From Eric Kahn of COA comes a photograph of an old car I used to own, a 1983 Saab 900 with a hood that had spiderwebbed under the California sun. After five years, I sold the car to James Lowder, who was then a SCI_Arc student and is now teaching in the architecture program at the University of Buffalo. 

Hot off the presses, my new article "The Architecture of Hertzian Space" has just appeared in issue 2008:5 of A+U. It's my first time in A+U and I am absolutely delighted that it's the lead article. 

Above, Osman and Omar Khan's fantastic project "Fruits of Our Labor," which I discuss in the article.

Last fall Mark Jarzombek sent me his Anti-Pragmatic Manifesto. To me the most critical passage of that insightful piece read as follows:

I predict a new fascination with carelessness, a new tolerance for “whatever” in a “whatever generation” - an architecture that prides itself on neither history nor theory, to put it bluntly. This generation will take over the mantel of the “avant-garde,” and demand that it vacuate itself of purpose and thought.  

At the time Mark asked if I might respond with my own assessment of the status of the discipline of history in architecture. It's been all too long, but here goes. 

I wish I could somehow be optimistic about the state of history, but I'm afraid that I can't be. History is already in a dire condition in the discipline and, as Mark suggests above, may soon wind up even worse off. 

So much of network culture seems to involve the shutting down of institutions created in the Enlightenment: the public sphere seems to have transformed into micro-clusters and micro-constituencies, newspapers are in free-fall collapse, the novel is giving way to a new fascination with realism, traditional markers of distinction seem obsolete. Perhaps then it should be no different for history.

Especially after Hegel, history operated under the principle of historicism, suggesting that an understanding of the past could be a guide for the present day. Whatever we may think about its problems, this gave a purpose to history writing (Manfredo Tafuri referred to this as "operative criticism"), making history vital and real for generations. For architects, key texts such as Nikolaus Pevsner's Pioneers of the Modern Movement or Siegfried Giedion's Space, Time, and Architecture grounded the present in the past.

Teleological in nature, such texts came under justifiable criticism from younger scholars, often bringing with them the anti-historicist methods developed by Karl Popper. But a second, perhaps more modernist meaning to historicism saved history at this point. This new history pointed to the past to suggest appropriate ways of operating within one's own time. Thus, the work of Palladio would be valued as an example of an architect who engaged with the forces around him and wrestled his structures out of that condition while the work of the Futurists could be resurrected in order to prove how banal modernism had become.

This form of historicism had an enemy: postmodernism. When I first went to school, the best historians argued that their work was a bulwark against postmodernism, that a modern approach was still the only appropriate response to the time. Postmodernism, which merely revived antiquated forms, was nothing more than a zombie form of architecture, misunderstanding the work of earlier architects, misusing it, and thereby threatening the legitimacy of the discipline. 

Soon after came the theory wars. As some theorists argued that history was outdated, now the best historians (Mark among them) argued that theory and history were deeply intertwined and that one should both historicize theory and theorize history. Slowly, history and theory reached a rapprochement.

Alas, this was just in time for the rise of computation. In a prescient text in 1992 entitled "Has Theory Displaced History as a Generator of Ideas for Use in the Architectural Studio, or (More Importantly), Why Do Studio Critics Continuously Displace Service Course Specialists?" Stanley Tigerman predicted that as architects began to dabble in history (as a consequence of postmodernism) and, thereafter theory, specialists in history and theory would be displaced from architectural education by more flexible personas who could also teach studio and the all-important new service courses in digital technologies.  

As this happened, historians began to reintrench into their own professional roles. Newly read in critical theory and particularly concerned about the dangers of operative criticism (as this of course could be so easily replaced by practitioners dabbling in theory). Thus empowered, historians turned back to the old process of academic distinction and discipline. No longer would history make pronouncements about the present. Instead, as Ph.D. programs were founded left and right (just what people would do with all these dissertations is a mystery to this writer, who sat jobless for two years in the mid-90s…maybe two or three programs are necessary at most in the entire country), historians turned toward research that would often be tangentially relevant. The handful of historians who did otherwise, can, I'm afraid, be counted on just a few fingers. 

Having turned to purposeful irrelevance, history now finds itself facing death by a thousands cuts. One course here, one course there. As the demands of accreditation grow, history slowly finds itself squeezed into a narrower and narrower slot in the curriculum. 

Simply put, this is a disaster. Our time would make the most bold of Futurists proud. We have little capacity for understanding historically anymore or even for understanding how others understood their times and reacted to their histories. 

I recently asked a historian about why we don't periodize anymore, he basically laughed at me, suggesting that I was naive for asking such a dumb question…after all, we all know periodization is bad, right. But is it? Mark calls for a reinvigoration of a Utopian imagination in architecture. Well what about a similar spirit in history? How about putting away our microhistories for a minute and making broad claims about culture, not just in the past, but today?

I recently observed that there were no more common texts in architecture. Ibelings' Supermodernism was the last one. And if the students and I found flaws in his argument sitting around the table in seminars at SCI_Arc (wasn't that our job after all?), we still recognized it as keenly intelligent, an attempt to explain the architecture and urbanism of that day historically. Operative criticism it was, but it was still a crucial historical argument, a signpost in a foggy field. And if it is outmoded today due to developments in telecommunications, that's fine too. Such is the nature of these kind of projects.

But wait, there are no more signposts in our foggy field. Just fog. And we continue to hurtle through it at breakneck speed. This is not a good condition and with the building boom about to implode, we seem likely to run into a massive pile of debris.  

So let's be naïve. Let's risk our careers. Let's make broad, sweeping observations. Let's make mistakes. Historians need to think big. They need to take stances and even condemn where such a condemnation is due. 

The alternative is more and more about less and less, until finally the accreditors and the administrators pull the plug on our life support system. And at that point, it seems to me, they will have done the right thing.  

I left design is dead on for quite a while, long enough that many of you might wonder if I myself was dead…in fact, i was in Ireland for most of the week and just got back. So, on a related note… just what has happened to books in architecture studios? For virtually all of modernist education, one or two key texts could always be found on students desks, from the modernist standards—Towards a New Architecture,  Space, Time and Architecture, The International Style—to the key texts of the 70s and the early 80s—Five Architects and Complexity and Contradiction—into 1990s—Supermodernism*, S, M, L, XL, and perhaps Move and Animate Form. But what's on student desks today? I've asked students and faculty around Columbia and in other schools as well. Nobody has thus far identified any texts that could act as a common basis of knowledge in the studio. Why is this? What does it mean? Is there any relation to my gloomy prognosis for design? 

*I'm hoping to have a surprise dialogue about Supermodernism on these pages soon.

For those of you who don't subscribe to blogs via RSS and even for those who do, Prss Release aggregates the contents of a number of architecture blogs into an elegant, downloadable weekly PDF. More confirmation of my suggestion that 2008 will be the year that blogs stop looking like blogs.

As blogs mature, I expect we will be seeing more experiments like this. 

Two fabulous posts from BLDGBLOG…one relatively new, on architecture that isn't what it seems and an older one, on Canadian photographer Robin Collyer's survey of electrical substations that mimic nearby bungalows. 

In looking back at the blog, I realize that I haven't mentioned a project that I'm bringing to closure this month. For the Buell Center, I've been editing the Philip Johnson Tapes, a set of interviews that Robert Stern conducted with Johnson in 1985 about the architect's life. It's been a fascinating process since this document not only surveys Johnson biographically, it also reveals Johnson's role as the consummate networker, something I explore further in my essay "Philip Johnson's Empire" for the forthcoming Yale University Press book on the architect. I do have intentions of one day doing a critical survey of Johnson, but that will have to wait. With this out of the way, Networked Publics in final copy edits, and Infrastructural City printed this spring (I hope), it'll be time for me to spend my year on the Network Culture project, something I'm very much looking forward to. 

The Winter 2008 issue of Log 11 is out.

For the immediately foreseeable future (a way of saying, I'd like to imagine this would last a year, but I'm expecting I will be done with it sooner), I'm setting out a series of projects by architects that embody a radical spirit in architecture at a rate of about one a week.

Two friends (whose work will appear here in that series) recently recounted how Jeff Kipnis told them that the rising generation of architects needed a critic to theorize their position and suggested that perhaps I should take on that role. My response was, well, yes, I would like to, but the amount of time I've committed to my own projects makes it unlikely that I'd be able to do that. But they did have a point and just maybe, through this project I can help nudge criticism in a better direction. Surely a decade from now we can't possibly be talking about cool form, right? 

So this research project is not only for me, but for a broader constituency of architects as well as for the readers of this blog who are not in the field. By all means please make suggestions. Your help in finding projects I may have missed or not looked at carefully enough is critical for me. At the scale of the blog rather than at the scale of a museum exihibit (which is more influential today anyway?), I'm intending this to be something like the collection that Amelio Ambasz put together in his Italy: A New Domestic Landscape, a book that should be in every designer's library.

In the broadest terms, my invocation of radical architecture refers to the neo-avant-garde work of the late 1960s and early 1970s that sought to reconfigure the individual's relationship with the world. Often this work, by groups like Archizoom, Superstudio, Utopie, or UFO employed technology but was critical of its use in the existing order. New radical architecture, then, refers to contemporary work that embodies that quality. 

Of course there are differences too. A key difference is that the work of the previous era was concerned with a critique of industrial culture and advocated, above all else, the process of individual liberation. See for example, this statement that curators Francisco Jarauta, Jean Louis Maubant and Frederic Migayrou put together for the CAAM's show Arquitectura Radical. 

Andrea Branzi, a member of Archizoom Associati first defined it thus - "Radical architecture is part of a bigger movement that liberates mankind from the trends of modern culture. This is an individual liberation that is understood to be a rejection of all formal and moral parameters that act as inhibiting structures making it difficult to fulfil oneself as an individual. In this sense, the term "Radical architecture" refers more to a "cultural place", an energetic tendency than to a unitary movement.

But today that historical struggle of the liberation of the individual is over (notice I say that, not the), revealed as a process inherent in the deveolpment of flexible consumption out of mass society. In network culture, the myth of the individual is itself something we must struggle to overcome.

So what is today's radical architecture? My sense is that Iain Borden gets at the heart of the matter in this statement in the book Urban Futures when he explains that radical architecture is "not simply the novel, but is to do with something more substantive and transformative…"

I'll be posting projects to the blog, but for reference they will also be available in one spot at http://varnelis.net/topics/new_radical_architecture. An RSS feed for the topic can be found at http://varnelis.net/topics/new_radical_architecture/feed