Contribution au symposium en ligne The Practice of Architectural Research, 8-9 octobre 2020, session 1B “Positioning the Discursive Practice”

This contribution aims at debating the recent practice of independent magazines in light of the still-standing cleavage between theory and practice addressed by the symposium. Evidence gathered from such magazines, that I have been studying for the past 8 years, allows to argue that many of the people involved in architecture today don’t really act from within a rigid professional frame, but rather work across a field of various forms of practices. They design, teach, write, protest, collect, publish, bringing together different publics (‘active’ or ‘passive’) and thus producing, de facto, hybrid kinds of architectural knowledge—all of which could easily be defined as architectural ‘projects’, even when construction is not the outcome.
Often informed by academic environments and methods, but easily intervening outside of academia and using other forms on inquiry and of expression, I argue that little architecture magazines represent a potential, prolific site for exchanging ideas in architecture. They contribute to redefining the practice of criticism in a nonprescriptive way: an intellectual position which can be considered as healthy in times when academic standards threaten to overrun and subsume other forms of practice, especially in the design studios.
If there certainly are frictions that need to be acknowledged, there might also be forms of convergence: on the one hand, in the past two decades academia has been opening up to artistic and architectural practice, progressively including practice-based research curricula as alternatives to the usual dissertation (e.g. Doucet and Janssens, 2011); on the other hand, parallel to the loss of confidence in the authority of the architectural ‘object’, discursive practices have become a fundamental mode of operation across all fields in architecture, prompted by ethical stances towards post-bubble economy and climate change.
Adopting a similar, non-prescriptive position, and looking past the divide between academia and practice, my contribution to the symposium suggests borrowing Isabelle Stengers’ notion of an ‘ecology of practices’ (2005) to explore the field of little architecture magazines. What forms of critical thinking do they offer? How do they, articulate theory and practice? What cross-connections do they establish in and out of academia?
Answers to these questions are based on the evidence gathered from little magazines of the past fifteen years, and revolve around two main concepts: that of the critical editorial device, as developed – among others – from Genette’s ‘paratext’ (1987); and that of the minor key, as developed from Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘minor literature’ (1975).
The first concept allows to move past the recent debate on critical architecture, the post-critical and the crises of criticism (e.g. Rendell et al, 2007), arguing for the existence of valuable forms of criticism other than the typical essay: it expands its room for manoeuvre to the ‘grey’ elements of the editorial process.
The second concept allows to consider the agency of little magazines in challenging architecture’s established codes. In a minor key, moving in the middle, little magazines cross the intra-disciplinary boundaries and contribute to dismantle the resistances by which we have come to oppose ‘practice’ and ‘theory’.