Theory’s Curriculum by Joseph Bedford (ed.). The Architecture Exchange, 166 pp., $10.
It’s no surprise that the central concern of Theory’s Curriculum, a book written by theorists for theorists, should be about theory’s wellbeing. But what is it that troubles theory?
Each of the volume’s ten contributors tackles this question with a refreshing sense of earnestness and urgency. They are not merely interested in saving theory for theory’s sake, but are excited by theory’s potential to transform the terms of architectural practice and pedagogy. Ginger Nolan’s essay recounting a 2013 midterm review at Columbia University is especially illustrative of this aim. In response to a studio brief for a university swimming pool, to be built on the site of a public housing complex in Harlem, a group of students proposed a segregated programmatic solution that maintained class and racial divides in the neighborhood. Despite the evident discomfort of the invited critics, Nolan recalls how the instructor praised the students’ “clarity of argument.” Not only was the project disturbingly reminiscent of “Gym Crow,” the nickname given to Columbia’s 1968 attempt to build a gymnasium on publicly owned land in Morningside Heights, it also reflected huge gaps in the studio’s pedagogy. Particularly missing was a thoughtful interrogation of sociopolitical context and value systems—in a word, theory—that should have been the basis of the studio all along. By reinserting theory at the heart of design, Theory’s Curriculum argues for pulling design pedagogy and praxis out of the contextless eternal present of Nolan’s cautionary tale.
The project’s backstory is interesting and offers novel ways by which theory can be produced. Over a five-day period in 2018, writers, educators, historians, and theorists congregated in a villa in the Italian Veneto, presenting and discussing texts in between meal preparation, site-seeing, and Ping-Pong matches. This conviviality readily comes across in the essays, which, despite being strewn with scholarly references, are less academic in tone than one might expect given the subject matter.
The resulting book is a collective metacritique of sorts seeking to elucidate the muddy terrain of theory. In his introduction, editor Joseph Bedford weaves a narrative of movements and countermovements, zeroing in on what Harry Francis Mallgrave termed the “Gilded Age” of architectural theory—i.e., the 1980s, during which an exclusive discourse took place at elite institutions in the northeastern United States—and highlighting the contributions of individuals whose names still dominate the field today. This “zombified image of theory” forms the “silent background” to which much of Theory’s Curriculum reacts.
Theory’s inability to fully grasp issues such as inequality and racial injustice may be attributed to how Western-centric, and white, it really is. This exclusivism ultimately undermines theory’s legitimacy as a field of inquiry.
Elaborating on this broader narrative, Nolan also critiques the embattled culture of architectural academia. In her view, lines in the sand and bitter polemics between ideological camps simply perpetuate “the illusion that the stakes must be worth fighting for.” What’s really at stake, she argues, is not the status of theory but rather the status of practice, “as many educators and practitioners refuse to confront the profession’s incremental divestment of its more utopian ambitions.”
In fact, what Nolan, Bedford, et al. repeatedly come up against is the insufficiency of theory to deal with material realities pertaining to inequality, racial injustice, the legacies of colonialism, displacement, climate change, sweeping technological transformation, and fast-changing demographics, to name just a few. Theory’s inability to fully grasp these issues may be attributed to how Western-centric, and white, it really is. This exclusivism ultimately undermines theory’s legitimacy as a field of inquiry, writes Joseph Godlewski. For him, the globalizing of theory will not merely lead to its diversification but to its complete transformation. Along similar lines, Elisa Dainese makes a case for the decolonization of the architecture curriculum by opening it up to a “plurality of theories (or a theory of pluralities),” even as she cautions against the homogenizing and generalizing tendencies that characterize so much of Western-centric research on Indigenous knowledge. Matthew Allen also takes on the topic of multiplicities by advocating an “ecology of theories” that abandons the search for a single metatheory of architecture. Allen focuses on the role that aesthetics can play in defining categories of concerns associated with different subcultures. Looked upon systematically, these categories can begin to “stand as figures of knowledge that mark situated theories,” he writes.
A situated theory necessitates a thorough engagement with both the past and the present, another common thread among contributors to this volume. Theory, for Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco, should refuse a stable canon, deploy an aggressive political attitude, identify collective struggles, and unsettle architectural common sense. For Jeremy Lecomte, “theory is inseparable from both historical analysis and speculative thought,” while Jake Matatyaou calls for “a kind of theory that is one and the same as practice,” an act of design that “will postulate, speculate, and invent new realities, making decisions that are critical in every sense of the word.” This is a new body of theory that the contributors to Theory’s Curriculum are proposing: an embedded practice and pedagogy, directly engaged with urgent social and material realities, a project sorely needed both within and outside the university walls that have traditionally been theory’s playground.