A little glimpse of the bigger picture

Thank you to Cara and others for starting this discussion.

I should to begin with a disclaimer: I am not from AIADO and nor am I from the United States, so in many ways I do not feel particularly qualified to comment on the broader thematic debates about “sustainability” in the context of current architecture and design, particularly in the U.S. (where I am yet to fully understand local planning, politics, or why everything is put in double plastic bags).

I am deeply interested in the issues that AIADO seems to be battling with presently, and having been (sort of) admonished by the art history department for publicly criticizing an aspect of their undergraduate program, I welcome more open forums in which to debate. So it is great that we now have this blog, as long as the online discussion is complemented by other, less distancing forms of public communication. Habermas would be chuffed.

I think what might help matters is to consider “sustainability” from an interdisciplinary standpoint. (There we go, another buzzword – interdisciplinary. Bear with me.) As we all know, with “green” emerging as the apparent religion of the 21st century, many academic fields are currently obsessing over so-called sustainability - with varying degrees of seriousness - using a variety of approaches, from the purely conceptual to the scientific.

Two fields that can be of particular use for designers, architects and critics, are environmental law and environmental ethics. Unlike other disciplines, in environmental law the concept of sustainability and environmental responsibility has to be carefully defined; it has to be something that can be proved.

Applying a (semi) legal approach to design questions may sound restrictive and cold, but it can help to illuminate questions of fairness, equitability, practical impacts and culpability. Similarly, environmental ethics concepts such as Intergenerational Equity and the Precautionary Principle can help to inform design practices, so that we can move beyond the buzz-word waffle and consider essential questions about environmental impacts on a short-term and long-term scale.

And as others here have suggested, we need to move beyond the dogma. There are certain situations when we need to ask ourselves whether a so-called “sustainable” approach may necessary at all, or whether such lofty goals may be an expensive, pointless hindrance, with very little measurable effect.

Interdisciplinary awareness is also crucial because as designers you will be working with a large number of stake-holders who may or may not be willing to commit to environmentally-responsible approaches, and within a complex policy framework. Designers and architects can’t “save the world” alone. One could be the most sustainability-conscious architect on Earth, but unless environmental and planning policy (and the will of clients), exists to support your work, your efforts may come to very little. Knowing how to navigate this policy framework, and work as resourcefully as possible within those restrictions, is essential.

Jesse Stein
MA candidate
Art History, Theory and Criticism, SAIC
April 26, 2008

Hennie,

It is always nice to hear you talk or read your words. Your eloquence could only be contrasted by Ben's directness in the following post. This contrast is what interests me and I don't want to hide these thoughts away in a comments section--especially since this blog seems to be fading out of the school's memory.

I didn't feel good after reading your post. Honestly I never expect to feel good after reading things online; but I had high expectations given that the author is the chair of the program that has been so affected by the events of last week. There are a couple of points in your entry that stick out among a sea of pretty words.

1. "The events of the past semester gave us all the opportunity to contribute, argue and debate within a public forum. I for one was rather surprised at the lack of penetrating questioning and significant observations from the audience at these events"
-I don't think, that as an educator, you can make an observation like this without acting or having acted upon it. If you see silence within your department, what have you done as a leader to institute discourse? I feel that if the forums and opportunities that you reference were understood as such, there would be no anonymous posters. An outsider's interest or surprise is not the type of position you should feel comfortable taking in your capacity as an educator and chair. If your kids are too quiet, then there is obviously a problem that they haven't been able to work out themselves. What type of institutional measures are you planning to take in order to avoid another semester of silence? Or do you stand by your statement which would now lend it with a quality akin to: "you should've taken your chance when you had it so don't complain."?

2. "It is only when oneself can produce a body of work that contributes significantly over a sustained period of time that one dares to criticise without substantiation."
-I don't agree with this statement given the speaker and the context. Criticism is serious work don't misunderstand me and unsubstantiated arguments made by flyer don't count; but I think there is a large gap between the criticism coming from a group of 18-25 year olds and that of an established group of professionals and academics. As an educator, you must have that in mind and be concerned with teaching the skills and creating the opportunities to bridge that gap. Why would you state that discourse in our environment would be limited to those who are most able to participate? Can't we leave presuppositions like that to forums outside of the school? There needs to be a vein of the oldest saying in education, "there is no such thing as a dumb question", running through all approaches to discourse at an institution of learning-especially given the immediate educational environments of most of the students coming into the school. Only with some sort of graduated system in place could you ever hope for students to make that move from talking and opinion to real discussion and exploration on a discursive level.

I'm really disappointed in those statements, as I understand them, being the first voice from AIADO as involved in this forum and I invite corrections and clarifications.

Isaac Smith
BFA, year 4
AIADO

So many ways to effect change, which to choose?

Now how did the Post It get invented? It was a dorky staffer at 3M who was futzing with test tubes and made something that kind of sticked and then didn’t stick at the same time and so he attached it to some paper and stuck it onto the fridge door. BINGO! That happy accident revolutionized analog memory. Massive change? Not really, bumbly change, sorry-I-didn’t-mean-to-disturb-you-change, but change nevertheless. Of course it probably didn’t happen that way, but a good story substitutes for facts more often than we care to admit, or as Oscar Wilde remarked "Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art."

Cara Ellis’ remarks on the credibility of sustainability probably wouldn’t meet Oscar’s criteria too well. The way sustainability is practiced in the US and Europe seems worse than lying, its more akin to feel good religion: green roofs on one hand and then a nice drive across the landscape in the summer Hummer on weekends. Incidentally, I’m convinced that the super-stretch Hummer is a green vehicle: twenty passengers in a single hot tub with one V-8 powering the whole shebang, that’s got to be better than twenty nasty little Priuses jamming up the freeways going home for twenty twenty minute showers. They say that the proliferation of gas-misers in England has only made the situation worse because there’s scads more cars, and the roads are hopelessly jammed up, which is very true. SHARING cars is bahavior change. Its our behavior that will change things, not some awful new engine that does the same thing for less. And don’t get me started: I cant stand that horrible green foam insulation thing: wear a woolly hat and a big sweater and turn the stupid thermostat to zero!

I remember going out for dinner with Ken Dunn, the most authentic sustainability advocate in town: when he was asked what kind of drink he wanted, he replied: “I don’t care what the brand is, just give me something in a clear glass bottle. Way to go Ken! If anybody deserves a McCarthur Genius grant its got to be Ken Dunn.

Talking of cameras in corridors, how about hooking one up in the fridge or mount one on the kitchen sink faucet: ever washed dishes with a constant stream of hot water running? You betcha! No more fresh hot water for you my friend! You want to suck oil out of the earth to heat water so that you can flush it down the sink without using it? Behavior change first, then we will see if you deserve the new technology.

My major pet peeve is green roofs. I really cant stand them. Here we go in Chicago, hauling dirt up 30 stories or more and planting prarie prairie ( I can never spell that stupid word) flowers? Meanwhile, the same City Hall is permitting the complete destruction of back yards of houses to make way for lot line to lot line Mega Mansions? Gimme a break! I saw it happen to our balloon frame home in Chicago: we sold it and then some idiot whacked it and maxed out the lot with a concrete block house with bricks veneered onto the front. The years of my espaliering fruit trees along the fence-line, smushed by a creepy-crawly Caterpillar tractor in a Chicago minute.

Another thing that I cant stand is raised beds! What the hell is wrong with the goddam ground for Chrissake! When I burn thirty gallons of gas to drive 600 miles through the P-r-a-i-r-e just to get to class each week, I wonder why the hell don’t people grow stuff in the fields where they are supposed to? You cant believe how much land is out there, TONS OF IT! I think I am going to build some fancy $5k raised beds in the middle of a Midwest ern corn field, just to see what happens.

The real question is not about sustainability, it is something quite different: it is this. How do we cope with hypocrisy? How do we make things fit together in a way that does not make you feel like a total idiot, but on the other hand not a slave to overarching candor. That’s what I like about Francis Whitehead’s article in the NYT: she came clean and said that all the green roof shit she has hooked up costs an arm and a leg and there’s no way she could recoup the expense of it all (assuming that it doesn’t go wrong, which it is sure to do). Yuppie urban farming is religion, its not ecology- its good for the soul, we make pleasure gardens and its wonderful and worthwhile, but please don’t confuse it with sustainability! Spiritual architecture might be a better moniker.

Remember its behavior change that will change the world, not getting all excited over new inventions that permit you to lead the same crazy consumptive life for less money, that is until the barrel of oil goes up to $117, oops, it just did that!

Phew! That feels better! Thank you students for letting me get that off my chest! Attaboy Poster boy!

OK, now let’s get serious. The new AIADO is a barrel of fun to be in, because it’s such a risky proposition. Everything is new, no one has the slightest idea what will happen next, save a foggy roadmap, we are traveling by the seats of our pants. Scratchy discussion has not really happened yet where real issues are involved, we have all pitter-pattered around the edges, so no wonder someone throws a hussy fit! I guess it had to happen. Actually I don’t think BMD has much to do with it, it could have been a dripping air conditioner that was the straw that broke the camels back, so no one should feel warm and fuzzy self righteousness for being the one who started the change. Certainly it was not much fun that it happened, and there are definitely some hurt feelings and bruised friendships, I’m smarting too. But this is a place of education, and EVERYTHING we do in our ivory-white round-tower is an opportunity for growth and should be taken as such: let’s get pedagogical rather that putative.

I don’t believe in anonymous remarks, as its much more fun to get a pointed response and then have the opportunity to grow the idea back and forth. There’s a big difference between opinion and discussion. Hogging the floor is something else I don’t believe in, making opportunities for quieter voices to have their say is the responsibility of inveterate loudmouths. I do believe that there are all sorts of ways to talk about some things, but talk we must! Remember the 1987 AIDS activists mantra: Silence = Death?

Look, don’t think for one minute that AIADO is the only place that has an mousy voice problem: there are complaints from every quarter in the US that academic discussion is atrophying: perhaps what is distinguishing AIADO from the other places is that we are actual interested (dare I say prepared) to do something about it; change yes, mousey not massive, and probably more effective.

And one more thing, I’m just going to post this, and not think about its consequences, as I see blogs as vapid ether, not as anything very factual. I’ve lost my blogger virginity tonight, it was wonderful. As my mother used to say: Sticks and stones may break your bones but words will never hurt me.) (One more, more thing: when this poster thingy happened last Thursday I drove 300 miles home to New Harmony and was woken up by that 5.2?4? earthquake, a mere 20 miles from the epicenter. I have never been so scared in all my life! It went on for 48 seconds and the earth literally moaned. Stuff like that quickly puts stuff like this in 4D perspective: so lets all get a life boys and girls, and work double time on the real issues, then we will have the school that is destined to be!

Ben Nicholson
Associate Professor
Architecture, Interior Architecture and Designed Objects
School of the Art Institute of Chicago

White Sound and the Footsteps of Giants

Once, walking with a farmer in a field of cows I saw a young bull charging the fence while an old bull leisurely walked through the far-end gate and had the cows to himself. I had a deep understanding of the young bull’s attempt at that time. More recently I came to understand another parable in relation to this moment of my past. Hannah Arendt reminds us of Kafka’s tale of an eternal struggle – call it a bloody fight – between the past and the future. Being caught in this epic battle one pushes the past from behind in an attempt to secure some ground. But in other moments visions of a possible future takes hold and one finds yourself pushing future along as it fights bravely for meaningful and significant change. To make sense of this one must jump out of the line of battle. Carefully observe, learn, and prepare. Jumping back into the struggle will only produce meaningful results once one is more fully prepared. This dance routine never ends and to wit, is native to design thinking.

We are certainly in a moment – as paradoxically as it may seem – where critique and meaningful debate is crucial and yet rendered with scepticism. On both sides of the aporetic boundary defining this struggle we are attempting to make sense of the intersection between true invention and ultimate banality, between intelligent thinking and routine execution, and between drift and predictability. It is with this view that I support and contribute to the debate.

But I do that with serious qualifications. First that all statements pertaining to issues, events or individuals be placed in its proper context, and second, that contributions need to add significantly to the debate. I specifically point to the statements about Professors Bruce Mau and Ellen Grimes in the earlier posts. To move this discussion to another level where we can argue, debate and critique the real issues at hand I respectfully ask that we keep to the facts when it comes to events or individuals. Professor Mau is contributing significantly to the broader field of various intersecting disciplines and is involved with SAIC as a distinguished visiting professor and practicing designer who is not part of any specific department, and certainly not embedded within AIADO. Professor Mau’s work in Chicago and his visiting position at SAIC affords us, and the city at large, with opportunities for collaborative engagement and dialogue. The events of the past semester gave us all the opportunity to contribute, argue and debate within a public forum. I for one was rather surprised at the lack of penetrating questioning and significant observations from the audience at these events. From within AIADO I offer our department’s approach below and by defining our position within current debates. This statement is as alive and dynamic in its mutation as the work produced by faculty, students, and visiting artists and designers here and at top schools around the world.

Many different interpretations of design are entering public discourse and are evolving and converging in a fast changing world where designers need to be comfortable with uncertainty and complexity – often having to locate their creative imagination in paradoxical opportunity outside the traditional boundaries of design. Art, design, science and entrepreneurial business are teaming to create new protocols and information flows. With the social shaping of technology out-dated bureaucratic mechanisms are breaking down around alternative environmental, social, and political sensibilities. Design is at the core of these changes in translating thought into the more tangible. The academy responds with significant alternatives in education and, through collaborative partnerships, a network of informed personalities contribute to the design of our changing world – making it dense, fluid, and dynamic. How designers explore this complexity is by definition a highly creative act of design. At the School of the Art Institute of Chicago we encourage and practice a vibrant engagement with design. As faculty we believe that future designers will need to be thinking designers – willing to explore unknown territory and engage problems not yet defined, taking risks while confident enough to find opportunity in failure. Deep explorations in the studio context are required where the art of thinking and making translate into the ineffable – at the very intersection of art, design and architecture. Explorations that are useful beyond the realm of design and adding significant meaning to environments across all scales – challenging the fluid borderline that defines the spatial, the world of objects, and the many opportunities in cognitive and non-cognitive environments yet to be explored. We take play and risk seriously. We give freedom with the one hand while expecting accountability with the other. With the rigor of thinking flowing from this philosophical approach we are breeding a new kind of relevance for future designers and architects. We launch future individual voices that are willing to lead in the fast mutating cultural landscapes – changing the field from the inside out while connecting past traditions with future possibilities.

It is only when oneself can produce a body of work that contributes significantly over a sustained period of time that one dares to criticise without substantiation. The value of a forum like this will only become significant when we argue and explore with integrity and with the willingness to translate our arguments into intellectual armour befitting our jump back into the line of battle.

Hennie Reynders
Associate Professor and Chair
Architecture, Interior Architecture and Designed Objects
School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Lay down your weapons, come out with your hands where I can see them

This from a website designed to help students avoid common errors in English usage:


"To 'flesh out' an idea is to give it substance, as a sculptor adds clay flesh to a skeletal armature. To 'flush out' a criminal is to drive him or her out into the open. The latter term is derived from bird-hunting, in which one flushes out a covey of quail. If you are trying to develop something further, use 'flesh'; but if you are trying to reveal something hitherto concealed, use 'flush.'”


Good advice, but what if the quail being flushed is also the substance of the idea that needs fleshing? In the above definition, fleshing out is depicted as an additive process, lumps of flesh, meaning and form piled by a dedicated creator onto a prefashioned frame. The frame was made to hold the flesh, shaped to contain an already previsioned, imagined, quantity of flesh. As most of us know from experience, however, when the frame and flesh stand in for the structure and content of a not yet fully-formed idea, the process of fleshing is more akin to the flushing process, not additive but delving, seeking. The substance is more like the quail and the criminal. The quail above, and the criminal too, are concealed from those who seek them, pursuer and pursued. The frame is a scaffolding that comes up in pieces, loses its relevance, has to be torn down, re-erected, in a new shape to fit the new content it supports, the latest flushed meaning. In short, to flesh out the truth is to flush out the flesh, piece by piece, to coax into the open what has hitherto been concealed.


In the context of this debate and the questioning of certain design practitioners, the substance concealed is also the debate itself. Seriously. The students are criticizing, postering, getting agitated; Mau and his mysterious troupe burrow away from the gaze of the hunters, and talk behind closed doors about...? probably about many of the ideas the students are talking about; and the faculty, the moderators, are alternately calling for a debate or squashing one - that is, when they're not trying to shove the latest in green gospel down our throats. Everyone in susurrus.



So what's the main thing under scrutiny, the elephant in the china shop? It's not Mr. Mau, it's a lot bigger than Mau. It's...dare I say it... "Sustainability." Green gospel. We're drowning in it. Little green goblins hide in our lockers and taunt us with their sexy photos and clever text. The captioned photos, misshapen frames, aesthetic disasters, promise salvation while providing only a mixture of good intentions and a dixie cup of spiked Kool-aid. Better living through chemistry is now better living through design, better living through sustainability. It's the wave of the future, it's right, we've got to save the earth, we can save the earth, buy the book and drink the Kool-aid.



What's the truth about Sustainability? I don't know, you tell me. I know what it often is when some unwitting professor tries to teach it to my particular brand of architecture grad student (poor prof!); it's foggy philosophy, laced with undefended personal ethics, taught to the beat of "Baraka" and "Dances with Wolves," seductive but insubstantial, a call to arms without providing arms, and the occasional, thankful glimmer of useful technology or efficient environmental/ planning strategies.



What is sustainability in truth? I don't know, but I can tell you now what I think it is and I'm sure many of you, my colleagues, will agree. Sustainability is a badly drawn quail hiding in the rafters of a shuddering scaffold. It's not a movement, it's a partially formed idea, rife with contradictions and intentions and innovations, and we, students and faculty and designers alike, are the hunters, the truth seekers. As such, we have a responsibility to flush out the flesh, and to load the armature to the point of breaking. Only then can we attempt to build a better armature, a more worthy frame. So I say, tear down the frame, get the quail, rip it apart, discard the offal and salvage what's good. Come out criminal, with your hands where I can see them. The hunt is on.


Cara Ellis
M.Arch Candidate
AIADO, SAIC
April 19th, 2008

This has been another post by:
Cara Ellis
MArch

Critique is not a crime

Hello Fellow Students and Faculty too! Thanks for joining the debate.
As you know, recent acts of student expression have been met with a harsh faculty response. Some of us witnessed an attempt to "flush out" the supposed perpetrator of threats against Bruce Mau in studio last week. We read the poster and found no personal attack, only an exasperated voice calling for an outcry. While we don't necessarily agree with the student's clandestine methods, we see his/ her action as an indication of the rising need for dialogue. Critique is not a crime, it's necessary. Pasted below is a very eloquant example of the kind of response and call to debate we so sorely need. Thanks, Taylor, for fanning the flames.
Yours Sincerely in Dissent,
Cara Ellis
MArch
AIADO, SAIC

I am a regular attendee of most consequential architecture lectures in Chicago. In the past few weeks following
the recent spate of lectures, I have spoken with a number of faculty from our department about the want of vocal
critical culture in both the school and in the architectural community at large. I earnestly sympathize with this
shared frustration towards a deficit, or at least and most lamentably, a silence, in criticality amongst architecture
audiences, and I certainly applaud the efforts of faculty like Ben Nicholson who actively pronounce and advocate
trenchant questions of the work we are impelled to sheepishly applaud.
I hope you can appreciate my disappointment, then, when Professor Grimes interrupted our studio on
Wednesday in high dudgeon, and proceeded to vocally denounce a student-made poster protesting both Bruce
Mau’s less than involved presence in our department and (from what I understand) decrying the recently
demonstrated superficiality and exclusivity of his design ethics. Professor Grimes then admonished any coconspirators,
notifying them, “we have caught the student responsible on camera.” Am I to understand, then,
that upon seeing the offending document, Professor Grimes or the department instructed the security to speed
through hours of mundane security footage in order to identify the student bold enough to express his or her
ideas—that I MUST add are almost ubiquitously shared—in order to punish rather than commend his or her critical
voice? From what I understand, there was no vandalism, no theft, no words presenting any “clear and present
danger” to anything besides Mr. Mau’s prodigious ego. How can we begin to cultivate a critical community while
publicly criminalizing and diminishing acts of student dissent? Are we, the students, meant to train our critical
scopes, only on distant architects and intellectuals, those not-affiliated with our department, and simultaneously
expected to meekly venerate whatever luminaries condescend to grace our department? It is incumbent upon
us to foster, maintain, and support SAIC’s iconoclastic impulses; Chicago already has a school down the street for
architectural sycophants.
On multiple occasions, the faculty has attempted to chide our idle voices by contrasting the torpor of our
criticality with the zealousness of European architecture audiences. HUNCH and student blogs recounting
critiques and conferences in their authors’ respective schools (www.archinect.com) have clearly supported,
documented, and at times lauded in print, challenges to their visiting visionaries’ words and work. Still, Hadid,
Hays, Koolhaas, Lootsma, Lynn, Prix, Van Berkel, et al continue to circulate through the AA, Berlage, and Vienna’s
Institute of Architecture circuit, materially participating in studios, master classes, conferences, etc. Arguably, it is
due to the challenge such critical communities offer practitioners that architecture’s vanguard elects to frequent
and immerse themselves in such institutions. When they want sycophants, they speak at $2,000 a night New
Yorker benefits; when they want dialogue and contributions they head for the elect design school studios.
If, perhaps, more students enunciated their reservations against Mr. Mau and his work, would he be inclined to
involve himself more in the studios just down the hallway? We are directed to emulate European audiences;
might visiting faculty not be obliged to do the same by participating in, at the very least, charettes or Berlage-like
master classes? Should the ‘fugitive’ student really be policed and censured for asking the same thing of Mr.
Mau?
I don’t think the aforementioned deductions reflect either the department’s nor, especially, given both her work
and gratifyingly electric personality, Professor Grimes’ intent; however, yesterday’s performance certainly
provokes such readings—I can only assume all the Sullivan center’s bays were treated to such denouncements,
not just the year 2 M.Arch contingent. I would encourage the department to respond to both the boldness of
the student’s actions and the content of his or her complaint in a manner commensurate with AIADO’s critical
ethics and aspirations, and not pursue any silencing and damaging act of retribution.
Taylor Lowe
M.Arch candidate
AIADO, SAIC