In the polite but destructive skirmishes between builders and thinkers, architecture's avant-garde holds the ultimate weapon.
By Philip Nobel
The Favored Circle:
The Social Foundations
of Architectural Distinction
by Garry Stevens
MIT Press
253 pp., $35.00
What's wrong with architecture? On the surface, maybe nothing. There is no shortage of real or symbolic issues to investigate and dispute, and architects enjoy an endless supply of new materials and technologies to play with in their professional sandbox. The public seems to think it's cool to be an architect, at least judging from the caricatures served up by Hollywood, and the mainstream press has probably never been kinder to the profession, receiving even its most outlandish offerings without shock. There is still a lot to build, for now, and some of it will likely manage to be interesting.
Times should be good, but not everyone is happy. Prosperity and approval appear to have done nothing to diminish many architects' insecurity about what they see as their marginal position in the chain of construction. And the architectural world is, as ever, split into hostile camps, between those whose primary mandate is to build and those who in a healthy discipline might be called an avant-garde--the ones we read and write about, who would provide art before service. Because the latter group represents (or misrepresents) the practice of architecture so successfully, the tensions grow. It is these occasionally fratricidal depths that Garry Stevens has plumbed in his new book, The Favored Circle, a look at how the dysfunctional society of architects affects the practice of architecture.
Stevens is not the first author to scold architects for the mismanagement of their domain; books of professional introspection are common. (I may not be hanging out in the right aisles, but I don't think other occupations, or arts, produce their own autopsy reports with such regularity.) Just to hit the high points, in recent years we have had Robert Gutman's now-classic Architectural Practice: A Critical View (1988), Roxanne Kuter Williamson's American Architects and the Mechanics of Fame (1991), Magali Sarfatti Larson's Behind the Postmodern Facade (1993), and Reflections on Architectural Practice in the Nineties, a collection of essays by various authors published in 1996. All of these books try in one way or another to answer the same question: Why, through good times and bad, does the architectural profession remain a house divided?
Unlike Gutman and Larson, Stevens is an architect, and his wonderfully bilious critique of his field is motivated by personal experience. As he tells us early on, the architecture school at the University of Sydney, where he taught for many years, is broken up into two warring parties. Stevens is aligned with the Department of Architectural and Design Sciences (DADS), which occupies itself primarily with research and the science of building. DADS is naturally at odds with partisans of the DAPAA, the Department of Architecture, Planning, and Allied Arts--the artistes. The same game is played out in various forms at schools everywhere, of course, in tensions between builders and thinkers, or the old guard and the zaggier-than-thou exhibitionists.
Central to the book is Stevens' analysis of the ways "genius" stakes out its terrain (for better or for worse, he relies heavily on data from a single source, the Macmillan Encyclopedia of Architects). Stevens believes that controlling the creation and definition of taste is the primary weapon elite architects use to subjugate the rest of the profession. Taste cannot be taught, and if you don't have it... well, someone has to draw the reflected-ceiling plans. (Stevens doesn't mention it, but Philip Johnson, the spindle around which our local favored circle turns, is always hailed first for his refined tastes.) Stevens supplements this argument with a array of damning charts and graphs that show the imperiled position of this taste-making group as it is increasingly outnumbered by so-called minor architects. But although he has embraced the methods of sociology with the zeal of the converted, he does not affect its objectivity. Stevens never misses an opportunity to vent his hostility toward the subjects of his study. "Perhaps these properties of taste explain one of the great puzzles of the architectural persona: the extraordinary lack of humor and priggish self-righteousness noted in the great architects."
Stevens concludes by proposing an amicable split. "It is a tragedy that the field as a whole maintains the fiction that the huge new segment... created this century is identical in nature to the older and much smaller sector inhabited by the eminent," he writes. "Architects, critics and academics alike take as feasible for all what is in fact feasible for the few architects inhabiting the purely symbolic space of the field. The confusion is not only made possible but encouraged by the fact that all have the same occupational title of 'architect.' " The favored circle--"those at the summit of the field who
design structures of power and taste for people of power and taste"--should, Stevens quietly suggests, go their own way.
So what's wrong with architecture? It's the architects, stupid.
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