In essence, criticism is a very prosaic exercise: it consists of judging the things around us. Thus, it is hard not to be a critic today. Everything is judged: the newsreader’s wry face reveals a critical stance in relation to the news report; newspaper headlines often carry sublime irony or humour; insulting comments fill up mail boxes on news sites. Critical distance is cultivated, even if, at times, that distance is only the short space from the keyboard to the post on whatever blog. Critical distance today functions at point blank, because the need for it has been internalised so much. 

In our modern times, the opinion is the substitute, the sweetener to replace criticism. The comment is the abridged version of the opinion. Smileys are the condensed version of the comment. Below the smiley comes the insult. Subjectivity and democraticity are guaranteed. The bond with the readers is precarious: it’s just an opinion, know what I’m saying? The head shots of the opinion makers in the newspapers tells us: they’re people just like us, minus the body. Criticism – at these diverse levels: opinion, comment, smiley, insult – is on our streets, or the Web, which is the same thing. What is not criticism today, is that accusation, resentment, desire, paranoia?

Given that an architect is an active critic, or a potential Tafuri, in a way being critical can mean being less critical, i.e. finding spaces where one can slow down, create an understanding and come to the best conclusion. In a competitive space such as architecture, increasingly taken over by intrigue and resentment, being critical can be the search for meaning in the interstitial space between theory and promotion/reporting, the two main forms the discourse on architecture in our times takes. I will return to this matter at the end of the text.

When one tends towards entropy and the annulment of meaning, criticism can be the attempt to focus on a specific object in movement. To understand its course. To make it touch the ground. But it can no longer be the judicial deliberation, the decision that many are anxious for. Thus, criticism is not an object on a precipice, i.e., definitive, but the topography of a crater, i.e. uncertain, variable. With all the holes, of course. 

As Ignasi de Solà-Morales has written, we already know that criticism “is not so much a sovereign act of pure reason but a practice that channels social behaviour through devices that are the fruit of convention”¹. The current situation has removed these conventions from a one-way street, straight-line situation, as François Chaslin argues: “critics may still explain, comment and debate [...]; but under no circumstances can they dictate like they did in the days of the dogma.”²

Architectural criticism is not a simple activity because, to begin with, architecture is a public art. Believing in Vitruvius, Joseph Rykwert affirms that one of the “earliest forms of human discourse was architectural criticism. [...] The mythical description of the origins of construction incorporates criticism in its invention”³.

So, architectural criticism is something anthropological, an instrument of survival and improvement intrinsic to human development itself. But it was the encounter between this vital aspect and the approaches that emerged in the Enlightenment⁴ that gives it the complex character we recognise today. The duality of common sense/erudition that always accompanies the debate on architecture confers upon criticism a difficult, unsatisfactory status. In the newspapers, academics expect criticism and find fluency; ordinary readers expect fluency and find criticism. There’s no pleasing everyone. And there’s no way out. Λ

Indeed, although it has a logic of judgement and confrontation, criticism only makes sense if it provides for or engenders consensus. If it convenes. In the context of the emergence of literary criticism in Britain, Terry Eagleton defines the critic as a “speaker from the general audience” who “formulates ideas that could be thought by anyone”⁵. Which is why the legibility of what is written, the sense of the discriminations that are made, is important. As Rykwert says: “That is the essence of our activity: discrimination.”⁶

A common sensibility, that which “could be thought by anyone” is today difficult to define or imagine. At most, each of us one has their own – original and critical – reading of events, which they post on their personal blog. What common sensibility? Paradoxically, therefore, criticism is that which can unite and not divide. While historically it functions as a challenge to the establishment – the oppressive regimes in the Enlightenment context, the academic world in the context of the vanguards, modern architecture in the post-war period – today it can function as a space of convergence. Or, if one prefers, a temporary interruption in an era of non-stop 24/7 broadcasting.

The diary-like logic of the blog has provided an outlet for one of the most profound impulses of human nature: taking an interest in what is thought and done – methodically, day after day. It’s always Groundhog Day in Blogland, the same day over and over again: the day on which people tell the world what they think. This narcissism is also part the exercise of criticism; but criticism presupposes the search for a consensus beyond the confession, the blowing off of steam or the insult. Blogging is motivated by resentment and/or amazement. Criticism is, too, but it is obliged to test that volatility for the sake of a common sensibility in the “public space”. As António Guerreiro argues, “very little of what has disappeared from the newspapers has resurfaced on the Net, [...] despite the infinite availability of space; on the contrary, noisy opinionating and chitchat have grown; banter and kaffeeklatsch rule”⁷.

2. The difficulties of criticism

Not only is there radical democraticity in the diverse levels and platforms where one can “criticise”, but our school education has been focusing, for decades now, on the need to foment a “critical mind”. In some areas, to the detriment of more substantive learning. But the moment we all become critics naturally brings with it a loss of “aura” for the critic. The problem is also that when, as one says, the ideologies or metanarratives go into a crisis – or, at least, the horizon that sustains them is shaken – criticism forfeits liquidity. The moment we can all be critics is the moment in which being critical loses a regulatory function. Add to this we’re-all-critics-now situation the fact that everything is beautiful (Andy Warhol). Not only are we qualified to pass judgement, but, in the end, everything can be loved, which is an inconvenience. We are in a world that is indifferently emphathetic, non-distinguishing and relative. 

The cultural relativism of post-modernity – and sceptics can feel free to try any other expression that better illustrate what ties us to our time – is making criticism one crazy exercise. By way of example: the distinction between high culture and low culture marked the first watershed between the elaborate and the spontaneous, or between the erudite and the commercial, where criticism found comfort. The end of that “barrier”, as Andreas Huyssen demonstrated in After the Great Divide⁸, meant that there was no more prior levelling. The reference points are fluid, the coordinates are constantly shifting, and criticism loses its bearings.

As Sola-Morales has put it: “We do not have one single historical, or technical, or visual set of knowledge. [...] It is impossible to write a treatise on architecture today given that it is impossible to hierarchically organise the technical knowledge [...]. In this situation criticism spreads out and deploys itself, looking for reasons in what Gilles Deleuze has called folds of knowledge, provisional coagulations of veracity.”⁹ Or also, according to Chaslin: “There is no higher and nobler philosophical authority on which we can base our point of view than the simple work of architecture. We can no longer rationalise our thoughts, nor refer them to an intellectually higher register.”¹⁰

In the architecture of the last 20 years we have witnessed a constant switching of places without a clear logic of progression (or retrogression). The neo-vanguard experiments of the 1960s, the political radicalism of the 1970s, the communication logic of the 1980s, the rigorous and cold discretion of the 1990s – all this is felt in contemporary architecture, and frequently in the same building. The architecture of Rem Kohlhaas, to give a classic example, cannot be understood without these various layers.

Criticism cannot trace a straight line when the works are tortuous, contain different layers of meaning, are ubiquitous. Herzog & de Meuron represented minimalist restraint in the 1990s and now they are “regime architects” in the era of globalisation, up there with the most eccentric and the most sublime. Peter Zumthor, with this rhetoric of the non-image, has created some of the most followed images in contemporary architecture; the revival in interest in the social and the modern brought modern Brazilian architecture back into the limelight, having unjustly spent the 1970s and 1980s somewhere backstage, and Paulo Mendes da Rocha is the improbable new hero. And at a time when Desconstructivism is, intellectually, on its way out, Zaha Hadid emerges as a global star.

It is interesting to observe that one of the last lines of “heroic” and “just” thought, Kenneth Frampton’s “critical regionalism”¹¹ in the 1980s, while effective in its criticism of post-modernism, has engendered such little empathy in the architects it targeted.

Living in an economic and financial crisis, in which denunciation of the opulence of the mega-rich and powerful animates neo-Marxist discourses, and the tomorrows seem to be singing again – even if no one knows what song –, the starchitect system would be a sitting duck. Unfortunately, most of the architects in question have an impressive amount of work. They are not parasites. The excesses of the star system reflect those of society at large in recent decades. But, in general, the architects in question – be it Gehry, Koolhaas, Herzog & de Meuron, Nouvel, Libeskind, Thom Mayne, Zumthor, Sejima, or others – are beacons of contemporary architecture. Indeed, not always is there such strong correspondence between merit and recognition as is the case here. The fact that the work of Álvaro Siza is so respected proves that the architectural culture is capable of celebrating the more marginal and more poetic and that the star system is not always at the centre of the action. As always, there is a lot of waste amongst the “stars”, but that is part of the way things are – there are always the bandwagon jumpers, those travelling on the giants’ shoulders. In such cases, time, more than criticism, does the job of dissipating the confusion.

When the system is as tight as most of the starchitects in it are sheltered, criticism is not evident and malediction has its limits. The classic alternative is defending to the utmost all that is new or – the equivalent – all that is old. For the critic there is an ultimate dilemma: if he is reticent in relation to the new he tends to be seen as a caveman; if he is ardently in favour of it, he will be a caveman the day after tomorrow. The “anxiety of the future”, wrote Manfredo Tafuri in 1986, means that the “architectural critic” is someone “looking for the new to get rid of the old” in a scheme of “continual destruction” that “contributes to the nihilism of our times”¹².

3. Pragmatic criticism and operative criticism 

Although I began by characterising criticism as a prosaic activity, its status is in reality one of enormous complexity. To simplify things I would distinguish between two modes: pragmatic criticism, which essentially originated in the Anglo-Saxon culture, where a direct and incisive approach, with the general public in mind, is cultivated; and what is known as operative criticism, in which the analysis is carried out in the name of the projection of an idea, following a model of transformative “action” ¹³. In pragmatic criticism, the legibility and practicability of what is written are central and a penchant for controversy serves spirituous and widespread dissemination purposes. Examples of this would be the work of Martin Pawle¹⁴ and that of Paul Goldberger in The New Yorker.

Operative criticism, according to Tafuri, “projects past history […] in the direction of the future” and “forces history […], given that, by vesting a strong ideological load in it, it is not willing to accept the failures and dispersions the history is impregnated with”¹⁵. Remetendo já para setecentos, Tafuri names Sigfried Giedion and Bruno Zevi as exponents of operative criticism: in both cases there are “historiographic contributions” while at the same time their proposals are “authentic architectural projects”¹⁶. 

Operative criticism refers to an aspiration in progress, an ongoing struggle. It is an instrument in the construction of a meta-narrative – rationalism in the case of Giedion and organicism, a serious issue in the 1960s, in the case of Zevi. In pragmatic criticism common sense prevails, while in operative criticism there is a horizon to be built as in English and French Enlightenment. The case of Tafuri himself is an exceptional one and, in the final analysis, it serves as a sign of what was going on at the time. “All great myths collapse one by one”¹⁷, as he says. The re-problematisation of architecture he begins in Theories and History of Architecture (1968)¹⁸ culminates, in Progetto e Utopia (1973), in the dramatic conclusion of the existence of an architectural ideology¹⁹. The ideologies are here understood as systems “which mask the operation of capitalism”²⁰. In other words, for Tafuri modern architecture operates essentially in the field of representations, more than in the field of the real overcoming of physical conditions. Modern historiography itself is founded on “deformations”²¹. The pessimistic view that modern architecture is in the end a place of manipulation is understood as a “death of architecture” and that assumption is the basis of a large part of the theoretic output from American universities, even if it contains considerable errors, as in the case of Joan Ockman²² and Diane Ghirardo²³.

For all purposes, Tafuri’s historiographic view clashed with operative criticism or historiography which established the various cycles of modern architecture, contributing to the end of its state of grace. Pragmatic criticism went on to draw maximum benefit from the corrosion of operative criticism. The polemic, taxonomic and celebratory vein gained predominance through Charles Jencks in the late 1970s. The 1980s were a period marked by the dying breath of operative criticism and an acceleration of the pragmatic mode – now also more effusive, tangential and publicity-oriented, in line with the times. Tafuri abandoned the discussion of contemporary architecture. Operative criticism lost its raison d’être also because the horizon that sustained it began to disappear. Pragmatic criticism made criticism of modernity into an action programme, but it was essentially reactive, specular. Operative criticism, or what was left of it, gained an essentially resistant and defensive component that was patent in the editorials and articles by Vittorio Gregotti for Casabella²⁴ or the “Critical Regionalism” theories of Kenneth Frampton, as already mentioned. 

Operative criticism and pragmatic criticism were strongly expressive currents between the 1950s and 1980s in a time arc that corresponded to a period of crisis and change in paradigm, where criticism was able to flourish, as I will suggest. The debate raised by Jane Jacobs, Robert Venturi, Aldo Rossi and Colin Rowe and defined by Jencks, Paolo Portoghesi and Heinrich Klotz in the 1980s as Postmodernism, still has a critical dimension. Tafuri’s influence in America and, later, the adoption of Deconstructivism by Peter Eisenman and Mark Wigley already revealed a dominance of theory over criticism.

From then on, operative criticism and pragmatic criticism faded into theory or, at the other extreme, promotion/editorial/lifestyle. Appropriating these dilemmas and variations, the critical output in Spain became a very specific study case. From the late 1960s onwards, elements of operative and pragmatic criticism converged there to forge a strong culture of critique. 

It was in Spain that we were able to follow the management of criticism’s possibilities of survival. From the lucid ubiquity of Rafael Moneo to Ignasi de Solà-Morales’ elaborate interpretations and to the pedagogic approach of Josep María Montaner, the Spanish context became prodigious in attempts to deal critically with the state of contemporary architecture. There is a reason why El Croquis became the symbol of globalisation in architecture, the bad and the good in one and the same object, more indispensable than loved.

It is also interesting to follow the mediation work Luis Fernández-Galiano carried out at Arquitectura Viva, where he was editor, and in the articles he wrote for El País. The difficult balance that he maintained between the tradition of operative criticism and the apoplectic nature of our times did not prevent him from being pigeon-holed as a neo-liberal²⁵ or publicist²⁶. Indeed, Galiano has intelligently sought to cross the pragmatic tradition and the Anglo-Saxon taste for controversy with the operative dimension of continental criticism. This passage is evident in the mea culpa JA publishes in this edition: the “crisis in the world” obliges one to reconsider the “utopian aspirations of modernity”; i.e. to return to the choreography of operative criticism. The orgiastic cycle is followed by a cycle of penitence.

4. History and theory

Having come this far, it would be interesting to consider the role of history and theory, of which criticism is traditionally a guest. There are obvious differences between architectural history, theory and criticism: differences in methodology, study object and purpose. According to José Mattoso, and to establish a correlation with architecture, history is “the scrutiny of the past on the basis of the marks it leaves, then the mental representation resulting from that scrutiny and, finally, the production of a written or oral text that allows for communication with others”²⁷. History aims to organise and narrate events so as to introduce order and meaning into the human saga. The defining of the succession of artistic movements, analysis of the continuities and breaks they introduce is a guarantee of civilisation. Macro-readings have been succeeded by a “fine layering of microtemporal strata”²⁸, the objective of which is to hone and refine the search for “positivity” in history.

Contemporary architectural theory has a different spatiality, although the objectives may be parallel: the search for a “whole” is done through the intertwining of discourses and questioning more than through narration of the events. Theory produces an intempestive discourse that has to be contained in history. History has an order-creating vocation; theory has one of dismantling [disruption]²⁹. History deals with the finity, with what was lost; and not just with the ghosts but also with the “death of the ghosts”, to borrow a term from Paulo Varela Gomes³⁰. For theory, everything is dead or alive; it is indifferent, for it moves in a phantasmagorical field. Even architecture in ruins, or architecture that never made it past the paper, can be re-erected through theoretical devices such as post-colonialism, feminism or neo-Marxism.

History creates suspense on the basis of what has already gone before – like Hitchcock’s Rope; theory results in Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction: it crosses, modules, releases, inverts – all in the search for a more pulsating “whole”. Theory wants to put out the fire with petrol, its style is anarchic, all over the place. In theory, the reflection of the present in the past is exposed, whereas in history it tends to be repressed in the name of “positivity”. The historiographic discourses themselves are the material of theory, which investigates their vices or temptations. Theory has a seductive discursive mode, with the plasticity and the power to “denounce” history’s narratives. As Hays states, theory’s successes and failures provide “precise calibrations of the history of architecture itself”³¹. 

Criticism focuses on the rapid landscape, the everyday, and is the verbalisation of experience. This discursive, thematic and temporal mobility of architectural criticism has been claimed by theory. In particular, the theory I refer to, that fostered and practised in American academic circles, is an invention that allows for discourse on what took place yesterday or 200 years ago with the same legitimacy and convenience. It is the Coca-Cola of thought! To the point that, as K. Michael Hays writes, theory “has taken architectural criticism’s place and rivals the methodological importance of traditional architectural historiography”³². Theory’s discursive model allows for the use of terminology that is shared by other disciplines, thus enabling mediation between these and architecture. According to Hays, architectural theory “opened up architecture to what is thinkable and sayable in other codes” ³³.

Furthermore, the aspiration to “the totality of the real” has led historiography to integrate elements from theory. Or to also look at itself – a historiography of historiography³⁴. In counterpart, the excess of interpretation has justified an accentuation of “positivity”. As Paulo Pereira writes: “There are those, on the historian side, who do not want their objectivity (which is always, as we know, a construction) perhaps tainted by a tendentially more volatile judgement”³⁵. History’s defence of “positivity” led Tafuri, as we have seen, to denounce the “deformations” that operative criticism or historiography did to the history of modern architecture. The deconstruction of these “deformations” is one of the founding elements of contemporary theory.

Tafuri asserted: “There is no such thing as criticism, there is only history”³⁶. The integration of criticism into history seems to contradict its denunciation of operation criticism. At any rate, history’s “positivity” emerges today as a step forward that no one will want to exchange for operative historiography. Furthermore, having stolen criticism’s soul, architectural theory serves those who do not feel at home in that positivist historiography.

5. Crisis and criticism

Criticism gets on well with crisis, with which it indeed shares etymological roots. Crisis – a “sudden change in the course of a disease, usually at which the patient is expected to recover or die.” – is, after all, the stage in which the disease presents the clearest picture of itself. From the 1950s to the 1980s the signs of crisis – of modernity – were clear and there was an ongoing change in paradigm. In this context, criticism was fluid. There was the differential diagnosis, the medicine and the cure. During that period a number of cures were being tested and criticism is a fundamental element in that process. Architectural criticism in Portugal, as I have already noted, was able to emancipate itself in this period, particularly through figures such as Nuno Portas, Pedro Vieira de Almeida and Carlos Duarte.

Today, the “crisis in the world”, to return to the term used by Galiano, allows one to cherish the idea of the re-emergence of a socially aware and ecologically attentive criticism. It would seem that the prevalent “cynicism” made it possible to conceal, also amongst architects from the 1980s onwards, that the social problems were not resolved. Who’d have thought! Now comes the wake-up call. The social is everywhere. One should have realised, after Tafuri, that, in essence, architects seek a system of ideas that allows them to have work, to think, to design and to build. And that they register, like a seismograph, societal trends. This will be followed by the non-social, etc.

My point is that since the 1980s we have been living in a perpetual “change in the course of a disease, usually at which the patient is expected to recover or die”. In other words, the crisis has shifted into cruising speed: the disease is chronic and incurable. For criticism to fully function, the disease has to be seen as curable. When the cure is not in sight, criticism issues an opinion, commentary or smiley. We are no longer in a crisis in the true sense: we have all the calm and silence of the space shuttle once it has entered into orbit. The crisis has become permanent; it is stratospheric. Criticism can be the monitoring of the mission, if one prefers the space metaphor; or regular consultations to keep the disease under control, if one prefers the medical metaphor.

The exercise of criticism meant creating a “second language”, which operates on the “first language of the work”³⁷, as Roland Barthes has written. “The critic unfolds the meanings”; and “it is sterile to bring the work down to pure explicitness”³⁸.

However, today, with the overload of senses that works (of architecture) incorporate, perhaps the path of criticism takes is being that crater space I referred to at the beginning. By that I mean the place of an archaeology of hte impact; one where the origins (the history) and the trajectory (the theory) of the object are ana-
lysed. We always have to go back to the beginning, i.e. the Modern Movement; and consider the source of propulsion: neo-plasticism/expressionism/constructivism, etc.

(The Modern Movement is, indeed, the place one returns to as the beginning and end of the world. There is an organisation dedicated to that cult – Docomomo – and it is natural that, a few decades from now, it will become a religion, like the others. With its own Messiah, Apostles, bible and followers).

At any rate, history is used today as a way of fixing coordinates and no longer as a way of projecting the future, in the manner of operative criticism. History does not have the future-oriented meaning that is patent in John Ruskin, Adolf Loos or Rossi. It essentially functions as a form of identification and localisation. Built architecture itself uses history in a Pop-like way, i.e. it cites obvious or obscure visual references. Criticism uses history like an instructions manual, or in the style of a literacy of the work.

In concluding, I would say that criticism has split into two, as I have argued above: its communicating vein is now patent in the reporting on and promotion of works of architecture; its more questioning aspect has emigrated to theory. Today what we have is a form of schizophrenia: between the at times unbearable density of theory and the at times unbearable lightness of the news item in the style of Wallpaper. Between extreme complexification (theory) and extreme simplification (architecture as lifestyle). Both types fit perfectly into the “market”: they are products that are choreographed with extreme refinement. The famous starchitect system feeds them and is feed by them.

As it cannot be what it once was, criticism can be what is in between theory and promotion. While not the cure, it can be the regular monitoring of the disease. It can be simplification without being propaganda; it can use theory’s excess of thought without the excesses of theoretical language. Or it can be less critical; it can stop vociferation; and use the “critical spirit” to gain space and not to jump walls.

People are now listening to radio on the internet and vinyl “has never been so modern”. Perhaps there is a future for architectural criticism.  After all, a little post-modern archaeology would do some good; going back to the moment when things got out of hand. And hearing once more: Houston, we have a problem...|