Far Beyond Buildings: In Conversation with Scott Colman
Pouya Khadem (PK): In your essay for PLAT 9.0, titled “Dolmen on the Beach,”1 you carefully analyze the language of contemporary architects, artists, and critics, who use terms such as “awkward,” “interesting,” “comforting,” and “strange” to view architecture differently. In the essay, you restate Andrew Zago’s position that awkward architecture ‘is neither aligned with, nor critical of ‘the correct.’”2 Can architecture which is not attempting to be “valid” or “right” tackle the kinds of sociopolitical questions we’re facing now? In other words, does an apathy toward “the correct” put architecture in an irrelevant position with regard to social and political issues?
Scott Colman (SC): I don't think architects are in an irrelevant position; with respect to social and political questions, I actually think we’re in a prime position. Part of the argument in that piece was that if we define architecture more broadly than we have for the last 50 years, saying that architecture is “intended environmental change,” then architecture becomes the water we drink, the air we breathe.
I think the problem the discipline has had is that we’ve reduced our conception of architecture to objects for art museums and one-off buildings for the very wealthy. One might argue this is some of the most extraordinary architecture that has ever been produced in terms of our material capacities, but we should also acknowledge that the role of wealth is undeniable in the production of what we call “extraordinary” architectural work. We have to recognize that this is a moment in which society has reached a height of material exploitation and the concentration of wealth, resources, and power.
The question I’m trying to get to, not just in that piece but in general, is how do we reconfigure our current wealth of architectural knowledge to think more expansively, and take on what’s coming? How can we think about and anticipate the fall from the “peak inequality” that I just described to achieve a much more egalitarian power dynamic, and tackle oncoming crises? I think that requires us to think more broadly about what architecture is and who it’s for, but I don’t think that what we’ve done over the last 30 years has put us in an irrelevant position.
PK: In “Dolmen on the Beach” you also reference a piece of literary theory by Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels titled “Against Theory,”3 in which the authors posit a challenge on the idea that meaning and authorial intention are one and the same. Our theme for this issue is Leave Space, exploring the inevitable distance between an architect’s intentions and a work of architecture. Does this space diminish architectural meaning? What does interpretation mean in the context of architecture?
SC: I agree that intention can only be understood through context, whether language or knowledge, and that meaning, in a certain sense, is fixed by authorial intention. But there has also been, since the late ’60s, an argument that the intention of the artist can be taken as different from the meaning of architecture. It’s been said that you can understand the way someone uses a building as an interpretation of that building. One of the things I was trying to do in the essay was distinguish between interpretation of authorial intention as a kind of cultural act and inhabitation as a kind of cultural performance. If I’m inhabiting a building, I don’t need to know what the designer of that environment intended, but if I’m an historian or someone trying to understand the author’s intention, I can’t just say anything about it without being informed.
Lately, I would say that our authorial intention with respect to architecture has been very narrow, focused on particular aesthetic accomplishments, disciplinary procedures, or specific kinds of cultural statements. But if we look back, there was a time when the architect was trying to capture what they took to be culture and society holistically, in its fullest breadth. I think we’ve given that up. There are difficulties with that, too, in terms of speaking for other people. Where does one culture or worldview end and another begin? But nonetheless, it’s been an ambition of art to try to articulate an essential conception of the human condition. That’s very abstract, but I think it means in a global society coming to terms with the technology we have and the predicament we’re in as a species.
Adam Berman (AB): In response to that, many of us see this movement towards a lowercase ‘a’ architecture that relies on community building and activism rather than traditional means of capital. In the U.S. it’s hard to work outside of the capitalist economy and find other ways to rethink the discipline. I’m wondering, what are some ways we can rethink practice when it seems like we are more tied to capital than ever?
SC: When I was a high school student in Sydney, I did a work experience program where you could try out a profession. I wanted to be an architect, so I went to the government architect's office in the state of New South Wales. They were located in the state office block in the middle of Sydney, in a modernist building which housed all the government bureaucracies that dealt with the planning of the environment. The people who worked there were paid a decent wage; they didn't get much credit for what they did, but I think they had a real sense of responsibility to the public, broadly conceived, in their work. The government architect's office designed schools, hospitals, community centers, public housing, sports stadiums, train stations, parks—you name it, they designed it. That was not that long ago, not much longer than 30 years ago. That's a model that existed in my lifetime in a democracy and within the capitalist system.
That’s not to say there aren’t any problems with that model. In the ’60s and ’70s there was a big reaction against the relationship between architecture and the state, and we still have to be critical of bureaucratic architectural institutions. Right now, that state government architecture department still exists, but it's much reduced in size and scope. It now has an indigenous branch where indigenous architects are designing buildings, which is something it never had before, so it seems to me that there are ways to be critical of institutions but also make them more progressive.
A lot of things are changing now; for instance, many countries have renationalized their airlines in the pandemic. We have to remember the US had a national airline, and it had a national telecommunication system. There were national banks and national insurance companies. All those things that have disappeared in the last 30 or 40 years might not have been as bad as we thought. I don't have the answer for where we are going, probably toward more international institutions; I don't know if our predicament is going to get better or worse, but at least right now it does seem like there is a potential to really rethink things again and realize that maybe what we've been doing for the last thirty or forty years isn’t so great.
AB: As you stated in PLAT 9.0, once we understand architecture in its broadest sense as intended environmental change and acknowledge its effects on tremendous spatial and temporal scales like that of climate, we see how narrow our understanding of the discipline has traditionally been. As a result, we’re starting to see a shift to a much more expanded and challenging understanding of practice.
SC: Absolutely, I totally agree. If you read Vitruvius, he talks about architecture as something that extends far beyond buildings: how to source materials or where to build and how to organize cities. Bit by bit, we have reduced architectural practice down to how to make a building; other questions are left out. This exclusivity needs to be rethought.
But I am not suggesting that we should return to an idea of the heroic architect—to a single white male, or any individual, in charge. I think there is going to be a conception of design that is much more collaborative and is better at recognizing and incorporating knowledge outside of architecture, particularly from disciplines which, at a certain point in time, used to be part of architecture. Architecture can't be just architecture any longer, if by that you mean what architecture has become in the past thirty years. It has to collaborate and be much more synthetic when it looks at the world. It can neither be us claiming design authorship over the whole process, nor can it be us abandoning authorship. We still have to be clear that architecture—and through it the environment and the climate—is being authored. Right now authorship is occurring in a way that is totally arbitrary and uncoordinated. For instance, corporations no longer act on a set of principles: making profit is their sole intention. Corporations used to have mission statements with commitments to certain ambitions and values. The structural idea that architects have a public responsibility and are bound by certain values beyond the needs of the immediate client has been thrown out the window. We have to realize that the world we live in is entirely designed, and the problems that we have are entirely human-made.
Jimmy Bullis (JB): Your take on the mission statement is interesting. I believe a lot of corporations and architects still have mission statements, but they don't necessarily adhere to them so much. It becomes a sort of public image stamp, and its usefulness has evaporated. So I'm wondering how can we create accountability today, where none seems to exist in architecture or beyond?
SC: Technically, the way it still works—which I think we've forgotten—is that when you become licensed as an architect, the state bestows upon you certain privileges and responsibilities that come with being an architect and an architect only. An accredited institution employs me to educate you on these responsibilities. As a professional—that is, as what a professional used to mean—you have responsibilities to both your client and the general good, just as lawyers and doctors do.
That used to be the case. Today, as Michael Meredith pointed out in PLAT 9.0,4 we have professional organizations and systems of making profit that are at odds with this idea and force the architect to only be a servant of the client. The public responsibility that is fundamental to the very idea of the architect seems non-existent today. For instance, the building façade—the most public aspect of the building in a visual sense—should not just be for the benefit of displaying the intentions or the power of the client; there is a public responsibility for the facade to serve a public good. And now, we have an urban environment where it couldn’t be clearer that buildings are designed for their own benefit and a lack of public good.
JB: This position is a bit difficult. On the one hand, it seems easy to say we should be doing this, architects should do that, and so on. But the reality for many architects is not one of great stability. It becomes a bit hard to blame some practitioners for not considering what in some sense are more important things, because they're trying to produce a salary that they can live on and trying to pay other workers. How, in your mind, can you conceptualize a way for architects to take some control back from a system that doesn't really allow for it? Is it a matter of architects at the top of the profession—those with the most control and the most power in their own right—doing something, or is it a matter of organizing more broadly across the discipline?
SC: What you said is really important. A lot of ink gets spilled critiquing the architects of the last 30 years for being neoliberal, and I do not want to do that at all. The notion that architects over the last 30 years have been complicit, willing saps is just idiotic. Thoughtful architects have been trying to figure out ways to develop design techniques to have more agency within a system that doesn’t give architects much agency at all. We have to value that.
There is an incredible body of intelligence that has been produced recently. Architectural knowledge has perhaps never been more exacting or diverse than in the last 30 years. We have to figure out how to take that knowledge and begin to think about how it could be employed for a different kind of system. It is clear that the day after tomorrow is not going to be a utopia that we dream up; at best it’s going to be some hybrid of ideals and the status quo. I think the value of the more idealist statements that I made earlier is that they at least begin to calibrate a sense of values against which more incremental change can occur. Just remembering that companies have mission statements and that architects have an implicit responsibility to the public is important. A whole bunch of these things are already there to grab hold of and start asserting and using. The fact that they’ve existed before means they are not utopian or idealistic ideas at all.
The advantage of being a little older and coming from a country that kept some of the midcentury protocols in place for a little longer is that I can see that the world wasn't always this way. In my lifetime I have seen one world for my first 20 years and then a different world for the next 30. And it should now be obvious to everyone that we’re not going to have the same world from here on out. Recognizing this is the first step.
PK: Maybe saying this would be naively heroic, but during these recent decades we have understood and analyzed buildings through the lenses of, for example, as you mentioned, “interesting” architecture, “awkward,” “boring,” “nice,” etc. Is now the time for us to try and imagine what would constitute “right” architecture or “wrong” architecture?
SC: Before we do that, we have to understand what the “right” city is and realize that buildings, to some degree, have to start with the given condition. Buildings can only do so much. We have to be engaged with larger urban, regional, and geographical questions about how we organize our settlements. Some of our land is going underwater or up in smoke. Some territory has already been urbanized and some will need to be kept for farmland and wildlife. There are issues about the usage of energy: how far we travel or how far away we bring food and other materials we use. We have to think about all of these conditions as we begin to act. And part of the issue is that we have restricted our thinking to the site and haven't thought about what makes the site in the first place. We should also think about how we can promote architecture as a form of authored cultural expression, which is really important, but happens within a frame. We need to think about how to make the “art” of architecture sustainable and equitable. I take architecture to be an expression of the larger system. We have to work on these larger questions at the same time as we work on more specific architectural questions. Right now for the most part we have architecture for the wealthy. We need an art of architecture for everyone.
And we have to work on these larger questions at the same time as we work on building-scale questions. City planning doesn’t happen today through architectural drawings, but through legal instruments. Architects used to engage those questions, but we have withdrawn ourselves. Perhaps the one valuable thing that professional institutes of architecture still do, it’s that they have committees that engage with cities on planning questions; together they set the rules that decide whether land is being sold off, being developed by developers, or being used for public housing, for example. All these questions are related to larger issues of governance. Until architects re-engage with them, we don't have a hope of implementing significant changes. We have historically engaged those questions, and it is crazy, even self-defeating, that we do not now.
Scott Colman is an Assistant Professor at the Rice University School of Architecture in Houston, Texas, where he teaches architectural and urban history, theory, and design. He is concerned about the fate of progressivism in contemporary architecture and is currently completing a book on the anarcho-socialist architect and planner Ludwig Hilberseimer.
1 Scott Colman, “Dolmen on the Beach,” PLAT 9.0 (2020): 19.
2 Andrew Zago, “Awkward Position,” Perspecta 42 (2010): 205.
3 Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, “Against Theory,” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 4 (Summer, 1982): 723-42, repr. in W . J . T . Mitchell, ed., Against Theory: Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 11-30, esp.17.
4 Michael Meredith, John McMorrough, and Sebastian Lopez Cardozo, “Untitled Conversation,” PLAT 9.0 (2020): 58.