What’s in a Name?

A Conversation with Ajay Manthripragada,
Alex Oetzel, and Letícia Wouk Almino
September 2023

For Architecture Writing Workshop’s third issue, What’s the Matter With Canon?, the editors convened a roundtable to explore how the changing perceptions of the architectural canon shape the modes of comprehending, organizing, and representing architectural knowledge.

How does a cultural product from the past, as is the canon, remain relevant to the myriad cultures and values around the globe—and the buildings they produce? Architecture’s inherited canon is variably understood as a defined set of architectural works and as knowledge that is (re)assessed and selected to be passed on to future generations. Depending on who you ask, the canon is either dismissed altogether—its legacy ignored—or, increasingly, reexamined through the lens of how we produce and organize contemporary architectural knowledge.

Editors Pouya Khadem and Mai Okimoto moderated the following discussion on architecture’s canon with Ajay Manthripragada, Alex Oetzel, and Letícia Wouk Almino. Discussants draw on experiences from their studies, teaching, and practice. (This roundtable has been edited for length and content.)

Mai Okimoto (MO): What is canon? Does it refer to buildings—or can it be used to describe ideas? Are works described as canonical synonymous with great work? Is this term still relevant to our field today?

Ajay Manthripragada (AM): It's a big question. I'm interested in the way you're phrasing the term "canon" without the article "the." You're saying "canon," as opposed to "the canon" or "the canonical." I'm wondering if that indicates something about an interest in its redefinition or rethinking.

By definition, the canon is a Western construct. The origin of the idea—that there's a body of works to which everyone refers and agrees upon their excellence—is derived from the concept of the canonization of saints in the Catholic tradition. In an academic context, whether it's literature, art, or architecture, the canon became construed as a body of creative works. For me, that's important to acknowledge because it has a different relationship to authority.

Letícia Wouk Almino (LWA): It’s a complicated term—and increasingly less relevant. I find it difficult to use the term at all. It’s a word that is not easily dissociated from its classic definition as a particular set of Western works. With a greater diversity of people teaching at institutions and bringing in voices from all over the globe, we're transitioning away from the singular way of thinking about architecture. One way in which this is happening is through the language we use to discuss architecture—through a new set of terms to address the complexity of perspectives and modes of practice.

Alex Oetzel (AO): I don’t think the shift in attitude toward the canon, on its own, is novel. The discipline has always been dealing with cultural transformations and changes in values. What matters is how the changes are happening, who has influence, and what are the tangible outcomes...

AM: Figures in other disciplines (literature for instance) have been unabashed about defining the canon by definitively selecting a group of works. It tends to be more nebulous in architecture—the canon is implied and rehearsed over many iterations and repetitions of certain examples in academia, and, for my set of interests, in the discipline of formal analysis. There's a kind of reciprocity between the definition of the canon and formal analysis. They support each other.

I agree with Letícia—we don't have to use the word, but I appreciate aspects of what it represents because it allows us to collectively have a conversation about what we value.

LWA: I am also a disciple of formal analysis. It was preached to me, and that's how I and a lot of people learned architecture, following a lineage of academics who have also been taught this way. Naturally, you would be narrowly limited to a specific subset of buildings that can be formally analyzed; there are only certain schools of thought that allow you to talk about architecture in this way. The more I think about your question, the more I realize that the problem of the canon is a question about architecture education. If we change the conversation, we'll be open to discussing different types of buildings that don't fit within the rules of formal analysis.

AM: I agree; these are important points. As we expand the references, we also need to completely reconsider the tools by which we look at them. There is a body of representational strategies that we can leverage, adapt, and change as we look at other aspects of architecture. However, I've come to see a flaw in the argument: Why do we need to draw them at all? Why draw a plan of a building conceived outside the logic of a plan? 

AO: I think our attitudes towards the relationship between canon and education are most visible in classrooms. I recently taught a studio at Ohio State University (OSU) about high-rise hotels. Before moving to the design phase, I prepared a list of over one hundred precedents of skyscrapers across history for the students to study the formal typology and its history. We started in Chicago where the first skyscrapers were built, but I encouraged them to branch out. The quantity of towers meant each building analysis had to be very quick, and encouraged a non-hierarchical study of the typology’s historic range and collective characteristics, rather than in-depth formal analyses of specific buildings.

MO: To Alex’s point, there’s value in rethinking how we approach precedents. We have access to more information compared to fifty years ago when architectural knowledge came from fewer sources such as print publications. It’s also interesting to think about formal analysis and how it lends itself to books and exhibitions. I'm curious to hear what your thoughts are on the changing nature of media and how that's shaping the way we're recognizing certain works.

LWA: This ties back to what Ajay mentioned about formal analysis as a tool of representation. It has its limits: it only works for buildings that have been drawn or documented. For me, this is quite exclusionary. The types of buildings that have been published are the ones that architecture institutions have historically favored through funding and resources—and are often buildings by architects who are savvy about self-promotion. In order to move away from the narrow scope of the canon, we need to diversify the ways in which information is passed down. In other words, we need educators who can develop new methodologies to confront the ever-expanding landscape of information and introduce students to varied perspectives. The unfortunate default is to reference parts of history that are the subject of easily-accessible, published materials.

AM: It is not a new idea that the expanded set of references cannot be understood autonomously as material realities in the world without understanding their deeper cultural and ritualistic significance. Therein lies a very fundamental problem in our premise: Looking at the architectural complexities of these buildings and gaining a deep knowledge of their cultural significance (particularly in the context of a design studio with its limited timeframes) substantially increases the risk of having misrepresentations, misunderstandings, and misinformation. They cannot be reduced to an elevation from which we then borrow. I don’t have an answer to the problem, but perhaps we have to open up to other forms of representation that are completely outside of the conventional drawings and models.

AO: I recently encountered Audrey Bennett’s essay, describing the history of the golden ratio from its origins in Africa to its use by the Bauhaus. The golden ratio (that celebrated, geometrically-derived divine proportion) was presented in my early architectural education as a Western (specifically ancient Greek) invention. According to Bennett, its origins are much older and applied throughout different cultures and regions from informal Sub-Saharan communities to Napoleonic Italy. Her analysis of the golden ratio is an example that shows how each generation’s understanding of the canon is heavily influenced by how their predecessors conceived and shared knowledge; possibly reduced or misremembered. Perhaps through rethinking the tools and framework of our studies, we might begin to notice forms that are shared across cultures and see ideas that are lost or misremembered by previous generations.

I’ve found myself feeling the time and curriculum constraints of what you can cover in a semester-long studio. Besides the logistic constraints, there are also limits to my own knowledge and subjectivity as an instructor. There are acts of exclusion and emphasis that happen as a result of limits of my body, mind, and time.

Pouya Khadem (PK): Even if studio resources and timeframes were to expand, is there ever a point at which everything can be comprehensively and, let’s say “democratically” studied? Is there any realistic circumstance under which no building is excluded from study?

AM: Is selecting which buildings to teach an exclusionary act? Yes, but I don't think that's necessarily a problem in itself. The methods by which we adjudicate need to change, evolve, and expand, but judgment is a part of discourse and pedagogy. The way that I've been addressing this in my seminars is to encourage students to bring projects to the table and argue for their excellence. These works can be from any source as long as the students can make the case for their close study. This opens up possibilities for authorship and criteria. The idea that there can be a body of counter-canonical works that also can be theorized (in this case according to the students' arguments) is very interesting to me.

PK: There are many useful things that we’ve inherited from this methodological framework we call the canon, and of course, we’re not talking about entirely throwing that knowledge away. Like any heritage, however, the canon and the way it is broadly understood carry the cultural values and assumptions of a certain time and place.

AM: The canon is a cultural inscription, but it claims to be otherwise. It claims that a work's greatness is inherent, independent of personal opinion. But, of course, that is impossible. The matter of assessment is always someone's opinion, and this is a paradoxical condition of the canonical. It claims to be dispassionate but by definition, it isn't. In this same paradoxical tension, I find some educational value. If we accept that the canon is a false construct, then we can keep defining it, redefining it, and using it to our advantage as an educational and cultural tool.

LWA: I continue to find a problem with referencing the term or even referencing architecture knowledge as a set of works that we need to talk about. It would be more productive to reframe the canon just as one element of architectural history. We keep returning to certain buildings and architects because they were influential to a certain subset of architects. When I teach, we discuss who these people were because architecture history is not just about the buildings. It's necessary to teach the good, bad, and ugly about the influential people of the past. Instead of canon, which implies a set of works divorced from history, it's more helpful to think about the conditions, cultures, and the influence of the people behind those works as irreducible from a specific moment in history. We're shifting away from seeing the architecture scene as an aggregation of singular works by singular geniuses. We don't all have to have the same set of references or foundational principles. Why do we need to discuss the canon as something more than a moment in history?

AO: It's worthwhile to think about a work of architecture as a point of reference—one of many—that brings us to the approximation of all the narratives built around it, its circumstances, and the people who were involved in the process of realizing it.

MO: We have been exploring the shifts in how the canon is taught and discussed. Does this shift ultimately manifest in the built environment—for example, via students that go on to work at architecture firms? Or are these kinds of changes merely happening within academia?

AM: I would answer this in relation to Letícia's points about letting the term go—implying the canon itself is going to be relegated to history. In that imagination, it would still continue to influence what we see in the world, even as a historical fact against which we work. There will always be a specter of it because it was so instrumental in the development of what we understand as a discipline. I'm on the same page as Letícia and Alex, that we should no longer think of it as a body of works to which everyone has to refer. Hopefully, the result will be a more diverse and richer reality in terms of what constitutes great architecture and who produces it.

AO: In my own work, I listen to clients and users describe their preferred way of living and then study ways to translate or materialize their needs using architectural modes of representation. For me, it's important to include them in the design process. This experience is particularly rewarding because it places me face to face with stakeholders who are not coming from years of architecture education that calibrate their references, and can freely engage in conversations about architecture from different perspectives. They don’t have nor need to have extensive knowledge of architecture.

LWA: There needs to be a fundamental shift in the way that we evaluate what is a good work of architecture. Within the tradition of formal analysis, there's almost no need for the building to be built in the first place to be considered good. How do we continue to talk about what is a good work of architecture beyond the narrow conversation around what is a formally good building? What is it like to live in a building? Who are the users? I hope we can develop a framework that allows us to talk with rigor about these topics in academia. It will change how non-architects perceive the built environment, and the conversations happening in architecture schools will become more accessible and relevant to them.

---

Ajay Manthripragada is the 2023-24 Lily Auchincloss Rome Prize Fellow in Architecture at the American Academy in Rome. Prior, he was Design Critic in Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Alex Oetzel is an architect and educator, typically located in Ohio. She works (more or less) at Moody Nolan and Ohio State University while serving on the AIA Ohio Board of Directors. She enjoys writing for the New York Review of Architecture, attending summer school with the Architecture Lobby, and celebratory donuts.

Letícia Wouk Almino is an architect, artist and educator based in Brooklyn, New York. She has taught architectural studio and drawing courses at Barnard College and Pratt Institute. Her artwork has been exhibited at 411 Gallery, Pratt SoA Gallery, and at the Center for Architecture.

Pouya Khadem edits for the Architecture Writing Workshop. He works as an architectural designer in Houston.

Mai Okimoto edits for the Architecture Writing Workshop. She works as an architectural designer in Houston.

---

>>What’s the Matter with Canon?

Speaking of Writing

A Conversation with Scott Colman,
Sydney Shilling, and Brittany Utting
January 2023

For Architecture Writing Workshop’s inaugural issue, Who Gets to Write?, the editors convened a roundtable on the topic of how architecture is communicated to the public, bringing together perspectives from design practice, journalism, and academia. 

Writing shapes the way architecture is understood internally by architects, and externally by the public. Historically, the tools required for writing—time, vocabulary, and space for reflection—have been available only to a narrow subset of people. The old adage that history is written by the victors plays itself out daily in practice and the academy: The distribution of wealth and leisure under late-stage capitalism determines who among us has the time and bandwidth to put pen to paper.

Editors Pouya Khadem and Sebastián López Cardozo moderated the following discussion with Scott Colman, Brittany Utting, and Sydney Shilling on the state of writing (and reading) in architecture, and the growing distance between our discipline and the public. (This roundtable has been edited for length and content.)

Sebastián López Cardozo (SLC): Who gets to write? Do certain people have more access to the act of writing than others? Who gets to shape architectural discourse today, and what resources are needed to do so?

Scott Colman (SC): It's a big question. People don't have time to write because they're often laboring for low money for long hours. Writing, as a mode of reflection on architectural design, used to be fundamental to architecture practice—at least in the western tradition. Because of capital and its structuring division of labor, the distinction between specialists within the discipline has been growing; all of the labels that we have for what people do—theorist, historian, academic, practitioner …—are products of that system. In the current system of design practice, we're structurally inhibited from having this kind of reflection—we are restricted to specialized roles, and we have little room to reflect. To have time and space for these reflections would lead us to question the system. So, the question of "who gets to write?" is as much a political question as a structural one.

So, in a way, your setup is an effort to find ways to hack the system. Now, the only way we get to consciously engage the politics of design is to do it on our own time with our own dime, using any surplus means, or any surreptitious communication tools we have. I'm one of those privileged people who have been given the opportunity to be able to spend at least part of my time writing. And so I have an enormous responsibility that I should feel more often than I probably do.

Brittany Utting (BU): The question asked for this panel is: “Who gets to write?” You could have asked “Who has to write? Who needs to write? Who doesn't write? Who won't write?” It’s important to unpack the implications of your phrasing, and what audiences it includes and excludes. More traditional forms of architectural writing typically take place in sites of “sanctioned” discourse: journals, magazines, and books. Increasingly, however, alternative formats of exchange are emerging: activist letter writing, open-source curricula, and even satirical memes. These different practices of writing have the potential to expand the notions of audience and authorship, but they also participate in a complex system of labor relations and exchanges that themselves aren’t free from exploitation.

Sydney Shilling (SS): It's important to mark the distinction between shaping the discourse and writing, because I don't think we can say that the discourse is only happening in publication. For instance, look at @fa.front and @architectural.workers.united on Instagram—the grassroots movements they have created are impactful, started through their own agency with virtually no resources. They didn't rely on traditional outlets to give them permission or to publish. Social media platforms, despite all their flaws, have in many ways democratized the conversation. In today’s saturated media landscape, it is an absolute privilege to have an audience, but as far as the privilege of being able to write is concerned, writing is as accessible as it has ever been. And in fact, the architectural worker is the ideal architectural writer, because they have a facility of language with which to discuss projects that is rare within the broader field of journalism.

SC: In the history of western architecture, this kind of architectural writing—what we call architectural criticism—arose with the public sphere, alongside newspapers and other modes of more democratic communication. Architects were no longer beholden just to the nobility or to the church, but also to the public at large. And now there's a fundamental crisis in democratic discourse, as the space to reflect and criticize shrinks everyday—especially in the last thirty years or so—due to the structure of the market and the neoliberal system of value.

BU: The question of writing’s accessibility that Sydney refers to is an interesting one. For instance, short forms of writing are accessible because they can more easily fit into the frameworks of social media that are increasingly defining the public sphere. But these shorter formats can also have the effect of flattening discourse: reducing disciplinary arguments to a quick quip, an image, or a few hundred characters. Although those formats can expand discourse into visible sites that are more immediately political, they can also make longer forms of conversation and more nuanced exchanges impossible.

Pouya Khadem (PK): Scott brought up an interesting point about democratization. Is there a connection between more accessible language and democratization? Is the consumer-driven "accessibility" that happens under capitalism a function of reduced leisure time to read and think? 

SC: It's complicated. The distance between architectural discourse, criticism, practice, and the general public has never been as wide as it is now. As mentioned earlier, architectural criticism was synonymous with public discourse. Through newspapers, socialist journals, and even gatherings in union halls, critics, academics, and practitioners conveyed their thoughts through a language that was accessible to the public. But as the different parts of the discipline have more intensively specialized, a certain language has developed—inevitably—among the experts. As a result, the space for reflecting on architecture has shifted away from publicly accessible media to specialized forums.

SS:  It makes me wonder to what extent the journalist serves as translator between the architect and the public. Communication about built works have been increasingly taken over by firms’ marketing and public relations departments. But in order to connect readers and writers, we need authors who can speak about architecture in plain language. The needlessly academic jargon prevalent in architectural writing is a barrier to growing an audience outside the profession. This hinders the public’s ability to engage in this discourse in meaningful ways.

PK: Any business that relies on traffic for ad revenue benefits from an increase in consumers. News and media companies have broad access to complex tools and metrics, and can tune their content to attract more traffic. But as columnist David Carr wrote for the New York Times some years ago on the risks of traffic-hungry journalism, “just because something is popular does not make it worthy.” Under this business model, the project of making architecture more accessible (in its image and written form) risks entanglement with questions of marketability for advertisers, and pushes elements of social, economic, and environmental significance—what makes writing “worthy”—aside.

BU: This perhaps is the role that emerging forms of journalism can play: to create a public space for intellectual inquiry and debate that can happen independent of a market-based translation of architecture to consumers.

SLC: I see two aspects to the question of writing’s accessibility that seem to be at odds with one another. At the core, there is the ethically-rooted, journalistic mission to create a more informed public and deepen their appreciation and engagement with architecture. This mode of writing is more likely to embody Carr’s idea of what makes writing “worthy”… Yet, when ad-revenue weighs too heavily, readership numbers trump any notion of worthiness. The difficulty in challenging this second, traffic-driven mode of writing is that it is still about a certain idea of accessibility: It’s giving the majority of readers what they want to see.

SS: Everything comes at a price. The industry has to be able to sustain itself one way or another. It is a very delicate balance to find a way to support the business of writing financially, and not sacrifice journalistic integrity.

BU: That’s why these alternative writing practices are so critical. For example, projects such as AWW function outside of both the traditional systems of academic review as well as profit-driven models of journalism. Such projects are ground-up, edited by students and recent grads, supported by non-profit institutions, and don’t need to sell a minimum number of copies to break even. However, because such formats exist outside of a financial or academic market, the ideas produced in these journals typically rely on forms of labor that are unwaged. When asking the question “Who gets to write?” it’s critical to also acknowledge not only the different value systems and formats of exchange in publishing, but also how the labor of writing is often hidden in discourse.

SLC: Sydney, in your work as a journalist, I know you're quite interested in this notion that there is a gatekeeping of architectural discourse through language—for example, through the way architects use internal, academic jargon that is often inaccessible and requires a certain level of education to access.

SS: I think that the question of accessibility is a difficult one, but architectural writing, and in particular academic writing, tends to be written for an academic audience. If we allow academia to become the only voice and agent to shape the discourse, we'll shrink the discipline into an echo chamber, where only those who have the luxury to read will have the luxury to write, and vice versa. In that scenario, what happens to the perspectives and voices outside of academia that don't necessarily have the resources to contribute to the conversation? There are not enough outlets talking about architecture in plain language that the public can easily understand, and this prevents the public from engaging with issues within the built environment.

BU: It's provocative to think about how we can write for non-architects—not as future clients, but as co-participants in the public sphere. Most design magazines cater to a wealthy clientele while many architectural journals are limited to only academic audiences. Far fewer platforms support writing for a public that focuses on the inequities embedded in the built environment—architects writing for and with their communities as they negotiate the political, environmental, and financial conditions of design.

SLC: Since 2020, we’ve seen a shift within the architecture community’s attitude—a willingness and urgency to engage with issues of labor, the Western-centric pedagogy, privilege, systemic racism, and more. I think all of us at AWW have felt that there has also been a renewed interest and appreciation for different forms of writing or expression, like memes and social media platforms. Maybe Sydney can share her experience writing an article on architectural workers’ unionization efforts. Would this have happened before 2020?

SS: That conversation probably could not have happened five years ago. I think that the pandemic necessitated a change in perspective. Many of these issues could no longer be ignored—priorities changed. I was seeing conversations about architectural labor (which had already been happening, albeit mostly in private) unfold on social media, and I thought about how to best translate these conversations to an architecture audience, and to spotlight the impact of the grassroots work. It was a challenging issue to cover, especially at a magazine where the majority of our readership consists of practitioners. But the industry seemed ready to confront these difficult conversations.

BU: Why wasn't this type of content being reported to wider audiences beforehand? Efforts addressing the issues of architectural labor have been going on for years. And so it’s interesting that it was only after the social and health stress of the pandemic and the immense pressure exerted by the Black Lives Matter movement that those issues got the traction to be discussed more broadly in the profession—and that they were actually implemented in firms across the world.

SS: Critical mass was really important in publishing stories like this because there is an inherent risk in publishing content that is, in some ways, critical of your audience. At the same time, we want to create relevant and valuable content, which is why it's so important that these issues are publicized to a wider audience. Until recently, the public really had no idea what it takes to produce a building. As a society, it's difficult to know what you value if you don't understand the invisible labor behind these projects. People are starting to acknowledge what the reality is, and this will enable people to advocate for change.

SC: There was an essay written by Sylvia Lavin maybe 15 years ago, called “Conversations Over Cocktails.” Its thesis was that written architectural discourse had died and the academic discourse of architecture was happening “over cocktails.” The obvious implication is that a society organized through verbal discourse is a society in which power operates behind the scenes as opposed to out in the open. These things are absolutely connected. There may be a thousand million tweets every second, but the way the world is actually being reorganized is through a series of very tight, specialized, increasingly privatized conversations.

---

Scott Colman is an Assistant Professor at the Rice University School of Architecture.

Sydney Shilling is the Assistant Editor of Azure Magazine, an international publication with a focus on contemporary architecture and design.

Brittany Utting is an Assistant Professor at the Rice University School of Architecture and co-director of the research and design collective HOME-OFFICE.

Pouya Khadem edits for the Architecture Writing Workshop. He works as an architectural designer in Houston.

Sebastián López Cardozo edits for the Architecture Writing Workshop. He works as an architectural designer in Toronto and is a frequent contributor at the New York Review of Architecture.

---

>>Who Gets to Write?