagogy -- the architect is free to take up any provisional outlook to realize (and here’s the allegiance to that romantic notion of solitary-creation) their idea. As soon as things start to concretize, they become antithetical to SCI-Arc's origin, and it’s time to move on -- no apologies.
![Book Launch: "L.A. [TEN]: Interviews on Los Angeles Architecture 1970s-1990s" author in conversation with Aaron Betsky, Sylvia Lavin](https://archinect.gumlet.io/uploads/yl/yl5lb6rodwh02yb3.jpg?fit=crop&auto=compress%2Cformat&enlarge=true&w=248&h=147 "Book Launch: \"L.A. [TEN]: Interviews on Los Angeles Architecture 1970s-1990s\" author in conversation with Aaron Betsky, Sylvia Lavin")
10 Comments
Great post and thanks for the shout out! :) It's funny, living in Boston I admit I had not seen either of these two images before Tuesday.
Couldn't have posted without your dutiful documentation! The beach photo is a real glamour shot.
I resurrected it few years ago but we should end the "tenure" of this pic and move past the PST, soon I hope.. No real critical discussions have been generated so far with Getty periphery and their money. Sylvia's come close but she ultimately backs the whole construct as well. She lacks the depth and criticality of her heroine Rosalind Krauss. Femininity issue in this discussion is a crowd pleaser and a musical chair. The real issue of content drought of the period is side tracked and distracted.
As someone who maintains the copy of the historical document where two signatures were missing to accept tenure structure at Sci Arc, in which, unsignees EOM & T. Mayne appear to have their own internal alliance. I can safely say that was a planned parenthood move by them to have their ideas and conjectures installed instead. So much for a endlessly revised pedagogy argument of Sci Arc.
These days EOM struggling to have his legacy written. Of course he does not like the Venice Beach sandcastle because it is not really a serious legacy but a nifty idea of an Italian editor for Domus. So far, all the heads EOM has invested are facing the similar issues themselves specially about their own acumenship. Please be careful.
Sylvia Lavin: Those who can't do teach
EOM: Can do and teach
They teach different things, Jamesarch.
There is a blog on this
http://archinect.com/blog/article/78869605/live-blog-sylvia-lavin-and-eric-owen-moss
Great post.
It seems like the discussion is rather hermetic. Interesting but unimportant. Nothing new even.
Perhaps the questions are wrong.
:those who cant do teach: is really the last bastion of the stupid. unfortunately for every dumbfuck architect there's two dumbfuck professors which makes the point really hard to argue. Fred S seems like a smart chap though. maybe ill put this bottle of oxycontin down and see what he comes up with next. or maybe ill crack open another chardonnay, put my suede boots on, and waltz to the deep end of the river - at least the sirens and bright lights will be entertaining.
Amelia Taylor-Hochberg: "What followed was a kind of hilarious exchange between someone whose professional title is “Director of Critical Studies”, and an architect refusing to engage with critical interpretations of his work."
Amelia Taylor-Hochberg: "Going beyond rejection of the intentional fallacy, Moss seemed to embrace the romantic model of the architect as a solitary, self-inspiring creator of immaculate ideas -- a perspective that Lavin, in the opening of the conversation, suggested was harmful to architecture's professional reputation. In an era of collective criticism and the “diffuse democracy” of the internet, a collage of interpretations and criticisms can crop up in response to any authority’s opinion, and in this day and age the architect has a responsibility to accept the inevitability of that reaction."
from what i understood, the Director of Critical Studies was enforcing her own 'critical' agenda rather than critically infiltrating EOM's mode/s of thinking, which would be a relevant criticality or is it a relevant criticality.
1- i'm wondering whether ahistorical criticality might well be guilty of an excess of interpretation
2- i'm wondering whether ahsitorical criticality might well be guilty of an avidity in furnishing an account with its deserving interperation
Everyone knows that was there or has seen the discussion online, that Sylvia is always trying to promote her own agenda for two things: to gain notoriety , or an attempt to deconstruct or degrade Sci-Arc at large (teachers, students) in a rude, however critical way. She may do the latter perhaps because she feels some sort of rivalry or feud between UCLA and SCi-Arc that is not necessarily said, but somewhat obvious by certain remarks she makes. " Im in your house tonight", or " what is the culture of questions here" ,and " what is Sci-arc's pedagogy", and clearly attacks Erics answers, " you are hard to follow". She clearly identifies herself as an outsider and with a cocky attitude. Her discussion with Eric was nothing more than an attempt to scrutinize and interrogate his personal life and his work and its relation between the two and its affects as the director Sci-Arc.
Eric clearly holds his ground against her questions she calls "hard ball " or "soft balls"
questions. And is able to answer the questions in way that pisses Sylvia off because she wants him to answer in away that proves her hypothesis correct, whatever that may be.
Im sure that she will not attend another debate with Eric, and Im sure Eric would not rudely interrogate her work at UCLA if invited and question there pedagogy and what type of architect they intend to produce. Because if you ask me the work that is produced there is quite similar to that of Sci-arc. It just goes to show her type of character in this profession and attitude towards SCI-Arc.
over and out.
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