Many architects are frustrated by what they see as a lack of direction in contemporary design. Compared to the strong sense of common purpose in the work of Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and Frank Lloyd Wright, architecture today has little in the way of a larger “narrative.” The sense of direction that characterized the Modern movement was partly a result of architects’ own propaganda efforts to make their work appear to be on the cutting edge of an international zeitgeist (Le Corbusier, for example, started the journal L’Esprit Nouveau to promote his vision of a post-cubist “machine aesthetic”). But it also resulted from a shared set of social aspirations and a belief that enlightened designers working together could improve the world–in other words, a utopian view of architecture’s purpose.
After World War II, this vision faded. Disillusioned with the efforts of modernism, the field turned its attention from the ideal of “the good society” to that of “the good life.” The critical moment in twentieth-century architecture did not seek to solve the world’s problems but to create “gaps” for new kinds of thought by resisting social or cultural norms. The discourse was propelled forward not by conceiving new utopias but by negating past ones. The resulting “heterotopic” architectures were fragmentary spaces where idiosyncratic visions could be developed to extremes. As a result, private enclaves replaced public space as the principal domain of architectural thinking and praxis.
The contemporary, globalized world is far different from the one in which criticality arose as a paradigm. What would “resistance” mean for a Western architect building a skyscraper in Dubai or Shanghai? In so many cases, the fruitful diversity of late twentieth-century architecture has given way to an all-out competition among buildings to outdo each other in spectacle. With critical theory on the wane generally, many architects are seeking a new narrative or movement, and some theorists are calling for a “post-critical” or “projective” architecture based on affirmation rather than negation.
The danger is that extolling theoretical novelty for its own sake tends to make architectural ideas into objects to be consumed and discarded. If we accept the premises of projective architecture, criticality begins to appear as something “used up” and in need of replacement by a new theoretical framework (inevitably, a more market-friendly one than either critical postmodernism or the socially-minded modernism that preceded it).
It’s a fact that humans rely on simplified narratives to make sense of complex phenomena. The U.S. presidential campaign, for example, is directed by “media narratives,” with events understood based on how they fit into a preexisting, quasi-mythical storyline. But, as we must never cease to remind ourselves, life overflows the frames we create for it, and every era produces “minor” works that give the lie to putative master narratives. Working without an overriding direction may not be such a bad thing: there’s something refreshing about the absence of a universal architectural agenda that everyone is meant to be pursuing. The challenge is finding ways to address the often-neglected problems of public space and collective experience not through an all-embracing paradigm such as “projective” practice but through the separate efforts of numerous individual projects.