The forthcoming Fall issue of Crit, journal of the American Institute of Architecture Students, includes a brief article by me on the history of performance as an architectural paradigm:
Advertised as a scientific, “expert” way to solve problems, systems analysis was highly influenced by the emerging discipline of cybernetics, which taught that the behavior of a system could be modified gradually by successive iterations of feedback. In 1967, Progressive Architecture coined the term “performance architecture” as the architectural application of systems analysis….
All those factors in excess of the purely utilitarian were to be rigorously quantified, and would stand or fall based on their marketing potential. “Value analysis techniques in the very basic approach recognize two classes of functions,” wrote [value engineer Lawrence Delos] Miles: “those functions which cause the product to work and those functions which cause the product to sell.” Form, in other words, would only be considered in terms of economy of effect. The overriding goal was to maximize the intended outcome for the lowest possible cost….
In the 1990s, a “performative turn” in the humanities sought to bracket questions of meaning and shift the focus in various disciplines to the ways in which reality is actively constructed. The architectural applications of this new way of looking at art, language, and society deserve further exploration. However, an oversimplified adoption of the paradigm of performance amounts to a reversion to technocratic design. Society’s most pressing problems—environmental destruction, poverty, the status of human and other life—are fundamentally political, because they concern the allocation of limited resources. Frequently, the locus of these problems’ material manifestation is architecture, but it would be foolish to think that they could be solved if we just had better digital modeling and simulation tools. Delineating problems is often preferable to promising solutions, and a refusal to perform is sometimes the most constructive act.